10 Smart Movies Which Are Secretly Dumb
6. Prometheus
Ridley Scott strikes again, this time with his film released the year before The Counselor - Prometheus.
The marketing for Scott's Alien prequel did a superb job of selling it as a visually stunning, switched-on sci-fi epic that had a lot to say about creation, God, and the origins of both human and alien-kind.
There's a loftiness to the film's early passages in particular which, combined with the film's technical finesse, make it seem like an intelligent movie.
But soon enough the superficial smarts give way to a film that becomes increasingly questionable in its logic.
From dumbass scientists who get high and pet a space snake, to a woman who fails to run away from a giant space donut, and the immensely contrived circumstances through which the proto-Xenomorph is created, Prometheus is a staggeringly silly, stupid film that just happens to have a master filmmaker trying to make it look like Shakespeare in Space.
The same is true to a lesser extent of Alien: Covenant, which similarly trusses itself up as a more thoughtful and "important" slice of sci-fi cinema, only to devolve even more transparently into gonzo schlock after the opening act.