Reviews

I think if you were expecting a post-apocalyptic action-packed gore-fest, you will definitely be disappointed by Mother/Android. What I found was a film that eloquently explored love and loss and grief and sacrifice. In that context, a pace that might otherwise have seemed slow made perfect sense to me; there was room to care about the characters, and to understand the choices they were forced to make.

It's certainly not cheerful, and if you expect a big android-crushing ending, you're going to be disappointed, but what I saw was a tale of courage and endurance, and I'm glad I've seen it.

The script is sensitive, and the performances (especially Moretz) beautifully nuanced. The ending might seem unsatisfactorily open, but I think that it fits with the whole nrrative of the film; the strength to endure, to keep going., even if you don't know where you're going to get to.

I will preface this by saying that I very much enjoyed this movie, but I think that it had significant weaknesses.

For a film ostensibly about Midway, it spent an awful lot of its runtime covering Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid (yet oddly almost none on the Battle of the Coral Sea). This seemed to lead into an awful lot of foreshortening and simplification of Midway itself.

With that being said, it was well-paced, with good performances, and covered a lot of the essentials well. Details such as the "water" message from Midway were well-placed, as were refernces to the well-known shortcomings of the Bliss-Leavitt Mk XIII aerial torpedo ("clunk"), and the TBD Devastator torpedo bomber (although in the actual battle the USN had 6 of the newer, faster, better armed and armoured TBF Avengers and lost 5 of those, so it wasn't just the planes).

I was surprised to see comparatively little involvement depicted of the fighters in the actual battle, and I think that not enough explanation was given of the US Navy's plan for coordinated aerial attacks with torpedo bombers at low level, dive bombers from high level with fighter cover provided by the F4Fs, and importantly why that didn't happen and its devastating conseuences in terms of the virtual annihilation of the torpedo squadrons.

In all, I think it was a good film that simply tried to cover too much historical ground in too short a time. For all that, I enjoyed it and would recommend it as a good war movie.

****SPOILERS**** I thoroughly enjoyed this film , and while i recognize that there are some weaknesses and unanswered questions, I would heartily recommend it nonetheless.

Weaknesses first; the motivation of the engineers could have been more fully explained. Against this I would set the fact that this is a question deliberately set up (I hope) for another film at the end. More time could have been taken for character development; perhaps a fuller cut would address this ('cause it's not like Scott's averse to filling in the story of a film in the DVD release...). The "twist" with Vickers turning out to be Weyland's daughter was so heavily foreshadowed by her being there at all, the comment in his video message about David being the nearest thing to a son that he'd ever have and so forth that I hardly think it counts.

OK, that's out of the way. Rapace, Fassbender and Marshall-Green turn in excellent performances. Rapace melds a lively intelligence with a combination of vulnerability and strength. Fassbender's David effectively conjures the spirit of Pinnocchio combined with a ruthlessness redolent of Ian Holm's Ash. Although not given nearly enough screen time to develop, Marshall-Green brings an infectious enthusiasm to the role of Charlie. Elba and Theron are effective in their roles rather than inspiring, but to a certain extent it is down to Rapace (Shaw), Fassbender (David), and Marshall-Green (Holloway) to carry the story and this they do very well. I am hoping that the aged Pearce is a hint that another film may develop Weyland's character more.

The cinematography is excellent, and the overall design strongly reminiscent of the first film, not merely with regard to the aliens, or the discovered ship but also the Prometheus itself whose internal fittings and layout feel very reminiscent of the Nostromo. I saw the film in 3D and this is one of the better usages of 3D that I've seen. Although there are obvious showcase scenes (the stellar map in the discovered ship being a striking example) overall, the effect felt natural.

I had no issues with the script; in most sci-fi films, some proportion of the dialogue will always be expository, and I feel that Prometheus handled this well.

Overall, while the film is not perfect, I found it highly enjoyable and a very worthwhile addition to the Alien canon; certainly superior to Resurrection and 3.