Some of the most vitalizing moments in director Ridley Scott’s Prometheus—his first science-fiction feature in 30 years—occur at roughly the ten-minute mark.These moments follow an opaque prelude featuring an albino goliath atop a roaring waterfall, and also a brief sequence set in 2089, wherein archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) make a discovery that supposedly confirms their Chariots of the Gods-flavored theories on humankind's origins. The film then jumps four years into the future, as the corporate space vessel Prometheus streaks towards the Earth-like moon LV-223. Shaw, Holloway, and the rest of the crew slumber in hibernation, while android David (Michael Fassbender, stealing the show as usual) roams about the ship, crisply attending to its maintenance and finding ways to amuse himself. There is a giddy aura of mystery, absurdity, and vague menace to these scenes. David serenely eavesdrops on Shaw’s dream-memories of her father, rides a bicycle in lazy circles in the gym while effortlessly sinking basketballs, and practices mimicking Peter O’Toole’s diction from Lawrence of Arabia.
It’s a fabulous sequence, smoothly evocative of genre landmarks such as 2001, Solaris, Silent Running, Moon, and Scott’s own Alien, while also retaining an attractive individuality. Sadly, Prometheus doesn’t sustain this cinematic verve for the remainder of its running time. Once the crew of mercenary pilots and scientists are awakened, ice-queen corporate overseer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and a hologram of shriveled mogul Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce under distracting age makeup) explain the Prometheus’ mission. Guided by Shaw’s archeological discoveries to LV-223, the Weyland Corporation hopes to make contact with a hypothetical alien race nicknamed the Engineers, or at the very least plunder some secrets from the remnants of their civilization. Things don’t go as planned, as happens in this sort of science-fiction thriller, and much screaming, running, and xeno-biological horror ensues.
Scott, working from a script originally penned by Jon Spaihts and re-worked by Lost creator and show runner Damon Lindelof, is attempting a tricky feat. Prometheus strives to draw upon the deep legacy of cinematic space stories while also offering a frightening and thoughtful tale that can stand on its own. In this respect, the film succeeds only intermittently. For every scene that presents a striking original vista or deft employment of generic tropes, another is undermined by wince-inducing dialog and lazy (or absent) characterization. It's shamelessly easy to pick out the poor saps that will perish in the first round of cast winnowing, which has the effect of muffling the otherwise dense atmosphere of tension.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that Prometheus functions as a demi-prequel to the aforementioned Alien. Strictly speaking, the new film is not laying the narrative groundwork for Scott’s 1979 haunted-house-in-space masterpiece, although it’s apparent that Prometheus unfolds in the same universe as Alien (or perhaps one universe over). Comparing the two films is a bit of an apples-and-oranges exercise, however, for while Alien was a horror film wrapped in some marvelous science-fiction design, Prometheus is a straight science-fiction film, with doses of frenetic action, disaster-movie spectacle, and—yes—skin-crawling horror. (David’s solitary frittering aside, this film’s standout sequence is a nerve-fraying episode of computerized self-surgery, depicted in all its gruesome glory and approached as a sort of bomb defusing scenario.) Shaw is ostensibly the film's lead, and although Rapace lacks the magnetism to make the role memorable, she sharply conveys a bloody-but-not-beaten quality that is the character's dominant attribute as the catastrophes pile up.
Prometheus' narrative somehow manages to be both ruthlessly straightforward and distractingly murky. On the one hand, the story is fairly lean and mean, possessing only a jot or two of character-based color and a palpable distaste for anything superfluous to the on-screen events. Scott seems to have embraced the James Cameron Corollary to Chekov's Gun: When a science-fiction technology is remarked upon and briefly shown, it guaranteed to be crucial to the plot. However, the story also possesses a frustrating fogginess that suggests the worst aspect of Lindelof's work on Lost. Motivations shift without obvious reason, characters suffer from short-term memory loss, and ill-defined schemes unfold portentously.
That said, Prometheus embraces its science fiction DNA wholeheartedly, while conveying its thematic earnestness in an appealingly subdued manner. It's plain that the film has Big Ideas on its mind—primarily concerning the search for knowledge—but the filmmakers avoid ham-fisted metaphor or dusty sermonizing. Shaw's Christian faith is remarked upon, but the filmmakers give it a slippery place within the narrative, refusing to allow what is foremost a creepshow-tinted space thriller to devolve into a didactic argument on religion and reason. (In this way, Prometheus proves to be oddly low-key compared to the pedantic Contact.) Ultimately, the science-fiction antecedents that Prometheus most resembles in spirit are the sorts of ridiculously grave, bargain-basement 1950s and '60s alien tales once mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Crawling Eye, Robot Monster, Rocket Ship X-M, It Conquered the World, The Creeping Terror, and Night of the Blood Beast. Amateurish direction and chintzy special effects aside, these predecessors share with Scott's latest film a gnawing, dread-choked sensibility, in which the cosmos is revealed to be a cruel and terrifying place, brimming with malign intelligences and corrupting plasms. Whether the re-emergence of such a grim outlook at the present moment has any grand cultural significance is arguable, so perhaps it's fortunate that Prometheus' principal ambition is simply to serve up an R-rated otherworldly nightmare. On that score, it functions respectably.
