Prometheus

There is a log­i­cal flaw at the heart of Prometheus, the jaw-slack­en­ing but intel­lec­tu­al­ly way­ward new film from Alien direc­tor Rid­ley Scott. Over the course of two hours, bil­lions of light-years and one cen­tral mys­tery, Scott takes us on a jour­ney dri­ven by a sin­gle, per­sis­tent ques­tion: why? It is the ques­tion, Scott sug­gests, that defines us as humans. And yet – tan­ta­lis­ing­ly? Infu­ri­at­ing­ly? Unfor­giv­ably? – his film refus­es to offer us an answer. ​“Why?” you will indeed ask. ​“Find out next week,” the film will reply.

Return­ing to the sci­ence-fic­tion milieu of pre­vi­ous tri­umphs – return­ing, in fact, to the same nar­ra­tive uni­verse as his 1979 clas­sic if not, exact­ly, the same cin­e­mat­ic topog­ra­phy – Scott has craft­ed some­thing spec­tac­u­lar but hollow.

No amount of fan­fare can pre­pare you for the exquis­ite visu­al rich­es of Prometheus. Scott pitch­es us into his film like a god, spilling the audi­ence from the palm of his hand into a starscape of spin­ning plan­ets, ion dri­ves and alien tech­nol­o­gy. Wit­nessed in ver­tig­i­nous IMAX, your first instinct is to cow­er in awe. But it’s not (just) the mys­tery of the uni­verse that the film is call­ing to our atten­tion. Prometheus is a hubris­tic, self-reflex­ive exer­cise. ​“Look at this,” Scott says. And then, ​“Look at me!”

It is this self-reflex­iv­i­ty, as much as the famil­iar ele­ments of the Alien uni­verse, that makes Prometheus a film of returns; an Odyssey back towards some­thing that remains out of reach. For the crew of the ship – a rag-tag band of sci­en­tists and ambi­tious cor­po­rate offi­cers – it’s a com­mu­nion with the ​‘Engi­neers’, an alien race who left clues to their where­abouts on Earth many mil­len­nia before. For the audi­ence, it’s the chance to relive that orig­i­nal expe­ri­ence, to be brought face-to-face once again with the xenomorphs and won­der whether, this time, any­one will hear us scream.

There are hints and reminders of those pre­vi­ous films lit­tered through­out Prometheus, but for the most part they’re as ossi­fied as the corpses the crew find on the alien home­world. Shroud­ed in echoes of oth­er films, it’s easy to judge Prometheus for what it isn’t because it isn’t a patch on the two movies that made the franchise.

Lack­ing both the iron-clad char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion and gut-wrench­ing ten­sion of Alien, or the gung-ho charis­ma of its James Cameron-helmed sequel, Prometheus relies instead on some care­worn hor­ror tac­tics that see its sup­pos­ed­ly hand-picked crew of genius­es doing some cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly stu­pid things. Whether it’s a biol­o­gist who greets a new life­form by try­ing to pet it like a dog; the expe­di­tion leader who gets drunk on the first night; or the ship’s cap­tain who aban­dons two strand­ed men to get laid, the film repeat­ed­ly, wil­ful­ly, stretch­es creduli­ty beyond break­ing point.

In fact, you don’t need to hold Prometheus to the impos­si­ble stan­dard of its her­itage to find it lack­ing. It has more in com­mon with Dan­ny Boyle’s Sun­shine and Paul Anderson’s Event Hori­zon than pre­vi­ous Alien movies, and even those com­par­isons don’t always flat­ter it.

In part, this is a func­tion, or at least a con­se­quence, of its ambi­tion. Prometheus is as promis­cu­ous with ideas as it is stuffed with spec­ta­cle. Faith, human­i­ty, nature, iden­ti­ty – all of them are thrown into the mix along­side the more res­o­nant fran­chise sta­ples: sex, preg­nan­cy, birth, gen­der. But where once they were left as sub­text, Scott drags them out into the light (or what pass­es for the light in the dim murk of plan­et LV-223) where they sud­den­ly look a lit­tle thin.

No one should be crit­i­cised for try­ing to up the IQ lev­el of the aver­age block­buster, but there’s a super­fi­cial, sopho­moric qual­i­ty to the film’s intel­li­gence. Like it doesn’t real­ly mat­ter because, hey, no one’s real­ly lis­ten­ing anyway.

And so it comes down to a few scenes and a few per­for­mances that real­ly linger in the mem­o­ry. They pro­pel Prometheus beyond the ordi­nary (because it is, in so many respects, extra­or­di­nary). Michael Fass­ben­der excels as the android, David, who is entranced by Lawrence of Ara­bia but must some­where have secret­ed a copy of Pinoc­chio. And there is Char­l­ize Theron, supreme­ly icy as the mis­sion com­man­der whose fate clum­si­ly and unfair­ly casts her as this instalment’s Carter Burke.

But above all there is The Scene. The one that will be talked about but maybe not here. It is the point at which Noo­mi Rapace’s Eliz­a­beth Shaw escapes the ghost of Rip­ley, if only for a sec­ond, and cre­ates an icon­ic moment that will for­ev­er be hers. You’ll know it when you see it. If you can watch it.

But final­ly, Prometheus returns to that inevitable ques­tion: why? Why make the film? Because there was both appetite and oppor­tu­ni­ty. Why move away from so much that made the Alien fran­chise great? Because that was then and this is now. Why set us up for an answer you’re not pre­pared to give? Because of shame­less stu­dio greed. Maybe it will work. Maybe Prometheus will snap more clear­ly into focus with the hind­sight afford­ed by addi­tion­al sequels. Maybe the price we have to pay for a future clas­sic is a crush­ing sense of present disappointment.