Quentin Tarantino Calls This Poloraizing Ridley Scott Epic Thriller Dumb: “I loved it, and I was disappointed at the same time”
Back when Quentin Tarantino announced The Movie Critic, allegedly his final film (ask Steven Soderbergh how those kinds of proclamations go), there was a lot of speculation about whether Tarantino would be culling from real life. Really, whether The Movie Critic would follow an actual movie critic from the time (the film is planned to be set in the 1970s) or, in typical Tarantino fashion, instead feature an amalgam of several noteworthy critics from the period.
Maybe it’ll just star Tarantino himself, playing himself. While Tarantino regularly champions films left, center, and sideways (he even has an entire book on the matter), he isn’t a fan of everything, and sometimes, he’s happy to let his fans know. Sorry, Ridley Scott, but Tarantino has complicated feelings about Prometheus. Get in line, dude.
Per IMDB: Following clues to the origin of mankind, a team finds a structure on a distant moon, but they soon realize they are not alone.
Prometheus, a quasi-prequel to Scott’s Alien series, was never going to live up to the marketing hype. When it bowed in the summer of 2012, there were legions of fans ready to dismiss it outright. More general audiences had likely gone in expecting something more akin to Alien (an expectation Scott would later remedy with Alien: Covenant years later), only to instead be met with a wildly miscast Charlize Theron. In fairness, Quentin Tarantino didn’t outright hate Prometheus. In fact, he kind of loved it, even if the Cinemasins in him came out during some of the more incredulous plot developments.
As Far Out UK recently reminded us, Quentin Tarantino was once quoted as saying, “I loved it, and I was disappointed at the same time.” Tarantino expands on the thrill of seeing Scott’s scope in action—he’s nothing if not inclined toward grandeur—and in recent years, his perspective has no doubt softened. Prometheus does a lot right, even if its philosophical psychobabble feels less filling, more perfunctory than audiences thought at the time.
Tarantino expands, noting, “There was also a lot of dumb stuff in it, though… When it got to the point where they are on another planet and then a space cobra literally shows up, opens up its hood, and the guy who is in charge of alien creatures goes, ‘Hey, little fella! How you doing?’… It was a space cobra!”
You could write an entire book on the gaps in logic Prometheus features. Why are they taking off their helmets? Why can’t Charlize Theron zig-zag her way out of a crashing spaceship’s path? Does it matter? Was that the point the whole time? Maybe, maybe not. Quentin Tarantino wasn’t a fan of everything, but like the best of them, he managed to sandwich his criticism between some earnest praise for Scott’s effort.
What do you think? Do you love or hate Prometheus? Is Quentin Tarantino right in his assessment? Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins where I’ll no doubt be sharing my own thoughts because now I really, really want to rewatch Prometheus.
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