Review by Stephanie Scaife
Mild spoilers ahead.
I was fairly reluctant to get on board with Prometheus when I first read that Ridley Scott was returning to the world of Alien, because – let’s face it – the franchise had long run out of steam and Scott hasn’t made a decent film since, well, Blade Runner, and that was 30 years ago (I guess Thelma & Louise and Gladiator were okay, but still…) Also, what would it be about? A prequel? A sequel? Then news of the casting came to light, and the trailers and viral marketing campaign were all very appealing, meaning that very quickly I became very excited. Alien after all, is in my top ten of all time and for a moment there was a glimmer of hope that Scott could actually be on to something amazing. However, when I finally sat down to watch Prometheus it wasn’t what I had been expecting at all. It wasn’t necessarily bad per se, but it really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
Noomi Rapace stars as Elizabeth Shaw, an archaeologist with inexplicable religious faith who, along with her boyfriend Holloway (Logan Marshall-Smith), discovers a series of ancient cave paintings depicting the same constellation of stars. They interpret this as being a key to discovering the origins of life on earth, which if the opening scene is anything to go by started when some muscley bald dude drank some wriggling black goop and fell off a cliff into some water… Darwin who, eh? This is clearly much more feasible to Shaw and indeed the corporation willing to spend a trillion dollars on a space programme to find the constellation, some two years away from earth.
The crew of Prometheus slumber whilst android David (Michael Fassbender) maintains the ship. In what is perhaps the best scene of the film we see David as he monitors the crew, learns foreign languages, dyes his hair (not sure why an android would need to do this…) and watches his favourite film, Lawrence of Arabia whilst mimicking and basing his mannerisms on Peter O’Toole. Fassbender and his portrayal of David is perhaps solely responsible for about 90% of what is good about Prometheus. With echoes of Scott’s Blade Runner, David is very much like a replicant and he provides a reminder to the crew and the audience that we are human but he is not, and would it be possible for an android to be a sentient being with a soul and free will. David also provides increasing amounts of comic relief in an otherwise dour film; he is somewhat like a child in that his observations are often truthful but his delivery of them is not always tactful or welcome. In one pivotal scene David asks Holloway why humans had created androids such as himself, to which Holloway replies, “we made you because we could.” David responds with “imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator.” Considering their entire mission hinges on the pursuit to find the origins of human life, to both Holloway and Shaw there has to be a more valid answer than that. But what David is saying is essentially the crux of the plot: where did we come from and why? But of course the truth of the matter is never going to be one that agrees with having faith in a creator or divine being; it will only ever serve to be a disappointment.
Part of the problem with the film is that there never really is any insight into why these so-called engineers may have created human life on earth or even if it was entirely intentional. Shaw’s unwavering faith is also irksome, especially as she’s supposed to be a credible scientist. Or even worse, was her quest to find the root of human existence motivated by her own inability to conceive and create life? You know, because all women desperately want to spawn and become slightly hysterical when they can’t.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t good things about Prometheus; it is a highly watchable but flawed spectacle. Visually it’s fantastic, and with a lesser cast the clunky dialogue would have completely overwhelmed the entire picture but they all do their best, even those there to provide little more than a body count. There are also a few great squishy slimy moments that did genuinely make my skin crawl, even if it isn’t as outright scary as Alien. Ultimately the success of Alien was that it was claustrophobic and it very much centred on the here and now, whereas Prometheus gets bogged down by asking too many big questions that ultimately never really get answered due to the lack of narrative focus and a muddled script.
Perhaps without such high expectations and the shadow of one of the best sci-fi horror films ever made looming over it Prometheus would have been a more enjoyable experience for me, but after a first viewing I was left disappointed. Even for a piece of genre filmmaking where it is often easy to let things go unexplained there were just too many monstrously gigantic plot holes and inexplicable character motivations to satisfy me. Undoubtedly it’s still one of the best big budget studio pictures of the summer, it’s just not what I was expecting or particularly wanted. Who knows, maybe it will improve over time with multiple viewings; after all, Blade Runner didn’t do so well commercially and critically upon release, and we all love that now…
Prometheus is currently on general release in the UK and arrives in US cinemas on 8 June.