Just saw Red State, and for me the ways in which it’s the antithesis of Prometheus are legion. Just for starters: I knew nothing about it, I had no expectations or anticipation going in, and I’m not a fan of its director. Prometheus is stuffed full of top drawer acting talent and big names. Red State has a cast that – with the exception of John Goodman – I’ve barely heard of. Prometheus was budgeted at 130 million dollars (if you believe Wikipedia), Red State got made for under 4 million. Prometheus, before the reviews came in, I would gladly have shelled out a tenner plus to see in 3D splendour at my local multiplex. Red State showed up through the door on DVD via my wife’s Love Film selection, and I nearly didn’t bother watching it at all (fifteen months into fatherhood, the twin needs for sleep and productive work hours hold me in a thrall previously unimaginable).
The prospect of viewing Prometheus at some future moment leaves me profoundly dispirited. I suppose I shall have to, professional interest and all. Seeing Red State left me energised and inspired. It reminded me why I love movies, why I love story-telling and ultimately why I write myself.
I’m going to reserve more definitive comment on contrasts within the material of each film until such time as I have – dispiritedly – shelled out for a DVD rental of Prometheus and actually seen it, because anything else would be grossly unfair. But I think some early estimations are in order. Prometheus appears, from the reports I’ve read, to be a soulless, confusing mish-mash of all that cool stuff you saw in that other movie and wanted more of. Red State is an utterly fresh and soulful mish-mash that works. Prometheus’s plot was going to be predictable from the get-go (which, NB, is not necessarily in itself a failing in a movie – it was also true of the original Alien). Red State was quite literally impossible for me to predict at any point past the initial twenty minutes in. Prometheus – apparently – looks for horror in CGI and the outer limits. Red State finds horror right next door and delivers it with scripted speech and tightly constructed human dynamics. Prometheus trumpets its philosophical concerns in full orchestral grandeur, from the earliest trailers on in – we’re after Life, the Universe and Everything here. Red State delivers a pair of taut little lectures on current religious and political state-of-play and leaves you to ponder.
Prometheus has taken over four hundred million dollars at the box office. Red State has just about made back its four million budget and change.
There’s a lesson in this somewhere, but I’m still not sure exactly what it is. I’ll get back to you.
EDIT – Getting back to you……
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, oh look, no, look, really, fer fucksake, nooooooooooooooo…………………..
I didn’t find Prometheus to be nearly as bad as reviews reported. There were definitely some nice original ideas in there, and the horror (like in the rest of the Alien franchise) is also partly attributable to the works of man.
Given that it was fashioned as a prequel it gave itself a lot more space than I thought available to it, and is more of an ideas movie than any of the following. While there is an inevitable moment towards the end, it is not clear until quite late as to how we’re going to get there.
My take on Prometheus was that it was a good movie for the first 30 minutes.
It started like a Hollywood take on a Greg Bear or Arthur C. Clarke space-exploration story. There were stunning vistas, the excitement and tension of embarking on an archeological and scientific expedition to an alien artifact, a hint of (clumsily handled) internal politics etc.
It was all admittedly very light on science and heavy on expedient screenwriting (the scene where the supporting cast is introduced is particularly shallow) but to be honest given the franchise I would have been pleasantly surprised by anything else.
Then came a moment of breathtaking stupidity, ***SPOILERS*** when the male lead removed his helmet. After that point it all just got dumber and dumber.
The list of idiotic, predictable and frankly boring problems and plot-holes is too extensive to go into. But what irritated most was the sheer contempt with which Ridley treated minor characters. In this respect Prometheus was breathtaking in it’s audacity.
If you’re watching a Jurassic Park and one of the characters is a bald South African mercenary with a bad attitude, you can bet your house on the fact that is destiny is to become lunch for Velociraptors. In Prometheus there were enough of these dis-likeable and disposable characters to overthrow a small African nation.
PS – Any chance of an edit function on this blog?
