Movie Review: Prometheus

[This review contains some pretty huge SPOILERS for the entire movie. Sorry.]

 Having waited, like a lot nerds, months for Ridley Scott’s ultra-hyped new sci-fi effort, “Prometheus”, I finally lugged my enormous geek-boner into the cinema today and sat through… something.

 Basically, my reaction is this: Prometheus is nearly a really good movie.

 “Alien”, Scott’s earlier, exalted effort, is a great movie. Prometheus is nearly a great movie.

 Sadly, Richard Thompson nearly won the 100m at the Beijing Olympics. But he didn’t. Usain Bolt did. And that’s pretty much the difference, right there.

 Things start off brilliantly. Having discovered strikingly similar pictograms all over the ruins of the ancient world, Noomi Rapace’s scientist, Dr. Shaw, and her boyfriend, who might be that guy from Grey’s Anatomy, deduce that aliens from a distant galaxy have visited the earth and left a map to their location.

 Fast forward two years, and the crew of the Prometheus (formerly the U.S.S. Tempting Fate of the Prophetic Ship Name battalion, or “The Fighting Redshirts”) has transported seventeen crew, including Shaw and her boyfriend, to the arse end of space to see what they find. Included are Charlize Theron’s bitchy corporate ballbreaker, and Michael Fassbender’s creepy android.

 Once on the planet, they find nothing, take some nice pictures and go home.

 Nah, obviously, they find a mysterious pyramid and go off to investigate, finding a few familiar scenes from the previous (or, chronologically, later) Alien films.

 The first half of the movie is pretty damn great. The ideas are deep and interesting, the special effects are suitably impressive, and the alien monument they discover, combined with decent performances all round, leads to a building sense of both wonder and dread. We want to know where this is all going, but we fear to look. We know something terrible awaits, but we’re intrigued to see what it is.

 Throughout this portion of the film, we see some pleasing nods to the universe we’re in; the Prometheus shares some background architecture with Alien’s ship, the Nostromo, and there’s a teasing new take on the “motion sensor picking something up” moment.

 Scott’s direction, too, is suitably excellent. He even manages to get some handheld camera work to function as a useful plot tool. Given that Scott’s own “Gladiator” was responsible for the maddening proliferation of “shaky cam” a few years ago, it’s nice to see him redeem himself with some handheld work that is at once believably wobbly, but also discernable and engaging.

 Inside the pyramid, we find the ancient “engineers” who could well have been responsible for all life on earth. We see them in the images of an ancient recording inside the ship. And they’re running. Because as soon as we see them in person, we realise: Something else on the ship killed them a long time ago.

 Then, as soon as the monsters are out of the bag, everything goes to shit.

 As soon as this becomes more of a straight up horror film, the characters devolve into straight up horror archetypes. Michael Fassbender has been lauded for his performance as the Artificial Person on board, but, although his acting is fine, the writing does him no favours. Whereas Lance Henriksen’s Bishop (“Aliens”) was suspicious and subtle, and Ian Holm’s Ash (“Alien”) was a shock revelation, Fassbender’s David* is straight away introduced as a robot, acts untrustworthy, and ultimately turns out to be an untrustworthy robot.

 Similarly, Shaw’s forgettable boyfriend runs down the curtain and joins the choir invisible in suitably short order, and in true slasher movie tradition, even manages to do it just after sex.

 In the middle of all this, we learn that Charles Weyland (Guy Pearce) the nonagenarian corporate patriarch who sponsored the whole expedition, is alive and on board the ship, which is supposed to be a major plot twist. Instead, it just feels like an extra trunk full of plot baggage.

 I like Pearce, as an actor, but I have to say that he sucked out loud all over Prometheus. He doesn’t convince for a single second as a very elderly man; he doesn’t move old, he doesn’t sound old, and he just looks like Guy Pearce under a shitload of prosthetics. His eyes are too alert, his facial reactions too sharp. I can’t help but wonder how many genuinely old actors could have done a better job. Weyland claims to be dying, and attempting to seek out his celestial makers in a last ditch attempt at prolonging his life, but as someone who followed the recent viral campaign, I find this odd.

 For those not in the know, Pearce appeared, un-made-up, in a series of prequel videos on facebook in which his character, at the time aged 40, gave a TED talk about how he cured cancer and did a lot of other impressive stuff.

 That’s all well and good, but what exactly is Weyland supposed to be dying of, then? He gives himself “a few days”, but that seems an oddly specific deadline to give oneself if the only terminal ailment left is time. And anyway, if Ridley Scott wanted to tell a story about angry ubermenschs seeking out their makers because they want more life, fucker, why doesn’t he just adapt Philip K. Dick’s short story “Do Androids Dr-…”

 …Oh yeah.

 Ultimately, the Gods that Dr. Shaw and co. have come in search of prove to be less than friendly, and the creatures attacking the crew are a bi-product of the Gods’ own tinkering.

 The Gods themselves, incidentally, are giant humans. That basically makes this movie into “Contact” with a body count.

 In the end, the alien mound is revealed to be a buried starship, which attempts to take off for Earth. The crew (Iris Elba’s Captain Black Guy and Mr. Sulu) crash the Prometheus into the ship to prevent it from taking off, and it lands on Charlize Theron, who doesn’t get out of the way, proving that she might, in fact, be Mr. F.

 It’s all a bit of a mess, and not in the “aliens shredding people” way. More in the “too many plotlines, not enough character” way. Some of the characters are so under-done that I called one of them Mr. Sulu up there because nobody will remember his actual name, ever.

 So who’s to blame? The film, as I say, has some brilliant themes. When Shaw’s boyfriend is unwittingly infected with an alien parasite and the two have sex, it creates a genuine, skin crawling fear of normal sexual relations that is far more subtle – and more disturbing – than Sigourney Weaver being chased by a cock-headed lizard. Fassbender’s David suffers some interesting, low-key racism (tech-ism?) in the form of being constantly needled by other characters and referred to as “Boy.” The idea that there is something out there in the universe that spawned us is alluring, and the idea that something else in turn may have killed it is genuinely scary.

 But then there’s the silly stuff. The godlike entities that created us were just other, more advanced humans, which, as one character points out, ignores Darwinism completely. When this happens, Shaw just goes to the default “I believe what I choose” argument, which means this movie is, weirdly, both “Contact” with a body count and also a great apologist treaty for Creationism. Which is bad.

 Some of he dialogue clunks audibly, as well. At the end of the movie, Shaw is carrying the robot David’s still-living head in a bag (seemingly having forgotten that he murdered her boyfriend the day before - an issue which goes totally unaddressed), and he tells her that he doesn’t understand why she is doing something. She responds, in a deep, philosophical tone “I guess that’s because I’m a human being and you’re a robot.”

 That line actually happens.

 On purpose.

 In this movie.

 Honestly, it would have felt silly in an episode of “Mac ‘n’ C.H.E.E.S.E.”, let alone a supposedly high-brow release.

 Also, the movie’s biggest selling point is it’s biggest weakness. The attempts to shoe-horn the original alien into the movie in subtle ways actually weigh things down. The whole film would have been better off trying to stand on it’s own two feet, instead of adding in plot points that feel contrived and un-necessary. The genuine article, the nightmare vision that launched the franchise, only crops up once in a subliminal, pareidolic image on a wall, and then again as a lame antecedent of itself in the final frames.

 Like “Wolverine: Origins” and the Star Wars prequels, the writers of Prometheus seem to be unaware of a crucial part of mythology: Archetypes don’t need backstory.

 No matter how fascinating or well written your ideas for how an iconic character really developed, by showing it to other people you automatically diminish that character in their imagination. We don’t NEED to see how the Alien evolved because it was such a perfect, terrifying, fully-formed entity on our first encounter with it that the rest could be left as speculation. Everyone is frightened of the Alien because of different, subconscious reasons. The thing that makes it terrifying is it’s blankness; there is no story, no explanation. It is a creature which is different, and other, and foreign, and unrelateable. If only there were a word that meant all those things.

 Leaving something mysterious often makes it work better; it’s a lesson more movies could do with learning.

 So maybe we should be blaming Damon Lindelof. The co-creator of “Lost,” a sci-fi TV series that started out great and got ridiculous half way through, has come up with a sci-fi movie that starts out great and gets, well, lost, half way through. Maybe Lindelof is a genius and keeps getting partnered with duds. Maybe he wrote the first halves of “Lost” and Prometheus and then left his co-writers to finish up, only to weep bitterly at the results.

 Maybe Damon Lindelof is brilliant, but only half the time. His brain melts when it gets dark, like a sort of were-moron.

 Maybe he drinks.

 Maybe he’s actually doing his best, but his work is constantly sabotaged by an evil android in black who is building a machine with the help of Space Jockeys to channel the water and the light.

 Or maybe Prometheus, so fittingly given it’s name, just had ideas that were too far above it’s station.

 A great movie is in here somewhere, but it’s trapped by the rest of itself.

                                                                                                                               3/5.

*Welcome to the only place on the internet to mention Michael Fassbender’s David, Lance Henrikson’s Bishop, and STILL not be talking about penises.