Prometheus - spoilerific embarrassingly nerdy review!

Prometheus looks great, we already knew this from the trailer, I won't dwell much on the visuals  - as you would expect it reeks of quality and class as with all of Sir Ridley Scott's productions.  It's almost enough to gloss over some of the problems and the numerous flaws it has at its core but as you watch, those won't be obvious straight away; it starts well, and builds slowly following a familiar pattern from 1979 but once things start to happen it really unravels and suffers from a lack of focus.

This is really exacerbated by the large cast consisting of 17 people who nearly all have to be killed in the last hour, most in the last half hour and a distracting back and forth between locations. It feels quite disjointed at times, you might sometimes feel that you've missed a scene as events don't quite follow on as they should.

Quite honestly it feels about an hour too short, just to get to the unsatisfying and moderately silly though exciting climax.  I fully expect extra footage will be used to make a directors cut of this which will be much longer but I'm clearly getting ahead of myself.  If you haven't seen the movie so far, probably best to go no further - I'll say this, go and see it, its an OK Sci-Fi movie overall, a worthy spectacle for the big 3D screens but behind that glossy metallic finish and carefully applied vinyl's, you might be left wondering what's really under the hood.

Forget about the "sequels". This really is trying to do something different, at its best keeping away from that franchise as much as possible, its a story far grander in scope, which ultimately should make the Xenomorphs look like a genetic mistake, along with the Humans.  If you like Sci-Fi then its worth seeing, esp considering how poor and shallow these films often are. It's better than say, the mindless wasteland of Battleship,  Cowboys and Aliens or the last Indiana Jones movie, all widely regarded as turds.

I'd take it over the Star Trek from 2009 or even Avatar (can't stand smurfs) and definately over the Star Wars prequels -  I'm still washing off the guilt just for accepting the DVD's one Christmas - I just took them and feigned polite enthusiasm, they knew I liked the old star wars as a kid, even today so of course I'd like the new ones but just because it has a label on it, doesn't mean its good. First world problems, no?

Anyway, like my umm, tongue in cheek preview from a few weeks ago that no one read, there's a lot which doesn't make sense.

"Once its off, its off..."

Lets start with the behavior of certain members of the expedition:

One character removes his helmet for no good reason in an entirely alien complex on an alien world, then everyone else chooses to jump off that same cliff, just because he hasn't died within ten seconds. While I can understand the need to get the actors out of the helmets as much as possible wouldn't they really have waited until knowing more than just the gaseous composition of the air in the chambers?  Even after returning to the ship from this exposure they're allowed to mingle freely with the other members of the Prometheus crew.

No one on board seems to care about micro-organisms, infections, quarantine, or even taking basic precautions when ramming electrodes into a goodness-knows-how-old misshapen human head which as one of the cannon fodder points out is unbelievably not decomposed at all and comes to life, for no reason whatsoever after being electrocuted. No life support is attached to it, like those grim soviet experiments on decapitated dogs and monkeys in the '50's but I think we're supposed to assume that its alive and aware to drive up the horror factor.  It then explodes for some reason, and also somehow the experimenters seem to know its going to explode even though there's no obvious signs that's going to happen other than the head seems to be in a lot of discomfort.

No real precautions are taken at all in this sequence, the room is packed with several people, one is even busy getting drunk (our protagonists idiot boyfriend, the one who decided to smell the dank tunnels earlier) and only a couple of people are wearing as much as a protective mask while this ancient living human/alien electro head is gurning on the table right in front of them, it's obviously meant to shock but its mostly shockingly daft.
 
This would surely have been a job for the Robot, being inorganic and wipe clean but as with the other movies that this isn't a prequel to, the Androids often have a sinister side or maybe he just wasn't interested in this multi-millennia old head of the very thing his 'Father' was looking for all along.

In this case our plastic pal has behaviours and motivations that are often confusing and inconsistent. For example, the scene where he takes some of the ooze to infect one of the Human characters (whos life the Robot saved just a few scenes earlier) seems to come from nowhere and is one of those times where you feel as if you've missed a scene.  We are perhaps left to assume that Weyland instructed him to do it, or it was some interpretation of pre-existing orders (aren't these things ever 3 laws safe?)  why anyone, even unspeakably evil would want to conduct an uncontrolled experiment like that in this dangerous environment seems to defy anyone's logic.

