Prometheus – The Red Pen of Doom

Hear me now and believe me later in the week: OBLIVION is an interesting and beautiful movie that could have been classic.

Why did it flop?

Let’s look at the prime suspects:

5) Tom Cruise fatigue

This is an easy target. Cruise has gone from “Biggest Movie Star on the Planet” to “Incredibly Excited Actor Jumping on Oprah’s Couch” to “Scientologist Who Gets Divorced a Lot.”

As a huge fan of Lee Child’s Reacher novels, I have to say that Reacher is something like 6’5, 250, blond and quietly sarcastic, while Cruise is short, light, dark-haired and loudly cocky.

HOWEVER: I will give the man his due, because Cruise did a fine job of acting in this movie. The average sci-fi apocalypse movie would have a hot new 20-something actor mumble his way through the thing looking stoned while trying to seem macho. Cruise was an upgrade from the typical New Action Hunk.

You could’ve put Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling or George Clooney in this sucker and it wouldn’t solve the problem. Cruise gets a pass.

4) Double mumbo-jumbo

Screenwriter Blake Snyder (may he rest in peace) says in SAVE THE CAT that audiences will buy one crazy piece of magic or sci-fi. They’ll buy a giant robot assassins with heavy Austrian accents or they’ll buy witches with real magic powers–but they won’t suspend disbelief to see a movie featuring magical witches battling a robot assassin.

Audiences might buy sci-fi techno stuff mixed in with a little magic if you distract them with lightsabers and don’t try to over-explain the magical stuff. But if you start talking like an idiot about the magic being caused by science, say something insane like “midi-chloridians,” they will turn on you, and hate you for ruining things forever.

OBLIVION throws all kinds of stuff in here: an apocalypse, an alien invasion, evil robot drones, massive human cloning, frozen astronauts who are 85 years old or whatever plus and a serious fetish for spiffy helicopter-things.

All of this, however, is under the happy umbrella of technology. Even the craziest stuff seems plausible given the setting of the movie. Also: Cruise should spend his salary from this movie to make a working replica of his helicopter-jet thing, which I’m gonna call the Tom-mobile.

3) Insanely confusing plot

This is a good suspect. While the movie technically avoid the double mumbo-jumbo trap because it’s all science, there are enough plot threads to weave a throw rug.

We’ve got dream sequences in black-and-white, Morgan Freeman channeling Morpheus by way of Mad Max, some Minority Report flavorings and a dozen other subplots thrown into the blender.

Even so, the director holds it together. You understand it. So the confusing parts of the plot aren’t what keeps this movie from being an instant classic.

2) Happy endings are for suckers

The ending is happy, which fanboys never like. Tom Cruise Clone #1 and the dying Morgan Freeman blow themselves up in the mothership of the aliens, saving the world, and later we see Tom Cruise Clone # 2 finding his wife and baby daughter.

Reunited and it feels so good. Except it doesn’t feel great.

1) The villain

There are three parts to a villain, which I’m making that up right now.

Let’s call it Guy’s First Law of Villainy, which states villains must be motivated, fascinating and scary.

Motivated: If your villain is simply doing bad things for no reason, it’s nonsensical.

This is a huge problem with OBLIVION, since these aliens invading Earth go through all kinds of trouble to (a) find Earth in the first place, (b) travel a bazillion light years to get to our precious rock orbiting the sun, (c) wage a long and brutal war to gain control of the planet so they can … (d) suck up all the water in our oceans to create nuclear fusion or whatever.

Hold up.

Water is no big flipping deal. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Oxygen isn’t exactly rare. You can find water on asteroids, comets and planets. There’s some moon orbiting Jupiter or Saturn that we think is a giant ball of water with a frozen crust of ice on top.

I don’t buy aliens going through massive amounts of trouble to steal our water. Sci-fi needs to make sense, because sci-fi fans are smart people who care about this stuff. So this is a huge problem.

Fascinating and scary:

If you’re going to have an alien invasion movie, don’t forget the aliens.

OBLIVION has no aliens. I kid you not.

It has all kinds of drones, which look like angry flying cousins of Pac Man, yet tiny little drones aren’t scary of fascinating. Give us big, threatening bad guys, not cute little ones.

Who is the ultimate villain of the movie? A big faceless computer.

That’s not fascinating or scary. At all.

To make this movie work, we needed amazing aliens, the kind that are incredibly fun to watch. ALIEN got this right, as did ALIENS.

PROMETHEUS forgot about this rule, and therefore wasted the gross domestic product of Paraguay on Michael Fassbender and special effects for no good reason.

This is the reason OBLIVION failed as an alien invasion classic: no aliens. You can’t expect audiences to go wild for a boring, faceless computer as the bad guy.

It’s the same trap that doomed THE MATRIX sequels. We never saw Neo battle the ultimate bad guy in charge of the machines. He died playing anti-virus cleaner for the machine lords, which put the B in Boring.

