SOAPBOX: Gallipoli + Prometheus: Best Works of Art in History

[Borachio]

Link to video.

All creatures will now make merry.

Under pain of death

 

[Azale]

Prometheus was a fantastic film. I'm partial to a wacky theory on why that's the case though.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/sh...3428948&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=3

From the above link, courtesy of user SuperMechaGodzilla:

Well let's get down to brass tacks: this film is hilarious.

Guy Pearce in an old man suit appears out of nowhere, says "i want immortality," and then gets bludgeoned to death with Michael Fassbender's still-conscious severed head. This is funny. No, it's the funniest film I've seen in theatres since District 9.

Weyland's death is a stock ironic comeuppance played for extreme camp. The film glosses over it because it know that this is a trope. The glib speed with which it dismisses the search for immortality is the same with which it dismisses all the other characters' motivations. Dude say he wants money? DIES. Dude says he wants friendship? DIES. These aren't random deaths. They are equated by this same tone and attitude. Humans are stupid and die because they're stupid.

David reads Liz Shaw's dreams and then tells her straight up: you are a shallow character. Her dream looks like a hallmark card. "Your entire motivation is that you're infertile and your dad died of Ebola. I just summarized it in two sentences." The moral: robots don't have souls, and neither do people. But the robot is smarter because he understands this. If you've seen Blade Runner, you know what the warm-toned recording of the dream of a happy family means. It means she's a replicant.

"It's a quote from a movie I like."

Look at the specific quote from Lawrence of Arabia: 'the trick is not minding that it hurts'. David's character feels everything the humans feel, but he doesn't mind it. He's built up his ironic distance, he constructs his own identity and puts on an incredibly campy performance. The whole film aligns with his POV. As I said in general chat, Prometheus is a masterpiece of straight-faced camp.

The very first shot is quoted from 2001 (it's a quote from a movie I like). Prometheus is transparently Scott's grand statement on Science Fiction as a genre. It's not 'hard' science fiction. It's "Science Fiction", deeply embedded in quotation marks. The Prometheus/Pandora myth is like Scifi 101, first day of class. It's THE example of mythological proto-scifi. It's referenced in Frankenstein, the first piece of Science-Fiction literature. Alien references it. The films that Alien references reference it. The films that reference Alien reference it.

So the characters fly into space seeking all the answers to their questions, and what do they find? A rational, promethan man locked in an unending struggle against a irrational, pandoric vagina monster. Just slapping against eachother until there is a literal, onscreen shuddering climax and postcoital release. Again: this is funny! You can imagine people staring at this scene and saying "hmm... what does this all mean?" Or, better yet: "how did the squid monster grow so big without a food source?" - just angrily looking for logical clues in this prolonged sequence of a vagina and penis locked in combat.

Scott's grand statement on sci-fi is to issue a moratorium. The point of Prometheus is that these stories pretty much always boil down to the same basic archetypal conflict. The humans are painfully mundane - they are all artificial. Only David sees through the guise and understands that he's a character in a movie. This is a loving ode to gleefully bad sci-fi.

Important scene: Naomi Rapace looks at some bleeps and bloops on a screen. Two bar graphs allign. "This is it," she cries. "This is everything!" We cut back to the bar graph, and watch it bleep and bloop a while longer. Wow, what an impressive bar graph. Next scene, it turns out she just wants to get hosed.

There are two distinct scenes in the film of wacky dames who just need a good deep-dicking. One gets an abortion, the other crushed by a huge black protuberance. A guy smokes pot and then dies instantly. This is Friday the 13th logic. The class conflict in Alien is notably absent. All these people are rich idiots, so we're not supposed to cheer for them. Idris Elba, the closest thing to a 'lower class' character puts on a Southern Accent, says YEEHAW! and rockets his ship into a wall to save the day. Michael Bay would give an approving nod.

Why is there a zombie scene? Because it's wonderful slapstick. He gets shot like fifty times and his head gets run over. I couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, the 'zombie' exists to shows us what Charlie was turning into. For a second, I though it was Charlie, back from the dead. Again, this treats the characters as slightly interchangable.

There are at least two shots lifted straight from Luigi Cozzi's (in)famous Italian Alien ripoff Contamination.

Prometheus owns.

I still like it partially for the graffix and whimsy, but this post really hit on why I enjoyed the movie as much as I did. It was self-aware sci fi camp.

 

[Kennigit]

I don't think it was self aware. There is campy "scifi" (eg Iron Sky), but prometheus is not one of them. It takes itself wayyy too seriously, and its waayyy too meta to say everything bad about it is done in self recognition.

