PROMETHEUS

On the top of a waterfall there is a man. Well, not quite a man. He’s twelve feet tall, with skin like marble and muscular beyond belief. Above him, hovering in fog, is an ill defined disk like shape. The man-thing gives it an offering, and then as if the disk where retaliating against him, the man-thing disintegrates. Watching the scene, one gets the feeling that this offering and rejection is a common ritual. That the man-thing knew full well what was going to happen.  Not unreasonable considering the titular myth. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know that he was about to be chosen for death. Why does God sometimes choose to reject his creatures? Why does a father strike a son, and why does the son still love him after?

After that opening scene, the film jumps forward an unknown number of millennium to the year 2089 where two archeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered a series of cave paintings from all over the world that seem to suggest the possibility that life on Earth really began out there. They head out on an expedition to a small, incredibly distant moon the paintings point too. On it they they find a series of roads leading to a kind of dome. Inside the dome they find a room full with a colossal statue of a human head surrounded by hundreds of metal “vases.” As must happen in films like this, one of the vases is opened, witch contributes to a series of terrifying occurrences I dare not reveal.

Ridley Scott's Prometheus functions as a sort-of prequel to his first sci-fi film Alien, which spawned three sequels and by the time the franchise was spun off into the Alien vs. Predator films, the thing was as run into the ground as a franchise can get. It seems that part of Scott's agenda is to rescue the franchise he started. He does a respectable job of it too, with so many prequels (Terminator: Salvation, the most recent version of The Thing) that try ever so hard to connect the dots, it’s great to see that Prometheus mostly tries to be, not just it’s own film, but a deeper and more relevant film than any of it’s predecessors. Not that it doesn’t resemble them at all, it has a lot of the same structure as Alien, and some similar story beats play out, themes are repeated, and some of the repetitions are more welcome than others. For instance, you’ll never believe that the giant corporation has an agenda–yet a fifth time!

But where the film succeeds is in what it’s trying to do different. It’s interesting that the crew member most like the original films protagonist is Vickers (Charlize Theron), who’s basically one of the film’s villain’s. She's a company overseer for Wayland Corporation, the company that funded the expedition. She’s cold and by the book like Ripley and despite her puppet master role, she’s ultimately more frightened of what they might find than anyone else. The real story on the acting front is Michael Fassbender as David the android. There have always been robots in the Alien franchise, but David may go down as the most memorable. He’s played initially as a sort of Pinocchio (in one scene, he bleaches his hair to look more like his hero T.E. Lawrence), but as the film goes on his innocence seems more and more plastered on. Apart from the interesting character arc, Fassbender creates a character whose every movement is fascinating. Even watching him play basketball is somewhat hypnotic. Idris Elba is a lot of fun as the ship’s captain and even though the crew is a little too big to develop everyone well (I counted 10 crew members), even the monster food roles are well cast. They’re all good at what they're doing, but they don’t all need to be there. The film gets away with this a little because the ideas being wrestled with are so big.
 
As you can guess from the opening sequence, there is a lot of God stuff in this film. Pretty much every character has some sort of opinion or relationship that comments on the Creator-Creation relationship that the film is exploring. Shaw wears a cross, despite the fact that her discoveries would probably invalidate the vast majority of religions, but she still chooses to believe. Someone comments that the difference between God creating man and man creating an android like David is that man created David “just because he could.” And near the end, one character is reviled to have some father issues that seem ever so relevant to the theme of a passive God turning malevolent. Scott’s vision of spirituality is as complex and terrifying as any the monsters in the film.

As for the monsters, it should be noted that the creature from the original franchise doesn't show up here (for the best, too much baggage I think), what replaces them is perhaps not as immediately iconic, but interesting. Anyone who loved the franchise for its sexually charged, body horror imagery will not be disappointed by the snake monsters, the final shot, or the most disturbing surgery I’ve ever seen on film. It’s not as scary as the original Alien, but that’s a very high bar. The film gets close at times, but the film’s tension is undermined by some of those minor characters.

The film has a lot going on, I know that not all of it works, but it’s complex enough that I’m going to have to watch it a few times before I’m sure of what does and what doesn’t. The fact that it’s a film that I want to see several times says a lot in this age of disposable blockbusters. Scott is trying to make his version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is totally not getting there, but the results are fascinating to watch and will serve as some great nightmare fuel.

Grade: B+