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Film: Prometheus

Country: USA/UK

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Ridley Scott

Screenwriters: John Spaihts, Damon Lindelof

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green, Michael Fassbender

♥♥♥½

British filmmaker Ridley Scott is one of the few directors in Hollywood whose big budget productions tend to meet with both critical and commercial success. From Thelma and Louise to Black Hawk Down to Gladiator, Scott’s oeuvre is remarkably diverse, his narratives bound together with a careful attention to detail, human experience and narrative plausibility. But while these and many other films have helped to expand Hollywood’s monolithic footprint, it is largely through two of his early films that Scott has garnered the respect and loyalty of film fans around the world. With Blade Runner and Alien, Scott set the bar for big budget science fiction very high indeed, and despite the wealth of CGI-rich sci-fi that has graced cinema screens in the three decades or so since the director first ventured into the future, few films have managed to exceed the depth, scope and precision of his vision.

Prometheus is a return to this richly fertile soil, and if the film lacks the bombast of his earlier classics, it’s in part because the director is telling a much smaller story, albeit one that takes place within an epic context. While not specifically labelled as such, the film acts as a kind of prologue to the first Alien film, although it also owes much to Erich von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods.

After a beautifully rendered opening sequence in which we meet a muscular alien who proceeds to take some kind of metallic pill and implode into a massive waterfall, the film moves forward in time several billion years and introduces us to a humanoid named David (Michael Fassbender, who looks very strange indeed with blonde hair) as he awakens the crew of the spaceship Prometheus, who have been asleep for the last two-and-a-half years during the journey to a planet which may or may not contain the secrets of humankind.

The expedition is a commercial one, led by the detached and tyrannical Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and funded by a cryogenically frozen man named Weyland (Guy Pearce), whose holographic ghost instructs the crew as to the nature of their voyage. Among the crew are Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), a scientist couple who are convinced that the planet is the home of ‘the engineers’, technologically advanced creatures who were responsible for the creation of human beings. But as they, together with the rest of the small crew of the Prometheus, begin to map and explore the remote planet and its unsettling contents – all of their assumptions are overturned.

Prometheus is exquisite to look at, and there are a few set-pieces with resonate with an exquisite beauty. The presence of artist HR Geiger, who provided the designs for the first Alien film, remains evident, although overshadowed by an aesthetic that is colder and less organic. And while it’s not in the same ballpark as Scott’s break-through classics, it’s still much, much better than your average contemporary sci-fi flick, the director’s precision and attention to plausibility separating this latest foray into deep space from the bulk of so many similar big-budget films.

Which is not to say that there aren’t a few moments of hoary cliché present. But while most mainstream flicks use clichés as their building blocks, Prometheus is refreshingly unpredictable. No grand conspiracy is revealed, there is no endless battle sequence, and characters die when we don’t expect them to.

The acting is fine but also remarkably uneven. I’m not sure, for example, that it was a good idea for Charlize Theron to appear in the same film as Michael Fassbender. Fassbender plays a robot, who, although deeply humanised, does not possess a soul. Fassbender turns the role – which could so easily have been a one-dimensional joke – into a layer of nuanced performances that make Theron’s character look far less than human. I know it’s unpatriotic to say so, but I’ve seldom been convinced by Theron, and I find her register gets thinner and thinner with every performance. In fact, there is very little difference between Theron’s performance here and her recent reprisal of the wicked witch in Snow White and the Huntsman.

To end on random note, I couldn’t help but notice that in the last decade of the 21st century, on the other side of the universe, only one vestige of contemporary society remains. As well as an array of holographic tools, the crew of the Prometheus still use what look like an iPad.  Now there’s classic design for you.