Prometheus: ****/*****, or 8/10
A tall,
pale humanoid stands at the top of a towering waterfall and nearly
ritualistically drinks a black liquid. Within seconds, his body
starts to physically come apart in a most gruesome way, his cells
literally unraveling and his physique disintegrating as he plunges
himself into the roaring chasm and his DNA mixes with the water. And
with this eerie opening the tone is set for Prometheus, the
eagerly awaited latest science fiction blockbuster from Sir Ridley
Scott, who with this film not only returns to his own roots but also
to the roots of the much acclaimed and beloved Alien saga. And
herein could lie a problem, since explaining some of the mysteries of
his own original Alien film (1979) might hurt the franchise as
a whole in terms of narrative continuity. The trick, however, is not
minding that it hurts, especially given the fact Sir Ridley
delivers a whole set of other intriguing questions in the process,
building upon which may very well reinvigorate this franchise which
until recently seemed milked dry completely.
-Warning!
Here be spoilers!- When scientists and lovebirds Elizabeth
Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) in
the year 2089 make a connection between the depiction of a tall
figure pointing at a set of ever identically proportioned dots on
cave paintings and murals of various ancient cultures around the
globe and a distant star system, the starship Prometheus is
dispatched by the Weyland Corporation to investigate the pair's
claims that humanity was spawned by a race of alien beings dubbed
'Engineers' which experimented with our DNA and left said dots as a
message to come look for them in space. Upon arrival at the barren
world of LV-223, a large artificial structure is found containing
endless corridors, a decapitated alien corpse and a room containing a
giant stone head and hundreds of odd cylinders containing black
liquid. It seems the gods the Prometheus was send to find have
died, but they left something behind...
So far
the plot seems like a mix between Sir Ridley's own original Alien
film, about a spaceship crew send to a deserted planet and
encountering an age old lifeform, and the often maligned spin-off
Alien VS Predator which revolves around the discovery humanity
was kick-started by the extra-terrestrial Predators for their own
shady purposes. Of course, Sir Ridley does not mean to copy either,
his Prometheus just starts on familiar ground in order to have
the plot turn in a whole different direction when we're settled in,
at which point it quickly gets quite darker than we have known his
work to be for the last few decades. Apparently the black liquid
destroys lifeforms it comes into contact with by turning it into a
different kind of lifeform: humanity was tricked into believing they
would find its creators across the gulf of space and only found its
apparent doom instead. And so the crew of the Prometheus must fight
for their lives or face total destruction of all mankind. Problem is,
the crew is divided into various camps all with their own goals, both
selfless and selfish, and all with their own take as to just what the
hell is going on. Given the somewhat erratic and hard to follow plot,
the audience too must figure out for itself just what to make of
things, since Sir Ridley has no intention to just hand us the answers
on a platter, but wants us to work for them instead.
It has
been a while since a decently philosophical blockbuster sci-fi film
tormented the audience by conjuring up sometimes nigh unfathomable
questions regarding Life, the Universe and Everything, so Sir
Ridley's attempt at provoking the audience to use their brains a bit
is certainly worthy of praise, but the plot makes it challenging to
comprehend Prometheus' intentions. It's quite likely studio
involvement is to blame, as is usually the case with Sir Ridley's
films, since studio executives often feel his movies are too
difficult to understand for general audiences which leads to them
being edited to focus less on the deep issues addressed and more on
the action. Already a Director's Cut has been announced that will
hopefully make for a better structured narrative, but so far we can
only speculate as to the Engineers' actual intentions by creating the
black liquid and their apparent loss of interest for humanity's
wellbeing.
So far,
exploring the background of these Engineers, who we originally came
to know as the Space Jockey from the first Alien film, does
sadly demystify the awesome introduction of this species in Sir
Ridley's breakthrough motion picture, by fleshing them out in more
detail than we might have liked, and eventually even reducing them to
more typical movie monsters as we watch the last of their kind alive
go on a murderous rampage to kill the Prometheus' crew, just
to be destroyed by its own lethal creation that was meant to be
humanity's undoing instead, but not before duking it out with this
monstrosity in a 'monster versus monster' battle of standard
Hollywood procedure feeling (again, there's a touch of Alien VS
Predator here, and not for the better). Which of course leads to
the question that is first and foremost on everybody's mind since
they learned this movie is more or less a prequel to Alien:
just what is the Xenomorph's deal?
It's in
regard to this matter that Prometheus remains the most vague,
as if Ridley never really wanted to provide any actual answers.
Suffice to say, Xenomorphs appear to be a a bio-weapon after all,
which they were always hinted to be used for by the evil Company in
the Alien films proper. It definitely seems open for debate
(an offer I accepted when travelling home with a friend while
returning from watching this film; we spend about an hour trying to
wrap our brains around it, with plenty of questions still unanswered,
mind you), but it seems to me the black liquid is this film's
incarnation of the 'Genesis device', creating life on a barren world
by mixing it with water (as the alien “Prometheus” did at the
opening scene of the film), or replacing already existing life with
such life. It's a complicated process for sure, and apparently it
never works the same in this film: while a worm coming into contact
with the black goo is turned into a Xenomorph like snake, a
Prometheus crewmember that gets a full dose in his face simply
turns into a prowling, deformed madman turning on his shipmates and
viciously killing them, before being shot at, burned and run down by
a truck. Of course the main question foremost on the fans' minds will
be, 'is the traditional Xenomorph we've come to love in Prometheus?'