You might assume that this would all be worthwhile as it would lead to an emotional payoff but even though the victim is the significant other of our central character and one of the characters we should care about (but we don't because he's the idiot drunk tunnel sniffer from earlier) he's despatched fairly clinically and very quickly.

It points to some of the pacing and script issues where a lot of important stuff is rushed through and as much as I like the graceful build-up, given the need to keep a movie under a certain length for the purpose of profits I wonder if the tradeoff was worthwhile.  With the larger scope of this movie as opposed to another film I'm trying very hard to not draw any comparisons to, its still following the pacing structure of that older production, at least by broadly splitting the production into two parts - one with action preceded by one without.

So could we have dispensed with some of that earlier buildup? Expressed it in a less time consuming way perhaps.  As there is so much to pack into the later part of the movie, its not merely seeing the crew being dispatched one after another, there's a lot more to take in and explore but its all packed into a small amount of time, it really for me seems the root of the problems. For example did we really need to see the old 'waking up from hypersleep' cliche again?  And OK, we learn a certain amount about the Android as he bicycles around the Gymnasium shooting hoops and watching a classic movie, but there's no payoff for this as the character just becomes muddled later on. Other than quoting a line or two from Lawrence of Arabia, what was the point? He's not the central character and his character constantly appears to shift so why invest so much time there?

Making a disjointed leap back to more things that don't make sense:

While the ship is parked on this stormy alien world there is a time when everyone is asleep or on downtime.  Not only leaving their only return ticket unattended (2 years before you could even hope for a rescue, folks!) but  also leaving two members of the expedition who have been isolated in the structure by the bad weather completely without support from the ships crew or sensor systems - during this time of course they are conveniently killed. Bit of a shame as they're really the only two supporting cast members with some personality and humanity and the movies invested quite a lot of time in them before they become the first to die, leaving the non entities to carry the rest of the supporting roles.

Shouldn't at least the Android have stayed up to monitor them?

Were none of the scientists interested in the intermittent lifesigns that were mentioned by the Captain?

Tactically its a poor decision, the place seems dead but do we take it for granted? Clearly some really ****ed up stuff had happened there before.  Also really harsh on the people you're just leaving out there, who are already completely freaked out by spending the night alone in the haunted house. I guess no one on the ship really gave a sh*t about these characters.  So when they do eventually die of stupidity no one has a clue whats happened - another instance of gross, systemic incompetance on the SS Prometheus expedition.

You're left wondering if they're just stupid or infact drunk too, and thats probably not far off as to be fair the people on board seem to on the whole, like a drink.  It's like the vacuous sex obsessed teenagers who in those tedious formulaic horrors go everywhere they shouldn't go and do everything they shouldn't do. The ones who get high, get sexed up and then destroyed in every slasher movie - except these aren't bad stereotypes of teenagers, or even corporate spacers dropped into a situation at the deep-end with no exploration skills, and as such and you're always left thinking these people should know better... Why all the stupid rookie mistakes and incompetance?

Prometheus expedition before leaving to investigate the alien tomb

While not every expedition is run with expert efficiency - things go wrong and people are stupid in real life too, but there are so many deaths of helpless stupidity in this production it really is akin to a much more shallow genre of movie making.  Nearly the entire cast is made of pointless redshirts who you won't care about, have little personality and when they die you'll be lucky to even remember their name or what profession they represented.  Even the meeting of Weyland and his 'maker' is entirely disatisfying, not only does the creature look just like a big man - very much like Lurch from The Addams Family, or the monster from the classic version of The Thing from another world; it also says nothing or  does nothing intelligent at all, it just attacks right from the off like a mindless drone. Despite being a 'God' its just a brutal, physical animal and a pretty stupid one at that. At least those Gods from Stargate had some class.

Note the armed security guy is there for the entire scene in the 'bridge' of the alien ship, takes about five minutes (slight exaggeration) after The Thing twists the Robots head from its body to actually think of doing something. Maybe he was just scared or something but the guy was definately an a**hole, having just rifle butted a wounded woman on her umm, wound just to shut her up.  I really think he'd have started firing the second stuff started going wrong, perhaps even cutting his own employer and that Scottish non-entity in half with his shells in his enthusiasm to save his own life. No matter how big, the things head didn't look particularly bullet-proof but he just shoots the armour instead, shots bouncing off like bb's.. Managed to rattle off all of two shots before dying, way to go... I've played enough FPS's to know that a couple of blasts from the shotgun usually wont do it, when attacking the big monster, keep shooting until its head is a mass of pulp don't stand there in shock that you've not killed it with one shot, as if waiting to exit the movie on cue.  Again this is a character (barely deserving of the term) who on the one hand would attack an injured woman without question, but moments later bravely step in to rescue another, wasting valuable shooting time.

