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.