 

[Azale]

I don't think it was self aware. There is campy "scifi" (eg Iron Sky), but prometheus is not one of them. It takes itself wayyy too seriously, and its waayyy too meta to say everything bad about it is done in self recognition.

Nah it knows what it is doing, just like Starship Troopers.

 

[VilePilot]

Galliopoli can't hold a candle to apocalyptaco. Gibson totally outdid himself on that.

 

[Leoreth]

I don't think it was self aware. There is campy "scifi" (eg Iron Sky), but prometheus is not one of them. It takes itself wayyy too seriously, and its waayyy too meta to say everything bad about it is done in self recognition.

I agree. This is one of those times where critics put way more thought into a movie than its makers.

 

[Azale]

You're all just mad you didn't pick up on it

 

[Kennigit]

I choose to believe

 

[Leoreth]

Because there's nothing to pick up on. It's the old parody excuse. You'd have just as much of an argument that Battlefield Earth is a parody instead of the failed vanity project of a deluded celebrity.

 

[Oruc]

I didn't enjoy prometheus.

 

[Antilogic]

Because there's nothing to pick up on. It's the old parody excuse. You'd have just as much of an argument that Battlefield Earth is a parody instead of the failed vanity project of a deluded celebrity.

It's The Room's excuse, except for that whole celebrity part.

I thought the tilted camera angles, blue filters, and terrible dialogue were all brilliant.

 

[Dachs]

that pickup football game was hilarious

 

[Azale]

Because there's nothing to pick up on. It's the old parody excuse. You'd have just as much of an argument that Battlefield Earth is a parody instead of the failed vanity project of a deluded celebrity.

Sure ok. Stay irate. Compare Ridley Scott to whoever pooped on the screen and created Battlefield Earth.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Because there's nothing to pick up on. It's the old parody excuse. You'd have just as much of an argument that Battlefield Earth is a parody instead of the failed vanity project of a deluded celebrity.

You're jealous you didn't get the brilliance. You are also a Bad Person(tm) devoid of a soul.

I didn't enjoy prometheus.

I need a break from trolling you so I'll just leave this alone for now.

Galliopoli can't hold a candle to apocalyptaco. Gibson totally outdid himself on that.

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You may have a point.

Sure ok. Stay irate. Compare Ridley Scott to whoever pooped on the screen and created Battlefield Earth.

What an unfair comparison. Prometheus raised so many questions so that we can get our minds blown to smithereens by the sequel. I for one am pumped.

I am still considering the merits of your take on Prometheus. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree yet.

 

[Antilogic]

that pickup football game was hilarious

What, don't you get fitted for a tux and then go play professional alley football? I thought that was perfectly normal.

 

[Leoreth]

Sure ok. Stay irate. Compare Ridley Scott to whoever pooped on the screen and created Battlefield Earth.

Your interpretation of my posts is just as accurate as your interpretation of Prometheus.

 

[Dachs]

Sure ok. Stay irate. Compare Ridley Scott to whoever pooped on the screen and created Battlefield Earth.

Roger Christian owns as many Oscars as Ridley Scott does. Admittedly, Christian won for set decoration on A New Hope, while Scott won for the mediocre work of Edward Gibbon fanfic commonly referred to as Gladiator. Also, Scott didn't technically win that Oscar, since he lost Best Director to Soderbergh and Gladiator "only" got Best Picture.

And just because Scott made Blade Runner and American Gangster doesn't mean everything he touches is solid gold. 1492 was awful. So was Robin Hood.

 

[Azale]

Your interpretation of my posts is just as accurate as your interpretation of Prometheus.

Your argument for why my interpretation (or my support of someone else's interpretation) is wrong is that it is overused on other movies. Specifically, you cited Battlefield Earth could just as easily be a parody movie by my metric.

I don't think so. BE was just a shoddily made movie, they couldn't even get the camerawork right. Prometheus, on the other hand, is seen as having "plotholes" and characters that act bizarrely stupid. I personally think this can be explained by the "purposeful camp" explanation. I don't think parody is the right classification.

EDIT: @Dachs, that's fair. Still, sci fi is his wheelhouse (or he seems to enjoy it the most) and I don't think it is beyond the realm of possibility that this was his intention.

 

[Leoreth]

Well, what you got wrong is that I never said that Prometheus is as bad as Battlefield Earth, but it's quite telling that you pulled the "how dare you insult Ridley Scott" line.

My point stands and it's that there is no objective reason to think that it's "purposefully camp".

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

Galliopoli can't hold a candle to apocalyptaco. Gibson totally outdid himself on that.

Except it contained possibly the worst plot device in cinema history. Our hero gets saved from being sacrificed at the altar by, check this, a solar frigging eclipse.

I mean Jesus, getting saved by an eclipse is ridiculous enough, but solar? They're very rare.