10 Movies That Explained Way Too Much

First, Prometheus is not a bad film. It does a lot of really clever things in fact. However, here again, we see a drive to overexplain, both in terms of its own plot and in terms of the wider Alien series. The more minor of these things is the former. Late in the movie, we figure out that the person funding the expedition the main characters are on to discover the origin of humanity has been on their space ship all along. Moreover, he is the father of the ruthless leader of the mission.

The problem here is that it misunderstands why paternity reveals, like the “I’m your father” of The Empire Strikes Back or even that of Pixar’s Coco, are interesting. Someone’s lineage isn’t all that interesting on its own. This lineage reveal needs to interrogate characters’ motivations or push characters in interesting directions. Here, it serves little purpose. It perhaps explains the motivations of one character, but it ultimately doesn’t much change the course of the film. It doesn’t give us much insight, doesn’t create especially interesting choices for characters to navigate, and doesn’t alter our own perception of the film and its messaging much at all.

Perhaps the more grievous error here though is that it undermines what came before. Especially in the first Alien film, the monster is just something you encounter out in space. It is a horrifying, unexplained creature that operates under different biological logic than you. The thought of being isolated and encountering this thing you cannot explain is terrifying…

…less so when you know exactly where it came from and why. The monster becomes a known quantity - part of a narrative you can see with omniscient clarity. Like with Hannibal, it’s understandable to want to know more about the monster, to have more answers, to have the curtain drawn back. But once it does, like in The Rise of Skywalker, the world almost seems to shrink to a collection of easily understandable cause and effects rather than a world like our own that is vast and full of seemingly random events and infinite possibilities. This is especially damaging to horror as we’ll see happen again and again in films on this list.