Prometheus

A stand-alone masterpiece among the Ridley Scott "Alien" universe. I thoroughly respect the intelligence of the screenwriters who put this script together, and the editors that made this work. This film is not for the slow crowd. It's definitely mindful, with a lot of subtext and nuance. It will leave you thinking, perhaps even debating its meaning with others. I'm a senior, and a videophile, and I rank this film in my top 50 of all time. See it! You won't be disappointed.

Loved the movie

I'll get the visceral reaction out of the way quickly. I was disappointed with the movie the first time I watched it, from a director who gave us the original "Alien" and "Blade Runner" plus gripping non-sci fi films such as "Black Rain" and "Gladiator". The best thing I can say for Director Scott is that I believe the primary problem is not with the premise, which had enormous potential, but in the plot and the line by line writing. But, I watched it a second time the next night, and some of the kinks were ironed out by noticing some lines. Also, the relevance of the Prometheus myth became far clearer, and through it, I realized an important back story explanation which was obscured by the characters' ignorance. Read the Prometheus story before watching the movie and pay very close attention to the opening (and think 2001 opening.)One indicator of how incomplete things seem is that the very old billionaire, Peter Weyland, is played by a fine middle aged actor, Guy Pearce, but we never see him younger in flashbacks, which were probably cut from the final editing. Without giving too much away, the Peter Weyland character adds very little to the story aside from being the person who funds the mission.I sensed something was seriously out of joint when the "away team" enters the cavernous artifact. After encountering something just a bit squeamish, the geologist Fifield (Sean Harris) and biologist Milburn (Rafe Spall) decide to return to the Prometheus (the name of the humans' interstellar space ship.) The remaining team does a fair amount of exploring. Among other things, they see a hologram of the intelligent giants, drawings of whom they found on Earth. they are seeking running from some unseen danger. I saw no clue to what triggered the hologram. Following the hologram, they find the decapitated head of one of the giants (as opposed to the 'aliens' we encountered in earlier films).The captain of the Prometheus sends them a message that a serious storm is approaching. The team, with the usual annoyingly distracting side efforts which slow them down, reach the entrance and begin driving their vehicles back to the ship. But, and here the train falls off the track, never to return, we find Fifield and Milburn still in the artifact, when they said they were returning to the ship. They found some kind of life which intrigued the biologist. But why didn't the team returning to the ship notice that none of their vehicles were gone. Why did they leave the other two behind? Somehow, the two truants don't get the warning about the storm, or ignore it, so they become stuck in the artifact.There are loose ends aplenty with the alien fauna on this desolate world. My expectation coming in was that the film would explore the origins of two creatures, the "Alien" and the race of the giant pilot discovered by the crew of the mining ship Nostromo in "Alien". We meet the giants soon enough, but we also encounter at least three other life forms which have a passing resemblance to THE Alien, but their connection to the life cycle of the Alien is never explained.I'm entering dangerous "spoiler" territory now, so I will not discuss any more of the plot except to say that there are a number of unexplained events. Mysteries are great in the middle of the film, but one expects most of these to be wrapped up and revealed at the end of the picture. Many are not, leaving a huge jumping off point for a sequel to "Prometheus".Part of the special attraction of this story is that the audience knows full well what will eventually happen, so there is a lot of mental "don't go there" and "don't do that" moments, because we already know what things that look like that can do. The problem with that is that there is too much "quoting" from "Alien" for my tastes. Most of it is done relatively well, but it becomes more and more obvious as time goes on, and increasingly annoying. There is also ample quoting from other major Sci Fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (both in situations and in dialogue). There are also some subtle cinematic (visual) quotes from "Avatar" and "Jurassic Park".One of the bright spots, aside from the imaginative, well done CGI and cinematography, is the acting, which I always thought was a weak spot in "Alien". The crewmen, such as Captain Idris Elba, are spot on (unlike Yahpet Kotto in "Alien"). Instead of the strong Ellen Ripley character, we have the physically smaller and less imposing archaeologist, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) who sports a convincing English accent as the lead character. Charlize Theron's character is restrained and unlikable. Like both Scott and Cameron's "Alien" and "Aliens", this movie has an android (artificial person) as a principal character, in a role much fuller than in the earlier movies. The only thing which distinguishes 'David', Michael Fassbender's android from Scott's earlier android Ash (Ian Holm, Alien) and Cameron's Bishop (Lance Hendrickson, Aliens)is that David is ever so slightly stilted, somewhat like Data from "Startrek, The Next Generation."I will give this the benefit of the doubt for now, but I found a strong disjoint in the rationale between two early scenes and the climax. I sense Scott wanted to leave plenty of meat on the bone to support a sequel. (In contrast, Avatar is almost totally devoid of preparation for a sequel I suspect I will need to revisit this review after seeing the film again. If my suspicion about gaps and disconnects is born out, I may have to lower my rating to 3 stars.

