By David Bjorkgren
NEWS Managing editor
It’s a good thing the crew of the Prometheus doesn’t work for NASA. This group of future space travelers would have easily washed out of the astronaut program.
Not only do they not work well as a team, they don’t even follow the basic safety protocols that go with the dangers of space travel. They land on an unknown world and sloppily expose themselves to all kinds of environmental and biological hazards. Guys this stupid deserve to be eaten by aliens.
And that was just one of the implausible things I found in “Prometheus,” the latest offering in the 33-year “Alien” franchise.
The film is striking visually. There are harsh alien worlds, cavernous spaceships, exotic-looking humanoids, a whole menagerie of morphing aliens ready to devour you in several disturbing ways and some nice-looking future hardware (the mapping probes are pretty cool). Credit has to go to director Ridley Scott, who directed the original “Alien,” along with the film “Bladerunner.”
Kudos also to the filmmakers for examining two of humanities most profound questions, “Who made us?” and “Where do we come from?” Exploring those ideas, coupled with all the eye candy, makes for a pretty interesting first hour or so. If they had stuck with that, thrown in a little more eerie tension and given us a scary alien assault every once in a while, the film would have earned its rightful place in the “Alien” saga.
The film revolves around an “ancient astronaut” moment when archaeologists discover a cave painting of a large humanoid pointing to a group of stars. This star map is discovered at several ancient sites and could point to the origin of humanity. The idea sparks the curiosity of Peter Weyland, founder of the Weyland Corporation. He funds a mission to follow the star map and seek out these aliens, now dubbed the “Engineers.” It is the year 2093 and the science vessel “Prometheus” has arrived at a distant moon from Earth to find some “Engineers.”
On board are the archaeologist couple, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapaci) and Charlie Holloway, (Logan Marshall-Green) who discovered the star maps. The crew finds a structure on the planet and start exploring. They find an Engineer’s corpse and discover the Engineer DNA perfectly matches human DNA. Hmm.
Of course, they go a little too far in their explorations and all kinds of nasty things, from tinny- tiny creatures in black goo, to a couple of snakes emerge, wreaking all kinds of unimaginable mayhem on the crew. How do these nasty things fit in with the Engineers? And what exactly is up with the Prometheus’ on-board android, David, (Michael Fassbender) who seems polite enough but does some fairly sinister things? And maybe most importantly, where does Elizabeth Shaw get all of her stamina moments after performing major surgery on herself?
It’s a couple of hours later, audience time, and we’re still not sure.
Like so many films these days, the filmmakers overreached, then ran out of steam, money, or time. There are multiple story teasers that take the film-goer down too many unanswered paths. Yea, I know, it’s a setup for the sequel, but confused audiences mean frustrated audiences, which can mean no audience.
Shortcuts suddenly emerge that had me scratching my head, saying to myself, “now how did they jump to that conclusion so easily?”It’s as if someone said at one point, “OK, let’s wrap it up.”
The film’s screenplay was penned by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, executive producer of the TV series, “Lost,” which would explain the confusing multiple storylines.
Sadly, the original screenwriter for “Alien,” Dan O’Bannon, died in 2009. He did not envision the 1979 “Alien” as an epic film. It was a horror movie in space, O’Bannon’s scary follow up to the quirky space comedy “Dark Star.” It worked because the storyline was simple, using the same formula Steven Spielberg used in “Jaws”: Don’t show them the shark until you absolutely have to.”
The anticipation of a gross-out alien attack made “Alien” fun and scary. Throw in a great cast and some interesting characters (Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley holds up well as the never-say-die heroine), give us good sci-fi window dressing along with a sinister android and you’ve got yourself a movie.
Aside from the sinister android and a lot of sci-fi, “Prometheus” doesn’t have too much in the way of interesting characters. There’s plenty of gross-out alien scenes, but not enough scary foreshadowing to take you there.
“Prometheus” tries to bring an epic feel to the “Alien” universe. It gets part of the way there. But audiences would have been better served if it had either gone all the way, or gone back to its simpler horror film roots.
I give “Prometheus” seven-and-a-half slimy morphing aliens out of 10.
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