Prometheus

Though there was always a tiny glimmer of doubt, nobody I knew really went into Prometheus thinking it was anything other than an Alien prequel. We’d seen that the story of the so-called ‘Space Jockey’ would finally get filled in – as a long-time fan of the franchise, I’ve long been aware of the weirdness of that one scene in Alien where a huge fossilised humanoid sits in a navigation chair, long dead, but is never mentioned again. Essentially its presence was one of the larger HR Giger fingerprints on the property – he drew the Space Jockey as one of the pieces of concept art he supplied for the first film, and it was duly realised. But the continuation of the Alien story didn’t need any more information about the dead extra-terrestrial; he was left a mystery and his people occasionally showed up in the extended non-canon universe as elephant-headed things. And that was where Prometheus came in. Set only a couple of decades before Alien and only at the end of this century, it tells the story of the space explorers who follow the signs left in ancient artworks to find a buried alien ship. Where, of course, they set loose something they soon wish they hadn’t.

There’s a purposeful simplicity here, as the story very much follows the Alien template, a template that isn’t exactly exclusive to Ridley Scott films. A crew full of broad, recognisable characters goes to investigate the mysterious artefacts, awaken unpleasant things and end up getting killed first in scenes full of suspense and then later in heart-racing action sequences. It’s simple, predictable and expedient. But it works just fine. The film is a good, satisfying sci-fi horror story and has an interesting enough cast (headed by the young Magneto from the newest X-Men film as an awesome artificial human who only falls a little short of being as cool as Bishop and the girl from Sherlock Holmes as the newest Ripley): it’s fun to watch and ticks the right ‘scary’ boxes too.

It has two glaring faults, though. Firstly, there is absolutely no way that Guy Pearce should have played the old man, because he doesn’t look like an old man. He looks like a young man in heavy makeup. Even if you choose to believe Ridley Scott was subverting expectations by making his audience believe Pearce would have his youth restored, that doesn’t stop it being a terrible decision – it always jerks the viewer out of the suspension of disbelief and will make the film look dated much sooner than it ought to. Secondly, there are just too many different types of aliens, and ways aliens could affect people: in the original, you have the perfectly reasonable life-cycle of egg, face-hugger, chest-bursting parasite, full-grown alien. It’s all believably one creature. Arguably you can add the Space Jockey to that. This film has the alien of the final reveal, the Space Jockey race, a black liquid that is apparently alive and when drunk turns into an eye-worm and then makes a person into a space zombie, a squiggly worm with acid blood that spontaneously appears from the black liquid in larger quantities/is made from it - and a monster octopus-foetus precursor of the face-hugger. Apart from the Space Jockey guys, they all appear as a result of the weaponised liquid cargo – but the qualities are just too disparate and unrelated for this to work well. The Space Jockeys are also rather hard to understand here, with a bewildering opening sequence in which one of them drinks a black liquid that is presumably different from that of the weaponised cargo, which breaks him down to a molecular level – and it’s not clear whether this is (a) on Earth, kick-starting the human race as is hinted – which leads to us asking why the jockey sacrificed himself for that end and why they stayed in close contact with humanity for millennia in order to appear in cave paintings but then disappeared and turned hostile, or (b) on another planet, possibly setting loose the weapon and causing an exodus/bringing the Xenomorphs into being. Prometheus makes it clear it needs direct sequels.

There is also quite a bit of awkwardness in the last act when most of the cast needs to be culled. One pilot would be quite enough; two of them going ‘You’ll need all the help you can get’ seemed pretty unlikely. And as for the girl who spent a good minute running around only to get squished, failing to just roll sideways, that was truly lame and she could easily have been dispatched in the next few minutes if it was really considered necessary.

For all these flaws, though, the film overall was very entertaining, had great 3D (especially on the huge Sky Screen) and good performances. Well worth a watch – if not up there with the first two films in the franchise.