Not Tom Hardy, Not Russell Crowe

It’s ‘summer’ (as in, it’s June, I’ve only just turned off the heating and we’re alternating between blinding sunshine and uncomfortable heat [yesterday] and floods [today]). As a side note, next year, can we just segue straight from spring to autumn? They’re both nice seasons, which I like and feel comfortable dressing for. I still haven’t bought any summer clothes, as I’m working on the assumption that I won’t need any, as the only holiday I’m going on is to Edinburgh. Where, as we’ve established, there are many weather conditions, few of which involve sun or extremes of heat. I’m also assuming that as Britain is staging a monster sporting event, for which we’ve been preparing for years, it will piss it down with rain for most of July and August. Ergo, I can stick with my customary jeans-and-Uniqlo-top combo and avoid the sales and buying anything new to wear till autumn. ‘Dressing for summer’ will merely involve either carrying an umbrella or leaving it hopefully at home.


I digress. It being ‘summer’, the film studios assume that our brains have gone melty in the heat, and we can only cope with effects-heavy blockbusters. Which is fine, but why do they all have to be such a monumental waste of time, money and effort?

First up, I bought into the hype (the PR and marketing team deserve a massive award for creating so much expectation and desire for something so dull) and went to see Prometheus. I wanted to go and see it at the Imax, as I’ve never seen anything there, but it was sold out, so Tottenham Court Road Odeon it was, with 3D specs which they now charge you extra for! As well as charging you extra because it’s in 3D in the first place! And then they offend you further by showing that bloody advert about how cinemas might die if we all download films, or watch DVDs or something and just turn into huge sheds with seats and cobwebs in. Stop doing this when I am a/ IN A CINEMA, THEREFORE SUPPORTING CINEMA and b/ you have just fleeced me massively for doing so. It does rather make me want to watch a DVD with popcorn I’ve made myself and no-one either kicking the back of my seat, talking through the film, or constantly checking their texts and emails on their phone, lighting up a surrounding area of at least four foot as they do it, all of which is immensely annoying. Make adverts about that instead, please, it would really increase my enjoyment of spending too much money in your ‘multiplex’.

Anyway, back to Prometheus. I have the dubious pleasure of having seen all four Alien films (yes! Even the one with Winona Ryder in it). I think I’ve even seen Alien Vs Predator on TV (which, for the record, was schlocky fun). Prometheus is an event because it’s the first time director Ridley Scott has ‘returned to the Alien universe’. Even though he’s spent the last six months protesting that, really, this film has bugger-all to do with Alien. I’ve no idea why he bothered with that, given that IT IS AN EXACT REMAKE OF ALIEN. Albeit with nicer effects and scenery, but made by a man over 70 who has clearly forgotten how to make a film that makes any sense in terms of plot or characters.

So, when you decide to make an homage to Alien, here are the things you need to include:

Big spaceships!

Robots being creepy and having their heads torn off!

Sticky substances that will probably corrode your clothes!

Unpleasant things either going into, or out of people!

Shadowy people doing things for nefarious means!

A tough woman running around in her underwear for quite a lot of the film!

A crew who, whilst they only number 17, you only get to know 5 of and there are a suspicious number of deaths! (Are some of them dying more than once?)

Shit apparently being blown to smithereens, without actually killing the one guy you want/need dead!

For Prometheus, you will also need to rip off the costume department of much-derided hot sci-fi mess The Fifth Element, and have supposedly feisty heroine Noomi Rapace running around in what is effectively a bandage boob tube and a pair of bandage pants, for about 20 minutes. Having just given herself a pretty hardcore abortion/caesarean. Because having your heroine run around in a skimpy vest and some pants was, like, sooo 1979 and repressive. We couldn’t even see her abs! Practically Victorian. No, in the future, female archeologists will feel so body confident that they’ll want to take off nearly all their clothes and dash about, covered in blood and trying not to faint with the horror of it all for ages, rather than, you know, making their first post-operative priority finding an intergalactic dressing gown or something.

You will also want to include a diverse mob of crew members who have apparently never met each other before they’ve been shoved on a massive space tank and put into cryostasis for two years, (other than nearly-naked Naomi and her boyfriend, who was obviously supposed to be played by Tom Hardy. But he either had ‘scheduling issues’ or read the script beforehand, and so didn’t do it. So they’ve hired a man who looks exactly like Tom Hardy. But isn’t him. Shame, as I always fancy Tom Hardy). The crew also haven’t thought to ask what mission they’re being recruited for. Or even where they’re going. Was it like a press-gang thing, and Charlize Theron just came up behind each of them, banged them on the head and then stuck them in a pod, after taking all their clothes other than their pants? If you can be put into cryostasis for two years, why do you have to just be in your underwear? Why can’t you wear something proper? Another of Ridley’s unanswered mysteries.

The crew includes a geologist who is admirably straightforward about why he is there (‘I just fucking love rocks’), which also, of course, means that he is doomed, despite his ginger Mohican and intriguing tattoos. One assumes, despite his appearance, that he’s one of the clever ones, as when they go explorin’, he has some laser gizmos for mapping the large construction that they’ve wandered into. However, despite the fact he controls the mapping gizmos, he manages to get lost trying to get back to the Mothership from the large construction. Call the gizmos back and make them show you the way out! Or, the large construction being revealed to be, essentially, a giant interstellar croissant, would you not just go back the way you came?

