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Prometheus at midnight: WORTH IT.
Okay, first point: You cannot go into this thinking of it as "the Alien prequel". If you do, you will be disappointed. If, however, you think of it as "that awesome science fiction/horror movie with a philosophical bent I've been wanting to see for months now", you should be just fine.
Second: AAAAAAAAAAAAAH YOU GUYS THIS MOVIE.
I--in the interest of honesty, I did...not like it as much as I did The Avengers? But that's because The Avengers snuck in and ate my brain, the way XMFC did last year; it's sort of a separate issue. However! I did, in fact, REALLY REALLY LIKE IT.
* The cast: so good! No, the non-marquee names didn't really get fleshing out, but they don't in a lot of these kinds of movies, so that wasn't as much of a problem for me. Guy Pearce didn't--I mean, it's a lot to do under prosthetics, you know? And he just gets snuck in with 20 minutes to go, so it--I don't know. I didn't hate him, but I've seen him be better in things. (Things like Ravenous, aka The World's Best Gay Cannibal Period Piece That Was Also, *Yes*, Directed By A Woman.)
* Idris Elba didn't have a lot to do besides pilot the ship and work a mildly dodgy Southern accent--yeah, wow, no--while playing the mini-accordian, but he did it *well*. (Also, for real: Elba is the only man I can think of who could use "Are you a robot?" as a pick-up line and have it work.)
* I have never heard of Logan Marshall-Green before this movie. I would like to know why, frankly, because he is really good: he veers from excited to disappointed to loving to worried to sacrificial, all in the course of an hour, and it never seems fake.
* Charlize Theron is stuck playing the designated villain for most of the film, but that's not fair; she's basically less evil Paul Reiser, she's The Company, and we have to dislike her for the rest of the film to be believable. But it's the little moments--the thing with Elba, above, or when she's talking to Pearce near the end--that make Vickers not just one-note, and I was actually sorry to see her go. (Not *that* sorry, since she just wanted to leave Earth to be murdered by bioweapons, but a little.) (Also, on a shallow note: Charlize Theron's ass in that jumpsuit is bananas. Hnnnngggh.)
* Between this and SH: A Game of Shadows, I really need to watch Noomi Rapace in the original Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, because holy shit. She is so good! Shaw never once loses her faith; she loses her lover, she gets disillusioned about the entire reason they're there, but she never loses sight of the original thing that drove her, which is fantastic.
Also, she clocks two medical professionals with a piece of pipe, then gets to the biobed in Vickers' suitepod and does emergency surgery on herself to get her sharktopus baby out of her abdominal cavity--while dressed like she's prepped to be part of a human centipede, no less--then runs around for the rest of the movie with staples in her gut and periodically dosing herself up on either stimulants or painkillers, before pimping around with a goddamn space-axe in case she has to kill some shit. ELIZABETH SHAW, YOU CAN GET IT.
(Seriously. Ellen Ripley would love her.)
* OH LOOK GET READY FOR MY DAVID 8 FEELS, WORD VOMIT HERE WE COME.
The Lawrence of Arabia parallels are less "parallels" and more "David obesssively quoting lines to himself over a two-year period, much the same way I still quote Buffy in my daily life", but--man, that opening sequence is rough: he was alone for over two years, checking over the crew, eating his...meal paste, fixating on a Peter O'Toole movie and teaching himself languages. Trying to be of use. He spies on Shaw's dreams to learn more about her; he has preferences for how he wears his hair and is quietly sly. He's not human, but you can't argue he's not a person.
The most telling part, I think, comes from how he interacts with Vickers and Weyland. He's the most polite bitch in the world to Vickers, who clearly hates him but tolerates him for some unknown reason. Look how he smiles when Weyland says he's the closest thing he'll ever have to a son; see how it falls when he says David doesn't have a soul. All of that leads up to "Doesn't every child, in their heart, want to see their parents dead?" Which--like he said, he doesn't necessarily want Weyland dead, but when he does, he doesn't have to worry about disappointing his "father" anymore. He can just be David.
Fassbender does an amazing job, not that I didn't think he would; he gives David little quirks, little tweaks, but still somehow magically makes him juuuuuuuust walk the Uncanny Valley line so you never forget he's an android. He's the least human-seeming of any of the other robots--Ash, Bishop, Call--but he's got the most complicated personality. I love that.
* I would legit watch a bunch of movies where it's Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender's Head in a Bag tooling around, trying to find our asshole space parents. THAT WOULD BE SO GREAT, YOU GUYS.
* OH MY GOD SERIOUSLY THAT IS SQUAMOUS GET IN THE CAR.
* Did anyone else think that thing at the end looked like a Xenomorph had just popped out of Pyramid Head?
* Shaw! No! We do not go ask our parent race why they want us dead! I don't think you and Robot Head are going to change their minds! Find the other ships and BLOW THEM THE FUCK UP.
