Film Review Promethous

Prometheus: 124 minutes
Director: Ridley Scott

After a quick look at the IMDB message boards, I was not surprised to see some mixed reviews on Prometheus. Prometheus can be a difficult film. It is not a film that holds your hand. It demands that you think and surmise and sometimes (gulp!) draw your own conclusions. It seems some people would much rather be assaulted by high octane action scenes and a bunch of humorous one-liners than be bothered with having to think during a film to enjoy it.

 Prometheus was like trying to solve a complicated jigsaw puzzle. As I made my way through the film, the connections with Alien combined with my own assumptions made for a film that went beyond just what I saw on the screen. I was able to overlook most of the plot holes that a lot of sci-fi fans out there seem to be screaming about, because I was too busy trying to put together the big picture as I am sure was Scott’s intention. I could critique every minor detail that doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny, but that would be like taking a single piece of that aforementioned jigsaw puzzle, examining it, determining it didn’t make sense, then discarding it as stupid.

The film itself was far from perfect, but it isn’t the incomprehensible garbage some people are claiming it to be. First of all, the opening sequence in Prometheus is one of the finest in the history of science fiction filmmaking and rivals the extraordinary evolutionary sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (SPOILER) It shows an alien engineer ingesting the mysterious black liquid on what we surmise is Earth before life crawled out of the primordial soup. We are left to assume that his death and the subsequent scattering of his DNA are the impetus for life on this planet.

                Fast forward to 2093 and humankind has sought out and found the “home” planet of these engineers, or so they think.  The crew finds the Engineers and most of them are dead, having been destroyed by what appears to be their own biological weapons. They then proceed to investigate with typical disastrous results.     

The film itself has nearly flawless production values and we should expect nothing else coming from director/producer Ridley Scott. The CGI and cinematography are both wondrous and I would be shocked if Prometheus doesn’t receive some Oscar contention in one or more of the visual categories. They are that good, and emit the sense of darkness and foreboding Ridley Scott was after. Overall, Prometheus is classic “thinking man’s” science fiction. Are there some plot holes in Prometheus? Yes, and Scott could have made some of the tie-ins with Alien a little more clear, but the criticisms are all pomp and circumstance signifying nothing, as Sir Ridley Scott is already planning the first sequel entitled Prometheus: Paradise and I am sure a more full and fluid picture of the “Alien” universe will be painted. Overall, I gave this film an IMDB rating of 8 out of 10.

Epilogue: Here are some of my answers to some common complaints I’ve read on internet message boards. (Spoilers)

1. Q. Why would the engineers create us and then want to destroy us? That makes no sense.
   
   A: the same reason an artist spends days on a painting and then crumples it up and tosses it after he isn’t satisfied. We suck as a race.
2. Q. How is Shaw running around after abdominal surgery? That’s impossible!
   
   A: The same reason thousands of movie heroes before have been shot dozens of times on film yet acted as if it they were mere “flesh” wounds or weave in and out of machine gunfire. It’s a movie and action heroes all perform feats that are impossible. Or perhaps it is too much a leap of faith to assume that the staples in her stomach weren’t just common staples like we use for paper? I am sorry if Scott didn’t devote an entire scene to the advances in medicine that had been made by 2093, like maybe the machine that performs surgery on its own?
3. Q. How does David the android have an agenda? He’s an android without feelings or motivation.
   
   A. Ask Stanley Kubrick (2001), James Cameron (The Terminator), Steven Spielberg (A.I.)…etc, etc, etc…..Sentient A.I. is a very common theme in sci-fi and within Scott’s universe or maybe he was just programmed with an agenda? Either way, move on.
4. Q. The scientists all take their helmets off when they get into the Alien ship. I may not be a biologist, but that seems completely unrealistic and stupid behavior for professionals!
   
   A. Who cares, no major plot points were advanced because they didn’t have their helmets on. No one was killed because of it and nothing of consequence occurs as a result. Get over it. Assume for one second that when the scientist said the air was breathable that meant there were no contagions in the air too.
5. Q. “There is no character development. The characters act unrealistically portrayed like the scientist who gets freaked out and gets lost going back to the ship, the pilot that can’t fly the ship, “etc” I didn’t care if any of them lived or died.”

A. The film already clocks in at 124 minutes. Had Scott taken the extra time to develop the characters, so we did care about them before being mercilessly slaughtered by the aliens, the film would have been the length of The Sorrow and the Pity. It’s pretty well known in Hollywood our attention span starts to falter after 120 minutes. Plus, why develop characters that serve as little more than fodder for the aliens? The characters that matter receive the proper attention and there are only two, Shaw and David. The ones that don’t are not that relevant to this part of the story.