After more than 30 years we finally see what a "Spacejockey" really looks like!

I have to wonder why they'd even let our protagonist in there with them in the first place, after all she's just been betrayed and ****ed over in the worst possible way by the Android and presumably the rest of the crew.   For example, no one cared where she came from a few scenes earlier when she stumbles into a room where weyland is being revived, If it were me I'd have gone to the stores, grabbed a gun and walked right up to that Robot and blown its head clean off its shoulders, who would have stopped me? no one because no one was paying any attention to anything other than reviving Weyland so we can get to the next scene.  surely someone must have realised she might have some kind of issue with what everyone seemed to want happen to her... And why does she take it so well anyway? I mean shes just gone through something horribly traumatic and she's like super cool about it - but lets not resolve that, there's no consequences so lets just carry on with the movie.

Things happen to these characters which should obviously cause some reaction, like getting angry, but it just doesn't happen, too many times these characters act as if they aren't real Human beings.

Also, did no one wonder or care what had happened with her 'baby'?  OK we're supposed to assume its dead but its in there growing, in basically a habitated part of the ship, why didn't Weylands daughter realise what was growing inside her own cabin? The med chamber used for the abortion was just off from her living quarters as shown in an earlier scene and it's in there for some time, enough to go from small squid to a umm, much larger squid.  Even if she hadn't just popped back in to change her underwear occasionally surely the ship itself would have noticed there was another passenger. I mean given that it can detect tiny life forms through meters of rock  and metal some kilometres away, does nothing monitor the inside of the ship?

And compared what you might be expecting, there's a real lack of imagination with these creatures overall. Disappointingly I don't see much Giger in them and really nothing in common in association with his famous bugs - there's no lineage here at all, I suppose its all window dressing really but if you were just to see these things out of context, you'd probably just laugh at what looks a bit like something from a second rate video game, Gigers original Necronome / Xenomorph and even some of the bastardisations that followed is beautifully lean and threateningly awesome whatever the situation.

The most the creatures in Prometheus can conjour up is a sense of revulsion, and that's mostly just because first the squid is torn out of a living human body and anything parasitic is nasty and scary, and later because it has a toothed Vagina face and we're not really allowed a good view of the overall form, which seems like its mostly a shapeless vaguely Octopus like mass of nothing... So its really only due to the skill of Ridley and the production crew that makes them anywhere near scary by use of context, shot and scene structure.

(The creature threats that the Humans encounter are:

Mutating Oil / Ooze, its a bit like the black oil that our Reticulan chums from the X-Files (who also created us in that show) use to mutate us into something useful to them, or the Ooze that made the Ninja Turtles Domino's Pizza's best customers.  Seems to be used to do lots of things.

Alien Snakes, like a snake crossed with a fluke or some type of worm, capable of breaking a mans arm or shooting down his gullet, has acid for blood.

Alien Squid, Extracted from one of the crew - foetal stage of a larger creature

Alien Octopus, Larger stage of the squid, approx 20 times the size of the baby version and capable of besting the thing from another world, grows this big in a few hours at most.)

A bigger problem is that important events like the untimely birth of that tentacled squid thing happen in this movie that seem to have no consequences unless called for by the plot or are simply forgotten by the supporting or main characters.  Again leading to a feeling of detachment from the story and like something has been missed or not thought through properly, As I said earlier I think there is a certain amount of cut footage and there's a version with less untidy edges somewhere.  I'm reminded of Dune while watching it: Simply too huge and too epic to make sense in a movie format that could make money at a theatre though I wonder if it would totally make sense even with an additional hour.

I could go on with nitpicking more and more, like the one or two lines of soul destroying exposition uttered by the Captain at a late stage that spells everything out for those who have been having a hard time following whats going on.  The line just feels like something tacked on to help the audience along.  How about snake thing shooting into a guys mouth - just to kill him? nothing seemed to pop out of him (other presumably than the same snake, which exits the same way it went in) so its just put in there as a needless nod to certain existing texts.  Also, why didn't the things have their own weapons? They're apparently breeding hostile life forms there, even the alien ship is apparently unarmed and unable to prevent a vastly inferior Human ship from colliding with it, even though we're under no illusions that this is nothing but a military outpost due to the painful exposition outlined earlier.

