REVIEW: Prometheus

Prometheus (2012): Dir. Ridley Scott. Written by: Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green and Charlize Theron. Rated R (Graphic violence and the appropriate swearing for such occasions). Running time: 124 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

In Prometheus, scientists land on a breathtaking world many millions of miles from Earth and, as is often the case, some pretty horrible things are waiting for them there.

A kind-of-sort-of prequel to the Alien films, Prometheus reveals its relation to those movies only loosely at first, mostly by borrowing their imagery and visual style, and builds a new mythology meant to coexist with the already established franchise. Knowledge of how all these parts from various films fit together is inessential to enjoying this one though and, at any rate, the mythology may or may not be too important. This is a straightforward sci-fi thriller wrapped in lofty ideas and a complex plot but its pleasures are relatively simple.

Onscreen text informs us the year is 2093 and that a crew of seventeen is onboard the spaceship Prometheus heading toward an undisclosed location. If you’ve seen movies like this before, not the least of which being the Alien films, you will recognize that seventeen is a large number of characters and that something bad will surely happen to at least a few (and quite probably many more) of them before the movie is over. Your intuitive suspicions will be reinforced when you learn that only a handful of these characters get substantial scenes and more than one of the supporting players are outright jerks. I trust you see where this is going.

Among the main characters are Elizabeth (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green), archaeologists who discover a pattern in several otherwise unrelated cave paintings across the Earth. The pattern points to a distant galaxy where, they believe, they will find the intelligent beings that created humans some millennia ago. An aged billionaire (Guy Pearce underneath a lot of makeup) agrees to fund a mission that will send them and a crew of technicians and scientists to that galaxy (specifically one moon in that galaxy) to see if they can make contact. Leading them is an icy corporate overseer, Meredith (Charlize Theron).

Also onboard is David (Michael Fassbender), an artificial intelligence robot. While the crew slept in a cryogenic stasis for two years en route to their destination, David was awake, studying human culture (old movies, mostly) and learning ancient languages so that he may hopefully translate an alien-human conversation should there be one.

Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo, is an intensely focused and amazingly resourceful heroine and Charlize Theron’s cold, calculating performance is a welcome reprieve from all the shouting she did in Snow White (I swear I could hear her in the theater next door). Logan Marshall-Green is a likable actor, though I don’t buy the character’s flippancy in the face of such monumental discoveries (or maybe Mr. Marshall-Green is just too ruggedly handsome to convincingly play a scientist). As the ship’s gruff captain, Idris Elba is a delightfully charismatic presence. It says something about a person when, after being cryogenically frozen for two years, the first thing he does is smoke a cigarette.

Michael Fassbender, however, steals the show. His tone of voice and facial tics always seem on the verge of showing emotions aside from the polite conviviality David has been programmed to convey. In a subtle way then, Mr. Fassbender’s performance gives depth to ideas the script only dances around regarding the extent of David’s humanity. We watch his reactions closely: Was that menace in his voice, or just the unsympathetic reasoning of a computer?

The script, written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, introduces a lot of enticing mysteries, including David, who seems to know something the other don’t. There is also the far grander question which Elizabeth and Charlie intend to ask when they meet their makers-in-question: If aliens created humans, for what purpose did they do it? And why leave clues in the cave paintings? The film gets a lot of mileage out of dangling these mysteries in front of us, though I am not sure they all get resolved in satisfying ways. Prometheus cares about its existential intrigue only so far and then it cares about the more obvious joy of watching humans get murdered by creepy-crawlies.

The score by Marc Streitenfeld creates a majestic mood as the scientists explore the alien moon and its runes, rightly characterizing their discoveries as the greatest in mankind’s history. But the characters don’t always see it this way. They’re too busy endangering their lives in all sorts of reckless ways. In their version of Earth circa 2093 are there no horror movies to teach them that they should never reach out and touch, much less taunt, an unidentified tentacle?

Prometheus is not without its sophistications, however. It is marvelous to look out and boasts one of the best production designs in a movie in perhaps years. Director Ridley Scott, who also made the first Alien, adds splashes of color to his earlier film’s rusty palette; consoles in the ship’s sleek interior light up yellow and purple.

There is also a wonderful attention to detail. Hours after waking from their two-year slumber the crew dons their spacesuits for the first time and their movements are understandably clumsy. When they try to cram into a small rover, their large helmets bump up against each other. Not many movies include moments like that.

