Prometheus: QUESTIONS WILL BE ANSWERED, AND YOU WILL BE LEFT HIGHLY UNSATISFIED BECAUSE WHAT YOU REALLY WANTED WAS LOVE.

Since the transformers.pdf went around recently, this reminded me that my favorite film analysis was by SMG on Ridley Scott's Prometheus. (paywalled link, but the relevant text is pasted below so don't worry.)

This is an insanely good thread about existentialism, horror, and simulation, which made me really appreciate the movie more and was largely responsible for my thoughts about horror and meaning (and of course my previous post on the movie.)

I've gone through the thread and selected the posts that present this analysis. It's very long, and you have to get used to the in-media-res of assuming SMG is responding to some argument without seeing it yourself, but it lays out the connections between film-making and how we define our own reality with clarity and wit. It's also incredibly arrogant and ungenerous to his interolocutors, but it's better to have an opinion strongly represented that lets the audience choose for itself whether and where it is correct.

Watching the film first is helpful, but not necessary.

Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. "***" separate different posts.

The Last Jedi

Some movies to see

Your Name

Colossal

Both explore very personal and quotidian issues of identity using extremely blatant metaphors. It's not even worth dissecting, but if you like "high brow cinema that is trying to be entertaining" then see these.

The Sources of All Our Troubles

"The Girl with All the Gifts" is a zombie story by Mike Carey. It takes the common themes about zombies, and is in no way subtle. So they made an incredibly faithful translation of it.

It was only available for a very brief time in theaters, but fortunately you can watch it now.

It's interpretation of zombies, as the degraded subject, is excellent but there's little analysis to do. It's so straightforward that reviewing it would be like the clown car theory of mockery. Just go watch it.

(Do you see the muzzle on the child in the poster? There, you've captured the entire movie in a nutshell.)

What's funny is that the other big work by Mike Carey, was the comic Lucifer.

Which was also translated, into the pseudo-detective television series Lucifer.

Whereas this interpretation is the complete opposite, throwing out the major storylines and the sacred tone of the comic for something completely different. And it is glorious. Lucifer here is a sort of super-slick deity in the sense of nothing in the world affects him, and he only intervenes out of a sense of boredom. It's a detective show where half of every episode is spent convincing the Deus ex Machina to even care. I don't even know what I'm watching, or that I could recommend it, but it's different in a totally fantastic way.