Why I Can’t Get Excited About Prometheus

I want to be excited about Prometheus. I see stills like the one above, and I really want to be excited about Prometheus. But I’m not.

Why?

Because it seems to fit in this movie genre bucket that I dislike. It’s as though movie makers have three of them, when it comes to science fiction with spaceships and other worlds and stuff. One is for Star Wars, one is for Star Trek, and the other is labelled “Survival Horror in Space.” And if you want to make a movie with spaceships, it has to fit in one of those buckets.

Alien? Sunshine? Event Horizon? Survival horror.

Hell, even 2001 is basically a horror movie in space. You have to step down to the B-grade, basically, to get to movies that are Star Wars-style adventures, and then they’re not always very good. Or, really, hardly any good at all. So then we’re left with the likes of Prometheus, which they’re marketing basically as survival horror, and you have Guillermo Del Toro throwing his hands up on one of his projects because Prometheus basically taps the same Lovecraftian horror vein. Which… if there’s one thing I like less than survival horror, it’s Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

And I get it, on some level. There’s been two ways to deal with aliens in science fiction movies, and one is “they’re just like us (no, really, they’re just like us)” of Star Trek/Star Wars, and the other is “they’re unspeakably different, no common ground, we’re hamburger to them” of the survival horror science fiction. (And by this I mean the, we go out there and seek them out aliens–aliens visiting Earth is a whole other thing.) There’s been very little middle ground in the last 30-40 years, it seems. Enemy Mine? The Last Starfighter? Can’t think of much more, and none recently, other than Serenity (which still had to have a horror element in the Reavers, so… blah).

Frankly, it’s kind of annoying. I think the spaceship-and-other-worlds spectacle is part of what the bigscreen experience is for and it’s been hijacked by Lucas, Rodenberry’s ghost, and horror. There are, there have to be other stories, other sorts of stories to tell. But either no one wants to tell them, or the studios don’t think they can make any money. Which, given the middling performance of Serenity, they might just be right.

Still, annoying. And disappointing. Which is why I can’t get excited for Prometheus. I appreciate it for what it is, and I wouldn’t want it not to be. But it’s not for me, and it’s one of those funny experiences, feeling outside of geekdom by not being able to get excited about this movie.