IRON MAN 3: Subtlety’s Kinda Had Its Day

Hi all, I’m not writing as many reviews these days due to time constraints, but I will try to write reviews for most of the movies I watch this summer. If you’re new here be very aware: SPOILERS ARE COMING. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. I do not hold anything back in my reviews. I talk about whatever I want, so if you haven’t seen Iron Man 3 and you don’t want to know anything about it, don’t read any further. If you’re simply unable to make decisions and are looking to a stranger on the internet for advice on whether you should see this movie or not, the answer is, Yes. One last time, spoilers lie beyond this point.

Iron Man 3 (2013) – The 7th Marvel Cinematic Universe Film – Directed Shane Black – Starring Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, Guy Pearce, Ty Simpkins, Rebecca Hall, Jon Favreau, Stephanie Szostak, James Badge Dale, Paul Bettany, William Sadler, Miguel Ferrer, Ashley Hamilton, and Stan Lee.

“Ever since that big guy with the hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety’s kinda had its day.” – Aldrich Killian to Tony Stark

In Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel needed to win mainstream audiences over to characters they were likely only partly familiar with, and the payoff for this was THE AVENGERS, the third highest grossing movie of all time.

Creating a superhero cinematic universe on this level had never been attempted, and Marvel cleverly built one film on top of the other, using Nick Fury, Phil Coulson, and Tony Stark to connect the films. Anticipation for the post credits scene became an actual thing; it became a sign of membership in the Church of Marvel. Theaters emptied out but a few remained to get the thrill of evidence of the connection. Comic fans had spent forever waiting for the films to acknowledge that they weren’t just watching Spider-Man in New York, but Spider-Man in Marvel’s New York. The nature of film rights made this difficult for Marvel, of course, and DC and Warner Brothers had only a halfhearted interest in doing anything except printing Batman money. They tried and failed with Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s $200 million love song to Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner, and then tried and failed with Green Lantern, Martin Campbell’s $200 million gamble on the precociousness of Ryan Reynolds.

Both films were stuck in the past. Superman Returns was clearly designed as a nostalgia fest, but Lantern was the more disheartening film, and not just because Martin Campbell had previously directed Casino Royale, the best action movie since Die Hard. It’s not awful, but it’s empty and cobbled together. Both films commit one of the largest sins of cinema in the 2000s – they had no souls of their own. They lacked vision: Singer borrowed his from Donner and Campbell got his from … marketing execs? Focus groups?

Forget quality for the moment – the truth of it all, the actual, honest-to-goodness, real difference between Marvel and DC at the moment isn’t that Marvel knows what it’s doing and DC doesn’t, but that Marvel and Disney want to make superhero movies and DC and Warner Brothers doesn’t.

Be real – if DC/WB had wanted a Wonder Woman movie to get made, it would have gotten made. There were rumors, there were people hired to write scripts, but … nothing. Remember when Vin Diesel was going to play the Flash? When David Goyer was going to do a Green Arrow prison movie? When Halle Berry was going to play Catwoman?

What happened to these movies? (Go with me on that last one.)

Chris Nolan’s Batman movies are excellent and it seems that DC/WB thought that was enough. (Watchmen is a DC movie but it’s not about the DC Universe.) The first and third movie in the Dark Knight trilogy aren’t so much Batman movies, anyway, but Bruce Wayne movies. As good as the films are, there’s a hint of “putting on a costume really is a silly thing to do.” Across town, Marvel has no access to Spider-Man or the X-Men, but they’re pushing on, getting a loan from Merrill Lynch to take control of the movies that get made with their characters. DC is commissioning scripts from everyone but barely committing to anything, and Marvel is tossing Iron Man and Hulk and Thor and Captain America onto the screen in solo movies and people are going to see them.

Seriously. All of a sudden, people not only know who Iron Man is, he’s the coolest superhero on the block. Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. created the blueprint for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and everything built to the phenomenon that was THE AVENGERS.

So … where does one go from there? Does one regress to the past or push on to new stories?

Sequels have tended to operate on the bigger is better model: more villains, more action, more of everything. I was very curious about how IRON MAN 3 would work – was it going to be a sequel to IRON MAN 2 or AVENGERS? Were we going to get a video call to Steve Rogers? Lunch with Thor? A double date with Bruce and Betty? Was there going to be a nice easter egg on a screen somewhere about Thanos? When you’ve gone and made the third highest grossing movie of all time by filling the sandbox with all of your toys, how do you take the next step? How do you outdo what you’ve already done?

