The summer blockbuster has grown from a highly entertaining trip through a fantastic world into a mindless collection of huge explosions and implausible stunts. Men like Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer have taken the craft of big budget movie making and removed everything that made it compelling. Long gone are the ideas of strong characters and tight storytelling when it comes to the biggest movies of the summer season. It has become more important to cause a dozen huge explosions then develop a quality character for the audience to fall for. I held up The Avengers earlier in the year on this blog as an example of a solid summer movie and even it left a ton to be desired in its character development and plot points. The Avengers was certainly 100 times better then Transformers or any of the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but does it really hold a candle to Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark? We have strayed so far from what the summer blockbuster once was that we hold up sub par movies as beacons of what the genre should be. I'd like to say that the creators of the big budget summer movie, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, etc., must be rolling over in their couches witnessing what their legacies have spawned, but those pioneers' efforts to right the blockbuster in recent years hasn't been much better then the crap Michael Bay produces.
So, as excited as the trailer for Prometheus made me, I went into the movie a little leery. Chances were high that another filmmaker from dawn of the summer blockbuster, another pioneer of well made big budget movies, would release just another collection of explosions that left character and plot behind. We've all been taken down the road of much ballyhooed prequels of beloved science fiction franchises and it hadn't ended well. That is until now. Ridley Scott has created yet another masterpiece and finally done justice to a franchise that has been waiting years to be done right. Scott avoided all the pitfalls his contemporaries fell victim too and put out a movie that puts Bay and company to shame. Prometheus is everything a summer blockbuster should be. It has its big explosions, it has its moments that make you jump from your seat, but never at the cost of character and story. It throws us into a world and pulls us through it by making us care about that world and the characters that do more then just take up space in it, the explosions are just sprinkles on the sundae.
Part of the appeal of the characters is the wonderful acting Scott was able to capture. Although none are big draw actors, except maybe Charlize Theron, this is a collection of some of the best in the craft. Noomi Rapace, the original Lisbeth Salander, Idris Elba, of The Wire fame, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pierce, Logan Marshall-Green, even Patrick Wilson shows up for a brief cameo. Each is able to make their characters pop off the screen.
This movie isn't anything revolutionary. This isn't James Cameron attempting to reinvent movie making with Avatar. It's Ridley Scott bringing back the conventions he and his contemporaries established years ago and showing filmmakers of today what a well made movie looks like. Prometheus is very much a classic science fiction story. If you're a fan of the Alien franchise you will be rewarded with a wonderful story filled with nods to the movies you love. If you've never seen an Alien movie you won't be lost at all, the movie never really mentions anything about its predecessors. This is very much a movie that can be enjoyed on its own as well as a part of the Alien universe. It's a throwback to an era of great movie making and hopefully a movie Hollywood and current movie makers can learn a few lessons from. The Avengers may go down as the biggest movie of all time but Prometheus is the summer blockbuster at its absolute best.
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