“Sometimes you do your best work with a gun to your head”.
I wonder how much a big budget really helped this story? One of the many things that has made certain films so successful has been the way that filmmakers have had to work to tell their story within a limited budget, this is what made Alien so damn good in the first place. It’s the editing in Jaws that makes a lot of the impact for me, which was done in part to distract people from what would otherwise have been an obvious crap fake shark.
I also think that Ridley Scott has become much too dependent on the post-theatre edit to tell his version of a film. I think he is right in that people have more time to watch a film at home and are less affected by length but I think that means that he has lost some of the tightness and consistent internal logic of his earlier films, as well as tension and believability.
Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, of which I am a big fan, was somewhat mangled in its studio release – not just deleted scenes but deleted entire characters, story threads and a completely different emphasis in others - including all of the opening scenes set in France which are markedly different and less clumsily anti-clerical than in the theatrical release. The motivations of many central characters are completely different and more adult in the extended edition and I think of all of Ridley Scott’s films to date (up until Prometheus) he felt that the studio editing of this film had destroyed its meaning most (he makes quite an impassioned speech for him as an intro to the extended DVD edition decrying the numerous studio forced edits).
Part of the problem of Kingdom of Heaven was that the studio really wanted it to be Gladiator II whereas that wasn’t the film Scott had made at all, although you wouldn’t know it from the trailers.
I do wonder what an extended, more adult Prometheus cut might look like but I guess I would say that I did enjoy the theatre cut of Kingdom of Heaven when I first saw it*, despite thinking it flawed but I didn’t really enjoy Prometheus the first time round, other than enjoying the visuals as many others have said.
*So much so that I ended up at the off-licence in my armour, very drunk and buying more wine. The Director’s Cut of Robin Hood couldn’t rescue that film, likewise the extended cut of Gladiator was a cynical studio cash in, which just adds in some deleted scenes (and which were scenes that Scott was perfectly ok with losing; he is on record as saying that the original theatre edit of Gladiator is effectively the Director’s cut).