Per the terms of the bet, I had to write at least 300 words of a positive review of Prometheus. And I did! At least, I listed 300 words worth’ of positive things about it, which is close enough. Per the terms of that same bet, it had to be in its own post, and I could not just write three hundred isolated words about it being good and spend the rest of the time listing all the ways that it’s bad. But I can do that in a separate post! So here we are!

This post is going to suffer from the same problems as the other one, in that I haven’t magically seen the movie again in the 45ish minutes since writing the first one. Sorry-not-sorry.

So, as I said in the other post, this will be full of spoilers because it’s a terrible movie and you shouldn’t see it anyway.

The broad strokes of What Is Wrong With Prometheus is, well, everything. There are problems on every level, from individual scenes that don’t make any sense to plots that don’t make any sense to the whole damn overarching “what does it all mean??” sense that gets raised and then not dealt with at all because Damon Lindelof was responsible for at least part of the script and I didn’t learn my lesson after Lost.

Small(ish) things that don’t make sense:

• Why does David (Michael Fassbender) infect that crew member with the alien goo? Does he have any motivation for that? (probably not. Again, not watching it again to find out) If he was going to kill the people, he could have done that any time they were in hibernation.
• Why does Guy Pearce have old-age makeup when there are no flashbacks to him younger to make it worth being Guy Pearce?

Medium problems

• That time when the professional scientist takes off his helmet, completely unbidden, on a hostile alien world after doing no testing to see if the air is breathable…
• …and then pokes an alien life form.
• Don’t make your movie about “what if there is an answer to life, the universe, and everything?” if you’re not going to at least pretend to answer the damn question.

Major problems

• When a giant rolling thing is rolling after you, and it’s very large but rather narrow, RUN TO THE FUCKING SIDE AND NOT JUST STRAIGHT AHEAD WHERE GRAVITY DICTATES IT WILL ROLL.
• When you’ve had MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY, some staples ARE NOT ENOUGH. You cannot be running and jumping and battling and whatnot.

Ugh. This movie. Okay, that’s everything I could think of literally just off the top of my head without reading Wikipedia to refresh myself on the finer points of this dumb, dumb movie. But now I have catalogued, for posterity, at least the main points.

(Also, after I wrote this, I went a-googlin’ for “things wrong with Prometheus and after seeing/remembering all the many, MANY things I forgot, I feel vaguely ill. I’m so glad I wrote the other one first.)

And, just for the record:

Not Recommended