Movie Review: Prometheus

Prometheus, 2012
(which could be subtitled, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the squid," to paraphrase Stanley Kubricks's Dr. Strangelove).



The other day I was watching Ridley Scott's masterpiece landmark fill-in-the-blank classic Alien. Must have been the three of four hundredth time that I sat through that little gem of a movie.  Anyway, I was thinking to myself: that the alien critter is bad news, but where did the space ship with the big guy in the funny elephant helmet come from?  And now, having just seen Scott's newest fare, Prometheus, can I say for certain where the guy who has colloquially been known as the "Space Jockey" came from?



Nope.

At least, not exactly.  Nor can I say, based on the premise of Scott's film, where I came from either.  As a human being, that is.

Ok, you gotta know first off that if you haven't seen Prometheus yet, and if you intend to do so, this review is a bonafide Spoiler Alert.  Because I'm not going to dance around the issues.  No sir.  I'm laying it out there, as I saw it.  And that's the way it is.

Poster for the movie / Source: LithiumCrackingStation.blogspot.com  (say that three times fast, I dare ya)

Let's get things out of the way, right off the bat, shall we?  This is a prequel to Alien.  Not a perfectly sequential one, to be sure.  And yes, it is more of an "in spirit" thing.  That being said, it is definitely not a disassociated scenario from 1979's Alien, by any means.  And yes, the Alien monster makes an appearance.  He/she/it doesn't look quite like the spiny, bony, sinewy thing we Alien fans have come to recognize, but the idea is still there.  The monster looks a bit more like a sea-creature, rather than the serpent/bug that later movies depict.  And you don't get to see our big toothy-grinned friend until the final frames of the movie are on the screen.  What about the rest of the movie?

Well, its good stuff.  The short version (if I can manage it, which you know I probably can't): a scientific team discovers enough evidence to deduce that ancient man knew of a star system way out in space where, our sci-guys hypothesize, the folks who created us came from.  So they, being resident on the earth in the year 2080-something, jump on a spaceship and fly out there to check it out.  Intrigue and scary stuff ensues after they arrive.

I should have known right away that this movie was not going to sew up the un-answered questions that Alien presents, such as why the alien eggs in that film are kept under a layer of blue, reactive mist, or how that particular ship got to that particular planet, or why Sigourney Weaver had such a thing for her stupid cat in the 1979 film.  None of these questions get resolved, since the planet these intrepid science folks visit in Prometheus is not the same as the one in that other movie.

But we do have an android.  A really cool one.  That's Michael Fassbender in the role of "David," and he does quite a good job.  At one point you're sure he's another "Ash," the psychotic android from Alien.  Then later on, he's taking his cues from Lance Henriksen's "Bishop" model android from Aliens.  In the end, our boy David both does his good deed in helping our heroine, the hard luck case Dr. Shaw (played by Noomi - I can't quite place her accent but it's cool - Rapace ), and also is responsible for creating the monster that the aforementioned Ms. Weaver would be fighting through four sequels; each film unfortunately doing worse than the last.  Well, it can be argued that Aliens did better, but really Aliens is Alien turned sideways.  Going from a straight-up sci-fi horror flick to an action movie with undertones of the Vietnam war.  Alien3, though I think it has more to offer than most would agree, is not  a truly worthy sequel, and the less said about Alien Resurrection, the better.  Ok, I'm getting off on my tangent.  Sorry.

See, there is proof that it's an Alien prequel.  There's our guy/thing in statue form up on the wall.  I half expected it to come alive, jump down and start dragging people away, but thankfully that isn't Ridley's style. / Source: ScreenInvasion.com

Back to Prometheus.  Our bunch of scientists and assorted spaceship crew people, including the always strikingly beautiful but in this performance extremely cold Charlize Theron, arrive at the distant planet and begin to investigate some weathered pyramid-like structures on the surface.  They begin to piece together that the big elephant-faced guys, known as the "Engineers" to our Dr. Shaw, were driven off the planet by something... bad.  The scientists find a room with a great big wanna-be Moai head and a bunch of little canisters that leak black gunk.  Somehow, a couple of little worms get into the gunk (I didn't quite gather where these worms came from, but that is beside the point), and they grow big and really hateful.  Two of our scientists get left behind in the pyramid during a really bad storm, and they both fall victim to the over-grown anaconda's-wish-they-were-that-scary worms.

Meanwhile, David mixes a little bit of the organic black gunk into Dr. Shaw's scientist boyfriend's booze.  Said boyfriend science guy then has "relations" with Dr. Shaw.  Bad move, dude.  Good thing our spaceship has an ultra-rare and fully autonomous surgical machine on board, because she's gonna need it.  After boyfriend kicks the bucket from his exposure to the black stuff, Ms. Shaw has to get the freshly implanted nasty critter out of her before it gets hungry and decides to have mommy for a snack.  This surgery scene was...  well, if you are squeamish, this would be reason enough to not see the film.  If you thought the idea of the Alien facehugger jumping on that guy's face in the first movie and then later the chestburster thing chewing its way out of him was bad, imagine those two events combined, and you've got the surgical scene in Prometheus.

