Reviews No One Asked For….

The wife rented Prometheus and Chernobyl Diaries. Both managed to take an interesting premise and drive it straight into the ground hard enough to warrant a quick mention. Warning: Spoilers, and at one point I will be saying fuck a lot.

Chernobyl Diaries (the title implies 'found footage' which mercifully, it is not) is about six, very first-world tourists on an adventure tour of Chernobyl, lead a local named Uri. However, once they get back to their van they find it has been sabotaged, and then things start to go kinda badly. It takes too long to get going and once it does all you can do is marvel at the stupidity of the characters. All of it wrapped up in a thundering turd of an ending. 

So, mutant zombies? …. whoopdeshit.

Gameraid: However, Chernobyl Diaries does at least have one redeeming feature. The scenes where the idiot tourists explore and run amok through the abandoned city (when running from C.H.U.D.,down is always a bad choice) are excellent fodder for Post-Apocalyptic or a Zombie Survival game. 

To learn more about CHUD consult your local library!

Alas, we geeks had such high hopes when we first heard of Prometheus, only to watch them crash to the earth like a giant spaceship doing a cartwheel across a volcanic hellscape. Like all franchises, this one seems destined only to turn a once great film into a very small part of a much weaker whole. You know it is a bad sign when the movie was two thirds over before I realized who the main protagonist was supposed to be.

In the first movie we got to experience true Lovecraftian horror as we ventured out into an utterly hostile universe filled with experiences we do not even have a concept for yet, and mysterious beings who barely notice us as they follow their own unknowable agendas.

no, not these guys

Prometheus ignores all that and basically tries to prove that this guy is the greatest scholar in all of human history …

which would be kind of awesome!

I could spend days writing about what goes wrong here, but personally I love that the Engineers worship the Big Giant Head, effectively tying together not only Aliens, but also Predator and Bladerunner with Third Rock from the Sun.

All Hail the Great Shanter's Toupee Stand!

The film also touches on one of my favourite peeves against the 'life on earth originating with aliens' argument, in that two of the characters have the following (paraphrased, but not as much as you'd think) conversation:

      'So the Muthafuckin' Engineers created life on earth?"

      "Fuck yeah!"

      "But, then who created the Muthafuckin' Enginners?"

      "Oh fuck, we'll never know that."



I guess it is still muthafuckin' turtles all the way down.

Gameraid: Can't think of s single thing that would be of particular use to gamers, except maybe the 'laser bots' that mapped out the interior of the ship.