I watched it for a second time and I have some new insights into this flick.
It's not a horror or a thriller but an action movie which is light on action. I said before that it was too bright and I read somewhere that the brightness has to be cranked up for 3D because otherwise it would be too dark with your glasses on. This would explain why the scenes are uniformly lit and would explain the discrepancy in lighting with the trailer and the movie. The former being far more dark and atmospheric than the latter.
I've learned to turn my brain off for the most part when watching movies so that I don't sit there being frustrated by some of the silliness on screen but afterwards I discussed this with my friend and the cynical side of me took over. Let me elaborate on and add to the list of dumb behavior that the Man in the Funny Hat made:
You spent a trillion dollars on this project and the crew don't know each other yet? I would think that with something of this magnitude you would spend some of your budget on personality screening and crew compatibility.
You've come all this way and decide to land right away without taking the time to scan the surface or send probes down to find a safe landing spot.
They enter the room with the giant head and no-one, not any-one in the room is in awe or even a little surprised that it is a human head. No-one but David, who seems to be the only one who makes the human observations.
The geologist who's just mapped the structure can't find his way back to the outside.
The biologist is confronted with a snake like alien who has given him nearly every verbal and non-verbal signal an animal can give you telling you to f*** off. He still wants to play with it.
Two of our guys are missing. We could have checked their cameras but really, why put in the effort.
Pieces of glass moving in excess of 200 kph should really turn a suited person into swiss cheese.
Most of my other gripes are with the near complete lack of characterization, excepting David. It's possibly just my perception of things, but I have this feeling that expensive productions in the last 10 years or so have abandoned characterization in favor of moving the plot forward. I understand why, or think I do. You don't need characters to sell a movie. You need stuff happening to the characters to sell a movie. My problem with that is that if I don't perceive the characters as human beings I do not care about what happens to them. As such, I'm not taken on an emotional roller coaster ride which American cinema can and has very often exemplified.
In Alien, we had the crew come out of cryosleep and then sit around the table and talk. They talked for a few minutes. And just those few minutes were needed to set up the relationships between the characters and to round them out as human beings.
There's little in the way of talking in Prometheus. In fact, the biologist wants to strike up a conversation and he gets struck down ending the scene.
The relentless exposition and build up of plot becomes boring for me without an invested emotional interest.
I have to disagree with you frankthedm, I wouldn't put this movie on the same level of classic science fiction. Science fiction is all about exploring the human condition in fantastical and extreme situations. The premise was sci-fi enough but the development of the story consisted of people getting slaughtered without any real reaction from the rest of the crew. In fact, the only exploration of human behavior I saw was David and his interactions with the rest of the crew. Even that was limited. We mostly had people talk to him in a condescending tone.
Allegedly, Ridley Scott said in an interview that this movie was a vehicle for his personal philosophical and religious views. If this is true, that would really rub me the wrong way.
Take this with a grain of salt. I have to ask if my friend can send me a youtube link of the interview. So far I only have this link from a yahoo
interview.