I guess I did go on a bit, but rejoice dear reader, we are not through yet! This is the point where I will completely ruin the ending for you..

Jumping straight into it, after many pointless and stupid deaths we're treated to a few more, thats a large cast to shove off to Valhalla so bear with us.  In an effort to stop The Thing from taking off and completely ruining the Earth all three people who could drive the ship are now driving it to its doom even though two of them could have escaped. We don't care about any of them though so **** it, lets off them all too with barely any reasoning as to why this is the only option or even why it should work at all. (Had those Gods just packed a couple of missile launchers, or perhaps just moved slightly to the side....)  No alternatives are discussed, no opposition, no drama, just a cue from an athletic but perhaps not too smart scientist (who all the same is probably the smartest of this bunch) telling them they all need to sacrifice themselves and they basically jump at the opportunity  with barely any consideration, it is a good day to die indeed.

You might even wonder if you've seen the two co-pilots before as with so many of the minor characters if you yawned at the right time in the first couple of acts you'll have easily missed them. They certainly aren't involved in any action until they're just about to die (as with many characters they only seem apparent in the story just moments before death) and their cheerful irrelevant banter in earlier scenes does nothing to set them up with a plausible death wish. I'm left wondering if their sacrifice is even required anyway (as we find out later on it's meaningless) how does our leading character really know that the alien ship is really going to Earth at this point, how does she actually know that they don't like Humans and really want to wipe everyone out, based on info from the tricky Android who clearly can't be trusted - OK the audience is shown that The Thing is targeting Earth but none of the characters see this.

Seems all she could actually prove is that they made us from the DNA analysis of the head, and don't like being woken up to be asked a lot of stupid questions from an elderly example of a  lower order of primate whos just scared to die.  Maybe this guy is the one that went postal and killed all the others or is suffering from PTSD or something. We're not actually shown what kills the rest of the things as their attackers are curiously missing from the beautifully rendered holo-recordings. In another scene though, with our first bloods stuck in the haunted house though its implied that its some sort of Xenomorph incident. 

It could seem like she's basing her ideas on a lot of suppositions and second hand info from an unreliable, manipulative source. Like the fringe celebrities who queue up to appear in episodes of Ancient Aliens and the content of the book Chariots of the Gods which interprets various aspects of ancient civilisations as having close ties with Extra-Terrestrials, which seem a clear inspiration for this work.  But anyway, lets not take off, follow the ship and send a warning to Earth, lets ram the ships into each other to make for a more exciting ending, eh, fair enough, its technically a great scene but very cold and unemotional, after all throwing away 3 more characters that we barely know is just par for the course at this point.

After the epic collision that's completely spoiled by the trailer from over a month ago only the two main female characters appear to have survived. Now running for their lives amidst falling debris from the collision. One (the lesser character) suffers yet another pointless death, simply crushed under the ship after it slowly rolls onto her in a scene reminiscent of someone trying to outrun a train by running along the track in front of the train, rather than simply going sideways to get out of its way.  Again it settles briefly with perfect timing having killed the first victim right at the end of its first roll,  and after having so expertly homed in on its first victim it begins falling remorselessly in just the right way to now squish our hero. Two rolls, two targets and its dead on both of them - like a 3D animator at the whim of his director is influencing this ship to stretch the sequence out and add tension and excitement, you can almost see the hand of god nudging this thing and placing people - God is really trying it's hardest to kill everyone in an obviously contrived way.  And if you look closely you can see that the geometry of the scene is all wrong, the first victim would have had to run about 60mph at least to get to the point where she was actually squashed, and our hero, who we think is the second victim apparently stunned and unable to move, would have had to teleport a few hundred meters to have been right under the end of the arm, yet more evidence for our hero that God exists perhaps?

Fantastically and not predictably at all, our hero is surviving by the thin film of plaque covering her teeth! Having been fortunate enough to be protected by some rock or something, leaving just barely enough space for her to keep on breathing - though nearly out of oxygen.. Fear not though, something tells me she'll find a new supply just barely in time as the tension inducing computer reads off the time she has left.

