Prometheus Review

“It must feel like your God abandoned you”

I’m that guy who went to see Prometheus at the Imax in 2012 and really enjoyed it like a prick and guess what, I still do. This movie is a pretty good time despite Fox getting the Xenomorphs completely written out of the original script so that we end up with a load of new alien things that are a lot like the old alien things but are completely unrelated to the old alien things. Ladies and gentlemen, Prometheus has landed.

We follow the ship Prometheus many years before the events of Alien, to a planet that our main character Elisabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) believes the creators of man have invited her to. She goes with a crew consisting of people who don’t know each other at all for some reason, Weyland employees, one being a robot and her partner. Landing on the planet know as LV-223 they come across an alien ship and the people they believe brought them into existence. There’s clearly a darker thing at play here and a lot of Xenomorph related things not actually related to Xenomorphs. The story is pretty interesting and it’s great to see how all the twists are set up but the script rewrites do damage this movie. The tagline to Prometheus was ‘Questions will be answered’ but it only raised further questions and it introduces so many things that will probably be considered meaningless in the next movie.

We have a lot of fine characters in this movie, David 8 is fantastically played by Michael Fassbender but once again because of rewrites his motivation is unclear. Elisabeth Shaw is nice and likable but I can’t really tell you why I like her so much. Her partner is a total asshole who doesn’t care about the discovered of the meaning of the human race. He’s even more of an asshole in a certain deleted scene and for some reason they cut the scene where he gets double smacked by Shaw, maybe that’s why I like her. Charlize Theron’s character: Vickers is a mean bitch but she plays that well but then she gets all weird on us. Idris Elba shows up just to be all laidback and cool and the others are either pointless or cannon fodder. It’s not a loss on characters but I don’t know if I’d call it a win. A big issue I have is with Weyland and it’s not a written character issue, it’s an actor issue. Why the fuck is it Guy Pearce in makeup and not just an old guy? Seems stupid.

The movie is gorgeous and well directed. It’s one of the prettiest movies to come out for a very long time, the colours are nice and the sets are really interesting. Prometheus looks nearly as wondrous as Alien did. The effects are top notch and I love the designs of everything. The issue being, if Prometheus is set before Alien then why does the tech seem so much better? It’s really, really gorgeous though. This isn’t the most horrific movie in the Alien franchise but hell if there aren’t any crazy effective or scary scenes, nothing beating the surgery scene though. The movie is brutal and breath taking.

I love the designs of the creatures. The engineers look pretty damn cool and they are intimidating. They are very ruthless in the final cut but they show more interest and curiosity it the deleted scenes. I’m really interested in the engineers and can’t wait for more of them, no I didn’t hate the fact that the space jockey suit was a suit but I know they should be a lot bigger and that does dull them down a little. The Deacon is a great creature and is a pretty cool twist on the original Xenomorph, even though it wasn’t one. The trilobite is pretty creepy looking and I don’t really have any issues with the hammerheads, they’re just not face huggers.

Prometheus does suffer from its script but it’s not really Ridley Scott’s fault and despite the issues the movie can still be tense and engaging. It’s visually stunning and has strong acting and I think all of this actually pushes it pretty high on the Alien film scale.

Rating:

****

Better than > Alien³ Worse than > Alien

Main pros

-Gorgeous

-Interesting story

-Design

-Acting

-Creatures (Despite not being Xenos)

-Tense

Main cons

-Contradicting