The irony is that you were the one that crystalized the criticism and gave it a defensive nature and changed the flow of this thread.
Feel free to start a “Prometheus [only people who think it’s a masterpiece allowed]” thread so that you can talk about the movie without feeling soul raped that other people have trouble with the weak points.
I pretty much hated it too. I’m definitely not a “comic book guy”, btw. The lack of a coherent plot and the irrational behavior of the characters kept making me want to bash my head against something.
ETA: I thought the visuals were pretty good.
The idea that anything that could happen in an message board thread could “crystalize” criticism just illustrates my point about internet groupthink. Either you like the movie or you don’t; what happens in an internet thread shouldn’t affect that one way or the other.
If you come in saying that anyone who has problems with the flaws of the movie and doesn’t think it’s a masterpiece is just a comic book guy style elitist nitpicker, then they’re going to say “no, my criticisms aren’t just minor nits, let me explain why they’re substantial” - by dismissing the criticisms as you did, you encouraged people to make sure they detailed just how exactly they thought elements of the movie were badly done.
The change in tone of the thread before and after you started yelling at us for having the audacity to be critical of flaws is pretty obvious.
So if you disliked the movie so much, why are you still hanging around on page 11 of a thread about it?
Hell, if I didn’t like a movie, I might pop into a thread to say so, give my reasons, and then leave the thread for discussion among those who did like it. But that’s not happening here. Instead, a weird sense of community seems to have developed around the dislike of the film.
Seems like there ought to be a word for that…
I just skimmed page 1-4. The reason the tone may have been different is because just about everyone (but not all) in those first two pages said the movie was stupid and wanted to point out various plot holes to prove how stupid the movie was to them.
Indeed, you yourself, in post #147 stated that the high IMDB rating for the movie had to be “a fanboy bump, right?”. Indicating that the thread only needed someone who was very pro the movie for the tinder keg to go off and the echo chamber negativity to be focused on someone. FWIW, spoke’s original “Comic Boy Nitpickers” comment was in reference to this post of yours. You can see, perhaps, where your comment may have been the catalyst for all this?
Not that I’m saying spoke handled everything ok.
That’s a pretty bizarre position to take. What’s the point of having these sorts of discussions, if internalizing the arguments is a sign of some sort of weakness or personal flaw?
Oh, maybe to discuss how different threads in the movie tie together, or maybe plot points or details you might have missed. Things like that.
Why? What do you think is the point? To bond with others who feel the same way as you about the movie? Or to look to others to decide what your opinion should be? Because that seems “bizarre” to me. I don’t seek affirmation from a message board.
Are you honestly saying that a person should have their opinion on a work of art set in stone after their first viewing, and it should never change after that? That people should never re-evaluate their position on a work of art, or consider alternate views of it?
Maybe I’m just weird, but the most interesting discussions I’ve had about art are the ones that made me rethink my entire opinion about the work. Ideally, I’m learning to appreciate something that I had previously disliked, but sometimes it works the other way, and I conclude that something I had enjoyed was not, in fact, very good. That’s not “groupthink” or “affirmation,” that’s a product of a free exchange of ideas and perspectives that led to a new understanding of the work.
I mean, at this point in the thread, you’ve posted to it 43 times, virtually all on the subject of whether this movie sucks or not. If no one should ever change their mind about the quality of a film based on an internet discussion, what was the purpose of those forty three posts? When someone says, “It was dumb when they did X,” and you posted an explanation for why it wasn’t dumb, I assume the purpose was to get them to change their mind about X being dumb, right? If someone said, “I thought this movie was lame, but after reading Spoke’s posts, I see that there was a lot of stuff going on that I didn’t catch the first time. Maybe it’s better than I thought,” would your reaction be to scorn that person for allowing their opinion to be influenced by what someone else said about it? Assuming that you would not, why do you scorn people for saying, “I thought the movie was kind of lame, but after reading Lamia’s posts, I see that there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t make any sense at all. Maybe it’s worse than I thought?”
This thread is for discussion of the movie, not of people’s personal conduct or their reasons for posting here. Let’s get the discussion back on topic.
Wow. I can’t imagine letting someone on a message board convince me to dislike something I had previously enjoyed.
