Backdated 1 - Prometheus

Warning.  Here be spoilers!

I rarely, if ever, do film reviews, so this attempt to air my opinions on Prometheus may end up slightly haphazard.  Set in the same universe as the Alien quadrilogy, it had some stiff competition to stand up to in the two originals, widely regarded as classics, while having to cope with being expected to be far better than films 3 and 4 (which I am yet to see).  It also had the added pressure of being a prequel, and having to therefore exist as a standalone film, while setting up any future plots it chose to and adding to the mythology.

The film started with some fantastic panoramic shots over mountain tops and valleys, before focusing in on the top of a waterfall.  A humanlike figure approached, with enough difference to make him alien.  He drank some black liquid which transformed him, black patches appearing over his skin, and his body beginning to fall apart before he tumbled over the precipice, with the camera zooming into his body, down to his DNA which mutated and was ripped asunder before our eyes, before reforming.  Visually impressive, and raising questions as to what happened after it reformed, it was a very good opening teasing us with what was to come.

Unfortunately that was as good as it got.  The film seemed to suffer from a great deal of confusion, hints of ideas formed throughout but none really developed to a level where you could see if they had any scope.  There was a lack of identity, right down to what it was trying to be.  The original Alien was a horror and the sequel an action packed journey.  But Prometheus seemed to want to do both but without being able to do either well.  If it chose which path to take, and replaced some of the scenes of the opposite nature with more plot development it could have delivered a film to back up the opening visuals.

The plot in a nutshell is that archaeologists on earth had found images in 7 different ancient civilisations that all showed men looking up at larger humanoid figures pointing to the same pattern of stellar objects.  We then travel to the only known place with this system, and the only habitable location within it, and find a non-natural structure that they then explore.  Inside they separate into 2 groups, find a body with the head perfectly preserved and more of the mysterious black liquid.  One group taking the head back to the ship, and the other group end up trapped inside over night and get attacked by creatures that grow from the liquid.  We return in the morning to find them both presumably dead, one of the crew poisoned with a drop of the liquid by the ships android, and the android goes separately and finds one of the humanoids (who the head belonged to and turns out to be a form of human that we descended from) alive in a stasis chamber.  We return to the ship, have one of the supposedly dead crew attack it after being mutated, while another member turns out to be pregnant with an alien baby after sleeping with the poisoned man who gets torched to death.  After an emergency caesarean she thinks she kills it, and finds that the company founder, close to death, is on board trying to find the reason for life.  Together (with android) they go to the stasis human and ask it, only to find more black poison, wake the ‘human’ and for it to destroy the android, kill the founder and try to kill the rest.  She runs away, the ship goes on a suicide mission to stop it trying to kill everyone on earth.  It survives the crash, comes after the heroine but gets eaten by the alien baby, from which is born the alien of the quadrilogy.

Fully developed the idea of why these people came to earth (and other planets), left and why they then want to kill them could have made for a good film.  Explanation as to what happened when the ‘human’ drank the liquid in the opening, full blown action fight between the people from earth and those they go to see, proper horror with aliens of both kind lurking around the darkened corridors, all would have been an improvement on the confusion.  Unfortunately this isn’t what we got, and they just tacked the link to the universe onto it, and had no need to apart from the name.

The titan Prometheus tried to put man and god on a level.  Ridley Scott tried to put this on a level with the original 2 Alien films, missed and will be lucky if its considered on the same level as the latter 2.