Antimetheus

[seriousfic]

So apparently Prometheus is doing well with audiences and critics, but the film geek circles are trashing it. Which is odd? I mean, comparing it to The Phantom Menace? Whatever else it is, Prometheus works as a film. The performances are good, the effects are good, the pacing is good, every scene is structured to make you wonder what's going to happen next. And Phantom Menace doesn't have a single character as interesting as David. Prometheus is flawed, clearly, but no one's childhood is getting raped. I daresay my childhood wasn't even lightly fondled.

Plus, it seems like there's a lot of nitpicking? I've heard complaints that the characters take off their helmets when they find there's breathable air. "Aren't they worried about microbes!?" Yes, granted, but there's this thing called dramatic license? As opposed to Alien, where one atmospheric scene is spent on the alien spaceship, here half the movie has people in it, and they don't want to spend half the movie with bulky helmets obscuring the actors' performances? Same reason the characters in Star Wars and Star Trek never put on any kind of protective gear unless it's a specific plot point. This isn't a documentary. I mean, maybe you guys liked Contagion, but I thought it was a little boring, and I don't want every movie to be like Abed Nadir's Halloween episode. "Let's stand back to back in the middle of the room with sharp knives." "I love you." "Shh."

That said, you have obvious cases of the characters acting like idiots which go too far and ruin suspension of disbelief, but does that really ruin the movie? If one side-character in Doctor Who acted like an idiot, would that make you throw up your hands and go "fuck this shit."

And there's criticism of Noomi Rapace's character having an accent! I don't even think she was trying not to have one. I think she's just playing a character from Sweden. What in her characterization precludes that? For fuck's sake, people, Patrick Stewart played a Frenchman with an English accent on Star Trek, anyone have a problem there?

Of course, Idris Elba's character does have a pretty board accent--oddly, if you hear him talk in real life, he has this kind of working-class Cockney accent which would be absolutely fine for suggesting the character's blue-collar stiff thing, so I'm not sure why he didn't just talk normally. Maybe he really wanted to do a Kentucky-fried accent. I don't know.

Maybe it's that the movie has a light theist bent, which amounts to one character expressing Christian beliefs and the movie not explicitly endorsing or contradicting her faith. It would really disappoint me if that were the deal-breaker for geeks. I thought science fiction was about having an open mind and considering alternate viewpoints. There's not a setting on there for "I'll consider alternate viewpoints so long as they agree with mine."

You hear a lot of times that movies used to be so great. I don't think that's the case. Sure, some of them were classics, but a lot of the times I think we were just willing to look past a movie's flaws and let it do its thing. Nowadays, we're just too focused on cutting apart movies and coming up with the best putdown to use on it. I can't help but think that's a little sad.

That doesn't cover Amazing Spider-Man, by the way. That shit won't stand.

Comments

[fengi.livejournal.com]

It seems like this post is trying to dismiss everyone who didn't like the film as merely unreasonable. Every critique I've seen legitimately argues it's a poorly constructed film made with a lot of skill which can be more frustrating which can be more frustrating than merely bad. They've found it hokey and implausible on its own terms. The expectation isn't documentary realism, but being plausible within its limits, and it's not. The spacejesus stuff is criticized as misusing religion to make a shallow movie seem deep. The biggest complaint is many good ideas and themes are used in a mediocre and unengaging way (par for the course for the writer of Lost). I don't think it's a matter of letting amovie do it's thing - paying attention to a story means thinking and if a story cannot handle basic audience engagement, it's not because people care more about the best putdown. It's because many movies aren't very good.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Not dismissal--I can understand if for some people the bad outweighs the good and especially if it comes across as a disappointment, considering the pedigree involved. But saying it's the Phantom Menace is definitely hyperbolic. You've got a movie that Roger Ebert gave four stars and people are saying it's a one-star movie. Is it really that much worse than Battleship or Men In Black 3?

[mcity.livejournal.com]

>And there's criticism of Noomi Rapace's character having an accent! I don't even think she was trying not to have one. I think she's just playing a character from Sweden. What in her characterization precludes that? For fuck's sake, people, Patrick Stewart played a Frenchman with an English accent on Star Trek, anyone have a problem there?

Well, there's the minor fact that as a child, she clearly has a British accent.

...While she and her dad are clearly traveling around the world, which means she could've spent an unknown amount of time in Sweden.

>Maybe it's that the movie has a light theist bent, which amounts to one character expressing Christian beliefs and the movie not explicitly endorsing or contradicting her faith.

As a Christian, I'm more concerned with trying to reconcile "devout Christian" with "in a relationship where she has premarital sex".

>. It would really disappoint me if that were the deal-breaker for geeks. I thought science fiction was about having an open mind and considering alternate viewpoints.

Scientists are generally portrayed as at odds with religious beliefs, especially creationism, even in real life. Once again, geeks demand something original, then complain when they get it and they don't like it.

>That doesn't cover Amazing Spider-Man, by the way. That shit won't stand.

Case in point.