Movie nite and Prometheus WTF?!

Right so movie night with my dad. After saying that The Princess Bride had stolen two hours of his life he would never get back (that was the nicest thing he said about it... which led me to wonder about genetics and quiz my mom in detail about any sexy postmen with good taste in movies that might have been around back in the day) my "dad" chose Prometheus as our next movie to watch.

I'd seen it before. On a plane last year during a flight that was Guiness World Record contender for the most stop overs ever ever ever. I was massively sleep deprived- like I was going on for 24 hours awake, which for me is two steps away from hallucination stations and for some reason decided it would be a great idea to watch a 2001 a Space Odyessy and Prometheus back to back... Resulting in me staring at all the sleeping passengers around me with their slack sleepy expressions, little blankies and their head phones all coated in that slightly menacing half light that exists in planes and is made up of flickering private viewing screens and reading lights and exit signs and the glow of "toilet occupied" and the bleepy things that tell you it's imperative to put your seat belt back on just as you finally get into the loo. Anyway long story short, by the end of the second movie I was looking at all this with at least 65% certainty that we were all going to die and 85% conviction that the vacant toilet sign had evolved some sort of artificial intelligence and was watching me.

Mercifully I remembered the staff call button and after a couple of emergency beverages I fell asleep and all was well...

Which brings me back to Prometheus...

- first viewing... Wow... Magical, terrifying, ooh landscapes, wow muscular aliens...blah blah.... 

- second viewing....WTF?

So these guys go into space... After seeing some paintings... just a bunch of paintings... Erm yep that's pretty much it... and then when they wake up after two years in stasis they have a big meeting with a creepy hologram and a creepy android thing and angry but also creepy Charlize Theron and a whole bunch of troubled dysfunctional and yes creepy people with interesting and varied accents (actually it was actually like they got the Big Brother UN cast list confused with the scientific crew of the Prometheus mission. Somewhere in the same time frame there is a group of highly qualified scientists sitting in a jacuzzi, being force-fed tequila and wondering what the eff "shower hour" is)

After the meeting, the previously mentioned super brainy scientists visit angry creepy Charlize Theron and find out through not obvious at all exposition ( thanks creepy Michael Fassbender android) that angry Charlize lives in a self-contained self-sustaining "life boat" with a ridiculously expensive state of the art medical thingie that she talks about but refuses to talk about... So at this point you really have to wonder how the scientists haven't started to suspect something is up and how they are quickly diverted from all suspicions by Angry Charlize's highly suspicious refusal to talk about any of it .. So to summarise the story this far we have a creepy android (Michael Fassbender is pretty amazing I must admit I would have fired everyone else and just got Michael Fassbender to do things for 3hours (this is not a euphemism I meant like cooking and walking and all that)) and creepy angry Charlize Theron and a secret mission and a suspicious amount of suspicious behaviour and then lots of creepy tunnels and and creepy dying alien holograms and then more creepy android just opening stuff when he feels like it.... how could this NOT give you a tiny little sense of foreboding.... like haven't you watched a sci if movie before entire crew of the Prometheus.

Also just the whole lack of scientific protocol of it all... 

"Let's take off our helmets... Yay cause the atmosphere looks normal and what could go wrong?" 

"Ooh let's go through this door opened against our wishes by the creepy android (call me conservative but if my TV said whoops and turned the VCR on ... I would be nervous.... So when a hyper intelligent, Laurence of Arabia obsessed android starts doing what ever it bloody well wants to, you switch the thing off and go the fuck home! Where did these people get their degrees from?) 

(Kudos to the crew of that Space Odyssey ship for  turrning the creepy talking machine the hell off... you would think the crew of Prometheus would have watched 2001 A Space Odyssey at some point) 

Next up the door "accidentally" opens and there are a whole bunch of creepy oozy urns and nothing says "don't put your helmet back on" like a bunch of creepy oozy alien urns accompanied by holograms of terrified giant advanced beings running for their lives and ,of course, a gnarly severed head. 

"What killed them?" muses internationally renowned scientist while not putting her helmet back on. 

"Ooh a head ...let's put it in a bag... without our helmets on. .." 

"Great idea... Hey look the creepy android is off in the corner not listening to us and fiddling with stuff. Let's absolutely not monitor him at all because it's all about trust and also... What could go wrong?"

"Should we put our helmets on?"

"Naaaah. Everything's decaying because we've changed the atmosphere of the room and we can't explain all the moisture.... We should be totally fine"

Then of course after all of this( including the geological surveyor and mapper getting lost in the tunnels he had just mapped.... aaaand the transport ship leaving without any of the ground party... aaaand ... oh God... do I have to go on?) our crack team finally decontaminate the head...... the head that had been in a duffel bag that everyone had been dragging around without their helmets on.... (as anyone who has left their gym bag in the car for a couple of days will agree  ... duffel type bags are probably not the most air tight containers you could hope for) 

Even better is when our highly qualified team then take the mask thing off the alien head but don't decontaminate the new revealed alien head but comment on the suspicious growths and cell transformation on it. COME ON GUYS.... REALLY!?

And this isn't even of the first half of the movie.

"Why would our makers leave us?" The scientists query pitifully..... Yeah uh huh right.

So I didn't finish the movie second time round.... When the biologist started trying to sweet talk a weird reptile serpent thing that was obviously going to try to eat his face off in about five minutes I gave up and read a book instead. 

The book was very good.

Happy new year all 

xxx