How many times have you said, “It was pretty good, until the end where…” coming out of a movie?

The past few years, not only have I found myself saying that a lot more often, but I’ve found myself in one too many situations where the ending of a flick has utterly ruined a movie I was enjoying not ten minutes before it all went to hell.

So without rambling on and on, I’ve decided to focus on a few movies that I feel utterly destroyed all the good will built by solid starts with unbelievably terrible endings.

I’ll be doing two or three of these a week, seeing as my rambling will require me to focus one movie at a time.

Needless to say: SPOILERS.

Prometheus

Prometheus was supposed to be the answer to all my movie nerd prayers.This was supposed to be my jam in 2012.

Forget the ties to Alien; I didn’t give a damn about that. We were getting Ridley fucking Scott back on the Sci-Fi wagon! This was it, we were finally going to have something imaginative and intelligent. There were promises of clever ties to the original Alien, a departure from the standard prequel bullshit we always get.

Full disclosure: I’m a rabid Blade Runner and Alien fanboy. I don’t care how many issues a person can find with those movies, I love them deeply and make it a yearly ritual to watch both and simply bask in their glow. To hear that the director of both would come back to the world of Alien and provide a new, interesting story focused on a single moment of that film had me foaming at the mouth.

Dude, we were going to get an answer to this thing! There’s no way you can fuck up an explanation for something this weird!

The trailers amped me up. The cast seemed to be on point. Those viral videos with Guy Pierce being all Guy Pierce about robots and space. I was literally willing to have a thousand of Sir Ridley’s chest babies. I walked into the theater with the expectation that sure, maybe the quality won’t redefine my life but that didn’t matter; I was getting hard Sci-Fi for the first time in nearly a decade or more!

So let’s jump ahead to movie. The first two acts have their flaws, but I forgave them. I even looked past the geologist and biologist acting like two McDonald’s employees thrown in a cave. It was all going to be ok, Michael Fassbender was being amazing, and everytime I started doubting myself, he or Idris Elba popped up and reminded me that a cast this cool-a cast this classy; couldn’t be in the wrong.

Oh look, an alien vagina faced cobra! How can you not put your face up to it?

I even dealt with the wacky caesarian scene. For one; being awake during surgery is a fear of mine, so it made me squirm like crazy to watch it. Also, it was actually an interesting twist on the chestburster concept, so I gave them a little credit for thinking outside the box.

That was a mistake.

From the moment the caesarian is over we get:

1. A woman who has just gone through surgery fucking sprinting on the surface of alien planet while wearing a cumbersome spacesuit.
2. They somehow completely screw the pooch on a full answer to the space jockeys. Really? They’re god, but for some reason they want to kill all of us? 
3. An inexplicably angry alien that it supposed to be our creator, but does little more than act like a cross between Michael Myers, The Hulk and one of the juice-heads from my gym.
4. Charlize Theron running away from a falling spaceship; and not once thinking to run to her left or right; where she would more easily avoid the falling object that was longer than it was wide.
5. That caesarian baby monster (torn from our main character’s body at about the size of a premature baby) somehow grew to the size of an elephant and grows a dozen penises from it’s vagina-head. This thing goes on to fight the pale, roided up frenchman (those dudes looked french to me, is that racist?) and face-hugs his ass.
6. Our heroine jets off in a spaceship by herself, that she has no idea how to use with the robot that was just trying to get her killed to go and ask the rest of Frenchy’s friends why they’re so mean.

This is all pretty stupid, and I knew this, but I still gave a little love to the movie. Sure, none of it made sense, but maybe what they were setting up would pay off in a big way.

That’s when Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof read my mind, looked at each other and threw me against the proverbial pinball machine (if you get, you get it) and gave me this:

41 seconds to ruin an entire movie. 41 seconds to say “fuck you” to fans new and old. I’ve never had a movie do this to me before; and I spent money to see the prequels, Crystal Skull AND Superman Returns.

Now maybe you think I’m being harsh. Maybe you think I should have hated Prometheus as soon as one of those pale french dudes got half-naked and fell into a waterfall to make human happen. In hindsight, you’d be right. Prometheus was a terrible film from the start, but I let hype and an open mind allow me to embrace it, only for it to clue me in on it’s awfulness at the very last minute with a cheap, shitty link to the original Alien films.

I remember walking out of the theater feeling empty, finally understanding what so many felt walking out of Phantom Menace (a terrible film, but that lightsaber fight at the end was completely distracting and “fucking awesome” when I was 18/19).

Fuck Prometheus.

Until next time, where I’ll be discussing, you guessed it: Robocop 3…I’m not kidding.