Prometheus could have been concocted by a publicist taking advantage of the current gullible film culture that believes the hype hoisting Ridley Scott as an artist (or even interesting). Scott’s sales record is all that makes fanboys take him seriously; his formulaic, stultifying, calendar-art-pretty movies certainly don’t. The mere fact that Prometheus gloms on to a legacy–it is a Prequel to the previous four films–is enough to convince the easily duped that something special is going on in this nonsense.

What’s going on is a plot that’s less coherent than any of the earlier films (even though it repeats them) with an unappealing cast babbling nonsense about Faith, Creation and Let‘s-get-the-hell-outta-here! The original film almost passes for art due to producer Walter Hill’s efficient adherence to genre storytelling and the unique exhibition of H.R. Giger’s unnervingly biomorphic designs for the monster and its space ship which simultaneously evoked outre genitalia and assorted seafoods. (The original’s signature motifs conveyed a palpable, nearly poetic fear of Sex.) Now, Ultrahack Scott reveals himself as little more than a production-design freak; Prometheus (convincingly shot in 3-D) lacks the atmospheric awe of the first film, the undeniably well-paced tension of James Cameron’s sequel and the rich, evocative splendor of Jeunet’s capstone.

Instead, Prometheus is marked by Scott’s typically shallow characterization, narrative confusion and disrespect for movie history. Not since the atrocious Wall-E has one movie so thoughtlessly trashed a superior film. This time both David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence are dishonored through the characterization of an ominous automaton, David (played by Michael Fassbender who quickly has come to emblematize crap cinema). David models his hair and speaking voice after Peter O’Toole’s classic enigmatic Lawrence and David’s lack of “soul” refers to the conundrum of Spielberg and Kubrick’s neo-Pinocchio conception–scoffed at here as “not a real boy.”

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Updating the Snow White legend into a vampire-zombie-cyber-goth fashion show results from commercial calculation more than any credible feeling for the ideas of innocence, selflessness, hope, beauty (and their opposites) that the Snow White story used to instruct.

Charlize Theron strikes her usual psychotic anger poses as Ravenna, a vengeful queen lusting for eternal youth and power while Kristen Stewart as Snow White again anguishes over her obligation and destiny. A Monster and Twilight mash-up to no purpose. SWATH may trigger reflex pretensions about feminism and narcissism (including Chris Hemsworth’s stolid Huntsman) but at the same time it is uprooted from the basic needs of storytelling and deep emotional identification.

So many jumbled motifs occur in Sanders’ SWATH that it resembles the promiscuity of music videos that ransack our cultural heritage out of art directors and costume designers‘ mad zeal. SWATH plunders the recent melting, morphing history of F/X–everything from that damnable The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Avatar yet never achieves the exotic originality of such magnificent Chinese fantasies as Chen Kaige’s The Promise, or Zhang Yimou’s Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower that evoke authentic cultural memory.

Romain Gavras, son of polemical filmmaker Costa Gavras, supplies similar cultural evocation for Kanye West–political consciousness as a form of style, music video as quasi-political internet communique. No Church in the Wild’s only message concerns the amoral panic that SWATH disregards. Kanye West’s current artistic project uses imagination to create new myths; his innovations constantly provoke (though not always successfully as in the visually striking yet metabolically abrasive Niggas in Paris music video), But No Church in the Wild pinpoints the loveless circumstances of modern living that SWATH placates with meaningless. non-spiritual fantasizing. Kanye uses the history of cinematic agit-prop to recall its absence/ignorance in today’s media but SWATH exploits fairytale mythology without the philological intelligence found in Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves.

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