Ass down on a baguette

Hooray for internet based C-swapping.

Hungryghoast's Web Presence: A thing on Prometheus

distorte:

hungryghoast:

[This is more a discussion than a review so if you’re really concerned with Spoilers and such well, duh, don’t read it]

This is really worth reading if you’re not yet sick of opinions about this film.

It’s been interesting reading a lot of the criticism of Prometheus over the past week-or-so. Or the grounds on which people wish to criticise Prometheus. Which to me seem quite strange grounds. I feel like I must have very different demands for the success or otherwise of science fiction stories to most viewers.

Science fiction performs, for me, two functions: a) to astonish and excite me about the scale, scope, and utterly alien strangeness of the outer universe, and b) to ask me, through allegory or enlargement, questions about the nature of the self, society and our relationship with the natural world.

The list of “criticism” leveled against Prometheus is something like a bug list. It is a strange brew of refusal of suspension of disbelief, misunderstanding of plot, and inability to excuse the actions of beings in impossibly strange and unknowable conditions.

Like Hungryghoast, I feel occasional urges to go through the complaints list and offer defenses, hypotheses and explanations. There are many. But would there be any point? We are obviously approaching this thing from two very different perspectives. I just feel sorry that people who have not seen it will go in under a weight of “criticism” that amounts to little more than a bug-list checked against a bunch of other Hollywood tropes we have come to understand as proper storytelling.

Helene made me watch The White Ribbon the other night, which would make Prometheus’ critics implode with its lack of respect for conventional spoon-fed storytelling. Genres raise strange expectations.

I’ve been thinking about this movie for weeks now and every person who loves it talks about the themes in the movie. Everyone who hates it mentions “mistakes” in editing or dialogue or logic. It’s not a math problem. They made a movie. It’s done. Watch it, or go yell at a tree for not growing how you think it should. ASSFACES.

11 months ago 21 notes

Tagged with:  #Prometheus  #Movies  #backseat drivers

  1. sciencevsromance reblogged this from distorte and added:
    This attitude of needing to solve movies is one that I, perhaps lazily, so rarely bring to my viewing experience that it...
  2. beaver-beaver reblogged this from distorte and added:
    I’ve been thinking about this movie for weeks now and every person who loves it talks about the themes in the movie....
  3. hungryghoast posted this