12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

One of the reasons I've continued writing reviews through the years (aside from the fact that it's something I enjoy) has been that I've wanted to give the people who are reading them some alternative to the kind of film geek culture that's emerged since the advent of the internet and the explosion of film journalism and social media on it. There's a lot of good film journalism out there, don't get me wrong. There's also a whole lot of what I now refer to as the "Reign of Geekdom."

Where the kind of people who tend to be obsessive about film, and especially genre film, in the way I am were the outsiders and generally looked down upon in relation to the rest of the culture at large (and within the film community) for the majority of my life, we've now become the ones who are running the websites, writing the articles, and driving a lot of the film culture. In some ways, that's great. I can't imagine what without the last ten or fifteen years worth of shift in film culture hadn't happened, something like John Dies At The End would have gotten made and/or distributed. Edgar Wright is a successful film maker. Genre film has come out of the basement in a big way.

At the same time, something kind of ugly has come out of the basement with it. The vile side of film geekery. Now we actually have popular and well respected film websites dedicated space to parsing the finer points of "fake geek girls," and the kind of bizarre, self righteous, self aggrandizing attempts at attempting some kind of geek hierarchy. It's roughly described as the kind of attitude that feels that anyone who does not share ones opinion about the quality of one piece of culture or another is somehow automatically, inherently inferior and treated as such. And really, worst of all, it can be incredibly mean and cruel. It won't take too long sifting through the more popular film sites to come across some articles that are written from this kind of perspective and it only takes a quick look through the comments section on any article on any film site to find this to be true.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

Prometheus is not Alien. If that fact is something you can understand and embrace, walking into the theater, the chances are you're going to enjoy the two hour running time.

If this isn't a fact you can both understand and embrace, the odds are in favor of disappointment.

It's a good film. It is a very different film than the film that is responsible for the franchise. It is, in more ways than not, a much bigger, much more ambitious film than Alien. Ridley Scott is a different man now than he was when he made Alien, and there's obviously a lot on his mind. Prometheus is, in another way, classic Ridley Scott as well. Some of Scott's better films have managed to tackle Big Ideas and present them in interesting ways while also being entertaining pieces of popular art. Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down being two of the better examples of Scott's ability to tame his narrative ambitions enough to produce films that have some depth and weight, yet find their way into the hearts of people who aren't looking for little more than entertainment in a movie theater. There's a lot of venom out there for Black Hawk Down, because it gets lumped in with other action-ish films dealing with the military as a simplistic piece of nationalist propaganda, but in reality, there's a good deal more to that film than the kind of empty headed, uncritical flag waving of the films it so often gets categorized with. What it isn't, is a preaching, preening work of anti-war, anti-military or anti-government propaganda, which is often what it's detractors seem most upset with it for. Personally, I don't like to be preached at via celluloid, whether or not I find some sympathy with the sentiments being expressed. If I want preaching, I'll go to a rally or go to a church. Decent narrative art, much less good or great narrative art, doesn't need to resort to communicating to the least common denominator in order to say something worth while. Even as Ridley Scott has directed a few films that seem to have been driven by little more than bloated arrogance (I'm looking at you Robin Hood), he has proved he can direct films with Big Ideas in a subtle and deft way. 


I have a feeling Prometheus is going to suffer a similar fate in many ways, separate and apart from the fact that there's going to be a large contingent of people who are going to be disappointed that Ridley Scott didn't deliver Alien wrapped in a new package and tied in a sparkling bow made of the latest special effects. As absurd as science fiction often is when looked at from the perspective of literalism, if Scott had attempted to make Prometheus in the vein of being nothing more than a spectacle of summer movie going, it would have been laughably absurd. Big Idea science fiction can slip into being deeply, unattractively, unknowingly campy very easily, and Prometheus avoids any of that, even as there are a few moments of definite gallows humor.