Right so some forty years after creating the Alien franchise Ridley Scott returns to the fictional world of his most famous creation. It's a return that's fully successfully sadly.
There is no mistaking that Prometheus is a fantastic looking film with sweeping cinematographer and outstanding work in the design of everything from the eponymous research ship to those telltale flashes of Gieger inspired design in the alien landscape. For instance the way the Prometheus both feels shiny and new but is reminiscent of the corridors and halls of the doomed colony from Aliens.
In fact of the best stuff is only glimpsed briefly such as the murals on the walls of the 'engineer' temple that quickly vanish. The design is undoubtedly the strongest single element of the film but it sadly lacks in other areas.
One of the main problems is that none of the characters are really developed enough to engage with and as such you never really get drawn into the story. Idris Elba's captain of the ship only seems to there to be surely and deliver a plot point to explain he known part of what is happening despite him barely leaving the ship. Charlize Theron's Vickers delivers an early piece of exposition to establish the mission and then actually does nothing pretty much for the rest of the film. Well, she does have one significant act but it's one more inexplicably initiated by another character.
We have also a few other collected crew members who get names but not enough screen time to actually remember these names let alone establish themselves as people rather than disaster fodder.
Arguably the three central characters are Noomi Rapace's Dr Shaw, Logan Marshall-Green's Dr Holloway and Micheal Fassbender's David.
Even here things are rather undeveloped as although we're supposed to understand Holloway's drive to push forward we never really do - he just seems to be a bit of a sulky twat and before we know it he's falling ill and deciding to off himself rather promptly.
Rapace's Shaw fares better and we get a slightly stronger sense of her as she becomes manifestly the central character although as the film goes and she increasingly becomes the 'Ripley' of events it becomes a little harder to believe this anthropologist is capable of seemingly shrugging off invasive surgery to be running around minutes later. Rapace she doesn't have that same ability to convey a layer of inner strength that Sigourney Weaver did, but it's a decent performance given she only really learnt English after hitting the spotlight in the 'Girl With..' series.
Fassbender's David is both the best performance in the film and the most interesting character, albeit one that doesn't really quite make sense. In some excellent early scenes he's establish as being an android along the lines of Ash and Bishop as he monitors ship and sleeping crew alone on the long voyage out. Fassbender gives him a very convincing sense of being almost human but just being that little bit 'off', a sort of uncanny valley sense about him. Things are muddled though as we are told repeatedly he is incapable of feelings yet we often see him smiling to himself and apparently experiencing wonder. The biggest problem though is he clearly has a secret agenda fairly on and no-one on the crew appears either smart enough (desptie him being fairly obvious about it) to notice or call him on it. He's also a little convienet and used to shorthand the story a couple of times. Why have people work out the alien writing when your android can 'learn it' by deconstructing early Earth languages whilst everyone else sleeps?
It's the story that does let things down in the main. It has some interesting ideas but to me the twists were fairly obviously signposted and chunks of it really don't make a lot of sense. So we have a expedition led to this planet by archaeological finds. Eventually we learn the 'enigneers' as they get called don't live on this planet and the facility that is found just seems to somekind of evil goo producing factory. So why signpost it to other civilisations?
Anyway, our crew arrive but not at the planet in Alien, find a mysterious structure and investigate. Inside for some reason there are helpful holograms that show them the way forward. We find a temple like room with a statue of a human face and jars of some black goo. This goo seems to either mutant things like worms into snake like things, people into super zombies or just disintegrate people from the inside. It's never clearly establish why each of these different things happen.
Eventually two of the crew get separated, one has face dissolved in our first encounter with that famous acidic blood whilst the other is grabbed but what is basically a protoface hugger. No-one seems to notice they're missing for a long, long time despite knowing they had been separated from the group.
Meanwhile David has taken some of the goo back to the ship, an 'engineer' head explodes for an unexplained reason and a storm arrives. Vickers' has a joke about sex - almost literally one of the three things she actually does and then David poisons Holloway with the goo. Seemingly just for the hell of it. Meanwhile Shaw discovers we have the same DNA as the 'engineer' aliens.
Holloway then impregnates Shaw, gets sick but in a different way to how we've see the goo affect other things and then basically forces Vickers to flambe him. Just after this the chap who was proto-face hugged turns up as a sort of zombie managing to kill a handful of the faceless crew before being stopped in a sequence that seems to have slipped in from The Thing. Shaw escapes isolation (after being placed there due her contact with Holloway - despite the fact that at this point everyone else has had the same level of contact to the knowledge of the crew) after discovering she is pregnant by knocking out two of the crew who fail to raise the alarm at all it seems. I say this because she then successfully carries out a cesarean section on herself to extract a alien squid from her womb which seemingly is ready to be born despite only being hours old without anyone trying to stop or assist her.
Meanwhile David has found a sleeping 'engineer', learnt how to work the alien ships, the Captain decides it's all a weapons factory despite setting foot off his ship once and old-man Weyland emerges from his not-so secret hiding place. Weyland, David, Shaw and some other people we don't care about then go to talk to the 'engineer'
Said 'engineer' however is not friendly, kills Weyland and the other non-descript characters and pulls David's head off. Shaw however despite having had surgery only hours ago manages to run away. The 'engineer' begins to take off so he can go to Earth and kill everything for some reason but is prevented by Captain Elba flying into his ship as it launches.
Shaw survives the crash but is then attacked by the 'enginner' whom she kills by luring to the still alive alien squid that she birthed which has now become a huge Lovecraftian thing that proceeds to facehug the 'engineer'. She then retrieves David's head and body and takes off with him to find the home planet of the 'engineer' aliens with everyone else already dead (Vickers is amusingly crushed during the crash).
Finally the face hugged 'engineer' has a proto-Xeno burst from him. A proto-Xeno that was implanted by a giant squid, which was birthed from a woman who had sex with a goo infected man. So either the Xeno's are a random development or these 'engineers' have a really strange way of going about things.
So what was Weyland trying to find? What were the 'engineer' aliens actually doing? Why did they all die bar one? Why build this temple? What is the black goo and what exactly is it supposed to do? Why did that guy become a zombie? Why were the 'engineers' trying to kill humanity after seemingly having created it? Why did the 'engineer' ship seen in Alien apparently decide to store a cargo of Xeno eggs on it's bridge?
Basically none of the main questions that stem from Alien are answered, all that is achieved is to take away some of the sense of wonder from that ship. Whilst the 'stand alone' story that Ridley has championed is underwhelming because you don't care about any of the characters and it doesn't really make any sense (you can feel the pen of Damon 'Lost' Lindelof trying too hard to throw in some curveballs)
The film also film also feels quite disjointed with characters seemingly jumping to certain conclusions/decisions very quickly - it definitely feels like a lot has been left on the cutting room floor. Fully expect a longer cut to emerge at some point that hopefully will fill in some of the gaps.
It looked great but has fallen into the trap I fear of trying to explain something that was so much more interesting as some unknown, imagined story. They've tried to remove the mystery whilst keeping a sense of mystery and left themselves with a inconclusive mess that in the end all feels a bit hollow.
Looked good though.
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