Okay, saw Prometheus over the weekend. Many words have been written (and will be written) on the quality of the film, and many people have already used more or less the exact words I would have used were I a better writer (Gammasquad and Chuck Wendig especially), so I won’t add to the din and cry here except to say, Prometheus is one big splotchy, badly written steaming pile of a money grab made by a director who should have known better than try to recapture the magic of a perfect film by essentially remaking it.

Yes, remaking it. Prometheus is less a prequel than a reboot, really. And reboots are going to be the death of us all.

Now don’t get me wrong. Some movies demand to be remade (I’m looking at you, Judge Dredd). But Alien is not one of them. (And anyway, it’s already been remade, what, at least two other times as official sequels, 3 and Resurrection, and knocked-off at least a dozen times more–Leviathan et. al.) Neither is Robocop. Nor Total Recall. Nor Fright Night. Nor Psycho. Nor The Day the Earth Stood Still. Nor Carpenter’s The Thing. Nor Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nor, especially, Conan or Evil Dead. Yet we’ve had to suffer through (or will soon have to suffer through) them all and more.

And they’re not just rebooting older films, either. The new Spiderman movie — that’s rebooting a movie that’s barely ten years old. They’ve rebooted the Hulk. And there’s even talk of rebooting Batman, and Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises isn’t even out yet–essentially instantly rebooting a reboot.

Isn’t it enough we’ve had to suffer more than a decade of reality TV? Must we now have to watch the same movie over and over again, with each iteration inevitably worse that the one before it? Yes, because the handful of studios that control the movies are in it to make money, and good or bad, people flock to reboots. It’s all about the moolah, folks.

Which is all well and fine — rah rah capitalism and all that — but if this trend continues, I predict that sooner than later, like this Fall, we will see movies rebooted on a bi-weekly schedule, with the same film re-released every two weeks with upgraded special effects (taking advantage of that 14 days worth of improvement in computing  power), and all the actors simply replaced via digital insertion with new actors chosen by American Idol-like TV competitions.

And what’s so wrong with that, you ask?

Think Chumley as Luke Skywalker, William Hung as Han Solo, and Kim Kardashian as Chewbacca — that’s what is damn well wrong with that.

And that, that’s the Apocalypse, baby.