Short answer: you don’t even try.

IRON MAN 3 beautifully blends both the IRON MAN films and AVENGERS. There’s no Cap, no Thor, no Fury, no Coulson … only Banner (Mark Ruffalo) shows up for this go-round and they save him for the post-credits scene. Marvel clearly set out to make a film which refocused on the individual characters. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is haunted from his experiences in AVENGERS which has made it hard to go back to his old life. Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is running Stark Industries now and she’s committed to Tony’s “no weapons” decree. When Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) shows up, having lost his old Igor appearance for a GQ look and pitching a new, admittedly impressive piece of tech, Pepper turns him down because it’s a tech that’s too easily weaponized.

There’s a nice mix of personal growth between Stark Industries’ three main actors: Pepper has never been better, Tony has never been worse, and Happy has never been better and worse at the same time. The expanded roles for Pepper and Happy (Jon Favreau) at the start of the film feel right. Deep in the film, when Tony has been captured by Killian, the antagonist tells the protagonist, “Ever since that big guy with the hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety’s kinda had its day,” but amidst all of the explosions and Iron Man suits, IRON MAN 3′s central argument is that subtlety has definitely not had it’s day.

Shane Black’s film will not be as influential as Favreau’s first IRON MAN, but there are some very nice, very subtle examples here that other films in Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe would do well to emulate, and the key to that is seen in how Tony, Pepper, and Happy are used. Black deftly balances the decline of the first with the rise of the latter two. In this film, Pepper still loves Tony but she doesn’t need Tony. She’s more important to the company than he is, and while he’s still giving her large stuffed animals for Christmas, tinkering with new suits of armor, and reliving New York, she’s running a company.

In the previous MCU movies, Tony Stark goes to his lab because that’s where he wants to be, but now he’s in the lab as an escape. He’s hyper aware of his public image, of course, so he’s not Howard Hughesing it, but he’s definitely a man in crisis, a man exhibiting post traumatic stress disorder over the Chitauri attack. It’s important that Killian references Thor in his “subtlety’s kinda had it’s day” speech and not the Hulk because it’s Thor and the Chitauri that Tony focuses on as the reason for his problems. He understands science, but gods and aliens don’t fit into that model. Be clear, though, that Thor and the Chitauri are what he focuses on, but his problems go deeper.

When Happy’s expanded role gets him put into a coma by agents of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), Stark tells the press that he’s going to go after the terrorist. “This isn’t about nations,” he insists. “It’s personal.” It’s a powerful moment but it’s not exactly Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. Tony’s words feel empty and he looks tired. He’s lashing out, desperately searching for a new project to focus on. In a great scene between Tony and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) at a restaurant, Tony practically begs to be let in on the Mandarin issue but Rhodey shuts him down. Contrast that to earlier films where Tony actively resisted working for the government. Now, it’s he who wants them and not the other way around. This exchange is a small part of a longer talk that ends with Tony suffering an anxiety attack when two kids ask for his autograph and present him with a crayon drawing of Iron Man. Tony writes the girl’s name on the drawing but then writes, “Help me” after it as his attack hits.

Subtlety has had it’s day? Not quite. Stark, and the film itself, forwards all the explosions and drama and snark, but look past that and here’s a guy who doesn’t have it figured out anymore. Who’s scared. Who’s unsure of his place in the world. It used to be fun when he was down in that lab, making fun of Dummy and trading barbs with Jarvis (Paul Bettany) and having his new invention not quite work out, but here it’s a bit sad, almost desperate. The billionaire playboy genius philanthropist has stopped being a visionary. Instead, he’s looking for comfort. Instead of building something new, he’s endlessly tinkering with his last invention. Pepper thinks he’s on Iron Man suit Mark 15, when Tony’s actually on Mark 42. The visionary is circling. When Tony looks at his armor now, it’s like he knows he’s created his masterpiece and all that’s left is to refine it instead of leaving the refinement for others and moving on to the next Big Idea.

