--
PROMETHEUS
The Master was coming home.
Well, now he has, and the overwhelming reaction can be summed up in one word: "meh". Moviegoers, underwhelmed, gave it a B or B- on popular review sites and, while a few critics, most notably Roger Ebert, championed it, most responded in the mold of Ty Burr, who warns that "Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store." And yet, in my eyes, it's a masterpiece, a philosophically loaded, visually ravishing tour de force that, quite frankly, blindsided me with its ballsy scope and feverish intensity. Rarely have I been so mystified by the critical consensus on a single movie, so agitated by the way said critics linger over niggling details and miss the big picture, so confused by the cold, clinical reaction to a movie that shook me so deeply and palpably. I don't just want to tell you that I love Prometheus. I want to rail against popular opinion and, by sheer force of argumentative will, get you to love it too.
OFFICIAL GUIDE TO LOVING PROMETHEUS LIKE DONALD TRUMP LOVES HIMSELF:
1) Don't go in expecting Alien: The E! True Hollywood Story--One of the more mystifying criticisms leveled against the picture is that it betrayed Alien fans by eschewing face-chomping, chest-bursting action for intellectually vigorous drama. As Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly puts it: "Alien taught us that in space, no one can hear you scream. Prometheus teaches us that the gods must be crazy." Indeed, as a prequel to Alien, the movie fails--but it isn't supposed to be a prequel to Alien! This is story of a space crew, who, led by two intrepid archaeologists (Noomi Rapace, Logan Marshall-Green), bankrolled by a dead billionaire (Guy Pearce), supervised by a bitchy business exec (Charlize Theron, continuing her hugely successful I'm-Actually-Kind-Of-A-Bitch-Campaign that started with last year's Young Adult), and aided by mysterious cave paintings, go searching for the very source of human life. Yes, it's a story that incidentally explains the origin of Alien's big-toothed nasties, and of the infamous Weyland Corporation--but that's where the connection stops. The decision to include these tidbits at all was, I'd bet, a marketing one--by weaving cursory bits of Alien trivia throughout this picture, Scott cleverly, albeit rather cynically, tied it to his biggest cinematic success, a gambit that paid off at the box office. With few exceptions, good movies use opening scenes as tonal indicators, as opportunities to prime us for what to expect. This one's prologue, a dazzling, meditative slice of 2001-esque prehistory, ought to make it clear; this is a far cry from Ripleyville. Going into this movie expecting a flat-out Alien prequel is like going to the deli, ordering a pastrami, and demanding that it taste exactly like that corned beef hash you got two months ago.
2) Get over Noomi--As Elizabeth Shaw, the devoutly Christian scientist who stumbled upon the aforementioned cave painting, first-time Hollywood lead Noomi Rapace is the film's center. Fresh off her run as punk hacker Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish Dragon Tattoo movies, Rapace is not a natural movie heroine; whether romancing the Marshall-Green character, spouting off expository dialogue, or just running for dear life, she doesn't project the seamless star-quality of Theron, who was originally cast as Shaw but switched at the last minute. You can sense Rapace making a concentrated effort to get it right, to become what she by her very nature is not. In an odd way, it works perfectly. She achieves a bizarre kind of movie alchemy; like Shaw, she is facing up to her limitations in a brand new universe, and, like Shaw, she has to work unbelievably hard to get what she wants. The actress's desperation to become her character dovetails with the character's desperation to find what she's looking for. This doesn't bode well for Noomi's future career prospects, but it does work for this character and, additionally, add a few extra volts of nervous energy to a movie that's already pulsating with suspense.
3) Fall in love with Fassbender-The one facet of the picture that's been uniformly praised is David, a forever-young android that goes along on the mission. As a plot device, he's crucial--putting humans in search of their maker on a ship with a being that they made sparks a handful of endlessly fascinating discussions. As played by Mr. Next Big Thing Himself, Michael Fassbender, he damn near walks away with the movie. Playing an emotionless robot is pretty simple--don't blink, don't yell--but Fassbender forgoes that easy route. He does something truly stunning--he lends truthful, tremulous nuance to a character without a soul. He can only be human by imitation, which gives every line a fascinating double meaning. When he proclaims that "Big things have small beginnings", he speaks with all the mechanical flatness of a robot, but underneath that is something else; an attempt to mean the phrase, to inject it with the wonder and awe that it would carry if it came from the lips of a human being. He's the walking, talking embodiment of the movie's theme--the paradoxical ways that we trying to become ourselves by echoing those who created us. Elizabeth Shaw may be the story's structural center, but David is its heart and Fassbender is its shining star. Oscar, please.