* Judging by the manta-ray...thing that attacks early on and Sharktopus, I am guessing that every vase has a fucked-up little surprise inside. And they have more than one ship. No, really: BLOW THEM THE FUCK UP.
* I...am unsure how infecting Holloway with the creation goo or wanting to put Shaw in stasis 'til they returned to Earth could have done anything for Weyland, so I'm going to chalk that up to "--also, David, while we're here, could we bring back stuff to make our *own* bioweapons? You're a peach, thanks."
* I really wasn't thinking "EW EW EW VAGINAL IMAGERY" with that thing in the biobed. I was mostly thinking "FOR REAL, THAT IS SHARKTOPUS".
* For an opening that consists of scenery porn and a giant alien sacrificing himself to seed Earth with the building blocks for humanity, my God was that lovely. I kind of want to go to Iceland now.
* Hey, you know what's fun? When What Used to Be Mohawk Guy comes back to the ship, he's crouched down with his arms and legs in weird angles LIKE A FUCKING SPIDER. And then he's hard to kill even with fire and bullets and he got jumped by something other than the manta-ray thing oh my God seriously hundreds of thousands of bioweapons BLOW IT THE FUCK UP, SHAW.
* All I could think during the surgery scene (other than "Elizabeth Shaw is a badass, and my new hero") is "OH MY GOD THAT POD JUST BURST AND GOO WENT INTO HER OPEN WOUND". I really, really hope that shit was sterile, y'all.
(I'm guessing the biobed was made for Weyland, because it was set for a male when Shaw tried to use it.)
* --yeah, I can't be too upset about Ford being killed, mostly because she was totally okay with putting Shaw and the sharktopus baby in stasis to go back to Earth. I'm calling that as a Weyland and/or Vickers directive.
* If you timed it right, you could air this and Filth back to back for a messed up XMFC RPS Christmas mini-thon.
* --Did anyone else get that Life of Pi trailer by Ang Lee featuring the kid and the tiger on the boat? What the hell was that? Short film, fine, but nope! Film trailer! I--yeah. Huh.
* Total Recall looks utterly ridiculous. So does Magic Mike, which I did not get a trailer for, but I am totes seeing, because: MATT BOMER, MALE STRIPPER. (Don't judge me.)
Final verdict: A-. I didn't go in thinking of it as a straight prequel, which really helped; it's its own thing, and comparisons just set you up for disappointment. But it's a strong, distinctive movie in its own right that deserves to be seen. Recommended.
Okay, first point: You cannot go into this thinking of it as "the Alien prequel". If you do, you will be disappointed. If, however, you think of it as "that awesome science fiction/horror movie with a philosophical bent I've been wanting to see for months now", you should be just fine.
Second: AAAAAAAAAAAAAH YOU GUYS THIS MOVIE.
I--in the interest of honesty, I did...not like it as much as I did The Avengers? But that's because The Avengers snuck in and ate my brain, the way XMFC did last year; it's sort of a separate issue. However! I did, in fact, REALLY REALLY LIKE IT.
* The cast: so good! No, the non-marquee names didn't really get fleshing out, but they don't in a lot of these kinds of movies, so that wasn't as much of a problem for me. Guy Pearce didn't--I mean, it's a lot to do under prosthetics, you know? And he just gets snuck in with 20 minutes to go, so it--I don't know. I didn't hate him, but I've seen him be better in things. (Things like Ravenous, aka The World's Best Gay Cannibal Period Piece That Was Also, *Yes*, Directed By A Woman.)
* Idris Elba didn't have a lot to do besides pilot the ship and work a mildly dodgy Southern accent--yeah, wow, no--while playing the mini-accordian, but he did it *well*. (Also, for real: Elba is the only man I can think of who could use "Are you a robot?" as a pick-up line and have it work.)
* I have never heard of Logan Marshall-Green before this movie. I would like to know why, frankly, because he is really good: he veers from excited to disappointed to loving to worried to sacrificial, all in the course of an hour, and it never seems fake.
* Charlize Theron is stuck playing the designated villain for most of the film, but that's not fair; she's basically less evil Paul Reiser, she's The Company, and we have to dislike her for the rest of the film to be believable. But it's the little moments--the thing with Elba, above, or when she's talking to Pearce near the end--that make Vickers not just one-note, and I was actually sorry to see her go. (Not *that* sorry, since she just wanted to leave Earth to be murdered by bioweapons, but a little.) (Also, on a shallow note: Charlize Theron's ass in that jumpsuit is bananas. Hnnnngggh.)
* Between this and SH: A Game of Shadows, I really need to watch Noomi Rapace in the original Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, because holy shit. She is so good! Shaw never once loses her faith; she loses her lover, she gets disillusioned about the entire reason they're there, but she never loses sight of the original thing that drove her, which is fantastic.