Maybe I’ve been pampered by internet forums and word-processors, but not being able to go back and correct my grammar, spelling and word choices is galling
Interesting- I almost picked up RED State several times and this just bumped it farther up the list.
I actually enjoyed Prometheus but it has to be viewed as mindless entertainment, not high art or a captivating story or even a particularly great film. Kinda like the Avengers.
Apparently I need an edit button too….
Well I have seen both of these films, and would never have compared them against each other
I agree with the other commenters that Prometheus wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. Visually it was excellent, and the synthetic human (Fassbender) was delectably creepy – and I really liked the Pinocchio digs from the crew at him. Oh and I spotted one Aliens reference “we are leaving!” perhaps there are more??
It didn’t live up to the other Alien(s) films in terms of suspense, or plot, but sequels/prequels rarely do.
**SPOILERS**
Red State was pretty interesting, standard horror plot – some kids decide to have sex and then the killing starts. I liked the way it descended into a Waco Massacre type scenario, but I have to say, that the way the police just decided to take everyone out was a little unbelievable.
I’m a sucker for aliens with acid for blood and will watch anything related to it no matter what other people say – Prometheus I enjoyed but probably will never watch it again (I could watch Aliens again and again). Red State was not a waste of my time and it was fun seeing John Goodman as a gun toting cop, and I will probably never watch that again either.
Now that you have compared these two films, I have to say that I enjoyed Prometheus more than Red State, and I’d be interested on your take on it too.
I watched Red State after reading this, and as much as I like some of Kevin Smith’s work (I thoroughly enjoyed Dogma), this movie was a stinker, despite the presence of some very good actors. Children of Men, now there is a great movie.
Prometheus… was a **huge** disappointment. Visually magnificent, yes, but Damon Lindelof is a hack and Ridley Scott really phoned it in for this one.
Well, fair enough, varying tastes and all that – interestingly, I actually didn’t like Dogma all that much; it had some fun moments, but for me it was a mish-mash that didn’t work. A bit like Mallrats, it felt like a series of sketches that never managed to assemble a narrative momentum. By contrast, Red State, despite the widely veering storyline, actually went somewhere pretty solidly defined – here’s our shallow sex-obsessed contemporary society out on the lash – here’s a bunch of religiously-inclined nutters incensed by the way our contemporary society is sex-obsessed and out on the lash – here’s the Big Daddy secular state storming in with hob-nailed boots and stomping said religious nutters to shreds with massive collateral damage once they cross the line. As a sketch of where the western-led world has gone in the last decade, it’s one of the sharpest I’ve ever seen.
So the question I have, for all of the Promethean refugees here, is…will the new Blade Runner stumble?
3 more queries I have for this rare group of literate movie reviewers concerns your preferences on an “Altered Carbon” movie:(Admittedly, I’m most interested in the author’s take, though I can understand, Richard, that if parts of AC are already in canned celluloid, you’re probably legally precluded from–even figuratively–responding. In any case…)
1. format
3D?…No 3D?
2. direction
Old director?…..New director?
3. style
Hollywood?….Warsaw?….HongKong?
4. license
artis-Oh!….shit!…Oh well, like Jo Pearson said, “There is no edit function.”
Bye for now,
–Bernie
“will the new blade runner stumble”?
YES.
Granted the original theatrical release needed to be fixed but if you look at the fixed version of Blade Runner there really isn’t anywhere else for the story to go and nowhere but down in standards.
Alien – Episode 1 – The Prometheus Menace.
Red Stink.
This is interesting. I had read about Red State as being the moment when Kevin Smith’s career “imploded” and thought to myself “Ah, so the Emperor was wearing no clothes after all” and immediately discounted the movie and all Smith’s future work as something I would not be bothered with (not that I was ever that big a fan in the first place).
But now after RM’s recommendation I will have to watch it and decide for myself.
I saw Prometheus on DVD recently. Perhaps it was my lowered expectations but I thought it was a perfectly fine space monster movie. The nerds went way way overboard in their vilification of it. No it does not give the answers to the meaning of life as it promised it would but only the nerds were fooled by that particular piece of false advertising.
