Prometheus

Went to see Prometheus yesterday afernoon. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but too many loose ends for my liking. Maybe, Ridley Scott would have needed a couple more hours to tell the story properly - in which case a Director's Cut release will solve all of this for me.

I was expecting a jump-in-your-seat Alien-like movie, but there weren't enough dark corridors on the spaceship for that (see picture to the right - there is even a chandelier! and the spacesuit is colour-matched with the door panels). I know, I know, it wasn't intended to be a repeat of Alien, but I found the story told in too straight a line. Speaking of straight lines - when the human spaceship picks a place to land on the planet, they seem to do so at random, without aerial mapping first, and then the first thing they see is a big straight road leading to a big intriguing mound. Yes, a straight road is certainly evidence of intelligent lifeform - but nobody even asks where is the road coming from. And also, aren't they so lucky to have come across this yellow brick road, of all the places in all the world, they had to come to this one!

There is an interesting android, David, but we're not finding out enough about his motivations to understand his actions - Why does he feed the cute scientist guy some DNA that will most likely kill him, and does he know that at that particular point? (And by the way, why does cute scientist guy decide to get drunk as soon as he's found evidence of the life form that created man - ok, that lifeform is dead, but there could be others alive somewhere else on that planet?) Why does David want cute scientist girl (Noomi Rapace) to carry her monster baby to term? And come to think of it, why does she not go around and tell everybody what David did, once she's managed to remove said monster from her belly, using a self-controlled operating theatre that looks like the crane game in an amusement arcade, the one where you can never catch the cute teddy bear that's sitting in the middle of a dozen other cute teddy bears, all equally uncatchable?

You get my drift - I don't mind questions remaining unanswered in a movie, or a director keeping us guessing. What I mind is protagonists who seemed to have been picked out of an actors' casting interview for this most important space mission. All decent actors, but none of them convincing me that they are serious scientists and space explorers.

If it hadn't been for the rain, we would have been better off going for a walk instead.