But we need him to get lost in a Scooby Doo way, because then he can be killed off along with the film’s most annoying character, the biologist, played as a Shaggy-style stoner dimwit, by Rafe Spall. I have no idea why they cast Rafe Spall, and then made him do a very unconvincing American accent. There are tons of American actors, employ one of them instead. Whilst Noomi is supposed to be English. Just make her character Scandinavian, it’s fine. No-one cares. If you’ve spent a trillion dollars, even on a seemingly really vague mission, I fail to see why you’d employ the universe’s thickest biologist. Rafe bimbles about doing nothing much, until faced with, them being on a planet two full years away in a spacecraft from where he lives, a lifeform that’s, well, alien. Ergo, he knows nothing about how it’s likely to behave. I’d be standing well back, or at least have my helmet fully up for protection. Not Rafe, though. No, he decides that the alien – which looks, if you’re being kind, like an albino cobra with the underside of a stingray grafted onto it; or, if you’re a feminist film critic pointing out Ridley Scott’s apparent issues with women, like a vicious fanny on a stick – is very beautiful. And goes towards it cooing as though he’s just found a big basket of kittens.

Naturally, the fanny on a stick attacks Rafe for being an idiot and he falls victim to the first ‘unpleasant thing going into or out of someone’ episode.

It was a bit unclear to me whether it was him or the ginger geologist who then randomly got reanimated as an Alien zombie (which no-one in the film really comments on, despite the ensuing spat having taken out about 7 of the crew’s members. It’s fine, we hadn’t been introduced to them, so we needn’t worry that they’re dead). We also don’t need to worry about who/what killed off Not Tom Hardy (probably because he’s not Tom Hardy); why they’ve travelled two years in a spacecraft, yet choose to park it about a mile away from their chosen spot, thus meaning they have to commute back and forth in some not very high tech-looking space golf buggies, getting caught up in sand storms, etc. But not seeing Zombie Rafe Spall approaching from a mile away, thus giving them time to shut the door and stop him taking out half the crew. And why, when faced with a huge, crashing spacecraft falling vertically on top of you, you don’t, if you’re Charlize Theron, run away to the side instead of straight ahead. Or why, when you’ve driven your really-tiny-in-comparison-with-the-Engineers’-ship ship into the side of the latter at great speed, there is still loads of it left afterwards, and it’s all working perfectly well, thanks.

You’ll also need to reference your original 70s classic by including a sequence that makes viewers of a certain age think not, ‘ooh, that’s a lovely effect’ but, ‘ooh, someone watched a lot of Jean Michel Jarre spectacles back in the day, didn’t they?’

Oh, it was all exhausting. And lacking in suspense, or shocks, or intrigue. What will happen when they wake up the Engineer? Well, he’s been asleep for over 2,000 years, or something (I’d given up caring about the timeframe ages ago; it could have been two billion), so of course instead of waking up and going, ‘ooh, some lovely chums to chat to! At last! Let me tell you the secrets of the universe!’, being eleven foot tall, built like a marble tower block and feeling like a bear that’s been dragged out of hibernation, he’s really bloody grumpy and snaps everyone’s heads off. So, by the end of it, they hadn’t answered any of the questions they’d set up and were clearly angling for a bloody sequel. However, Michael Fassbender does ‘creepy robot’ brilliantly and is still acting everyone off the screen even when he’s reduced to being just a head in a bag.

In other news, I went to see Avengers: AGM, or whatever it was called. Again, boredom on a stick, just with loads more explosions, and I’ve now decided I fancy Tom Hiddleston a bit. And that it’s the law that everyone, regardless of gender, has to fancy Scarlett Johansson. The film also stars Chris Hemsworth, who, as Thor, is equipped with a massive hammer.

Hemsworth seems to be building a career around raiding the tool shed. He lost out on wielding some tools in The Hunger Games to brother Liam (perhaps bows and arrows aren’t strictly ‘tools’), but within the month, there he was in Snow White and the Huntsman, clutching an axe. Also doing battle with: a drink problem; depression because he was a widower; a Scottish accent; trying to make people care about Kristen Stewart; the fact most of the film was ripped off from Lord of the Rings; a load of famous dwarves in an unconvincing Technicolor fairyland complete with CGI badgers and foxes (just film some real ones!) and a big stag that spent all of its screentime projecting, ‘I AM NOT ASLAN. NO, I AM AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GOD-LIKE ANIMAL BEING. ALSO, I AM NOT THAT STAG IN HARRY POTTER.’

Anyway, it is diverting, if, like me, you enjoy watching a woman deranged by her own beauty and power turning into a flock of crows, and being a bit like a fantasy version of Loose Women (ie constantly bitching and raging about other women being younger, prettier and nicer than you).

It does make me worry about what Chris Hemsworth’s next film will be, given that it will have to include a/ an accent that is not his own (heavy Australian) and b/ tools.

Chris Hemsworth’s Agent: Hi Chris!

Chris Hemsworth, Wielder of Tools and Accents: G’day, mate!

CHA: Er, g’day! Yes. Hi! Anyhoo, I’ve got a lovely new job offer for you! It’s got all your favourite things in it! It’s got an unwieldy title, you’ll be doing an accent, AND it’s got tools! It’s soooo you!

CHWoTaA: Ripper! What is it, cobber?

CHA [brightly]: It’s Avengers Self Assemble: The Ikea Story! You’ll be playing a character called Bjorn! There’ll probably be a sequel, which will involve the pun ‘Bjorn Again’!

CHWoTaA [raising Aussie eyebrow quizzically]: Sounds good, but what are the tools, mate?

CHA [quietly]: A really big set of Allen keys.

CHWoTaA [with a heavy sigh]: Where do I sign?