Besides everyone knows that if you want to find out the meaning of life these days then you should just google it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_of_life
@ John – yeah, don’t believe the anti-hype. From what I’ve seen, Smith behaved like a bit of a tosser at Sundance and his supposed model of indie distribution is a bit disingenuous (sure, he can do it, he’s a millionaire cult movie maker with a broad fan-base following – other indie directors starting out, not so much). But all the furore over that really obscures the rather more important fact; that conventional distribution of a film like Red State would have been all but impossible in the contemporary American movie industry. It’s savagely scathing of both US fundamentalism and US law enforcement, it is in fact the closest thing to a subversive movie that I’ve seen come out of the US in the last decade or more.
“…..the closest thing to a subversive movie that I’ve seen come out of the US in the last decade or more.”
Well, that and The Valley of Elah
Now that I know a little more about it this movie sounds right up my alley. Have you heard of a movie released last year called “God Bless America”? Its a satire about a terminally ill guy who goes on a countrywide reality tv contestant killing-spree.
Speaking of subversive movies has anyone seen “Innocence of Muslims”? I checked out the trailer and it looked just like an SNL sketch. I know lots of politicians and even Salman Rushdie have come out and condemned but personally I take my hat off to the guy who made it for having the balls to do it.
So its purpose was to provoke and offend? Well good, I believe people have the right to do that last time I checked. They certainly have the right to speak their minds and if the guy who made it thinks Islam is a crock of shit then so be it. Seriously what right-thinking person does not think it (and every other religion) is a crock of shit?
I do think it is fair to single Islam out as being particularly offensive in its brutality and idiocy though. How many people have been killed by their latest worldwide riot-fest now?
Muslims want nothing less than for it to be illegal and punishable by death for anyone to speak out against Islam. That is fascist totalitarian shit and it has no place in western civilization – or any civilization.
The usual counter-argument for all that is “Oh its only the fundamentalists you have to watch out for – all the rest are lovely people” but as Sam Harris points out in his book The End of Faith its the moderates who apologize for and enable all the nut-jobs.
I saw Red State and Prometheus, the former was a good take on the current religious zealotry, and the law enforcement guys gone overboard (seriously some police departments are looking to purchase surveillance drones… as if they were in a war zone…). Unreasonable reaction by the law enforcement, not really. Just change the religion to drugs and make the perps black or latino and you could get a similar outcome easy. American law enforcement passed the Mayberry standards long ago. Its just that the majority is getting to feel a bit of fire more often now.
Prometheus…..
Well I read Chariots of the Gods, its a better book than this is a movie. I mean seriously, even in a sci-fi flick there has to be some reason, something tying all the elements of the story together, for it to be considered a good movie. (Pandorum, a pretty good sci-fi flick got horrible reviews on RottenTomatoes…) This movie just seemed like they wanted to say something, but then got another great idea and decided to go with that, then they got another great idea and decided to go with that, etc… The movie could have been pretty good, but ultimately it turned into a “lets include enough stuff so that we satisfy every demographic on our checklist” exercise. Women – love story, check. Guys – Big burly aliens that look like they were born inside a Nautilus machine – check. God – girl with cross “I believe what choose to believe” scientist with cross – check. Comedy – Guy pierce – check (LOL I had to put that one in because I didn’t even know who he was until this movie), African American minority rep – Cool music playing black guy – check. and so forth… I am convinced that Ridley didn’t direct the movie at all – or he is getting a bit long of tooth. This one was a stinker.
Red State was an excellent satire on our perception of law enforcement and religious zealotry. It was as if Smith condensed all the excrement about religion, law enforcement, etc. that the modern media peddles into a convenient little package…like looking at our media fueled biases in a funhouse mirror.
Either that or Smith is even more insane than the cartoon characters he created in that movie and is just another casualty to CNN and Fox News.
Prometheus on the other hand…not memorable…simple sci-fi plot fruit salad.