Prometheus is tense and exciting enough that you do not mind that it neglects to answer every question it raises (or even most of them), at least not until you are well on your way out of the theater and discussing it. The elaborate backstory ends up being a little beside the point and I wonder why it was included if it was to be left undeveloped. There will probably be a second film that addresses the unsolved mysteries but am I the only one who wishes movies would just stand on their own without always setting themselves up for a sequel?

- Steve Avigliano, 6/11/12

REVIEW: Snow White and the Huntsman

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012): Dir. Rupert Sanders. Written by: Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini. Based on Snow White by the Brothers Grimm. Starring: Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin and Sam Spruell. Rated PG-13 (Some scary creatures). Running time: 127 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

In Snow White and the Huntsman, the evil Queen’s mirror slides off the wall in a metallic ooze and takes on the shape of a cloaked figure. Later, we see a majestic forest where a white elk stands beneath a tree filled with nymphs. During the climactic battle, our heroes fight warriors made of black glass shards that shatter on contact and reform instantly. The visuals in this film are bold and stunning and they mean absolutely nothing.

Snow White would seem to be a sturdy enough classic for another pointlessly gorgeous reimagining but when the quality of storytelling is this lazy, the barrage of dazzling effects feels like an exercise in extravagance or, worse, like a crutch.

The tale is a familiar one though perhaps told a shade darker than usual. A deceptive beauty named Ravenna (Charlize Theron) weds a widowed king and, after murdering him on their wedding bed, claims the throne. She has a grab bag of magical powers that include eternal youth, great strength and, I’m pretty sure, a few telekinetic abilities. The one condition of her sorcery is that she must be the fairest woman in the land. So she rules her kingdom with tyrannical vanity, literally sucking the life out of all the pretty girls. Assisting her is her brother Finn (Sam Spruell), a wormy creep who steals the occasional incestuous glance at his sister.

Ravenna’s rule is threatened when one day her talking mirror delivers some bad news: She is no longer the fairest of them all. That title belongs to the recently matured Snow White (Kristen Stewart), the King’s only daughter and rightful heir, who has been locked away in a tower since the Queen’s takeover years earlier. (One of the biggest suspensions of disbelief the film asks of us is accepting that the pouty Kristen Stewart is fairer than Charlize Theron.)

The rivalry between Snow White and the Queen is never absorbing though, largely because of the performances of Ms. Stewart and Ms. Theron. This incarnation of Snow White, with a vaguely weepy expression permanently fixed on her face, is a lousy heroine. She has no spunk or life; she wanders around without agency, letting other people make her decisions for her. Ms. Theron, meanwhile, turns the dial to eleven too often, too quickly, never giving the wretched Queen a chance to earn her reputation as a feared villain. She is loud and shrill but not menacing.

Actors take a backseat to everything else in this movie though. Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, which gives the film’s art directors and set designers another opportunity to flex their creative muscles. Look out, Snow White! That tree branch is really a snake! Get down! A troll is heading right for you! One after another, the movie throws its ideas at us but they do not add up to anything; the filmmakers fail to build a cohesive world where all these different parts could fit together.

The only two men brave enough to face the digitized terrors of the Dark Forest and find Snow White are a huntsman named Eric (Chris Hemsworth), who the Queen hires by dangling before him the prospect of reviving his dead wife, and William (Sam Claflin), a childhood friend of Snow White’s. Eric and Snow White engage in the standard squabbling between movie tough guys and distressed damsels but wait! Did they just share an extended, melancholic stare? Yep, they must be in love. They are, after all, the film’s top-billed stars so a romance between them is a foregone conclusion. Add the old friend William and we have ourselves a love triangle. (Never mind that William is a total bore.)

Some dwarves show up too (seven of them) and they take turns being quaint, wise and off-color. Like everything else in the film, however, they are cogs in a beautiful machine that has no purpose or function. The final battle is predictably well shot and edited but also dull and forgettable.

Snow White and the Huntsman is also hurt by a clunky script full of groaners spoken in faux-Victorian language. Movies like this tend to fall back on flowery dialogue in an attempt to cover up how vacuous the characters’ conversations are but all this really does is force us to decode the language before we realize just how dumb it is. “The forest gains strength from your weakness,” explains Eric. All right. Whatever that means. Later, when giving Snow White advice on how to kill a man, he instructs her not to remove her dagger until she sees her victim’s soul. What? This guy is a master hunter and that’s the best tip he can give?

