Well, for various reasons, I only made it to the cinema once in June so this is not much of a fight…
Prometheus seems to have riled up a lot of people. Many seem to be annoyed it’s not Aliens, whilst others seemed to think that nothing much happened. It’s certainly not Aliens (and that’s not a bad thing), but an awful lot happened. You see, the thing about Prometheus is that it has absolutely no interest in spoon feeding any of the many answers that are either in the film or hinted at extremely strongly. I’m fine with that. Ambiguity, whether a little or a lot (and this film deals with both), can be a great way of giving a fantastical premise a dose of reality; things are rarely cleanly explained in the real world. Everything that needed to be answered was, to some degree. This film deals in questions that are far above the scope of most action-adventure films, about that nature of existence and the things that we will never know. Beyond the narrative itself, the action set pieces were surprisingly good, giving a sense of scale, desperation and pace when needed, and the performances more than did the job. It was not perfect: that final scene was entirely gratuitous, and I would’ve ended the film about 10 minutes earlier. However, it seemed to me like it was the film that it needed to be: not an Alien film, something different. Something more ponderous, and interesting. A very good film. (See my Prometheus Twitter review).
Well, it’ll be no surprise that Prometheus is the winner this month.