Skip to main content

Prometheus versus Cabin in the Woods

Over the weekend we had a bit of an iTunes smackdown, watching Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien, Prometheus and the Joss Whedon produced Cabin the Woods. I can't say either was brilliant, but I definitely preferred the lower budget number.

First, Prometheus. You have to say there was great CGI - very realistic looking. Inevitably there were movie references - I couldn't help sniggering when a ship's computer with a voice like HAL addressed someone called David. That couldn't be a coincidence, even though there were no pod bay doors mentioned. And there is no doubt that Ridley Scott has a good line in creating tension. Of course if you've seen Alien (I did first time round in the cinema) once the protagonists got in the room with lots of egg-like cylinders you couldn't help feel a little nervous for them. But even though Alien was little more than hide and seek in space, it was very good, tense hide and seek in space, where I struggled more to get engaged in Prometheus.

There was very little plot structure, the aliens were tediously consistent in being homicidal monsters and I really didn't care for many of the characters. Whenever Hollywood does someone really old by piling on the rubber it looks so fake that you wonder why they can get monsters right but not this - the really old man, who was an important part of what plot there was, was truly bad. (On the plus side, Charlize Theron was stunning, if something of a cipher.)

I'm afraid I couldn't help but laugh aloud at one point, when two of the protoganists were trying to run away from a huge space ship that was falling on them... by running along the length of the ship rather than going sideways and covering a fraction of the distance to safety. It was pure Road Runner. And the baby Alien at the end looked far too much like a child dressed like Alien for Halloween. All in all it made me appreciate how brilliant Blade Runner still is. But at least Prometheus was better than the remake of Total Recall.

So we come to Cabin in the Woods. This was a relatively low budget movie that for some reason was shelved for several years before it came out. Despite getting very mixed reviews, I had to love it to some degree as I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan. Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse all score high amongst my favourite TV. And Whedon didn't do badly with the Avengers Assemble movie, though I think his ability to combine drama, fantasy horror/science fiction and big dollops of humour works best on TV because there's more time for things to develop. He also has more chance to produce his trademark reversal of expectation in TV - but having said that, this was something this film certainly packed in. Whedon wasn't the director, but he was writer and producer, and it shows.

Whedon fans will be delighted that three of his rep company are present in the cast, though mostly underused, apart from the nerdy self-deceiving scientist from Dollhouse, who is excellent as a stoned fool who turns out to be a key character against all expectation. It might be portrayed as a traditional teen horror slasher, but the first scenes with a kind of industrial control room, manipulating what's going on in the teens' horror story make it clear that it's something different and won't play as expected. (One of the best bits was the phone conversation with the evil harbinger at the gas station near the cabin, who really gets peeved when he finds the control room has him on speakerphone to laugh at his portentous remarks.)

In the end, I don't think it quite works. The overall concept is brilliant if bonkers, and some parts of it work well, but the ending clearly was a 'we can't think want to do next' bit of writing. Having said that, a major theme in Buffy et al is how you might have to sacrifice your friends and everything to save the world. The ending inverts this traditional Whedon mainstay by putting friendship ahead of saving the world.

I can't stand gore/slasher movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Saw, so when it turned out that some of the baddies would be zombies with TCM tendencies I was not thrilled - but actually even though there are times when a scene is absolutely swilling with human blood, you don't see too much detail, which makes it more acceptable for me. For all its problems, there was much more originality and inventiveness in Cabin in the Woods than there was in Prometheus and I have to say it made for much the more enjoyable evening of the two.

Both are now available on DVD/Blu-ray.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope