Nordling here.
(Yes, I'm aware many of you are waiting for the next installment of PERFECT ORGANISM, where I dive into ALIEN3. I sincerely meant to have this series all wrapped up in a bow before PROMETHEUS's release but life got in the way. But I'm going to finish it come hell or high water, so expect to see my write-up very soon.)
If you’re expecting a Consumer Reports type of review for PROMETHEUS listing all the pros and cons of the movie like I’m trying to rate stereo equipment - this won’t be that review. I will talk about what works and what doesn’t, but I’ve got too much invested in this movie. I know very few people anticipated PROMETHEUS as much as I did. ALIEN, in the parlance of Ash, is a “perfect organism.” It’s a B-Movie dressed up to the nines and there’s not a damn thing wrong with it. It is one of my all-time favorite movies.
PROMETHEUS is not ALIEN. Yes, it’s set in the same universe. Yes, there are themes and connective tissue between the two, and comparisons are inevitable. If you want a definitive, under-oath-on-the-stand statement if PROMETHEUS is a prequel, than yeah, it’s unabashedly a prequel. But you’d probably do better watching LEVIATHAN than ALIEN if all you’re doing is looking for similarities.
But here’s where it gets sticky – Ridley Scott wants to talk about Big Ideas (even the title font of PROMETHEUS is reminiscent of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), and for two-thirds of the movie, he does it very, very well. Then the questions arise, and the ideas get shoved aside for CGI monsters and ALIEN tie-ins. Much of the central conceit of the movie seems to fall apart with too little examination. That’s not to say that what Scott, Jon Spaihts, or Damon Lindelof are doing has no value, but PROMETHEUS asks the audience to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to exactly who the Space Jockeys (or Engineers, as they are referred to in the film) are. For some people, that request will prove to be incredibly frustrating.
I enjoyed playing with the movie in my mind, and I think I’ve come to some conclusions about what I saw. Unfortunately, I also don’t think Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof connect the dots properly in too many places. Take a film like 2001, which asks Big Questions about humanity, evolution, and our place in the universe. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke knew where they wanted to go, knew the themes that they wanted to explore, and 2001 in the end is completely sure-footed and knows exactly what it wants to say. PROMETHEUS does not have that kind of surety. The grand goals and plots of the Engineers don’t make sense in the context of the movie, and again, I had to do much of the heavy lifting before I came to a conclusion about what they are. For some people, the plots and goals won’t be ambiguous at all – I admit a couple of spots did a fly-by on me and I didn’t pick up on them until later.
After reading Ridley Scott’s interviews about ALIEN over the years and his ideas for the prequel, it became very clear to me about what the Engineers are. Take the idea that the Engineers have been tampering with human history, and the archeological discoveries of the pictograms with the same star field in them. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is certain that it means that these aliens want humanity to leave Earth and find them. For Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), they mean that somewhere out there are the answers. Shaw is a woman of faith, and Holloway is a man of science, and together they are able to convince Weyland Industries to spend a trillion dollars on a state-of-the-art ship to take them to that mysterious area of space to get the answers they seek. The problem is that in the movie that Ridley Scott has made, those answers don't make sense in their seemingly logical conclusion.
I’m doing my best not to spoil, but the idea behind the Engineers, as presented, sounds impractical and ludicrous, and here’s where the script shows the cracks. I’ll address this in a spoiler review later on, because I do think there is a purpose to their machinations, but the movie fails to demonstrate it to the audience in a satisfactory way, instead giving us monsters that, while impressive looking and scary, don’t service the ideas that the movie has in the first two-thirds.
Visually, PROMETHEUS is stunning, and I’ll see it again for those visuals alone. The 3D is top-notch, and the use of real sets and props pays off here in ways that green screen can never do, at least not at this stage. I was worried that the movie would skew too dark for the 3D to be effective, but I was wrong – there are times that I forgot about the 3D entirely and just absorbed what I was seeing with little complaint. H. R. Giger’s beautiful, insane imagery, coupled with Arthur Max’s practical science fiction design of the ship Prometheus, pays off visually in much the same way that the dichotomy of Giger and Rob Cobb’s work does in the original ALIEN. The creature design is inspired – in more ways than one – and there are visceral moments in PROMETHEUS that rival the chest-bursting scene in ALIEN but with a gleefully evil twist. We’ve seen this all before, of course, but Scott knows how to get under your skin and make those moments work.
Sadly, all the great character work of ALIEN is gone, with one exception. PROMETHEUS has too many characters, and while it is telling a bigger story, it feels all surface with little subtext. Rapace’s Shaw is the closest thing we get to Ripley here – unable to bear children, she is devout to her faith and hopes to find God out there in the vastness of space, but Rapace simply doesn’t have the chops of Sigourney Weaver. The character is not as rich or multi-faceted. Charlize Theron as Weyland Industries corporate representative Meredith Vickers actually does things that make sense in the movie – things that any rational person would do, but she’s saddled with an unfortunate plot twist in the third act that feels shoehorned in, which seems to make her previous actions meaningless. Idris Elba is fine but the third act betrays the character completely and puts words in his mouth that he frankly has no business saying… I’ll leave it at that.
The one across-the-board great performance of the film is Michael Fassbender’s android, David. Fassbender plays the android with a curiosity bereft of any human emotion. David can do things that the other crewmembers would never do in a million years, because to him, it’s all simply a problem to be examined. For some people this may put David in an antagonistic light, but I found the character terrifically ambiguous and his motivations aren’t as simple as good vs. evil. David is not human, and attaching human motivations to him is futile, and Fassbender plays him with a humor and a charm that is sorely missing from the other performances. David emulates Peter O’Toole and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but Fassbender puts enough mystery into David that makes it impossible to take your eyes off him when he’s onscreen.
Is PROMETHEUS a science fiction film with Big Questions, a monster movie, or an ALIEN prequel? The problem is that it tries to be all three at once, when only the first one would have sufficed. Without spoiling, the ALIEN tie-in stuff isn’t perfunctory, but that’s part of the problem. Had PROMETHEUS been unfettered from all the expectations of an ALIEN prequel, and not relied so much on the imagery of that great movie, it might have been allowed to develop its own, unique vision. All the waffling over the past few months about whether or not PROMETHEUS was a prequel seems silly in retrospect - it is. Unfortunately, because of its ties to ALIEN, the really great ideas of PROMETHEUS suffer. Does that keep me from recommending the movie? Hell no. I’m seeing it again, partly because the visuals are so great and partly to see if my idea of what the Engineers are holds up. It’s a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed thinking about for days after I saw it, and I’ll buy the Blu-Ray when it comes out. There are moments in PROMETHEUS that really open up the potential of science fiction cinema, so it’s all the more disappointing when Ridley Scott and the writers betray those moments just to be needlessly ambiguous, to satisfy the studio’s need for a franchise, and to keep the ALIEN fanbase (of which I am certainly a member) happy.
