Prometheus

Ridley Scott’s oeuvre, while far from perfect, contains flashes of brilliance. I don’t mean the brilliance of an auteur—his personal style is too varied and often too commercial to merit that title. I mean brilliance in the sense of delivering Hollywood genre films that transcend the limitations of their forms. Alien at its core is a run-of-the-mill sci-fi horror flick, but its ferociously original delivery made it a classic; similarly, Gladiator relies on many of the tropes of the standard historical epic but the package itself is ingenious and unforgettable. The artistry here is in masterful entertainment.

That said, I’m disappointed to report that Prometheus fails to deliver on Scott’s demonstrated potential. But first with the story: in the year 2093, a team of scientists led by Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) set out aboard the titular ship to pursue a race of beings they believe established human life on Earth. The intentions of their financial backers, though, represented on board by a sinister Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender as the android David, are less clear. Things quickly go south once they land on the mysterious planet and soon the crew is dispatched by sabotage and some pretty nasty aliens.

The movie might have worked if that’s all there was to it. But there’s more. Scott litters the story with oblique references to Christianity and plenty of armchair philosophizing on the nature of humanity, distracting from the slaughter rather than elevating it to any kind of profundity. It’s as though the film couldn’t decide what it wanted to be — a fast-paced alien horror movie or a meditation on Life’s Big Questions. Its attempts to be both render it awkward and cumbersome.

Alien succeeded because it was content to do one thing really, really well: kill off its characters at the hands of that iconic Xenomorph. Prometheus does some of that, and then some other stuff with religion and immortality, and none of it particularly well. Add to these flaws the facts that the characters are forgettable and the plot formulaic and at times utterly bewildering, and all you’ve got is a long, violent, half-realized summer blockbuster.

If you want a genuinely scary sci-fi horror movie, save your time and re-watch Alien (Prometheus is ostensibly an ambiguous, indirect prequel to that film, another mystifying decision by the creative team); if you want science fiction with an authentic philosophical exploration of human nature, watch Blade Runner, another Scott classic. When Scott himself has already covered this ground with such success, you have to wonder why Prometheus was made in the first place.