So while I was in Santa Fe I caught Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien (1979), the flashy and eye-catching Prometheus, which is certainly trippy, even if it doesn’t all add up. I guess if I were rating it as such, I’d give it 3 1/2 to 4 stars—that is to say, I did like it, had fun watching the film, for all its flaws. What I didn’t like: it seems to end with a begging for a sequel, though Ridley Scott took so long to do the prequel, I doubt if he really plans for another: But who knows? He might be casting a glance at the Harry Potter franchise and thinking why not. Some catty Hollywood observations are easy: It’s like 2001 meets Alien meets Chariots of the Gods, with an homage to Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) in the early scenes, plus a little spritzing of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia—and Michael Fassbender does resemble Peter O’Toole. What I liked: It throws in enough complexity to make you think and wonder, ponder over the implications of this or that scene. The opening, for instance, is gorgeous and puzzling, when an alien/human on a distant planet swallows a mysterious liquid, falls apart and dissolves in a river, the final shots of the scene showing his DNA recombining to another life-form, which most likely becomes the precursor of the badass arthropod in Alien. The alien/humans who seem to have “terraformed” Earth and to have seeded humans here later appear to change their minds and decide to destroy us (as happens in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of 2001), but why? It begs a philosophical question, and an interesting one, at that. Perhaps because we are only one stage in a creative/destructive cycle of intelligent beings in the universe? Maybe.
But the film was only part of the megaplex cinema experience. The trailers were so over-the-top I was exhausted by the time the film started. Even the bathroom was intense: The hand blow-dryer practically took off two of my fingernails. To regain some sense of normalcy, I ended the night taking pictures of the cool neon signs along Cerrrillos Boulevard, like this one:
