Prometheus

Prometheus – Touted as Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien, this 2012 science fiction film fishes in far murkier waters. Alien, as has been pointed out, was a straight-forward haunted house picture, the homicidal gorilla lurking in the dark and scary labyrinth of the Nostromo. Prometheus, although adopting some of the themes and imagery of the earlier film, is more speculative and metaphysical, an inquiry into the origin of human life, and, unfortunately, far less successful as a film. Briefly put, the adventurers in Prometheus are drawn to a distant and dangerous planet on the conjecture that this place is the source of the DNA underlying all life forms on earth. The explorers are guided by a robot named David who, like his forebears in the preceding films, has a secret agenda. The robot has modeled himself after Peter O’Toole’s performance in Lawrence of Arabia and is certainly the most interesting of the film’s characters – as one viewer noted Michael Fassbender plays a robot channeling Peter O’Toole performing as Lawrence of Arabia, certainly a jaw-dropping tour de force and something that is riveting to behold. The film is handsomely mounted although repetitive – there is too much mucking about in black and nasty, goo-dripping subterranean cavities – and the special effects are effective if not particularly believable: the exteriors filmed with CGI modifying the moonscapes of Iceland don’t look significantly different, at least in some respects, from the landscapes in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a dark basalt foreground with distant highlights of sunshine in the bare, craggy mountains; it could also be Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. The plot features a lot of ridiculous risk-taking, people choosing to wriggle into dark holes where clearly something bad is lurking and there’s one scene in which hapless scientists try to befriend a hissing cobra-shaped death-eel that exposes the rickety plot machinery – why would anyone in their right mind get close to one of these things? In an unfortunate way, Prometheus makes explicit a lot that was implicit, and, therefore, more effective in the original Aliens. That film was largely viewed as an archetypal encounter with the vagina dentate heavily inflected by the lethal AIDS epidemic then underway. Prometheus carries this anti-sex message to its reductio ad absurdam – sex results in being impregnated with a wriggling monster, a variation on a similar scene in Cronenberg’s much more horrifying and funny The Fly. You would have to watch this film several times to uncover its secrets and I’m not totally certain that they are worth exploring. It turns out that the cosmic engineers who seeded earth with DNA, large white and colossal bald guys, are also homicidal – after creating us, they decide to wipe us out. The “why” to this proposition is completely unclear and, indeed, one of the characters can be heard lamenting the fact that the plot makes no sense – why would they create us only to destroy us? (A question, I suppose, that could be asked of the various gods that have held sway over the earth at one time or another). I guess I will have to confess to what ultimately disappointed me the most in this picture – I kept waiting for the vaguely hominid reptilian Ninja-creatures of Alien and Aliens to appear. But these guys, whose antics I really enjoy, don’t make any appearance until the very end and, then, it is a cameo at best. The film is respectable, reasonably intelligent, if implausibly plotted, and I think it’s enjoyable from minute-to-minute, but the picture is by no means as good as it should be.