4) Feel the slow-burn-A couple years ago, I went to a steakhouse that had a footnote next to their hottest menu item: takes a little longer, tastes a great deal better. So it is with this film, which spends a fairly bloodless ninety-minutes building to a blistering third-act pay off. Those who complain that the film gets too mired in philosophical heaviosity to truly cut loose missed the point--the film's contemplative first and second acts engage your brain so deeply that your heart is woefully unprepared for the sudden shot of adrenaline that is the film's climax. That scene, in which Shaw, imprisoned in a glass case, performs anesthesia-free surgery on herself as Marc Streitenfeld's brilliant score saws away at our ears, is one of the greatest in Scott's forty-year career, a hellish, hair-raising gross-out setpiece to end all gross-out setpieces. Better yet, it's not an obligatory attempt to cater to the bloodthirsty nerd crowd. It's the inexorable moment that the whole plot's been building to--the moment when these people's search for their creator and their own objective meaning becomes, in a very real sense, destructive.
5) Brush off the boo-boos-I'd be amiss if I didn't mention the one area in which I agree with the critics; there are some pretty stupid moments in this movie. Some are merely silly, such as the inclusion of a sort of interstellar zombie attack. Some are genuinely frustrating, such as the scene where one of the crew members taunts a pissed-off alien with such brainless zealotry that it's almost the sci-fi equivalent of serpent handling. Yet, for this movie, I'm willing to make exceptions. It's not every day that a filmmaker tries to use his talents to really explore, to take a shot at answering our biggest questions and entertaining at the same time. Ridley Scott is working on a tightrope for two straight hours. Are a few stumbles really that big a deal?
6) Allow for ambiguity-Ah, we've reached the biggest issue moviegoers have had with this picture; it raises considerably more questions than it answers. JR Jones of The Chicago Reader sniped; "The plot of this Alien prequel was a carefully guarded secret -- so carefully guarded, in fact, that not even the movie reveals it." What Jones misses, in addition to the fact that this ISN'T a traditional prequel, is that the movie's ambiguity is at the core of its genius. Stephen Sondheim once said that content dictates form; in other words, when telling a story, do it in a manner that honors the themes at the heart of said story. Isn't it sort of appropriate that a movie about our urge to know...leaves us with an urge to know? If Prometheus were a movie about the answers, this would be infuriating. But it is not. It is a movie about the human obsession with answers, and the very real damages that metaphysical obsession can reap. If there's a sequel, it is my hope that it leaves us with twice the unaddressed quandaries that this one does. I'd rather have unanswered questions than unquestioned answers.
When they screened 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, scores of people, Rock Hudson among them, stormed out of the theatre, confused and irritated by what they just saw. Now, it is the cinema's greatest evocation of cosmic wonder, and a canonized classic. I suspect that Prometheus will fare more or less the same.
Folks may roll their eyes now, but, in twenty years, they'll sit at a special screening, in awe of Ridley Scott's mastery, stunned that he managed to make a third sci-fi picture that damn near measured up to his first two. A
---
Moonrise Kingdom
There's a moment midway through Moonrise Kingdom that sums up, better than any critical exegesis ever
could, what a cinematic miracle it really is. In the midst of a raucous chase,
a key character is struck by lightning and sent flying across a field. Seconds
later, he gets up, and the marvel isn't that he's survived; it's that this
movie, with its carefully crafted fabulosity, its prodigiously realized
otherworldliness, has suspended our real-world notions of time and space so
completely that enduring a lightning strike seems as trifling as stubbing one's
toe.