sometimes fans expect too much and dont take in the story and elements. Prometheus was the first part in a prequel Alien Trilogy exploring the origins of "Creators" and the evolution of the Xenomorph. You have great leads from Guy Pearce, Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rappace among a few others. The controversy among fan reception lead to delays in sequels.

Definitely is an excellent movie

Super thought provoking. Wish the extended dialogue scene with the engineer was in this cut, but all is well

When is a prequel not a prequel? When a studio, let's call them 20th Century Fox, concerned about limiting the audience for their latest, big-budget science-fiction/horror film, PROMETHEUS, sidestep the use of the word prequel in their marketing materials and ask the director, Ridley Scott (KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, BLACK HAWK DOWN, GLADIATOR, BLADE RUNNER), and the screenwriters, Jon Spaihts (THE DARKEST HOUR) and Damon Lindelof (LOST), to sidestep direct or indirect questions about the connection or connections between PROMETHEUS and Scott's second film, ALIEN. We've been told PROMETHEUS and ALIEN share DNA. We've been also told that PROMETHEUS occurs in the ALIEN universe, but not a prequel to ALIEN. PROMETHEUS is indeed a prequel, albeit an indirect one, meant to launch another trilogy before reaching its inevitable endpoint: ALIEN.In 2089 C.E. (or A.D. if you prefer), two archeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), a true believer of the Judeo-Christian time, and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), Shaw's colleague, lover, and the skeptic to Shaw's believer, discover 35,000-year-old pictograms on an island off the coast of Scotland that seemingly confirm their theory that aliens visited different civilizations in the past. Shaw and Holloway believe the aliens influenced or otherwise directed cultural and possibly biological evolution, an idea that seeped into the pop culture mainstream forty-four years ago when Erich von Däniken published his factually challenged bestseller, "Chariots of the Gods." The pictograms contain a star map that Shaw and Holloway interpret as an open invitation for renewed human-alien contact. Shaw implicitly believes in their benevolence. Holloway doesn't seem to share Shaw's optimism, but doesn't completely slip into negativity either. Shaw's optimism proves woefully unfounded we're in the ALIEN universe after all).Shaw and Holloway's evidence proves sufficient to convince Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), the octogenarian CEO of the Weyland Corp., to fund a trillion-dollar expedition to the star system where Shaw and Holloway hope to meet the aliens and get the answers every child or teen asks once or twice: Who are we? Why are we here? Who made us? And to what or for what purpose? Shaw answers, somewhat naively, with religion, but she's still a scientist and as a scientist knowledge, regardless of whether it conflicts or not with religious belief, takes precedence. Holloway is far more the skeptic, the empiricist, the non-believer, but he's just as eager to meet the godlike beings that presumably created us. The science vs. religion debate isn't really a debate, not in a film with a $150 million dollar budget. It's just enough to suggest depth without in fact providing anything approaching depth.Weyland sends Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a cold, calculating corporate executive with her eye on the CEO's chair (when Weyland passes into the great corporate beyond, of course), to keep tabs on the expedition. The ship's 17-member crew fulfills its primary function in the ALIEN universe: As fodder for the inevitable outbreak of something or other that decimates the crew. The script gives the secondary and tertiary characters names, but they could be easily called Generic Character No. 1 through Generic Character No. 10 or 11. Even worse, the characters that are coded as "smart" (because they're scientists) make fatally idiotic decisions at the worst possible times, presumably because Spaihts and Lindelof ran out of ideas and decided to rely on standard horror-film clichés. Only a few characters make any kid of impression. That's less to do with the screenplay and everything to do with the actors, like the Prometheus' captain, Janek (Idris Elba), who gets minimal screen time or character development, but whose actions suggest a heroic, self-sacrificing nature.With his dyed blonde hair and mannerisms lifted from his favorite film, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and a secretive, ambiguous agenda (again typical of androids in the ALIEN universe), David (Michael Fassbender) easily emerges as PROMETHEUS's most compelling character. He's first introduced watching over Shaw in her sleep chamber, picking through her childhood memories, a choice that's simultaneously