In most of these sequels, when a character does the same thing he always does, it plays as tired because we’ve been there and seen it, but the subtle smarts of IRON MAN 3 is that it knows you want to see this scene even if it knows you’ll probably end up feeling that it’s just an echo of better scenes from days gone by, so it gives you the scene and makes it a purposeful echo and uses it to not celebrate Tony Stark, but to show how he’s as much stuck in the past as the audience. We’re watching IRON MAN and AVENGERS over and over again on Blu-ray and he’s watching them over and over again inside his mind. We’re all stuck together on the shelf.

So what do you do? Where do you go when you haven’t gone anywhere?

Critically, it’s only after his desperate plea to the Mandarin to come get him results in the Mandarin’s goons coming and getting him, blowing up his California mansion, that Tony gets moving forward again. Tony falls into the ocean and the armor gets him out of it and while Pepper ends up driving away with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a scientist/ex-one night stand of Tony’s, Jarvis delivers Tony to Tennessee. He crashes in the snow and his armor shuts down and he has to drag the heavy suit someplace warm. He breaks into a garage and gets to work, and it’s here, in this small garage, where Tony’s life gets going again. His work is interrupted by Harley (Ty Simpkins), a kid sidekick who manages to make the film better instead of worse by challenging Tony. The two of them cut deals and help each other and give each other crap. I like that Tony actually seems most comfortable in this film with someone who he doesn’t know. Part of being a visionary, one imagines, is a restless spirit. Tony has always treated life like it’s his playground, but over the last six MCU movies, he’s increasingly had to play the grown up.

What has that brought him? He already had fame and fortune, but it gave his life a purpose, it delivered him his One True Love, it put him in position to save the entire freaking world. It’s taken away his restlessness and replaced it with stagnation.

But thanks to the Mandarin, all of that is taken away from him and he has to build himself up again, and from that moment on, you get the sense that as awful as the things are that are going on, Tony’s actually happier now that he has a new problem to solve.

And about that problem …

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has largely stayed true to the comics. Oh, the details have been altered a whole bunch but there has yet to be a really large disconnect between the films and the comics.

Which brings us to the Mandarin.

In IRON MAN 3, Iron Man’s most classic foe has been turned into a fraud. The Mandarin is presented as a terrorist mastermind, blowing people up and teaching the United States lessons in the process. Kingsley’s approach to the character is to speak in long, slow, monologues punctuated by threats and promises of additional violence. He’s got Aldrich Killian’s Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) think tank helping him broadcast his message of hate out to the world.

Except he’s a phony. Without the benefit of his armor, Stark plays James Bond, breaking into the Mandarin’s mansion in Miami and discovering that the Mandarin is just an out of work British actor-slash-junkie holed up doing drugs, drinking beer, and fornicating with some whores. It’s bound to be controversial, of course, as Marvel has sacrificed one of its greatest villains on the altar of comedic distraction.

For me, though, I thought it worked beautifully. Maybe IRON MAN 3 didn’t need to do something to send shockwaves through fandom the way Nick Fury showing up in a post credits scene, but what this says to me is that Marvel has made a conscious decision to remind its fans that they’re not making films simply to translate the comics into celluloid. Phase One was about establishing the heroes and building up to AVENGERS. Phase 2 apparently isn’t interested in playing things safe. Marvel doesn’t want to sit on the shelf. It wants to push forward. The risk is that it comes across as disrespectful, but the number of people who are going to be so upset by this and not come back for future MCU movies is bound to be negligible.

And here’s the thing – this might ultimately make the Mandarin and even badder-ass villain than how he appears in the first half of IM3. There’s a couple things to keep in mind here. One, this could all be a ruse. Trevor Slattery (the name of the actor playing the Mandarin) might be nothing more than a backdoor escape the Mandarin created in case he needed him. One of his ten rings of power, after all, allows him to increase his psionic energy. The film presents Aldrich as the mastermind but there’s no reason Marvel couldn’t reveal in the next movie that the Mandarin used one of his rings to make Aldrich think he’s the mastermind.

Two, Aldrich claims at one point that he’s the Mandarin since he created the terrorist to help manipulate the global war on terror. There’s no reason Pearce couldn’t come back as the Mandarin in the next movie, either. Those dragon tattoos on his body could be more than just ornamental.

