I loved Prometheus...I just don't know if it's good

[Yar! There be spoilers ahead]There’s something about exploration science fiction (for lack of a better term) that really appeals to me. Some of my favorite sci-fi is just about people going out into the unknown and looking around and poking at things. There’s something that’s just so cool about that: some ragtag crew (with something to prove! And hidden agendas!) flying out into space and landing on an new planet or spaceship or whatever and throwing on the ol’ spacesuits and walking out there all slow and cautious and scanning everything. I love it.

I love that feeling of the unknown. It’s so crazy because even though you don’t know what you’re going to discover inside that crazy temple building, just discovering that it’s there has already completely changed the course of humanity. Just seeing the thing has reshaped the world, but everyone has to focus on what else is in there to find out what happens to them. It makes everything so tense-you know every weird picture or strange button they see is going to be important later and you’re trying to piece everything together just like they are.

So I loved Prometheus. Like, a lot. Especially the first hour—I was floored. It hit every note for me. The scenery was gorgeous. The crew was a good mix. There were some interesting themes emerging about who creates who and meeting your maker and all that. I loved the very first scene, with the giant flying saucer (that looked heavy,  alien ships never look heavy) and the dude that jumped into the awesome looking waterfall.  I loved the first walks inside the alien temple/building/spoiler. Where they walk into the room with the giant face and all the weird pots and stuff – you just know something crazy is going to go down! What’s in the pots? It was one of those perfect sci-fi scenes where everything is strange and odd but it all looks like it made sense to whatever alien was there in the past, so you know there’s an explanation and it’s Ridley Scott so someone is going to die.

Weird giant head with room full of vases. What could go wrong?

Things (of course) start to go wrong.  They go wrong in the right way too! A couple of fools get rocked and infested and now we get to see all the crazy crew dynamics start to play out. It asked the question (one of the ones I thought was the most interesting) about hey, these alien/creators created earth, but now they want to destroy it…why? I want to know!

This is all great science fiction to me. The sense of awe, and the questions you ask, and the curiosity and the danger and everything all came together really well for me. I was totally sucked in.

But as a I-need-to-be-all-ready-to-sound-smart-and-objective-so-let’s-be-critical-about-this person, I started thinking more about Themes and Plot and Character and I’m not sold, for a lot of reasons and things, that this was a “good” movie. It left too many untied ends. It tried to do too much, too quickly. It got messy in the wrong way.

 I’ve been talking to Chris lately about critics and objectivity and who can rate movies and who can say what. Can a movie be objectively good, by some Special Criteria, or should it be judged by how I personally feel after having experienced it?  I’m torn between giving this an A+ (for how I felt when watching it) and a B- (when I objectively picked it apart later).

But honestly, I haven’t been this excited about a movie in a long time. I have a very hard time thinking of a sci-fi movie that has come out since the Matrix that I like better. It brought me back to all those books I loved as a kid, and it made me wonder about those classic sci-fi questions that I hadn’t thought about in a while. I’d absolutely see it again, and again.