*Warning: This review contains spoilers to the movie*
Prometheus has landed and it’s landed with a thud. Ridley Scott’s return to sci-fi was something I was doing celebratory back-flips over (not really, I’d hurt myself if I’d have actually tried a back-flip) and this was a movie I have been looking forward to for quite sometime. As far as I’m concerned this movie is a steaming pile of Bantha fodder.
I’m not going to give a detailed synopsis of the movie due to the fact that anyone who has seen the trailers has pretty much seen the movie already. Basically the store breaks down as such, scientists (and I use that term very loosely) discover “an invitation” from the stars and go looking for the answer to the creation of man. They land on a mysterious planet and bad things happen, the end. For a detailed synopsis of the movie as well as different opinion on it check out Matt Landsman’s review.
People have been referring to this as a “thinking man’s movie” and that’s a statement I completely disagree with. Trust me, I’ve thought about this movie a lot over the last few days and despite the basic premise the rest of the movie is not thought out at all. The basic premise of ‘man looking for his maker’ is a cool idea but the presentation fails in almost every way possible.
Screen-writers Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof ask two big questions in the movie, “who created us” and “why do our creators hate us.” Yet they only answer the first question with a very simple “because they could.” Dammit Lindelof, that’s about as in-depth and thought-provoking of an answer as the one you gave for “what is the island.” There is absolutely zero character development in this movie and it says something about a movie when the most interesting and thought out character is an emotionless android.
Michael Fastbender’s David, who is the aforementioned android, easily steals this movie and aside from the visuals, is the best part of it. But what about the other characters? Well, the Prometheus is said to have a crew of seventeen and yet out of those we only (sorta) get to know five of them, not that we really get to know any of these people. These are supposed to be scientists and yet none of them, save for Noomi Rapace’s character Elizabeth Shaw, seems to care about the most important discovery in human history. Hell, one of the characters (I’m not even sure if he even has a name) is said to be a geologist and it seems like he could give two shits about the geology of this mysterious planet he’s on. If this is a “thinking man’s movie” shouldn’t I want to know what the characters think about the most important discovery in the history of man and shouldn’t I care about them in some way? Yet, when people start dying horrifically I could not care less nor could I probably tell you who they even were. They might as well have been red shirts from Star Trek.
The rest of the cast is made up of the likes of Charlize Theron, who plays Meredith Vickers, representative for the Weyland Corp and an uptight bitch. That’s pretty much the extent of her role here. Logan Marshall-Green plays Shaw’s boyfriend/fellow scientist Charlie Holloway, we only know they are an item because they have sex about half-way through the movie (see, told you there’d be spoilers). His character doesn’t do much other than pout and get drunk when they get to the planet and then bang Shaw, I don’t think he actually performs any science in the entire movie (aside from the science of sex that is). Then there’s Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland, who is caked in prosthetics and bad make up. Why they cast him in this I’m not really sure, they could have just cast an actual old man and we would have ended up with the same results minus the bad make up. These are all cliched characters that we’ve seen plenty of times in other movies.
Director Ridley Scott knows how to make a beautiful looking movie and that goes for this one as well, despite it merely being window dressing this time around. Sure, the movie has some cool action sequences as well as some gruesome parts, like a scene in which Shaw must perform surgery on herself. That scene is the closest this movie gets to the gruesome horror of original Alien. Scott previously stated that this movie isn’t so much a prequel as it is more of a movie that contains the DNA of the original, which is a very true statement in every way. Do we see xenomorphs in Prometheus? Well sorta. We do get to see an early form of the xenomorphs and that is pretty cool. Truth be told, I’m okay with this not being a direct prequel to Alien- if it had been I would have been even more disgusted with the finished results than I currently am.
If Ridley Scott and company wanted to truly make this a “thinking man’s movie” then they should have created a better movie with characters that actually think in the first place. Will this movie get a sequel? Probably, but will it be any good? Probably not. If you want to see a movie filled with cardboard characters and lack of a plot but that looks amazing then this is the movie for you. If you want to see a good movie, go re-watch Alien and Aliens.
Score: 2/5