Three, Slattery claims that he’s completely unaware of any of the violence being perpetuated in the Mandarin’s name. He thinks he’s just playing a role, but even with all the drugs and booze and whores, that seems an illogical stretch of the truth. Does he really not think he’s talking to the President? Was his assassination on live television of a Roxxon Oil Exec all an act? Is he completely unaware that there’s no violence being committed out there? In the film, Stark and Rhodey need information from him that he’s willing to provide, so they overlook any inconsistencies in his story in exchange for stopping Killian.

Black forgoes a personal confrontation between Stark and the Mandarin for his climax, instead orchestrating a CGI orgy of multiple Iron Man suits versus Extremis soldiers. It’s effective without being excellent.

IRON MAN 3 is a very good movie. There’s no way it was going to top AVENGERS but as the duty first fell to Robert Downey Jr. to launch the MCU, it falls to him again to relaunch it. He is, once again, very good: funny, smart, fast-talking but now with self doubt added to the mix. I hate seeing him blow up all of his suits of armor, but I love that he goes back to his destroyed mansion to rescue Dummy from the wreckage without the film milking it for cheap emotion.

Subtlety’s day isn’t over, yet.

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Atomic Reactions: Marvel Comics on Film now available.

When he’s not talking to other writers, Mark Bousquet is doing some writing himself. He is the author of multiple novels and collections, including the recently released The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

LOCKOUT: Here’s an Apple and a Gun. Don’t Talk to Strangers. Shoot Them.

Lockout (2012) – Directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger – Starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Lennie James, Peter Stormare, Vincent Regan, and Joseph Gilgun.

LOCKOUT goes right into that batch of movies that I’m gonna talk up and keep talking up until everyone realizes how awesome they are. Films like Doomsday, Trick ‘r Treat, The Faculty, and Attack the Block that seem to have escaped your average fan’s attention. Films that didn’t do so hot at the box office, maybe didn’t even connect with critics, and still haven’t found a huge place in the hearts of fandom but that definitely deserve a better rep than they’ve got.

I love LOCKOUT. There’s nothing fancy here – it’s been rightly pegged as being highly derivative of John Carpenter’s Escapes from New York and Los Angeles films. Fine. Is that supposed to make me hate this movie?

I fully admit that when I saw the trailer for LOCKOUT I laughed at how dumb it looked. It wasn’t because I made the Escape comparison, too, but because it looked so cliche without any sense of humor or originality. But by the end of the trailer, the fact that the narrator had no sense of humor about what was going on kinda had me intrigued. Would Pearce really sign on to something this dumb? Had Luc Besson (who came up with the idea and co-wrote the screenplay) lost his marbles?

I didn’t manage to see LOCKOUT in the theaters, but Netflix finally delivered the Blu-ray and the film instantly won me over. While there’s nothing overly complicated or original about James Mather and Stephen St. Leger’s film, LOCKOUT contains plenty of smart dialogue, solid performances, and fantastic, old school action. Instead of feeling derivative of Carpenter’s Escape films, LOCKOUT feels inspired by them.

The film opens with Snow (Guy Pearce) being questioned by an unseen interrogator. Each serious question is answered with a smart-ass reply, which in turn is answered by a hard punch to Snow’s face. The interrogate is Langral (Peter Stormare), a Secret Service director who’s questioning Snow over the death of a CIA Agent he believes he saw Snow kill. Stormare and Pearce are both good actors and they don’t mail their performances in; Stormare is decidedly serious, slow, and gruff, and Pearce is his antithesis. It’s great fun watching them chew up the pulpish dialogue on display here. Lines that could be utterly dreadful and hokey in lesser actors hands actually sparkle with energy and conflict here. Exchanges like:

Langral: “Again, what happened in that hotel room?”

“It was coupon night and I was trampolining your wife.”

The bound Snow gets punched in the face.

Langral: “You’re a real comedian aren’t you, Snow?”

“Well, I guess that’s why they call it the punch line.”

Over and over Stormare and Pearce deliver these heated exchanges, and LOCKOUT quickly becomes one of those films you’d quote endlessly if you were seeing this for the first time in high school.

“Who was that on the phone, Snow?”

“His name was F*ck You.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he was Asian.”