Also, she clocks two medical professionals with a piece of pipe, then gets to the biobed in Vickers' suitepod and does emergency surgery on herself to get her sharktopus baby out of her abdominal cavity--while dressed like she's prepped to be part of a human centipede, no less--then runs around for the rest of the movie with staples in her gut and periodically dosing herself up on either stimulants or painkillers, before pimping around with a goddamn space-axe in case she has to kill some shit. ELIZABETH SHAW, YOU CAN GET IT.
(Seriously. Ellen Ripley would love her.)
* OH LOOK GET READY FOR MY DAVID 8 FEELS, WORD VOMIT HERE WE COME.
The Lawrence of Arabia parallels are less "parallels" and more "David obesssively quoting lines to himself over a two-year period, much the same way I still quote Buffy in my daily life", but--man, that opening sequence is rough: he was alone for over two years, checking over the crew, eating his...meal paste, fixating on a Peter O'Toole movie and teaching himself languages. Trying to be of use. He spies on Shaw's dreams to learn more about her; he has preferences for how he wears his hair and is quietly sly. He's not human, but you can't argue he's not a person.
The most telling part, I think, comes from how he interacts with Vickers and Weyland. He's the most polite bitch in the world to Vickers, who clearly hates him but tolerates him for some unknown reason. Look how he smiles when Weyland says he's the closest thing he'll ever have to a son; see how it falls when he says David doesn't have a soul. All of that leads up to "Doesn't every child, in their heart, want to see their parents dead?" Which--like he said, he doesn't necessarily want Weyland dead, but when he does, he doesn't have to worry about disappointing his "father" anymore. He can just be David.
Fassbender does an amazing job, not that I didn't think he would; he gives David little quirks, little tweaks, but still somehow magically makes him juuuuuuuust walk the Uncanny Valley line so you never forget he's an android. He's the least human-seeming of any of the other robots--Ash, Bishop, Call--but he's got the most complicated personality. I love that.
* I would legit watch a bunch of movies where it's Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender's Head in a Bag tooling around, trying to find our asshole space parents. THAT WOULD BE SO GREAT, YOU GUYS.
* OH MY GOD SERIOUSLY THAT IS SQUAMOUS GET IN THE CAR.
* Did anyone else think that thing at the end looked like a Xenomorph had just popped out of Pyramid Head?
* Shaw! No! We do not go ask our parent race why they want us dead! I don't think you and Robot Head are going to change their minds! Find the other ships and BLOW THEM THE FUCK UP.
* Judging by the manta-ray...thing that attacks early on and Sharktopus, I am guessing that every vase has a fucked-up little surprise inside. And they have more than one ship. No, really: BLOW THEM THE FUCK UP.
* I...am unsure how infecting Holloway with the creation goo or wanting to put Shaw in stasis 'til they returned to Earth could have done anything for Weyland, so I'm going to chalk that up to "--also, David, while we're here, could we bring back stuff to make our *own* bioweapons? You're a peach, thanks."
* I really wasn't thinking "EW EW EW VAGINAL IMAGERY" with that thing in the biobed. I was mostly thinking "FOR REAL, THAT IS SHARKTOPUS".
* For an opening that consists of scenery porn and a giant alien sacrificing himself to seed Earth with the building blocks for humanity, my God was that lovely. I kind of want to go to Iceland now.
* Hey, you know what's fun? When What Used to Be Mohawk Guy comes back to the ship, he's crouched down with his arms and legs in weird angles LIKE A FUCKING SPIDER. And then he's hard to kill even with fire and bullets and he got jumped by something other than the manta-ray thing oh my God seriously hundreds of thousands of bioweapons BLOW IT THE FUCK UP, SHAW.
* All I could think during the surgery scene (other than "Elizabeth Shaw is a badass, and my new hero") is "OH MY GOD THAT POD JUST BURST AND GOO WENT INTO HER OPEN WOUND". I really, really hope that shit was sterile, y'all.
(I'm guessing the biobed was made for Weyland, because it was set for a male when Shaw tried to use it.)
* --yeah, I can't be too upset about Ford being killed, mostly because she was totally okay with putting Shaw and the sharktopus baby in stasis to go back to Earth. I'm calling that as a Weyland and/or Vickers directive.
* If you timed it right, you could air this and Filth back to back for a messed up XMFC RPS Christmas mini-thon.
* --Did anyone else get that Life of Pi trailer by Ang Lee featuring the kid and the tiger on the boat? What the hell was that? Short film, fine, but nope! Film trailer! I--yeah. Huh.
* Total Recall looks utterly ridiculous. So does Magic Mike, which I did not get a trailer for, but I am totes seeing, because: MATT BOMER, MALE STRIPPER. (Don't judge me.)
Final verdict: A-. I didn't go in thinking of it as a straight prequel, which really helped; it's its own thing, and comparisons just set you up for disappointment. But it's a strong, distinctive movie in its own right that deserves to be seen. Recommended.
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