Prometheus

Before seeing this film, you should forget or ignore that it might have anything to do with Alien. I spent most of the time waiting for clues or hints as to the origin of that film's storyline, and really would’ve been better off without this distraction. Aside from perhaps the last thirty seconds, this movie stands on its own. It is an entirely new plot only tangentially connected with the Alien franchise. However, this does not mean there aren’t parallels. The structure of the film essentially imitates that of Alien, and this could be said to be its main weakness: a ship lands on a hostile planet, something bad happens, an android works at cross purposes to the crew. What Prometheus could have learnt from Alien, however, was the context in which it was set. Alien succeeds because it portrays an insignificant crew of an insignificant ship discovering a creature that wants to kill them. In Prometheus, the crew are trying to discover the meaning of our existence. There is a portentousness there, a sense of its own self-importance, which is hard to shake off. The film raises questions about life and death, but only from a certain perspective. It’s very slow in giving us any information to work with, and refuses at all to give us certain facts. The beginning, for example, is never explained. It is only with careful thought, and several leaps of logic, that one comes to realise it could be an explanation for the creation of life on earth. The film is vast and impressive, and Noomi Rapace is brilliant, but there is something perfunctory about its procedure. Nothing really excites or thrills. I would argue that this is because nothing is explained. We need some bits of information, and receive virtually none. There are too many ‘why did that happen?’ or ‘why was that there?’ questions that arise after the film. Yes, the film deliberately raises some questions which are meant to be unanswered, and this is intriguing, but there are many more which I believe should be answered. There are some other, obvious complaints too: the technology that’s more advanced than that in Alien (this was asked of the Star Wars prequels also); the underdevelopment of Charlize Theron’s character (the advertisement of her as the main character doesn’t help); the ease of finding the valley which the aliens used; and the very clichéd character of the captain. The film sticks to a reasonable two hour length, but it could easily have gone on for three hours – there’s so much material here, and perhaps this is the problem. The creators suffered from having too many ideas which when edited down leaves the audience asking too many questions. Whether this is true or not, what we ultimately have to ask ourselves is whether we’d watch it again. The answer for me is not a definitive yes, but it is a yes.