Snow talks this way with everyone, which keeps his character grounded at the center of the movie. Pearce sells his delivery every single time, too. It’s a very impressive performance in a movie that a good many actors might take just for the paycheck. When I saw the trailer, I wondered how LOCKOUT escaped the resume of Nic Cage, and how after somehow missing out/avoiding him, it ended up in Guy Pearce’s hands instead of, say, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s. That the lead actor here is above the Nic Cage Line instead of below it is a credit to the film’s ambitions.

(The Nic Cage Line – I just made that up. I am, in the moment, very impressed with myself.)

We’re in the future here, and there’s a massive Super Max prison in Earth orbit. On the day of our narrative, MS One is being visited by Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace), daughter of the President of the United States. She’s concerned about the treatment of the prisoners on the station, as MS One puts all of its prisoners into stasis. (Which kinda raises the question, If you’re just going to put them on ice, anyway, why not just house them in Cleve Land or something. And that question kinda raises the answer, Would you rather watch a movie set in Ohio or a space station?) Something goes wrong with Emilie’s visit when prisoner Hydell (Joseph Gilgun) is taken out of stasis to be interviewed and he escapes. There is amazingly little security on MS One, as one prisoner with a gun is able to send the entire station into complete chaos. However long it takes to put someone into stasis, they can apparently come out of stasis in 14 seconds.

Hydell’s brother Alex (an excellent Vincent Regan) eventually takes charge and no one questions him because they know that would just be unnecessary plot stuff, and like us, they just want to get to all the shooting.

The prisoners don’t know that Emilie is the President’s daughter, at first, which gives everyone some time to get Snow on board the station. In Snow’s ear is Harry Shaw (Lennie James), who plays Good Secret Service Agent to Langral’s Bad Secret Service Agent, and helps direct Snow through the station.

Snow manages to find Emilie rather quickly, but she just thinks he’s another prisoner, so she smacks him in the face with a fire extinguisher and hides in a secure room with her bodyguard. Her bodyguard Hock (Jacky Ido) is the film’s biggest idiot. It’s his fault that Hydell managed to escape because he brought a gun into the interview room which Hydell picked, and when he locks himself and Emilie in that secure room, he shoots a control panel that starts pulling oxygen out of the room. They two of them are running out of air and on the verge of dying, and the script pulls out one old trick to heighten drama, and a new one to relieve it.

Harry is in Snow’s ear about how he has to get in that room or Emilie is going to die, and he’s literally counting down the time to her death. Apparently, in the future, they can predict your death by oxygen deprivation down to the exact second. Harry is counting down the seconds, and as Snow hurriedly tries to break into the room, Hock blows his brains out in order to allow Emilie to have more oxygen to breath. It’s not a very smart thing to do, given there’s a whole prison of crazy criminals trying to get into the room, but immediately after he offs himself, the techs around Harry back on the cops’ orbiting station tell him, “She just found some more oxygen! I don’t know how she did it, but it’ll only buy us a little more time!”

There’s all sorts of silly stuff like that peppered through LOCKOUT, but if that’s going to derail your enjoyment of a film like this, you’re probably not the kind of person who’s going to watch a movie like this, are you?

Once Snow and Emilie get together, it’s a whole lot of alternating between them bickering and them shooting. LOCKOUT moves really fast and keeps the tension high. There’s some predictable banter between them about how he’s the bad boy criminal and she’s the inexperienced rich girl, but both Snow and Emilie are deeper characters than the stereotype the other drops onto them. It’s little details like the fact that as bad-ass as Snow is, he hates heights, and he’s squeamish about having to put a needle in Emilie’s eye to revive her, that gives LOCKOUT that little bit extra that takes it from being just a really good action movie to something really engaging.

LOCKOUT isn’t a movie I’m now going to rush out and buy for $25 because I know and you know it’s only a matter of a few short months before the price drops to something much more reasonable. There’s not many movies I’m going to lay out $25 for, but this is an automatic buy when it hits the $10 rack. LOCKOUT is the kind of movie that restores my faith in storytelling. There’s no pretentiousness here but there is a whole lot of professionalism. It’s a smart, fun movie that just wants to keep you entertained for 90 minutes.

Which sounds an awful lot like a John Carpenter film.

Don’t avoid LOCKOUT because you think it’s a shadow of Escape From New York; watch it because it’s a fitting heir.