That’s so page 2, post 69. :dubious: :rolleyes:
Because as someone who really loves movies, I even love bad movies in a way.
Ambitious failure sheds just as much light on what makes for good movies almost as much as success. I often go to movies I suspect I won’t like just because I think they’re trying something and in the effort, even if they fail, will produce something worthy of discussion.
To restate my position: As a purely emotional experience I left the theater reasonably high (though not remotely ecstatic because after a wonderful opening 30 minutes it began its descent even at a visceral level) on the movie. That is a valid experience and if that is the goal, it mostly works.
But as soon as I started giving it more thought it began to crumble on various technical levels. As an intellectual experience, it is (for me) a failure. “Wait, I think I know what they were trying for but if so this doesn’t make sense.” or “As a representation of something that is supposed to resemble a real human being the changes in behavior of that person are really weird.”
Commenting on conservation of mass in monster growth or why the geologist didn’t map the planet and then got lost while holding the map he did have or just side issues to be bandied about after the movie already failed to make me want to cut it any slack.
Why am I not bothered the broad stupidities in Total Recall while they ultimately do bother me in Prometheus? I don’t know, and so I keep reading and commenting and maybe something will shed some light on it.
And let me also deny Comic Book Guy-ness. Prometheus is not “Worst. <insert something>. Ever.” Is is simply disappointingly sloppy and pedestrian for a movie that garnered high hopes based on its pedigree and advertising.
Can you imagine letting someone on a message board convince you to like something you had previously disliked?
Why do you think that can only happen in one direction?
My take is that people argue the most viciously about movies that are great in some ways but terrible in others.
The obvious parallel that illustrates this process in the science fiction realm is the reaction to Avatar, which was visually stunning and addressed big issues but had many plot elements that … annoyed. People argued with considerable heat over that movie as well.
I’ll give Prometheus this: I think that purely as entertainment I preferred it over Avatar, because the pacing never flagged. It was, obviously, not set in a world as beautiful as that of Avatar, but it was visually very impressive nonetheless.
That’s admitting it had lots and lots of plot and characterization issues, already discussed at length.
Wait, what? Einsatzgroping’s remark was of the type explicitly allowed in the forum rules:
Even though there seems to be only one conspicuous fan of the movie in this thread, Einsatzgroping’s post was clearly a comment on the moviegoing public in general, not that one individual.
I’m basically fine with poor science and realism in a movie, but I would have to agree that these were overly stupid:
The larger issue for me was that the movie couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Is it a thriller, horror, mystery, action, or “greater message” style movie? If they had wanted to be an action film, then they probably would have done better to simply do like The Matrix, spoil everything there is to know in the first 10 minutes of the film, and leave the rest of it to action/suspense. If they wanted it to be a horror/thriller/mystery film, then they should have revealed far less about the Engineers and the alien-weapons and opened up more time to build suspense between brief reveals of creepy-looking mysteries. If they wanted it to be a meaningful/mystic film, they should have tied together the alien birth, Weyland, the dissolved Engineer, David’s condition, the star maps, etc. into something meaningful.
Design by committee is written all over the movie, and it ends up being decidedly sub-mediocre because of it. With worth acting and visuals, you’d come out of the theater laughing at how horrible it is.
I’m a fan of the movie. Loved it.
Because it has never happened for me, and I can’t imagine it happening.
Can you give an example of a work of art you liked until the SDMB convinced you it was unworthy?
It was more mixed than that. Most people praised something about it, and then pointed out the weaknesses.
On account of the moderator note, I can’t fully answer this question, but I think it’s pretty obvious to most people that Spoke is taking this very personally for some reason, so I don’t think my comment was the catalyst - there were dozens of other posts pointing out issues.
Anyway, movie review aggregate sites often have a cycle like this. The people who rush to see the movie first are the most likely to be fans of the movie and hence will give it a higher rating than average - so the first votes coming in are higher than usual. I was surprised to see Prometheus as high as it was - while it’s not a horrible movie, there’s no way it should be knocking on the door to IMDB’s top 250 all time movie list. So I was speculating that the current rating must be during the high cycle of the initial ratings, but then saw that there were 40,000 reviews, which I wondered if that was past the initial burst of fan reviews.