Prometheus: A Review
I think it’s standard to tell everyone that this is filled with spoilers. I’ll leave the spoilers under the cut.
However, I just finished watching Prometheus. As a fan of the Alien series, Prometheus was one of those movies that was supposed to answer some of the questions about that planet.
The main plot is that a pair of scientists find several markings around Earth that point to a star system light years away. Interested, and with the help of Weylund, a team goes off to explore this and find out it’s secrets. Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charliez Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce and several others, you almost knew right away who was going to die (let’s face it, it was a prequel to Alien, people were gonna die). When they get there, all hell starts to break loose.
Though, in a rather slow paced way.
Mind you, if you look at the pacing of Alien, Prometheus was pretty dead on the mark.
The characters themselves all had certain flaws, and I was really not shocked that Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) played the Ellen Ripley role of the film. Michael Fassbender’s take on David, the synthetic of the voyage, was interesting, and creepy all at the same time. Theron played the ambitious, though cautious executive for Weylund, while Guy Pearce played the CEO of Weylund who was well aged (though, not well in the sense that he looked good, he was just really freakin’ old).
For those of us who have seen the Alien series (me, including all of the Predator and Alien vs Predator movies, though the last AvP was pretty awful), we all knew what was coming, we just didn’t know the events that took place. Think back to Alien; the Nostromo finds a derelict ship, they find an organism on the ship that infects one of the crew, and one by one, they’re all picked off save for Ripley (and a cat). They find a dead pilot of the bridge of the ship, and something burst out of his chest. Surrounding him are eggs, all over the place. So the questions become, how did all of that happen. Prometheus does answer some of those questions.
As the movie progresses, we discover that the Engineers, those who the researchers were trying to find, created the human race. But something went wrong. Now, time for the spoilers. Click the link if you want more.
The Engineers, it was discovered, also wanted to kill the humans. There were vases in the cargo hold of the one ship filled with vases that contained a biological substance. This substance infected one of the researchers (Shaw’s husband), but it was Vickers (Theron) who killed him instead of whatever the organism was being released. Shaw herself ended up with some sort of organism inside her, which she removed using an advance bio bed. Talk about home medicine. This, it turns out, was an early form of the face huggers we’ve seen in Alien.
Elba’s character was the pilot, and though he had some flaws, he was determined to protect the ship and determined not to let whatever was on the planet return with them. This he kept by destroying the Engineer’s vessel with his own ship, killing himself, and two of his crew, but also answering the question of how the derelict ship crashed on the planet’s surface.
Janek (Elba) knew that whatever it was the Engineers were making, it was a biological weapon. So did David.
And for some reason, David really wanted to see what would happen if a human was infected. He was the one to infect Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green), Shaw’s husband.
There was one cheesy scene when the Engineer’s ship crashed. Rapace and Theron both were running away from it, and instead of running in a diagonal direction away from how it was rolling, they were running right in front of it. At least Shaw did eventually dive to the side, by Vickers kept going straight. The ship crushed her.
Vickers was interesting as well, as she was a company executive, but wasn’t interested in retrieving something dangerous and returning to Earth. Though, she was interested in seeing Weylund, who it turns out was her father, die. Only so she could take over the company.
Prometheus answered a lot of questions raised in Alien, but it only managed to raise more questions itself. Maybe those will be answered in a sequel. An interesting note, both Prometheus and Alien had similar closing dialog.
From Prometheus: Final report of the vessel Prometheus. The ship and her entire crew are gone. If you’re receiving this transmission, make no attempt to come to its point of origin. There is only death here now, and I’m leaving it behind. It is New Year’s Day, the year of our Lord, 2094. My name is Elisabeth Shaw, last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching.
From Alien: Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo, third officer reporting. The other members of the crew, Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash and Captain Dallas, are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.