PROMETHEUS: Ridley Scott’s Hobbit: There and Forward Again

Prometheus (2012) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Patrick Wilson.

If you’re coming to this site for the first time, you need to be made aware of something right now: SPOILERS are coming. Lots and lots of SPOILERS. This isn’t one of those reviews that talks about the film in generic terms, this is a detailed reaction to the movie and I’m not going to limit myself. I’m telling you right up front that SPOILERS are coming, so don’t read on if you don’t want the movie spoiled. Go watch the movie and then come back.

I’m also not here to tell you why you’re wrong for disagreeing with me. I’m here to tell you what I think about movies, nothing more, and I’d love to hear what you think about the film, too. I’m sorely tempted to pull an Avengers and write up reactions to all the principal characters because with this reaction clocking in around 2,400 words, there’s still way more I want to talk about. I simply don’t have the time to do it this time around, but I love that this movie makes me want to write about it.

That’s that. We clear? Right, then, let’s do this.

In case you watched any of the trailers for PROMETHEUS and thought trailers were always an accurate representation of the film it was selling, here’s what PROMETHEUS is not: it’s not ALIEN, it’s not a horror movie, and it’s not a summer blockbuster. It’s really not even a Ridley Scott movie as much as it is a movie about Ridley Scott movies. While Scott is still going strong, at age 74 it’s a safe bet that he’s closer to the end of his career than the beginning, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s turned in his most philosophical take on the subjects of life and death.

But since he’s still Ridley Scott, it is equally unsurprising that PROMETHEUS’ answer to these big, important, existentialist questions is that their significance comes from being the fuel that drives humanity on its journey, and not in being answered. PROMETHEUS strikes me as Ridley Scott’s Hobbit, serving as a prequel not just to ALIEN, but to his entire cinematic career. The questions and themes that return again and again in his films are present here, and so PROMETHEUS is contradictory, being both a prequel and a capstone, as if Scott has decided to make a movie in which he attempts to figure out, or coalesce, what he was doing in all of his other movies into this singular film.

And what does he find when he looks back on everything? He finds that it’s much more important to keep pushing forward than to look back, and that questions about where we come from are less important than questions about where we’re going. Life – the actual act of living – is, to Scott, something to be embraced. Questions fuel life, and we are defined not by the destination, not by the answer, but by the journey and the search.

PROMETHEUS is a fantastic movie that does not tell a fantastic story. Ultimately, the most truthful pre-release tease about what PROMETHEUS is came from Scott himself, who said that this film would contain the “strands of ALIEN’s DNA” but explore its own questions, and that’s exactly what it does. That the result is less successful than ALIEN should not come as a huge surprise, since 98% of all movies made don’t measure up to ALIEN. PROMETHEUS fails to live up to ALIEN because the narrative is often clunky and a good many characters are defined more by their appearance than their personalities. I don’t understand why an expedition into deep space would have such a poor screening process that two of its scientists would freak out and bail the second things get weird other than the fact that the story needs to have two scientists freak out and bail the second things gets weird so they can be the first sacrificial lambs to the film’s monsters.

In Dana Stevens’ review of the movie over at Slate, she writes: “Co-scripted by Damon Lindelof of Lost, this film shares that series’ love for nested mythologies and involute philosophical riddles. Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them.” Ms. Stevens is not impressed, lamenting, “Prometheus could have been an elegant, moody sci-fi actioner if only it didn’t strain so hard (especially in the final scenes) for weighty existential meaning. [...] As Prometheus’ characters wrestle with these slippery abstract questions, the concrete and immediate ones raised by the story itself go unanswered. What were the motives of our marble-skinned forebears in creating us, given that they now seem bent on destroying us? And what are David’s motives as he commits acts that seem intended to sabotage the ship’s mission? To judge by a closing teaser that links this movie’s rapidly mutating beasts to the multi-mouthed xenomorphs of Alien, we’ll have to wait until the next installment in the franchise to find out. After all the strenuous philosophizing that came before, the ending’s floppy irresolution feels less like a sophisticated embrace of ambiguity than like a profound cosmic cop-out.”

I’m not picking on Ms. Stevens, nor am I interested in pointing out why she’s wrong, because she’s turned in a well-written review, and other than one instance where she uses the “you” formulation that mistakes her experience for a universal experience, I really only disagree with her conclusions rather than her individual points.

