I suppose it's rather late to be commenting on a film from 2012, but I just recently came up with a reason why I didn't like the film Prometheus. Or at least one reason...
When Prometheus came out, all the critics and many fans on the internet praised how the film asked big questions. I never got that. To me Prometheus didn't ask big questions, it only pretended to do so.
For instance, it is made pretty blatant in the film that characters in Prometheus are asking about where we come from. Were we created by a superior alien race?
The answer is given to us right at the beginning of the film. So, yes. According to the opening sequence, the 'engineers' seeded the building blocks of life on primordial planets, presumably including Earth. We're given an answer even before anyone on screen asks the big question.
Surely, this pretty much negates the whole purpose of having a big question in the film...
Also, films that really do address big questions, don't necessarily have to have characters ask those questions on screen, they make the audience think about them.
If Prometheus didn't start with the opening sequence it had, or it didn't even feature a living 'engineer' so the 'engineers' were just as mysterious as the 'space jockey' from the original Alien was, and the whole thing was written much better, then maybe we as an audience would have sat through the film wondering and pondering about how these mysterious 'engineers' related to the origin of mankind...But that's really asking too much of Damon Lindelof, who seems to think that confusing the audience equates to good thought provoking sci-fi, like Lost. Right....
This is why Prometheus failed to ask the big question.
When Prometheus came out, all the critics and many fans on the internet praised how the film asked big questions. I never got that. To me Prometheus didn't ask big questions, it only pretended to do so.
For instance, it is made pretty blatant in the film that characters in Prometheus are asking about where we come from. Were we created by a superior alien race?
The answer is given to us right at the beginning of the film. So, yes. According to the opening sequence, the 'engineers' seeded the building blocks of life on primordial planets, presumably including Earth. We're given an answer even before anyone on screen asks the big question.
Surely, this pretty much negates the whole purpose of having a big question in the film...
Also, films that really do address big questions, don't necessarily have to have characters ask those questions on screen, they make the audience think about them.
If Prometheus didn't start with the opening sequence it had, or it didn't even feature a living 'engineer' so the 'engineers' were just as mysterious as the 'space jockey' from the original Alien was, and the whole thing was written much better, then maybe we as an audience would have sat through the film wondering and pondering about how these mysterious 'engineers' related to the origin of mankind...But that's really asking too much of Damon Lindelof, who seems to think that confusing the audience equates to good thought provoking sci-fi, like Lost. Right....
This is why Prometheus failed to ask the big question.
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