Comic Disbelief

The original Prophet, if you aren't familiar, was a Marvel comic run in the 90's at the height of comics. Flash forward to 2013, and the boring 90’s comic hero stereotype John Prophet has been revitalized to serve as an avatar in a short self contained story collection by Image comics. Each comic a self contained story that explores the alien, yet familiar. John is designed in each as an avatar in which the author uses to interact with absurdly fascinating alien settings. Prophet suffered from many of the same problems of Prometheus and was originally a rather self serving comic. Neither their characters felt true to themselves, especially in the case of Prometheus, they didn't feel true to the Aliens series. The original Prophet was just a Marvel comics hero from the 90's, boring to put it bluntly. What the original Aliens struck on that the Image revival of Prophet does also, is that good stories tell the truth. It doesn't matter if they haven't ever happened or never will. They're truthful in their own ways.

The problem that Prometheus suffered was that of it’s design, something that it could have learned from Prophet’s short story format. None of the characters in Prophet, or the original aliens for that matter, overstay their welcome. It’s this brevity and simplicity of their brand which allow “Game over man.” to hold more emotional weight than say “Big things have small beginnings.” As much as I rag on Prometheus, I really did not hate it. The film is infinitely recommendable on it’s look alone, and acting was top notch, even if the lines they were asked to deliver weren't. Prometheus just suffers from being too clever for its own good, with the gun on the mantelpiece choreographing every potentially interesting plot twist in the film. From the fact that the Charlize Theron’s segment of the ship is a lifeboat to the fact that Noomi Rapace is sterile, Damon Lindelof set his cast up for failure at every turn.

If you’re going to have a film have a run-time of over two hours, you can’t have a collection of themes which overpower it’s characters. As much as I wanted to love David as an analog for Lawrence of Arabia, the film openly contradicts itself on this front. David’s trajectory of pessimism downward throughout the film, in stark contrast with Lawrence, which begs the question why did they even include that entire theme to the film? Possibly if his arc had been left more vague, these schisms would not have existed. Each Prophet story is like stacks of violently beautiful graffiti painted over a wall, overlapping each other but self-contained shining through like peeling plaster. That is the sort of experience I expect out of Ridley Scott, not a comic book.