I like PROMETHEUS. I like it quite a bit, though I can certainly understand why people do not like the film. In regards to Ms. Stevens, I simply don’t share her frustrations about the film refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, and I don’t feel like the film is straining for weighty existential meaning at all. The characters in the film struggle with these questions but I don’t think Scott, or the man he chose to re-work the original script he was given, LOST’s Damon Lindelof, struggle with them. I should point out here that I was one of the seeming few who absolutely loved the final episode of LOST, as well, and PROMETHEUS, as Ms. Stevens points out, shares a good deal with LOST’s overall structure of raising questions and building mysteries that it refuses to answer. Like LOST, PROMETHEUS ultimately decides that after building a mystery, resolving the mystery is less important than offering an emotional resolution. If life makes you lemons, Scott and Lindelof are interested in making lemonade, while Stevens is interested in finding out where the lemons came from – neither side is wrong, but I don’t think PROMETHEUS would have been a better film if we did get those answers. Learning why the Engineers did what they did would have provided an interesting answer, but it’s not an answer that defines the film’s characters, and PROMETHEUS is far more interested in examining how the characters react to questions than in answering the actual questions.

I can certainly understand how frustrating this is, and I certainly would not like all stories to be constructed in this manner, but I also have some love for movies that step outside of the box and that refuse to play it straight. And PROMETHEUS does offer answers – it’s just not the answers that its characters forward as being the most important. They’re here to learn about the great mysteries of the universe, but Scott and Lindelof are here to learn about them. And what they find is coded right in plain sight when Janek (Idris Elba) sings a little ditty after getting the invite back to Vickers’ quarters: “If you can’t be … with the one you love … love the one you’re with.”

In other words, embrace the challenges of the moment you’re in. Don’t let your long term desires interfere with the life that’s happening around you.

In 2089, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers a star map while on a dig with her partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). It’s the same star map found across the globe on multiple archaeological finds from civilizations that had no contact with one another. Their find catches the attention of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, in some atrociously bag old person make-up), and he funds a trip to the stars so they can find the so-called “Engineers,” whom they hope to find alive.

We’ve got a cast full of people with different goals: Shaw wants to find answers, Holloway wants to find the Engineers alive, Vickers (Charlize Theron) is the corporate agent who lurks in the background, Janek (Idris Elba) is the captain of the ship who is interested in keeping people safe and getting in Vickers’ pants, David (Michael Fassbender), a robot with mysterious, somewhat contradictory actions, and everyone else, who can be grouped under the title of Cannon Fodder.

PROMETHEUS would have benefited a bit from ALIEN’s technique with characterization, where the characters were simply but clearly drawn. Here, characters are a bit more slippery and it’s to the film’s disadvantage. PROMETHEUS is constantly creating doubt as to David and Vickers’ motives, and it throws in odd bumps in the characterization. After getting to LV-223 and discovering a man-made structure which contains dead Engineers and then returning to the ship in a storm, Holloway decides to play the grumpy drunk because the Engineers weren’t alive, and then be a dick to David because …

I dunno. It’s like his manhood is challenged by David’s very existence, so he’s always looking to make little digs at the robot. It’s hardly like David is all that sympathetic, either, because he comes back with one of the oozing metal cylinders and doesn’t tell anyone about it. Then he drugs David’s drink with a bit of the ooze that ends up infecting David, which, in turn, infects/impregnates Shaw after she and David have sex, which leads to Shaw having to enter a surgery tube (I forget the fancy name) where she has to cut out the fast growing alien fetus inside of her.

There’s a question with David about how much of what he’s doing is because he’s a programmed robot and how much is him expanding and potentially jumping his programming. While the crew is in stasis, he’s busy learning about them and simply acquiring knowledge. He likes to play basketball and watch Lawrence of Arabia, and when they reach LV-223, it’s David who has to wake the rest of the crew up.

The biggest narrative failure in PROMETHEUS is that the film doesn’t do a better job setting up David and Shaw as rivals. By combining David, Shaw, Vickers, Janek, and Holloway together in a chaos cloud from which David and Shaw emerge, it muddles the narrative focus. I think the movie would have been better off more clearly making David and Shaw the opposing signposts around which everything revolves, with the other characters filling the grey space between these two black and white positions, because that’s where the movie ultimately ends up, and if you’re going to raise questions that you don’t answer, I think you need to make a point to lock down the emotional conflict, and PROMETHEUS doesn’t do this as strongly as it needs to for me.

