Approximately five years ago, around the same time he acquired the cinematic rights to property-based board game
Monopoly (a tale of greed, corruption & the pitfalls of winning 2nd prize in a beauty contest perhaps?), Sir Ridley Scott announced his intention to revisit the universe of his 1979 stone-cold classic
Alien - a universe already expanded by such cinematic alumni as varied as James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & err, the brothers Strauss. Yet, rather than dish up more tales of terror involving face-huggers, chest-bursters & the eventual xenomorph itself; the legendary director had an interest that went far beyond a simple rehash of his master-class in primal fear.
Anyone who has seen
Alien will recall the visit made by the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo to a long deserted planet, a planet where they pick up an unwanted stowaway, who in turn ensues much mayhem on board after announcing its arrival via John Hurt's chest. The more dedicated or attentive viewer will also remember a couple of key points other than a nest of alien eggs. One, the discovery of an enormous horseshoe-shaped spacecraft. The other, a large armoured being strapped to a chair, wielding a massive gun & with a hole in its ribcage (commonly known in
Alien folklore as the Space Jockey). Who was this individual? Where did it come from? What happened to it? It is those very questions that have wrestled in Scott's mind for the past three decades, and after accidentally stumbling across the abominable
Alien versus Predator, he felt compelled to return to the very franchise that essentially launched his career as a successful Hollywood director in the first place, with the intention to provide some of those answers.
Five years later, we now have
Prometheus - not so much a film but a cinematic event, riding on a wave of near unprecedented hype that even Batman would cower over & an expectation to which even yours truly couldn't fail to get caught up in, largely thanks to the
wonderful teaser trailer & a pretty impressive (if a tad spoilertastic)
follow-up. In recent times, it's difficult to think of a cinematic release carrying such monumental anticipation. In that respect, it was always destined to disappoint.
To judge the resulting
Prometheus fairly, one has to understand its specific origins & intent. Firstly, contrary to what many have perhaps gone in to expect, it is not an
Alien film. If you go along hoping to see another Scott film which is essentially a slasher horror film with the murderer being a merciless extra-terrestrial - you are in for disappointment. If you are expecting the discoveries on the planet made by the Nostromo to be neatly woven into the narrative of
Prometheus - you are in for disappointment. The universe Scott began with
Alien is very much on display here (an android, the Weyland corporation, the ship interiors, the slightly 70s look are all present), yet we are not in horror territory and we are still two films away for picking up on the events that led to the original discovery of the Space Jockey.
Prometheus is very much about the race of the Space Jockeys (or engineers, if you will?) and most importantly of all, their significance to the birth of man kind.
Set towards the tail-end of the 21st Century & a mere thirty-odd years prior to the events of
Alien,
Prometheus concerns itself with the members of the same-named ship on an expedition to a planet. A planet a member of the crew, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), believes to hold the key in revealing the answer to the ultimate question over the very existence of humanity. In a sort of polar opposite to Shaw, we also have David (Michael Fassbender), an android with a love for basketball,
Lawrence Of Arabia and a hidden agenda that's not too dissimilar to the one Ian Holm's Ash pursued on the Nostromo. Both however are bound together by questions of faith - Shaw in the hope to meet ones maker. David, in wondering (unlike his creator proclaimed) whether robots have souls (a theme Scott visited once before in his 1981 masterpiece
Blade Runner).
It has to be said that
Prometheus actually holds a lot more in common with the dystopian tale about escaped replicants rather than his one about a 14 foot tall armoured killing machine reducing the Nostromo crew tally to Sigourney Weaver in her underwear & a ginger cat named Jones. It is very much a film trying to present musings over the very existence of life, its origins, the implications that follow & the concept of having a soul. It isn't a film that's particularly interested in being all about orchestrating tension, the slow-building of dread or the execution of memorable set-pieces (something which the impressive teaser and first main trailer misleadingly suggested). This isn't necessarily a problem when the ideas are as thematically sound as the ones on display here, yet at the same time it puts a lot of pressure into ensuring that the script itself is smartly devised. This, tragically, is where
Prometheus fails on a colossal scale.
On closer inspection though, a poor script shouldn't be too much of a surprise considering the names behind the pen to paper. Its authors, Damon Lindelof (a man well versed in delivering endless threads of intrigue that never seriously attempt to tie into a satisfactory end point, i.e.
Lost) and Jon Spaihts (writer of
The Darkest Hour and out of the 64 films I've sat through in 2012, currently stands as the second worst of the lot) take the enormous themes and the heavy mythology, before reducing it to a series of muddled plot threads that are at best rushed and at worst tedious. Thanks to their outline, Scott is never really able to execute a memorable set piece, for the simple reason that there aren't any (with the exception of one that takes place in a sort of
"do it yourself" operating theatre - irrespective of the absurdity of the science behind it).
Disappointingly as well, the after effects of (shall we say) "certain bad things" are far too sporadic. Given we're set in the
Alien universe, we still have certain body horror-esque situations which are intended to be a primitive form of the classic face-hugging/chest-bursting process. The problem with them here though is that the incidents for the large part, are completely random. There's no definitive cause & effect, just a long list of unfortunate situations which feel like they've been thrown in with the desperate hope of gaining some scares and suspense - even if it results in a complete disregard for logic. It's one of those scripts which confuses ambiguity with plot holes.
Unsurprisingly, its characters don't fare particularly well either. With the exception of Fassbender (who isn't even playing a human being in the first place), the assemble of fine actors (Charlize Theron, Sean Harris, Katie Dickie to name a few) struggle terribly with the perfunctory dialogue, which seems to only have aspirations of pushing a narrative forward rather than attempt to draw a set of sympathetic and believable characters. The sad irony of
Prometheus is that it's a film trying to question what it means to be a human being, yet the human beings within it are scarcely recognizable. Irrespective of whether you're a scientist or a road sweeper, characters who achieve the appropriate levels of suspension of disbelief in any piece of drama never walk around explaining the plot to one another. In this, it's the only conversation to be heard.
It's also a film that looks like it was savagely cut, and nothing suggests this more than the appearance of Guy Pearce in utterly dreadful ageing make-up reminiscent of Armie Hammer's laughable prosthetics in Clint Eastwood's mediocre
J.Edgar. It's hard to believe that Scott would cast a middle-aged male actor in an solely elderly role without any intention of him playing a character of his actual age demographic. One suspects that scenes with a more youthful Pearce were left on the cutting room floor - something which will likely resurface in a directors cut in the next few years (Scott has already confirmed his intention to do this in press interviews leading up to release). Perhaps then in the long run, we will get a version that feels more satisfactory.
For the time being though, we'll have to contend with this cut - a badly written, beautiful mess of a film that whilst gorgeous to look at and intriguing enough to hold ones attention, never threatens to live up to the obscene levels of expectation which, in a critical sense, it has now probably suffered from - a victim of its own importance. A decent science fiction piece that will attract scorn because it's not a great one, and unless Christopher Nolan or Peter Jackson spectacularly drop the ball, it's also set to become (rightly or wrongly) 2012's biggest cinematic disappointment.
"Don't believe the hype" Flavor Flav once said, how right he was.
3/5
