Prometheus (2012)

I know I've seen this more recently than 2012.  There's no way it could have felt so old hat if I hadn't seen it in damn near ten years.  I put it on because I needed two hours to clean my living room and wanted something that I didn't really have to pay attention to.  It's still very good but softer now.  I don't feel any of the same rawness.  That could be because the Alien franchise is a little too careworn for me.  I've seen all of them God knows how many times.  They're comfort movies for me.  I guess I should swap them out for the Conjuring-verse for a while.  Originally posted 10 Jun 12.    Nominated for:  Best Visual Effects    I have got to find some way to talk about this without going the spoiler route.  It's really hard!  I want to tell you guys about all the cool stuff in it but I don't want to ruin it for you.

Suffice to say, this is definitely a keeper.  Visually, it's stunning, the pacing is tight, the actors are on point, and the monsters are...well, I don't want to spoil it.  Ridley Scott has previously revealed that he had always intended Alien to be an allegory for rape, in a form that would make it as abhorrent to men as it is to women.  He succeeds on such a grand scale but, given that I'm a possessor of a fucked up sense of humor, knowing that it's an allegory makes it slightly hilarious to see every dude in the audience squirm.  I couldn't stop laughing during a highly inappropriate scene.  Rob said it was like The Deathly Hallows part 2 all over again.

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her colleague/lover Dr. Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a series of pictographs from various ancient cultures that show the same star grouping. They theorize that the map comes from the creators of humanity, whom they have dubbed Engineers.  They secure funding from the aged Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) and board the Prometheus, along with her crew of various geologists, biologists, and medical personnel.  Helmed by Captain Janek (Idris Elba) and commanded by Weyland employee Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the crew travel to the planet depicted.  There they find caverns full of strange canisters weeping a sinister black fluid, giant monoliths, and the piled corpses of Engineers clustered around doors...as if they were fleeing something.

I seriously wish, after having seen this movie, that Charlize Theron would have switched character portrayals here with Snow White and the Huntsman's Queen.  Meredith Vickers is an ice-cold bitch and it greatly added to the tense atmosphere of this film.  Snow White could have used a heaping helping of that.  I did love the android, David, played by Michael Fassbender.  There is absolutely no argument that he is anything but malicious and hateful, despite not technically being capable of emotion.  I wasn't so much into the philosophical argument underpinning the film but I felt like it was a great addition to the previous movies.