There’s something to be said for limited ambition. Alien had a simple setup – crew lands on planet, finds something it shouldn’t and pays a terrible price for it – but used it to craft a story about the frailty of the human body and the dangers of exploration that’s rightly considered a masterpiece of its genre.
It succeeded thanks to its workmanlike grasp of filmmaking fundamentals: elements like pacing, dialogue and design. Sort-of-prequel Prometheus follows an arc that’s identical in the broad strokes to Alien, but grafts on a search for the meaning of life.
In trying to address grand philosophical questions that Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) would probably think twice about tackling – big but futile questions like “Why are we here?” and “Where do we come from?” – it loses the simplicity that made the original so successful.
The film – the first entry in the franchise to be helmed by Ridley Scott (Robin Hood) since the first – follows the crew of the rather unsubtly named starship Prometheus as it ventures to a distant exoplanet. Crew members hope to find conclusive evidence there that life was brought to Earth by extraterrestrials, a theory that’s essentially just a scientific spin on creationism.
That the crew’s mission in Alien was purely commercial while Prometheus‘ is scientific seems like a metaphor for the gulf between the films. The former was about pure survival; the latter attempts so much more and achieves so much less.
The crew finds some answers on the planet, unromantically designated “LV-223,” but, in the film’s smartest move, they’re deeply unsatisfying and only lead to more questions. These are puzzles without solutions.
And perhaps it’s better to not even look. Because, of course, the crew also finds all sorts of alien creatures that want nothing more than to kill every human they encounter in the grossest way possible, which they do with great aplomb.
The body horror doesn’t have the capacity to shock that it once did – how could it, more than 30 years after the original was released – but it’s still damn effective, which is especially impressive given that audiences have already had four films worth of chest-bursting ickiness to become inured to the franchise’s tricks.
The film’s more interested in pretentious contemplation and atmospherics than character development, but, to Scott’s credit, there’s still enough room for a few good-to-great performances among the action set-pieces and Intro to Philosophy banter.
Noomi Rapace (Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows) excels as the film’s ostensible hero, Shaw, who manages to be something more than a Ripley stand-in. Idris Elba (Luther) and Charlize Theron (Snow White and the Huntsman) shine in the margins as a workaday pilot and the icy representative of the mission’s corporate financiers, respectively.
The real standout, unsurprisingly, is Michael Fassbender (Haywire), who plays a deceptively polite android with an endearing penchant for quoting Lawrence of Arabia. His performance nails the balance between recognizably human and disturbingly robotic features; it’s like watching HAL-9000 come to life.
The film’s true stars are the visuals, however. Alien set the gold standard for set and creature design, and Prometheus is a worthy heir. A sci-fi film made in 1979 would’ve had technological and budgetary constraints one made today doesn’t, and Scott is able to paint on a much larger canvas than he was when making the original.
He had to suggest the desolation of his alien world through shadows and fog in Alien. Here, he’s able to render barren environments in stunningly gorgeous detail. Shots of beautiful devastation abound. The minimalism of the original worked fantastically well, but so too does the grandeur of Prometheus.
At least it does for the visuals. The ethos of “never imply what you can show off” also seems to have been applied to the script, which is a bit too on the nose. The naturalistic dialogue of the original has been lost and replaced by characters that, well, talk like they’re characters in a movie.
There’s hardly a bum scene in the film – and there are a couple of great ones – but it adds up to considerably less than the sum of its parts. The film even unwittingly critiques itself: It’s a movie about the danger (and ultimate emptiness) of searching for answers, but its entire raison d’etre is to answer any lingering questions about the franchise – questions that were probably best left unanswered.
Prometheus is, in many ways, the summer blockbuster everyone claims to want. It’s brainy and exciting in equal measure; it’s ambitious and respects its audience. But the same could be said of Alien, and it didn’t make so much fuss over itself. The original was a film about the things that lurk in the shadows; this is about casting light in those shadows, and the results are inevitably disappointing.
