This review contains no explicit narrative spoilers.

Prometheus is a hugely disappointing film on several levels. The first is in regards to its director Ridley Scott, never the most consistent filmmaker but one with an especially underwhelming track record since 2003’s pleasant Matchstick Men. Scott’s two legitimately stellar works, Alien and Blade Runner, were both science fiction efforts and his return to the genre after a 30 year break is not even half as successful as either of those films. The second source of disappointment is in regards to Prometheus as a prequel to Alien, being that, among its many expansions of that fictional universe, one narrative reveal towards its end effectively undoes one of the central appealing conceits of Scott’s original film: that theme of the Darwinian brand of survival of the fittest, revised in Prometheus by having knowing but elusive engineering bearing a primary influence. The third source of disappointment, and the most crucial, is that the film, regardless of its relation to its director’s filmography and an established fictional universe, is a wholly unsatisfying work in its own right…

A relevant source of comparison for Prometheus is the recent “premake” of The Thing. One of the key issues that film had was a slavish tendency to hit the same sort of story beats as John Carpenter’s version, even going so far as to have similar scenarios occur in the same sort of locations, despite its story taking place separately and prior to the earlier film. Prometheus is not quite as guilty an offender of this – there’s no blatant repeating of Alien scenes akin to The Thing 2011’s rec-room rampage redux – but for all its lofty ideas thrown around on basic levels, and even in the absence of the iconic xenomorph creatures, the film is so frequently prone to reviving the same old cat-and-mouse pursuit traits of the rest of the series. Regular franchise characteristics like company representatives with underwhelming agendas also pop up to distract further from any of the potentially interesting new ideas, but even when there are moments devoted to the big questions raised it all feels rather squandered…

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Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris, which documented her character’s struggling relationship with American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) while visiting her home city of Paris, was a rewarding comedy with pleasing one-note simplicity. Arriving five years later and set four years after, 2 Days in New York operates both as a sequel to that film and as a standalone entity. Disregarding the streamlined focus of the first film, this follow-up takes on an array of often soft targets and disappointingly favours a much broader brand of humour that isn’t nearly as successful….

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