creepy, because it's voyeuristic and a violation, and comprehensible as an expression of David's loneliness. David isn't supposed to have wants or needs, but he evinces them in practically every scene. He also evinces a dry, droll sense of humor that's often misunderstood or ignored by other members of the crew. They treat David less as a valuable member of the crew than a personal valet or even worse. When David makes consequence-heavy decision, he's simultaneously following Weyland's orders and engaging in payback for real and perceived slights.David, however, can't carry PROMETHEUS alone and either can Shaw as a proto-Ripley action-heroine. While Scott gives Shaw one of the most disturbing, squirm-inducing scenes in the ALIEN mythos, one that easily rivals a similar scene in ALIEN, she doesn't charge in any noticeable way until late (very late) in the film. Rapace's slight stature doesn't help, but Scott could have worked around Rapace's physical limitations with a script with a stronger focus on Shaw. Vickers exists primarily as a link to her predecessors (or rather successors) in the ALIEN universe, as embodiments of the amoral corporate ethos critiqued strongly in ALIENS. Vickers serves another function, but to say more is to spoil one of PROMETHEUS' few remaining surprises. It feels superfluous because, in fact, it is superfluous.PROMETHEUS suffers from the failure to meet the outsized expectations of ALIEN fans that expected and wanted, if not a carbon copy of the first film in the series, then something substantially similar, yet uniquely different to ALIEN. ALIEN centered on the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial freighter in the not-so-distant future. After the Nostromo's crew responds to a non-human distress beacon, they discover a long-dead, non-human pilot, the Space Jockey, and derelict spaceship's deadly alien cargo. ALIEN's lone survivor, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), appeared in three subsequent films of uneven quality. Only James Cameron's ALIENS matched ALIEN's ambitious scope and scale. Both films are justifiably considered genre classics if not outright genre masterpieces. Returning to the ALIEN universe and answering the questions surrounding the Space Jockey, the derelict spaceship, and the mystery surrounding the ship's cargo spurred Scott, working with Spaihts and Lindelof, was always a problematic, even controversial choice. Was answering the questions surrounding the Space Jockey worth exploring or answering? On the strength or rather weakness(es) of PROMETHEUS, the answer is, at best, a qualified one.PROMETHEUS, however, doesn't offer any ideas, intellectual, metaphysical, scientific or otherwise, that could be described as fresh or original (because they're not). Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END, Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (among many others) all posited alien visitors for more than just cultural tourism or anthropological explorations of primitive cultures (ours), but also to prod cultural and sometimes biological evolution (ours, again). It's a pity then that Spaihts and Lindelof, following Scott's lead, don't develop the idea beyond the merely functional (to setup sequels to the prequels), but it's hard to blame them or Scott too heavily if PROMETHEUS, a film made by a Hollywood studio specifically to kick off a new, hopefully commercially lucrative franchise, fails to provide narrative or emotional closure, but instead tapers off into an semi-satisfying, sequel-ready ending.Narrative problems and shortcomings have been more the exception than the norm in Scott's work and while PROMETHEUS is no exception, it's also another example of Scott's strengths as a visual stylist. Scott always seems to have a clear vision of what he wants to achieve cinematically and PROMETHEUS is no different. To that end, Scott shot in Iceland to capture the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the alien moon. Scott's longtime production designer, Arthur Max (BODY OF LIES, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, BLACK HAWK DOWN, GLADIATOR, SE7EN), and his cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski, bring a palpably believable, not-so-distant future into the present, a present made all the more credible thanks to subtle, immersive 3D. It's clean, pristine, and antiseptic, filled with the floating transparent screens filled with colorful data streams that AVATAR made de rigueur three years ago. The alien structures owe a great deal to H.R. Giger's seminal contribution to ALIEN, expanding on Giger's design work organically, if, at key times, no less repulsively. Scott fully embraces PROMETHEUS' R-rating, crafting several unforgettably repulsive scenes that would make even David "body horror" Cronenberg simultaneously recoil in disgust and applaud in appreciation.Cross-posted at VeryAware.com.