"Yes, Dave, my penis is huge. Would you like to see it?"
I read a piece on David Fincher recently where he described a distinction between “films” and “movies.” He says The Game is a movie, Fight Club is a film. “A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for an audience and the filmmakers,” he explained. The way I extrapolate that statement is that I imagine a film as something that asks and attempts to answer the big questions, whereas a movie just sort of references them to use as playthings. You could say it’s the difference between art and entertainment, but let’s not, because I’d rather piss hot thumb tacks than get hung up arguing the semantics of “art.” Point being, what I found most compelling about Prometheus was they way it keeps you wondering whether you’re watching a “movie” or a “film,” schlock or philosophy.
It starts off as your basic, rag-tag-team-of-scientists plot. Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green play a husband-and-wife team researching similarities between ancient civilizations’ depiction of aliens. I could go into more detail, but long story short, as Rapace says, “I think they want us to come and find them!” Yeah, totally, that’s why they got some cavemen to draw their planetary system in wooly mammoth dung and hid it inside a cave 2,000 years ago. “The humans are sure to figure this one out!” they were probably thinking. But Rapace and Green are convinced that the aliens are some kind of race of “engineers,” who created humans.
