Adeel Hail
Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.
Celia
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
vis666
This film is by far one of the most underrated films I have seen in a while. The story (a man banished from his home town loses his wife to the Black Plague) could have been taken straight out of a Bram Stoker novel and has a very 20's German/Gothic feel to the whole. Adding to that experience is a romantic and yet very menacing string/piano/organ music which is consistent throughout the movie. (There is no spoken dialog in its entirety.) I haven't found a soundtrack on any retail sites yet and that's a real shame seeing it's absolutely beautiful. As far as setting, mis-en-scene and all that concerns (I'm not a professional) to me looked all fantastic and a low budget very well spent. Overall, a DVD every cinephile should consider buying. 8/10 for the movie, 9,5/10 for the music. 9/10 averaged. Kickass work guys!
Argemaluco
What started as a humorist experiment became into a small cinematographic niche : movies which simulate to come from a bygone era.As examples of this,I can mention movies like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,Dracula : Pages from a Virgin's Diary,Planet Terror,Death Proof or Alien Trespass.I understand the main intention of using that style : it does not only show the nostalgia associated with past decades,but it also uses the most modern tools to simulate the course of time on film material,complementing like that,its anachronistic (in theory) narrative and making the illusion of age and traditional and handcrafted value more credible.Prometheus Triumphant : A Fugue in the Key of Flesh belongs to that group of movies and although it makes its best effort to emulate the mute cinema from early 20th century,it fails on many levels so the final experience is not too satisfactory.However,I do not think this movie is bad.Prometeus Triumphant... tries to emulate the conventions from mute cinema,but it could not do it on every aspect from the production.Sure,this movie uses banners for telling the story and it underlines its emotions with a melancholic company of cello and violins...but co-directors Mike McKown and Jim Towns should have comprehended that the beauty from expressionist cinema are not those elements,or the cinematography in black and white,or the digital filter for adding scratches to the image.If they had studied with more care movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis,they would have noted that the cinematographic language surpasses the digital limitations.In other words,the direction from Prometheus Triumphant... lacks of visual imagination and narrative style,because it trusted too much that the digital magic from post-production would add the necessary "taste" to become the movie into a "lost classic" of the childhood of cinematographic art.As a clear contrast of Prometheus Triumphant...,I can mention the fascinating movie Dracula : Pages from a Virgin's Diary,directed by the great Guy Maddin.That one is also a mute movie whose story is told with banners and which is endorsed by an excellent soundtrack...but it did not stop there.Maddin reproduced the style of the performances,illumination,scenery and direction from the expressionist cinema.The other visual elements (black-and-white cinematography,granular appearance,flicker,etc.) are just a complement of the technique,but not a replacement.Prometheus Triumphant... is not a bad movie and it did not bore me while I was watching it.But I think it could have gone more far away and that it wasted the opportunity of doing something unique and relevant.However,I think that,although the movie is a failed experiment,it deserves some respect.
mike-1444
I saw this movie during a week run in LA's Laemmle Grande 4-plex. It was amazing! They did a great job of making this movie, shot on video, look like an old Nosferatu-era film! And to make a period piece on a super low budget is a true challenge, but they pulled it off. The buildings they used for the sets definitely fit the era. They all looked very industrial and and dwarfed the actors, which really added to the production value of the film. It's hard to believe that it was shot in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and not in the Czech Republic! The cinematography was visually stunning and the score really put you in the correct time frame. I can't wait to pick up the DVD and watch it again.
