Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Sean Harris, Rafe Spall, Emul Elliott, Benedict Wong, Kate Dickie
Runtime: 124 mins.
2012
Unless you're specifically writing a comparative piece, a critic must strive to engage with a film as a standalone artifact. Drawing parallels and making value judgments based on other films is a slippery slope. It can lead one to commit the cardinal sin of criticism--not approaching the art on its own terms. It is with that in mind that I have been frustrated by my tendency to see the Alien sequels through the prism of their progenitor, Scott's 1979 masterpiece Alien.
On the other hand, it may be that such purity of critical lens is unattainable. What else is a franchise but a demand that you consider a certain work in conjunction with others? There are countless ways to sequelize a property, but one thing they all have in common is a link, however obvious or obscure, to the original.* Although one wants to respect the agency of a sequel, its ability to tell a coherent story is often predicated on some narrative or thematic information that cannot be found in the domain of its own runtime.
*With the rare and deranged exception of something like Troll 2, a "sequel" that has no discernible connection to Troll, including a complete absence of trolls.
What emerges is a difficult balancing act of acknowledging the expectations that come with being a part of a larger franchise without being bewitched by them. Then there is the additional can of worms of whether a sequel retroactively changes the meaning of an original. (It certainly does in our cultural consciousness, though perhaps it need not for certain critical endeavors.)
Believe it or not, all this discourse is germane to discussion of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to the franchise he birthed thirty-three years previous. One of the more interesting aspects of this return is the tortured relationship it has to its own standing within that franchise. On the one hand, it's clear that Scott wanted to distance Prometheus from Alien as much as possible. Where Alien was a lean thriller, Prometheus aspires to be a grand epic exploration of the Big Questions of life--with a heavy garnish of horror imagery. On the other hand, some of the most desperate-to-please moments of Prometheus involve feverish Alien references and mystique-destroying prequelicious explanations. The film even has the gall to end on a bit of fan service utterly transparent in its desire for the audience to feel a base swell of nostalgia.
The start is much more auspicious. The film opens on a sequence of gorgeous swooping landscape shots accompanied by Marc Streitenfeld's reverent score. The camera lands on a very tall, very buff, very white dude. A spaceship abandons him standing isolated on the edge of a rushing waterfall. He consumes the ethereal black liquid contents of a strange container, then proceeds to horrifically disintegrate before our eyes. We follow his organic material at a molecular level through the credits sequence, an upscale version of something you might find in a Spider-Man or X-Men movie. Thus Prometheus begins on a note of melancholic mystery, a wordless sequence with gripping imagery.
The trouble is that there are characters, and they begin to talk. We are introduced to Power Science Couple Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). They are very much in love with each other and the pursuit of universal truth. You see, as they explain to each other and later a whole gaggle of expendable crewmembers, they have found a series of cave paintings that indicates extraterrestrial influence in our species' origin. Not only that, but they all share a specific star map that corresponds to a real life system that just so happens to have a sun and a potentially habitable moon. Clearly the beings who created us left a map so that we could track them down once we had ripened a bit as a species. That Shaw and Holloway cheerfully infer all this from what appears to be stick figures pointing at dots is the first of many head-scratching logical leaps that Prometheus commits.
They go to this moon and discover an underground network of tunnels, engineered and abandoned long ago. The entirety of the plot surrounds the characters driving their dune buggies back and forth between the ship and the tunnels, where they bumble around like a bunch of apes. Another critique to be leveled against the film is that these scientists don't act much like scientists, contaminating their environment unnecessarily and putting themselves at high risk for no particular reason. You might ask when do movie scientists ever act like scientists, and I am sympathetic to that observation, though I would point to Ridley Scott's very own The Martian as a more dignified example. More damning to me, however, is that these people rarely ever act like people.
Filling out the crew are stone cold captain Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and Janek (Idris Elba), who hang around the ship not monitoring things they're supposed to, and wacky duo Fifield (Sean Harris) and Millburn (Rafe Spall), who hang around the catacombs touching things they're not supposed to. Everyone's behavior is more or less inexplicable, except in the meta sense that the plot clearly requires it. Again, I would be willing to give a certain amount of leeway if these characters were at all worth defending. It's too bad that at best, they are one-note cliches in the grand tradition of sci-fi B-movies. It's astounding to me that as committed as Prometheus is to exploring high minded ideas about the meaning of life, so many of the characters seem utterly unimpressed by the wonders they are experiencing. Shame on writers Spaihts and Lindelof for giving none of these characters any traits of substance, and shame on Ridley Scott for packing this film with an incredible cast only to bog down their performances in chilly nonchalance.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the true exception to this rule is David (Michael Fassbender), the film's requisite trickster android. David is introduced in another of the film's best sequences. While the crew cryosleep peacefully, we get a glimpse of David's daily routine of self-care, self-education, and very impressive basketball skills. Fassbender, whose quest to prove himself as one of our greatest living film actors now includes the distinction of being compelling even in Prometheus, comports David with a sense of implacable curiosity. His hyperconscious physical performance marks him as Other, yet his frequent moments of surprising tenderness make him feel more human than the rest of them. That makes it all the more compelling when his curiosity combines with his contempt for human life in a series of actions that endanger the entire crew--not that they needed any help with that. To be sure, David's actions don't make any more practical sense than anybody else's in this movie, but his status as an android obsessed with life and the act of creation gives credence to that unpredictability. He is also given one of the film's only good pieces of dialogue. As Holloway mourns about the fruitlessness of their journey, David pours him a drink.
"Why do you think your people made me?"
"We made you because we could."
"Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?"
The dastardly David has contaminated the liquor with some organic material he found in the catacombs, leading to a chain of nightmare impregnations that includes the very best sequence in the entire film, bar none. Shaw comes to realize that she has a foreign body inside of her, and rather than allow herself to be knocked out and studied by the Weyland Corporation, she fights her way to Vickers' self-surgery machine. Noomi Rapace is given the unenviable task of living up to Ellen Ripley's legendary survival instinct and at least in this scene she does not disappoint. The self-surgery is a masterful piece of body horror filmed with blistering tension by Scott and performed with sweaty urgency by Rapace. The machine's soothing voice and laser precision provide a disturbing counterpart to Shaw's desperation, and the disgusting reveal of what is inside her almost matches the highlights of the Alien movies.
Beyond that scene, the film's predictable descent into horror is effective if not particularly elegant. The film can be more or less split into two halves, a sci-fi film that asks big questions, and a horror film that tears them down. The former ends up being more frustrating, as the film can't muster up any answer beyond sticking its tongue out at the audience maliciously. The Engineers are apparently just bad dudes who love organic weaponry.
Yet Prometheus is far from a lost cause, despite its litany of narrative deformities. Most of what is worthwhile comes from the sense that, although not nearly as laser sharp as he used to be, Scott is still firing on all cylinders. Prometheus is hugely ambitious, and what doesn't work is largely kneecapped from the get-go by the script. The film never stops being visually captivating. The landscapes are a precursor to the awe with which Scott would film Mars a few years later, and the production design is stark and unknowable and entirely compelling. The black organic goop alone is enough to inspire more reflection than perhaps the movie deserves. Prometheus has proven to be extremely polarizing, and this is not at all surprising. Its value to any given viewer will certainly depend on how willing they are to tolerate heaps of dunderheaded nonsense in order to get to the nougaty goodness of inspired visuals, nasty body horror, and a bit of fun but flaky philosophy.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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