The movie assumes we will take its hokey, underdeveloped mythology wholesale and without question. There is magic but we never get a sense of its limits or its rules. The spells and curses and fluttering fairies only exist to justify the top shelf set pieces. Snow White and the Huntsman tries to be epic and profound but all it is is sleepy and dopey.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/4/12

REVIEW: Young Adult

Young Adult (2011): Dir. Jason Reitman. Written by: Diablo Cody. Starring: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson and Elizabeth Reaser. Rated R (Language and sexual dialogue). Running time: 94 min.

2 stars (out of four)

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a thirty-seven-year-old divorcee and ghostwriter for what she refers to as a “disturbingly popular” book series for tween girls. Her name appears not on the book jackets but in fine print on the inside title page everyone skips over. When a young bookstore employee declines her offer to sign a few of the store’s copies, she spitefully tries to autograph one anyway. She is desperate for some love and affection or at least some attention.

The books she writes are garbage but she doesn’t show much ambition to become a great literary author. For all her too-cool-for-that dismissal of the series, she even seems to take pride in them. She eavesdrops on teenagers’ conversations and works the overheard snippets into her writing.

Still, modest success is not enough for Mavis. She sloths around her apartment with her pet Pomeranian, which she mostly ignores, fueling herself with an endless supply of Diet Coke to get her through another empty day. She harbors depressive alcoholic tendencies for a number of vague reasons, one of which is her divorce but that seems to be pretty far in the past. Much more recent is the news that her high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), has fathered a child with his wife (Elizabeth Reaser). This prompts Mavis to trek back to her hometown – a small Minnesota fishing town called Mercury – in the ignoble pursuit of breaking up Buddy’s marriage and reclaiming their now decades-old romance.

There she runs into Matt (Patton Oswalt), an old classmate who she fondly recalls by the nickname, “Hate Crime Kid.” A few jocks in high school, mistakenly believing Matt to be gay, jumped him in the woods and left him for dead, crippling him for life. Twenty years later, Matt is a social recluse. He works at a local bar but spends most of his time at home where he lives with his sister and paints action figures. He and Mavis strike up a friendship, mostly by wallowing in each other’s misery and getting blasted off whiskey from Matt’s home distillery. Mavis stays focused on the task at hand though, fearlessly hurtling down a path that cannot end well for her.

Young Adult reteams screenwriter Diablo Cody with director Jason Reitman, whose previous collaboration was 2007’s Juno. Striking a different note here, Mrs. Cody and Mr. Reitman seem to want Mavis to be at the center of a dark comedy but the script can never pull off the delicate tonal balance. The jokes are too on point, Mavis’s grand moment of self-destruction to carefully calculated, Mrs. Cody’s ostensibly poignant insights into her characters too self-satisfied.

Mavis feels too much like the creation of a screenwriter. She is the embodiment of a self-absorbed, snarky attitude but not really a person. We never get a proper sense of what brought her to her current depressed state or what keeps her in it. There is her divorce, I suppose, and the heartbreak of Buddy Slade but are we really meant to believe her emotional turmoil is the result of man troubles now years behind her? In the right writer’s hands, a mean, vengeful character can be a lot of fun. A petulant, whiny character, however, is another story.

Ms. Theron admirably portrays Mavis’s passive aggressive, self-deluding personality with subtlety even when the script is far from subtle. The same is true for Mr. Oswalt who has a genial presence in an underdeveloped role. Side players such as Patrick Wilson’s grown-up high school heartthrob are little more than objects adjusted to satisfy story requirements; Mr. Wilson’s role in particular feels like a pale imitation of his character from Little Children, a vastly superior film about suburban anxiety and unfaithful husbands.

Mr. Reitman, whose previous film, Up in the Air, had such a deft touch in depicting its characters’ social and emotional lives, does little to save Mrs. Cody’s weak script. The story meanders along without offering many notable details and fades quickly from the memory. Mavis is so self-absorbed she believes that what happened in high school is still important twenty years later. I, on the other hand, have a feeling I won’t remember her problems even a month from now.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/22/11