Anti-metheus


I haven't hated a movie as much as I hated Prometheus in a long time. It is a movie that screams for mockery.

Some of my favorite writings on it so far...

Nick Mamatas:
In the grim meathook future of this film, corporations rule the planet, CEOs rule their corporations on whims, and women wear naught but Ace bandages as undergarments, the poor sexy sexy things.

Kameron Hurley:
In the world of Prometheus, we all came from white dudes, who went around seeding the universe with their magical, life-giving sperm.

Genevieve Valentine:
One of the saving graces of the psychosexual terrorization in the Alien franchise is the leveling of the gender playing field – the rape threat they represent is omnipresent and sexually indiscriminate. But not in Prometheus! Thanks, Prometheus.

Richard Brody:
Which is to say that, despite the lack of intentional humor, lots of things in the movie are laughable, from the giant tiki-head of primordial power or the flying cruller that threatens humanity to the cumbersome pseudo-mythology that blends Sunday-supplement science with the kind of puffed-up archetypes of genesis that would have embarrassed Wagnerian epigones—and which Scott’s proud earnestness renders all the more ridiculous.

Also, the production design and cinematography are dull and repetitive, the plot is little more than a videogame script (and thus about as much fun as watching somebody else play a videogame), the characters are all idiots and stereotypes who spout pseudo-profundities they apparently picked up from Fortune Cookies of the Gods, and Guy Pearce is stuck in Dustin Hoffman's Little Big Man make-up for no apparent reason. (I liked Michael Fassbender's performance, though. He seemed like a refugee from an incomparably better movie, A.I.)


(Even though the movie is ploddingly predictable, if you haven't seen it and want to predict every plot turn five minutes ahead of time yourself, don't read on.)

And let's not forget Charlize Theron as the Ball Busting Career Woman With Daddy Issues, Who Might Be A Lesbian — I mean, Robot — a character who finally gives in to the propositions of the Hunky Black Dude Who Will Make Her A Bit More Hetero — I mean, Human — Just Long Enough For Us To Imagine Them In Bed Together. It's not enough, though, and we still don't like her after that, so she must be punished for her general ball-bustingness at the end anyway by becoming a force of gravity that attracts giant flying petrified croissants.

The thing that annoys me most in the movie, though, is the Boyz Only Wonder Machine.

Nice little Creation Museum attendant Noomi Rapace has sex with her always-obnoxious boyfriend, thinking she is incapable of making babies (a Deeply Emotional Subject for her, because apparently in her heart she knows women were put on Earth to make men's babies for them). What she doesn't know is that always-obnoxious boyfriend has been injected with alien blood contagion and so his sperm is now Alien SpoojTM that gets her all knocked up with nastiness. When she finds out, she runs to the Boyz Only Wonder Machine that she discovered in the Ball Buster's lair.


Why would the Ball Buster bring a super-expensive Boyz Only Wonder Machine with her? Maybe it was to remove Guy Pearce's Little Big Man make-up. But it really seems to be her Boyz Only Wonder Machine, since it's in her cabin, not Little Big Man's. The only explanation is: She thinks she's a boy. As all Ball Busters do. They want to do a man's job in a man's world. They bust balls because they don't have their own, and they're jealous and vindictive and do nothing but nag, nag, nag. Probably don't even know how to cook.


But the nice little Creation Museum attendant who thought she couldn't get pregnant by having sex with her boyfriend has now been punished for her naivete, and she wants an abortion. So she goes to the Wonder Machine, which she doesn't realize is Boyz Only until it tells her so. She was very discrete with her request, too, asking not for an abortion but for a c-section. No way, though. Boyz Only Wonder Machines don't do that. That's girl cooties stuff. Get your own machine, poopy-head!


So what we have here then is a future of medical miracles and miraculous technology that cannot bridge the unfathomable gap between men and women. Men are from Mars, women are from who the heck knows but don't touch them they're icky! In the world of Prometheus, the sexist assumptions of all sorts of pseudo-science are taken as literal truths. Men and women are so different, they need their own separate Wonder Machines.


We the audience are left to wake from the cryogenic sleep induced by this drivel and start gagging.

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