Where PROMETHEUS shines is as a spectacle; this is a gorgeously shot movie, whether it’s the ship’s interior or the exterior’s of Earth, space, and LV-223. There’s lots of great little visual touches, with the very-cool red survey “pups” and the blue survey suits working best.

Plus, there’s all the connections to ALIEN, which are not over-sold, but in clear evidence: the Engineer’s space ship, the interior design of Prometheus, the Alien-like creatures, and the H.R. Giger-esque designs that touch nearly everything on LV-223. And in the final scene, the Cthulhu creature shoves its tentacle down the Engineer’s throat and out pops what is clearly the first Alien that we recognize as “our” Alien.

There’s a whole handful of excellent action spectacles, from an Engineer’s initial appearance on Earth to the silica-based storm on LV-223 to the surgery sequence to the Prometheus taking out the Engineers’ ship to the Engineer vs. Cthulu-spawn final battle, but the real signature moment comes when David is on the bridge of the Engineer’s ship and activates the star map. I love scenes like this, where people are walking around inside of massive, 3D maps, and the visual effects team on PROMETHEUS nails it. David figures out that this Engineer ship was headed for Earth when the tragedy happened that cut it short.

What’s that tragedy? The Aliens took them out. Now, these aren’t the Aliens we come to know and love but a prior generation that are clearly modeled on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu more than Giger’s Alien, especially as it grows larger. The role of the Engineers and the Aliens are two of the questions that PROMETHEUS refuses to answer. The film indicates the Engineers did, in fact, build humanity because there’s a DNA match between the two species, and also indicates that the Engineers turned on their creation and were headed to Earth to wipe humanity out. This idea is enforced when the one, last surviving Engineer is awoken and starts killing people. (Which brings up another muddled plot point – Peter Weyland has been kept in deep freeze this while movie and then awoken to go see the Engineers. He’s hoping they grant him immortality, but instead they kill him almost instantly, meaning his whole appearance in space was kind of a pointless dud.) Why did the Engineers create humanity and then want to destroy it? Were the Aliens created by the Engineers to infest the Earth? The film refuses to answer and it doesn’t really bother me all that much because it works as a commentary on faith and how, in the end, whether one chooses to believe in God or disbelieve in God, we’ve yet to get an answer to the question of His existence. What’s important isn’t that we get an answer, but that we keep searching.

I know I’m in the minority on this, but not getting an answer doesn’t really bother me because I’m far more interested in what the characters do with the not knowing than I am bothered with not getting an answer. Both Shaw and David – the woman of religious faith and the atheistic robot – make it out of the film alive and they choose to work together to get off LV-223 and go exploring through space.

The key question that PROMETHEUS poses for itself is David’s, “How far are you willing to go to learn the truth?” All other questions and mysteries are secondary to this concept – what are you willing to do and how far are you willing to go to get the answers you want? Holloway was devastated when he thought there were no Engineers (and thus he dies a physical death that matches his psychological death), but Shaw and David kept pushing forward, and the film ends not with an answer to why the Engineers built humanity or why they then decided to wipe humanity out, but with Shaw and David staying on the hunt.

For me, it’s a powerful resolution, as the true believer and the atheist come together to continue the search for their answers. PROMETHEUS is ultimately about humanity’s never-ending quest for knowledge, and it’s fitting that its two survivors are those who were most interested in acquiring as much knowledge as possible. While it’s a difficult film with a muddled narrative, it’s also an exciting film for me to watch and think about. I can’t wait to see it again.

And therein lies the rub: In Tolkien’s Hobbit, Bilbo’s memoir is entitled There and Back Again, but for Ridley Scott, there is no going back again because a return home signifies an end to the journey, and Scott is too unsettled for tidy endings. The only real finality in his signature films (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator) comes through death, and those who make it to the end of Scott’s films are typically unsettled survivors – they may have made it to the credits, but the experience they’ve undergone has altered their worldview in such a way that they cannot mentally go home again even if they can physically go home again.

There and back again? No. There and forward again.