Now, I am not some kind of movie snob who only watches black-and-white French existentialism plus “films made in the early years of Wes Anderson‘s career, before he went corporate.”

However: Ridley Scott is a crazy great director who made a crazy bad mess out of PROMETHEUS.

Yes, he is a film god for making the original ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER and GLADIATOR.

Being a film god, though, means you shouldn’t spend the gross domestic product of Paraguay on a movie that, with a few tiny little fixes, could have been 5,982-times better than it was.

Because — let’s be honest — PROMETHEUS stank up the joint.

Fix Number 1: Give us some flipping aliens in our ALIEN movie

There was all sorts of noise from Ridley Scott that this wasn’t, technically, an ALIEN movie.

Well, no. Because there was a complete shortage of the alien.

This movie is like selling people bacon cheeseburgers and making them all wonder why they’re looking at a bun with some fried pork bellies on it, but no actual hamburger.

Sure, there are tall bald bodybuilder Engineer guys, who technically are aliens, except their DNA is the same as ours, so technically they’re not. IT IS CONFUSING.

And yeah, we get about six seconds of an alien on screen at the very end when (spoiler!) a baby alien bursts out of the chest of an Engineer after he refuses to pay his dues to the Squid Facehugger Engineering Brotherhood, Local No. 1291.

But otherwise, we all paid $9 for 3D tickets and $8.50 for popcorn that cost 12 cents to make to watch an ALIEN movie with no aliens except for those six seconds.

Instead, we got this stupid black goo that makes no sense whatsoever.

Fix Number 2: Lose the Black Goo nonsense

So, there’s this Black Goo that the Engineers use to: (a) disintegrate some other Engineer they left on earth like some kind of frat-boy prank, you know, filling the bottle of shampoo with Nair, except Engineers are hairless, so hey, we’re gonna turn you into dust; (b) bomb planets far, far away with their donut spaceships; (c) turn worms into snake things; (d) turn humans into zombies; (e) turn lead into gold; and (f) make it so zombie boyfriends who get busy with their sterile human girlfriends create squid facehugger things the size of Volkswagens.

I may be missing five or six other things the Black Goo does. IT IS MAGIC.

Here’s the problem: the Black Goo commits the classic storytelling sin of Double Mumbo Jumbo, which is a technical Tinseltown term that means, “The audience will believe one piece of crazy sci-fi nonsense, but they won’t swallow 17 of them.”

The original ALIEN did this right. Can we believe a cute little facehugger will hatch from an egg, find a human host, implant an egg in his stomach and make an adorable little chest-burster who grows up to become a big, strong Alien?

Yes, we will.

The audience might have bought the notion that this Black Goo could do one magical thing, or maybe two, but not five or six or 30.

Fix Number 3: Cut the crew down from a cast of thousands to like, six people

Pop quiz: Name half the characters on the PROMETHEUS. Now, that’s not fair. Let’s go with 25 percent of them. Ready? Go.

There’s no way. Unless you have a copy of the script and a rewind button, you don’t know who the hell these people are except for (a) the girl with the dragon tattoo, (b) her boyfriend, (c) Magneto and (d) Charlize Theron.

Everybody else gets about 30 seconds of screen time, including Guy Pearce looking like Yoda for some reason.

Kill off all the other guys. We don’t need them.

The original ALIEN had something like six characters. You could keep track of those guys as the alien killed ’em all off until Sigourney Weaver was all alone with the Alien, which was the main event anyway.

Peoples of Hollywood, hear me now and believe me later in the week: Kill off every character you can. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. This will both save you money (good!) and make for a better film (better!), which will make you even MORE money at the box office (amazing!).

Fix Number 4: Engineers should not be super-smart 7-foot tall toddlers throwing a tantrum

OK, I can buy that a bunch of space-faring aliens run around the galaxy, putting the seeds of life on planets. Maybe they got bored of spending their days playing MEDAL OF HONOR: THE BATTLE FOR XENOS, PART 873.

Having the Engineers go wacky, though, makes no sense. Why would they want to bomb earth with Black Goo?

Why would the one Engineer wake up from a long sleep, see the handsome face of Magneto and decide to twist his head off before Magneto says more than two sentences? Because the Engineer, he’s got such a busy schedule that day, just waking up and all. “I have things to do, humans! I have planets to bomb for some random reason!”

There are rumors on the Series of Tubes and papers of news and magazines of film that Ridley Scott himself said little baby Jesus was an Engineer, and they all got mad that humans killed him.

OK, that’s wild and crazy, and would have brought down the wrath of all kinds of church people, so maybe that’s why Ridley the Scott left it on the cutting room floor. HOWEVER: At least that would be a reason for the Engineers acting like two-year-olds all hacked off because Mom won’t let them watch The Wiggles for the 11th time this week.