Prometheus

Prometheus had gotten pretty good reviews, so we decided go see it. Oh, but were we let down… So the special effects were pretty good and the 3D wasn’t too awful, but talk about plot holes you can drive spaceships through.
The main problem was that absolutely nothing seemed to have any consequences whatsoever: A discovery that overturns absolutely everything we know of history and biology? No matter, that won’t change measurement methods, technology or anything. You need a crack scientific team to explore a hugely important issue? Just gather random people with all the discrimination of a charter trip to Mallorca. You’re travelling through the galaxy, space and supplies at such a premium that people have to be put into hypersleep? Well, once they wake up, they’ll have all the amenities of a five-star spa hotel. Somebody tries to lock you up, so you had to beat them up and steal the use of expensive and prohibited equipment, leaving it all bloody and infested with parasites? No worries, nobody cares a whit. You have just have major abdominal surgery? No worries, a couple of painkillers will keep the wound from ripping open even if you keep hitting your tummy with every available object on the planet.

Still, the most egregious problem is the lack of understanding of biology. I forget how many films I’ve seen where they analyse the “DNA” of alien creatures. How likely is it that alien life should be DNA-based to begin with? Somehow people seem to have the idea that life is necessarily based on DNA, and once you have DNA, yeah, well, obviously you can combine it any way you see fit to make human-alien hybrids. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the proposal that alien life would come to Earth and start making jellyfish-alien hybrids, or fern-alien hybrids, though that would make at least as much sense, for some infinitesimal value of sense.

There is also a bizarre scene where the archaeologist protagonist starts inserting electrodes into a magically preserved alien head in order to…well, turn it alive again, as far as we can tell. She does it as a routine matter, which makes one wonder how archaeology is performed in the future. I would presume there would be even more protests from indigenous populations not only having their graves robbed but their ancestors turned into reanimated zombies. She then proceeds to put “50 amps” into the head. 50 A! No wonder it explodes.

In the end one was left wondering whether the positive reviews were simply due to Noomi Rapace being in the film, which seems a bit unfair.