Prometheus

Or, Goo bye and goo riddance.

How much meta-content do you want in your horror movies? Prometheus has been panned by some on the grounds that it starts out promising to tell you the origins of humanity and then fails to do so. To me, that's not nearly as much of a disappointment as the fact that it promises to scare the daylights out of you and then fails to do that. 

Our main characters, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), and her husband, Dr. Charles Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered cave paintings of big people pointing at a bunch of dots, which conclusively proves where life on Earth came from. I have no problem buying this premise, as long as it gets us to a really creepy planet. Which it does, of course, but it takes about half the movie to get there.

On the way, we are introduced to David, an android played by Michael Fassbender, who likes to watch Lawrence of Arabia for pretty much no reason except perhaps to learn a British accent. It would make more sense if he had been watching 2001, or Terminator 2, or Saturn 3. Are the robots ever the nice guys in movies like this?

David is in charge of waking everybody up from the obligatory cryosleep, at which point we meet Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the corporate executive who has been sent on this mission to do pushups, apparently, and walk around as robotically as David and bark at everybody because she's a corporate executive and that's what they do. Since Ridley Scott brought us Blade Runner, it's worth discussing whether Vickers is herself an android. If this review doesn't put you off the movie entirely, or you saw it too late, come back and discuss in the comments.

Are you scared yet? Exactly. 

There are a lot of conversations about how we're here to find out who created us, and Dr. Shaw wears a cross, which we discuss at length. If this makes you suspect that it is a symbological sledgehammer which will later be wielded against you, go to the head of the class.

There are a bunch of other characters. I'd tell you who they are, but they're all redshirts, so that'd be pointless.

Finally we get to the planet. They find a mysterious cave (yawn), and some mysterious black goo (probably not good, right?) Then a storm comes, and two redshirts get stuck outside the ship, and I thought, finally! The movie's starting!

It kind of never does, though. We've just seen this all before. There are nasty lifeforms, but they're surprisingly ho-hum. David does what you knew all along he was going to do, and again the results fail to truly scare. There's a creepy alien birth sequence, which would have bothered me more if I hadn't seen it coming since the otherwise pointless sex scene. The miniseries V had a creepier alien birth sequence thirty years ago (and I hear the Twilight series had one too), so if you're a connoisseur of these things, it's worth a look but otherwise not a reason to watch Prometheus. Oh, and you're pretty sick.

In between, the humans discuss whether the aliens on the planet made them, and David points out that humans made him, just in case you missed that wrinkle. I'm mystified that reviewers would say this movie was obtuse, because the characters really refuse to let the audience figure anything out for themselves.

And at the end, it turns out this is an origin story of sorts...the origin of a new set of sequels. That might be the most predictable thing about this very predictable movie.