For his entire fifteen-year career, Wes Anderson has delighted in such
mad-scientist deconstruction, upending the most basic tenets of objective
reality with all the giddy flippancy of a toddler tossing aside unwanted
toys. In Andersonland, sharks have jaguar stripes, birds return to their old
roosts after decades away, and teenage boys stage big-budget war epics in high
school auditoriums. Other than maybe Tarantino, no other modern day director has
taken such distinct and dynamic advantage of the cinema’s ability to shatter
the constraints of our own world, to dream against the grain, to journey not to
Middle-Earth or to Panem, but to venture into our own everyday universe and, if
only for a few hours, force it to answer not to the inescapable dictates of
physics or metaphysics, but to the sheer intrepid ingenuity of the human
imagination. In Moonrise Kingdom,
Anderson’s able to put that unique skill to better use than ever before,
because his protagonists share his desires. Those protagonists are Sam (Jared Gilman), a lonely Khaki
scout who flees camp to meet up with his pen-pal, and Suzy (Kara Hayward) a
solipsistic, sophisticatedly depressed only daughter who lobs not-so-veiled
threats are her parents while drowning them out with French pop music. As they
make their way towards the titular location, an empty inlet by the stormy
coast, their quest to live in defiance of bleak, unrelenting reality dovetails
neatly with the director’s quest to do just the same. Anderson’s always wowed us with the firecracker dexterity of his
hyperactive, culture-fueled brain, but Moonrise Kingdom, the most deeply personal and emotionally rewarding
movie he’s ever made, he also generously offers us a piece of his soul.
Of course, for all the new ground the picture breaks, it still features the old Andersonian standbys; the silly-cool slo-mo, the sonic smorgasbord of a soundtrack, and, of course, the usual arsenal of whiplash pans, stationary still-lifes, and entrancing slow zooms that comprise his pop-art visual style. It's a style that's served him well over the years, lending a sense of sweeping motion to films that took place mostly in the most insular of spaces; a classroom, say, or a submarine. Here, set adrift in the wilderness, it's richer and more visionary than ever before. When filtered through his poet's eye, river crossings are bittersweet paeans to man, dwarfed by nature; wind-wrecked aisles shimmer with jagged beauty; and even the most startling storm carries its own picture-book wonder, carrying with it a rapturous tint of foggy blue. Moonrise Kingdom captures, better than any movie I can remember, the strange, potent spell of suburban wilderness.
And, when it comes to human nature, the film's no slouch either. Anderson's characters are, without exception, broadly drawn caricatures, toeing the line of self-parody, and he knows better than anyone that he needs whip-smart, committed actors to shade them in; every Royal Tenenbaum cries out for a Gene Hackman. Here again he has assembled a sterling ensemble who aren't afraid to play up their characters' obvious quirks, but who remain ever alert to their hidden nuances. As Suzy's wallflower father, Bill Murray continues his wildly successful serious-actor makeover, and, as her mother, Frances McDormand turns in kind of tacitly nimble, vanity-free performance we expect from the woman who gave life to Marge Gunderson. Portraying the Scoutmaster, Edward Norton commendably eschews cheap cynicism and does some of the most earnest work of his career, and Tilda Swinton, by contrast, has an ice-queen ball as the draconian Social Services (yes, that IS her name). And Bruce Willis, doing truly revelatory work, displays a heretofore untapped eye for irony, lovingly toying with his Die Hard image as a daft but endearing cop. As for the child actors, what they do is so profoundly organic that it seems sinful to call it acting; whether it's due to thespian prowess or recently lived experience, they conjure up the duelings joys and demons of puberty with startling accuracy, giving life to those few years where the future can seem so small and a solitary crush can seem so big.
To heap this much praise on any work of art is to make it sound prestigious, self-important; so, let me assure you, Moonrise Kingdom is, first and foremost, a damn good time at the movies. It has drama, suspense, action, adventure, and some of the most winningly original comedy you're likely to see on a movie screen all year, including perhaps the funniest shotgun wedding in cinema history. This movie will leave you with a radiant, stupid grin on your face. But it will also toy with your heartstrings for hours, maybe even days, after you see it. That's because this movie, like most good fairy tales, is at heart a tender reminder of beautiful freedoms and painful burdens that come with adulthood, and how maturity will, like the flood that seizes up in the movie's climax, envelop you whether you want it to our not. The movie ultimately reminds us that, someday, we all must renounce our Moonrise Kingdoms, wherever or whatever they may be. But, thanks to the power of imaginations like Wes Anderson's, it is possible to return to them, if only for a little while. That's an opportunity you shouldn't think twice about. A