In reference to the scene above, I still want to know why Kane (played admirably by John Hurt) found the eggs covered in that 70s laser light-show of blue mist in the first movie.  Won't someone please explain that? /  Source: CyberPunkReview.com

Cutting to the chase, the survivors of this whole mess decide that the planet they are on is not the origin of mankind, but instead it is some sort of weapons manufacturing planet.  The black stuff makes whatever it interacts with into really malevolent and nearly indestructible monsters.  One of the scientist guys who was left in the pyramid and got partly eaten by our nasty little friend the worm actually comes back to life and kills half the spaceship crew who are left.  And he's just human.  The squid critter that Dr. Shaw C-sections out of herself is way worse.

So let's get to the end of this movie plot spoiler, shall we?  Come to find out, the old dude who sent our gang out into space and claimed to be at home taking a six foot deep dirt nap is actually alive and on the spaceship.  He came along because he wants to ask the Engineers to heal him so he can keep living.  And Charlize Theron is his daughter.  That plot detail wasn't tough to pre-guess, at least.  So our old benefactor turned fountain of youth seeker and David the android and the rest of the science guys go to the buried horseshoe shaped spacecraft under the pyramid to meet the last surviving Engineer, who is in a cryostasis capsule and just waiting to be awakened. He is not a happy guy when woken up.  There are no survivors, except for David, who, as an android, can get along with his head being removed forcefully from his torso.

And I always thought the Space Jockey, now known as an "Engineer," had a severe case of elephant envy or something.  Come to find out, he looks kinda human under that helmet.  So apparently the source of all mankind is a eight foot tall white bald guy.  / Source: AlienPrequelNews.com

To rap it up, the Engineer fellow is off to deliver his payload of black evil gunk to Earth.  And the human's spaceship captain and what is left of his crew must ram their ship into his horseshoe spaceship in order to keep it from getting away.  They die nobly as heroes, and in the ensuing crash, Charlize Theron's character gets squished.  Dr. Shaw gets away, but then the Engineer decides to come and pay her back for being a meddlesome human.  In the lifeboat of the human's spaceship (by the way, the ship's name is Prometheus, thus part of the reason behind the film's name), our big angry human-analog tries to smash Shaw to jelly, but she lets loose the squid she had inside of her up until recently, and it does the nasty to the big mad Engineer guy.

So here we are back at where I started this review.  The alien comes out of the Engineer guy's chest, wholly formed and not in chestburster form like in the '79 movie.  And our Dr. Shaw?  She enlists David and his head (or is that David and his torso?  I can't be sure how to look at two parts of an android and determine which is him and which is... well... him) to take her to the home planet of the Engineers.  She wants to know the obvious answer to the question: 'why did you  create us and then make a really yucky weapon to kill us?'  It's a reasonable inquiry to make, I'd say.  And with any luck, it'll never be answered.  Now that we know that the "Space Jockey" from Alien is a big bald white guy in a spacesuit, I don't much care what else happens to him and his ilk, thank you very much.

Sure, they look like they're having fun now.  One will get his head torn off, another will get squished by a tumbling alien space-horseshoe-ship, and the less said about Ms. Rapace's adventures in motherhood, the better. / Source:  Entertainment Weekly.Tumblr.com

Anyway, now that I've given all the basic details of the movie, all I can say is that I found it... good, but dis-quieting.  There was some stuff here that was really gross, and some stuff that was really cool.  Overall, I'd say it was a pretty good film.  Rapace was great, as was Theron and - in my opinion - best of all, Fassbender.  The rest of the cast did their jobs well too.  There were also some nice and very subtle nods to both Alien and Aliens in there as well, which were appreciated for their presence, and even more so for their lack of "hey look, I'm a poorly done reference to a previous movie in bad cameo fashion"-sense.

The plot?  Its quite complex, as you no doubt noticed.  Did it do it for me?  Sure.  It would have been hard for Scott to break the Alien franchise that he basically founded, but stranger things have happened.  And as for the "ancient visitor" idea (the bantered about theory that a visit from alien beings brought life to prehistoric Earth), it was effective.  Somebody made the point in the movie that Dr. Shaw should stop wearing her crucifix, as Christianity was supposedly disproved by this new scientific discovery, to which somebody (I think it was Shaw herself) quipped, "Ok, who made the Engineers then?"  Nice job.  Didn't offend the Christians, and still ran a good movie plot.  Until you take into account that there is a lot of alien-on-human "relations" in this film.  That alone ought to be enough to offend anybody.

And now the final analysis.  Was this show worth the matinee ticket price I paid.  I'd say yes, it was.  Of course, I'm an Alien fanboy, so full price and 3D (which I skipped this time, even though this film would have been just as striking in 3D) would have been cool for me.  Thankfully though, Prometheus did the job and left me willing to watch it again.  As much as I watch Alien, or its sequel Aliens?  Probably not.  But more than Alien3 or, shudder, Alien Resurrection for sure.

So that's it for today.  Ah, and you may be wondering, why did I do a few and far between movie review for Prometheus, but neglected to do one for The Avengers?  I'm ashamed to say, I didn't get to that one soon enough.  I still owe a review of Avengers, but not today.  Stay tuned for that one.


The parting comment:

Source: Xidon.DeviantArt.com

Here's a parting comment in keeping with today's post.  Having watched (make that endured) both of the Alien Vs. Predator films, I can honestly say that Prometheus is much better than either of them.  In fact, this is the best idea for a match up between an Alien and a Predator that I can imagine.  Oh, and I've got suggested taglines for that movie.  "In space, no one can hear you say checkmate."  Or how about, "If it moves like a pawn, we can kill it"?  Yes, the first one was better, I know.