Ridley Scott has attempted to create an origin story for his classic Alien franchise. Now let's first establish that I have not seen these films, yeah I know, they are classics, I have Blade Runner lying around somewhere waiting to be watched, but as with many things in life, watching DVDs I should have watched years ago always gets put on the back burner. The only recent sci-fi film I can claim to have seen and enjoyed would be Moon, an excellent début from Duncan Jones and cementing my appreciation of Sam Rockwell. Prometheus is probably the direct antithesis of Moon, where Moon asks it's questions with a level of care and subtlety, Prometheus blurts them out at any given opportunity. Moon's effects are somewhat minimal and cheaply done (still effective), whereas Prometheus's are expensive, and massively impressive, and where Moon steeps itself in reality and reason Prometheus asks you to hang up any common sense you have by the door because this is a big budget Hollywood film and it may seem to be something more but it's possibly the most stupid film I've sat through in recent times. I have also sat through Avengers this year, another blockbuster without any pretensions of being anything less. Obviously in order to fully express my confusion and disillusion with this film it'll involve some spoilers, some have to be seen to be believed though.
A fun term that has been bandied around about this film is it's reliance on 'Hollywood scientists' and their stupidity which lead to the action taking place in the film. Be prepared to raise your eyebrows quizically regularly if you do deign to watch this bloated mess. The characters are all ciphers filling roles which are common in blockbusters, you have the nerd, the hotheaded hardass, the whiter than white heroine, the ballsy likeable love interest, the bitch, the salty captain, the cheerful chummy co-pilots, the aged billionaire etc. What hurts somewhat is the fact that Nina Gold, the casting director of Game of Thrones hand picked the cast and they are all instantly recognisable and actual talented people being put into such stock soulless roles. Speaking of soulless, the only character with any level of depth is Michael Fassbender playing android David, his motives and actions are bizarre and hard to follow, the rest of the cast seem intent on insisting he has no mind of his own, or soul, and yet he displays an affection for Peter O'Toole and an interest dreams and a useful knowledge of alien languages and murals. His actions lead to some terrible consequences but it seems easy to forgive when an actor as masterful as Fassbender lights up the screen with his presence, even later in the film.
The big questions that are asked, who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? They are answered to some degree with alien explanations but the film loses interest in such trivial things when there are tentacles to attack people, oozing pots of goop, alien pregnancies, giant pyramids, dead bodies stacked up everywhere, alarmingly human villainous bad guys and a plan or aim to destroy Earth. Oh it's all so ridiculously exciting, or at least it should be. Instead the pacing goes from incredibly slow set ups, to fast paced gore, back to discussion, sometimes jarringly swiftly. Don't get me started on the departures in logic, for instance, why, take your helmet off on an alien planet regardless of it's earth breathable? Is it because those incredible cool looking helmet's obstruct the view of the actors by any chance? There are several instances when they are steamed up from condensation, well fair enough, there's your reason, get better ventilated helmets, don't ask the audience to believe for one second a bunch of scientists who invested billions into a mission would land, very conveniently on an alien planet, exactly where they need to be, would go out instantaneously without checking the landscape fully. They could have perhaps, with some preparation/better technology, determined that there was a spaceship beneath them all along, it's not that hard to find technology to do that on a high tech spaceship surely? Oh and please don't get me started on how a woman can walk after watching her stomach be cut open and stitched back up then have a jolly stumble through some corridors on a simple anaesthetic. And my biggest gripe? Why hire a young man and spend 5 hours putting him in prosthetics to play an old man, when you could have hired an old man? The make up was terrible and insanely pointless!
Those were of course only my main gripes about the film as I walked out of the cinema. There was the fact that the heroine, over the process of a day manages to go through so much physical turmoil, survive it, learn about her makers (they are psychotic aliens who want to kill us now) and then still believe in God/Christianity, which fits in with the mainstream appeal of such a film. It's all such hilarious ridiculous crap that it is put across in such a pretentious manner that all you can do is laugh. It's not the fun, or remotely thought provoking film that it set out to be, it's just a mess, a bloody expensive mess. I wish I'd seen Moonrise Kingdom instead but it wasn't on...