Having given a nicely red coloured spoiler warning some paragraphs
above, I will simply answer this question positively by stating that
it is... sort of... The problem for me is not its appearance (which
differs from what we've seen before), but its creation. In answer to
the question cleverly hidden in this article's title, here's the
recipe Prometheus gives for creating a genuine chestbursting
Alien (don't
try this at home!):
-Slip a
small dose of black liquid into an unsuspecting male victim's drink
-Let the
male victim have sex with a woman, even though she's sterile
-After
successful (unsafe) love making, the woman will find herself pregnant
within ten hours
-Soon
afterwards, the squid like creature gestating inside her tummy will
burst through her chest (unless she manages to remove it by
performing an caesarean section on herself)
-The
squid will rapidly grow in size from about 1 ft. long to a whopping
10 ft. long overnight
-Have
the now full sized creature penetrate an Engineer's mouth with its
ovipositor
-After
several hours, a small Xenomorph will spring from the Engineer's
chest, killing him in the process (as is Xenomorph tradition)
Say what
you will about Prometheus' dubious and overly convoluted
Xenomorph origins, it makes for some very effective and affective
horror, as the above description makes clear. It's safe to say Sir
Ridley hasn't added such overtly gory scenes to any of his films
since the original Alien in 1979. Where he sticked to an
occasional chestbursting scene and limited the gore to suggestive
imagery in that movie, he certainly went all out here, resulting in a
plethora of scenes featuring the likes of genetically decomposing,
arm snapping, involuntary facial penetration, burning and general
dismemberment, not to mention a certain explicit self-operation scene
that had even me gasping for breath while firmly grasping my seat. To
think the studio ever considered this movie susceptible for a PG-13
rating seems completely unrealistic, since Prometheus is
largely the stuff only a hard R rating can do justice. It's good to
know Sir Ridley still knows how to shock his audience convincingly,
like he did with Alien at the start of his career.
Something
else this accomplished director succeeds in perfectly is eliciting
excellent performances from his cast. In fact, Rapace and
Marshall-Green, though they do an adequate job for sure, are
outclassed at every turn by their colleagues, with Michael Fassbender
delivering the film's standout performance in the role of the android
(wouldn't be an Alien film without one, eh?) David, balancing
carefully and compellingly between the psychotic and the angelic,
between a child asking his parents how and why he came to be and a
slave eager to turn on his oppressors at the first opportunity, so
you never know what his agenda is and whose side he's one (if
anybody's). The film successfully draws parallells between his human
masters searching for their supposed creators and David living amidst
his own creators who he obviously finds flawed, in several all too
short scenes of which we can only hope there's more where those came
from on the expected Director's Cut. At the other end of the spectrum
there's Charlize Theron in the role of Meredith Vickers, the mission
leader whose apparent job it is to make sure the Weyland Corporation
gets its money worth out of this excessively expensive space trip,
though her plight is far more personal considering she's the actual
daughter of Mr. Weyland himself, who preferred David's company over
hers, since the android is the closest thing he ever had to a son.
Theron plays the role on fire, shrewdly maneuvering between appearing
as a coldhearted rich bitch simply out to make money and a wronged
daughter aiming for revenge. And then there's the old man himself,
being played by Guy Pearce in heavy make-up. Weyland was a secret
passenger, like Prometheus was on a secret mission to make
contact with the Engineers and ask them for the secret to immortality
so the dying old man could yet be saved.
As the
movie makes perfectly clear, human immortality is actually far from
the Engineers' minds, which results in some solid action scenes, both
those involving the Engineers and Xenomorphs as well as those
without. Also laudable is the quality of the visual effects, which
help remind the audience of the original Alien atmosphere in
both human and extra-terrestrial sense, but also being uniquely
Prometheus material instead of simply rehashing what was done
before. In fact, this sums up the whole of the film, since as a
supposed Alien prequel, it certainly stands on its own merits,
only hinting at the events in that earlier film without giving the
exact explanations as to what happened prior to the events in Alien,
so there's still some mystery to enjoy in that regard. It does at
time contradict the later entries into the franchise though: the role
of the badass Alien Queen which drove much of the later Alien
films' plots now seems under serious scrutiny. But considering Sir
Ridley's involvement with the franchise ended then right after the
first film, it's understandable he favours his own appraoch here
above building on the work of others who took over his job in the
past.
Overall,
Ridley Scott proves he can still distill a good movie out of the
dried up franchise he created, the result being both spectacular and
thought provoking, but frustratingly feeling incomplete, something he
has even gone so far as to admit it simply is. Prometheus
is a thinking man's Sci-Fi
horror rollercoaster, a rare thing to behold in the post-Avatar
days where science fiction feels dumbed down a bit due to the focus
on visual and 3-D effects and the lack of exploring philosophical
themes as the genre used to do more often. Given the large number of
new unsolved questions, a sequel feels both likely and desireable.
Sir Ridley could leave it in the hands of a capable young director
like he did last time (it was James Cameron then, it shouldn't be
now), or he can save everyone three decades and just do it himself,
instead of having to do some damage control in another 33 years time.
Either way, the Pandora's Box opened by Prometheus
certainly won't be closed just yet.
And
watch the trailer here:
