Monday Morning Quarterback Part II

By BOP Staff

June 12, 2012

This is as nice as Djokovic ever looks.

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In spite of this, he still manages to call his shot Babe Ruth style with the title of the movie. He puts it right there on the poster what the most gripping movie scene of 2012 will entail. I am in awe of that. I would also add that for those three minutes, the audience at my theater was a quiet as I can ever recall. If someone's cellphone had gone off at that moment, I suspect they would have been beaten to death. Everyone was utterly engrossed by the greatest medical operation in the history of film.

The disappointment I am reading across the Internet stems from the fact that Prometheus subverts expectations. People wanted another Alien movie, something Scott clearly had little interest in doing here. Instead, he builds the same mystery that he did in 1979, but the payoff here is different and exponentially more disturbing. It is the same fear every child has of their parents: what if they don't love us the way that we love them? Or what if we are simply too different to communicate with one another? Scott is a man in the twilight of his life who is tying together every nugget of wisdom from his life and placing it into a heady exploration the area that lies beyond current human understanding. He does this in impacting fashion while going so far as to promise answers in a future film, a generosity he did not offer in his 1979 and 1982 science fiction masterpieces.




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These are the bigger issue aspects of Prometheus. With regards to a specific note of Mr. Huntley's, I would maintain the following. There are only 17 people on the ship at the start. It's a massive vehicle capable of galactic travel, which means that there are many compartments of it. Without doing any major spoilers, many of the original crew members are not on the ship when she has her medical issue. Why should we assume that the ones who are would have knowledge of her situation? If the only clue is that she has blood on her clothes, that hardly differentiates her from anybody else by that point. If anything, the movie goes to great length to create a plausible scenario wherein she could experience that odd turn of events while still being able to fulfill her later role in the movie.

With regards to Max's concerns about the status of the crew, that is easy to understand. As opposed to the later space marines concept in the Alien franchise, this is a scientific endeavor that has been largely kept a secret by (presumably) one of the most powerful people on Earth. His options in finding people to explore the galaxy and thereby give up five full years of their life (it's a two-way trip, after all) are presumably limited. In spite of this, Scott still manages to tie back cleverly to the Alien storyline that is so impacting after all this time. They are all relative strangers stuck on board a space cruiser and the only thing that some of them care about is the money, just as was the case in Alien and Aliens. I appreciated Scott's remaining respectful to the genesis of the Alien universe.


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