And so we are left with our protagonist to re-discover her baby, which has lurked on the ship with otherwise zero consquences for the entire last act and was cleverly ejected before the collision along with the entire penthouse suite of Prometheus. (hopefully the vodka remained intact)

Now that the no doubt hopping mad pilot of the alien ship is storming over for a drink and in a scene like something from The legend of Overfiend, except without the schoolgirls and me vomiting quite so much, like a B-Movie Battle Royale, our hero skillfully utilises it to dispatch The Thing from Outer Space. (Bet he wished he'd brought a gun, eh?) We have no warning really that this is going to happen, just a radio call from a disembodied Android head just seconds before this final engagement begins - I guess the Robot, even though he'd have seen Lurch getting up out of his chair and leaving in a huff presumably some time before thought it would add more drama to the movie its in to wait until the last second before speaking up.

But as well as The Thing appearing from nowhere, again there is no consequence for this, we don't see the creatures being trapped or any steps taken to neutralise them, what if baby just kills the thing and starts right back after its mum?  (btw friends, do not take your pregnant girlfriend to see this movie - everthing I said about not seeing certain things due to demographics, well I was pleased to see I was mainly wrong.) Its just another loose end that is not dealt with, clearly an ongoing situation but we turn the other cheek and just get on with the rest of the story like it never happened at all. I assume this somehow is tied to the dead, exploded from within, Elephant faced man in the film which shall not be named. Or is it, hold on wait, is this even the same plan.... I mean moon?

Anyways, whatever.... Presumably the baby is free to roam wherever it wants (but just doesn't want to) and the Jockey crawls back to its knackered ship to die in its control chair and wait to be discovered by another crew thirty years ago, or not depending on whether this is a prequel or not perhaps.  While our noble survivor tenderly packs the head of the souless robot that just screwed her over into a bag - suddenly for no reason they have some sort of understanding that's not revealed or even makes sense - and they find a new ship to sail off into the sunset. Literally cutting from recovering the android and being really nice to it for no reason ( Again, I'd have dismantled the toaster the easy way long before then) to another Jockey ship taking off, erm, presumably despite literally everything else going wrong, that all went without a hitch.

It's lucky these big goons left so many more undefended ships sitting around and even luckier, they can be easily started by playing a simple tune on a Flute, thats right, a Flute... The wind instrument that's easy enough for a small child to play, which is not only left laying around right in the bridge itself but precisely what to play is left recorded on the ships holographic system, which plays back for the first person who walks in after thousands of centuries.

Serious Science Fiction

That's like leaving your car unlocked, using a whistle to start the ignition and the song you have to whistle loaded into the stereo, as well as actually inviting people to come and steal it.  Not to mention, if there's lots of these ships laying around then why on Archeron (sorry) wouldn't Lurch have simply gone to one of those and carried on with his mission instead of needlessly rushing to beat up on a woman half his height? I guess that would have made the sacrifice of the flight crew and the entire ship seem pretty meaningless though...

Again right at the end we're robbed of a coherent story and left only with assumptions and questions, so many loose ends its nearly impossible to have any sort of emotional reward.

As a final word, can I mention it directly once and not appear to be the Alien fanboi I could easily appear to be? I'm really judging it on its own merits and the problems are nothing to do with its not being like its heritage I wanted to see something new, I don't care about a new Alien movie - if anything Prometheus perhaps has too many nods toward Sir Ridleys first sci-fi epic. Alien was a perfect self contained story, as was 'A New Hope' but they also left things open and unresolved for possible sequels, our heroes survived, Ripley was safe, signed off and heading home and Luke and Leia et al had a party, (of sorts) even the Sasquatch got (sod all infact- thanks Matt!) and the immediate threat was over.  Alien wasn't exactly a 'feel good' ending in the classic sense but probably brought a great deal of relief to the audience that the ordeal was now over.

Prometheus totally ends with a feeling that the ordeal is just beginning, which might be awesome if I could watch the sequel right now, but there's no guarantee it will even be made.

So ultimately as an audience participant, you're really robbed of any sort of satisfying ending as a standalone piece - It's desperately and deliberately begging for a sequel even, whilst Alien and A New Hope, both which spawned at least 2 half decent sequels each were also happy to end it there if needed. I dont think that Prometheus is a really bad movie or anything, particularly when compared to the dross that is projected against cinema screens on a daily basis but its just one that was cut too brutally and maybe just didn't have a great script - I never liked Lost as it just seemed aimless, as does this film in a way, so maybe I just don't dig what that guy does.  I hope there is a directors cut sometime soon which is somewhat longer and flows better but I'm not sure what's going to fix that contrived empty ending, perhaps that won't seem so bad with a sequel, one where we actually get to see a real alien planet and see Prometheus as just the first act of a larger work.