Alienating your audience

I should be doing other stuff. There is a lot of real world stuff going on but I need to get something off my chest (or out of it?). Last night I finally got to see Prometheus and complete my Alien marathon. The reviews were all fairly poor so my expectations were set very low and this film still managed to get below them.

The budget for this film was $130 million. Really? Couldn't they have spent some of that money on checking that the script made sense? I suppose with one of the writers from Lost we can expect some confusion. I watched every episode of Lost and that was a load of nonsense, and so is Prometheus.

For starters let us consider the shuttle medical pod that gets used in the ridiculous self administered surgery scene. Charlize Theron has her own shuttle/life-boat on the Prometheus with its own special medical pod, so why when Noomi Rapace tries to use it for an emergency caesarean does the computer state it is set for male procedures only? Are they trying to give us some sort of weird clue about Theron's character? Seeing as how she spends most of the movie wearing a skin tight bodysuit because, well because she can, there doesn't seem to be any doubt about her gender.

All the medicine in this film was terrible. Rapace performs her own emergency caesarean alien-ectomy and delivers a squid baby. She then pulls out the umbilical cord, but what was that attached to? You need to remove the placenta as well, Ms Rapace, or you're going to bleed to death. And another thing, let us assume that there is some good reason for wearing bandage boob wraps when in hyper-sleep but surely when you wake up you would put some more functional underwear on?

What do alien squid babies eat? There has always been a problem in the Alien franchise about how the beasties go from pretty small to enormous without apparently consuming anything, but this example is particularly extreme. Maybe it has been munching all the bandages they use for underwear while it has been in the medical pod.

But by far the biggest problem with Prometheus is that the highly paid, brain-box scientists act like such morons. The examples are too numerous to mention. It is left to Idris Elba and his fly-boy crew to act with a bit of sense, at least when he's not trying to do his own gender test on Charlize Theron.

This film is truly terrible, but you have probably seen it yourself by now and know that already. £130 million to make and takings in excess of $400 million. Meanwhile Dredd 3D cost £50 million and is currently struggling to make even half of that back. There is no justice.

At the time of writing life is being particularly unfair to someone I love so the fortunes of multi-million dollar Hollywood movies are mere trivia, but what rubbish trivia this is. Even the AVP films were better.