"Prometheus" is Flawed, But Fun

There's a minor plot twist near the beginning of the third act of "Prometheus" that is executed so badly, and falls so flat, it elicited laughter in the theater when I saw it, and the movie never quite recovered. However, I don't think that moment would have come across quite so badly if the first half of the film hadn't been excellent, or if we we're coming down from the high of one of the most terrifying horror sequences in recent cinema memory. There's no denying that parts of "Prometheus" are badly written, and that for all the austere, hard science-fiction overtones in the first half, the whole thing turns out to be a funhouse horror movie in the end. And yet, the good parts are so fascinating, so memorable, and so much fun, I'm willing to forgive many of the film's sizable flaws.

"Prometheus," despite all of director Ridley Scott's coyness, is a prequel to the "Alien" series. It opens with a marble-skinned humanoid alien meeting a grisly end on a pristine young Earth, and this somehow triggers the beginning of life on the planet. So we're starting straight off with the assumption that aliens were responsible for the rise of the human race. A few million years later, archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) uncover proof of ancient civilizations having contact with visitors from the stars, stars that are in a specific enough configuration to identify. Cut to the spacecraft Prometheus, another few years later, arriving in the one particular spot in that star system which is capable of sustaining life. Shaw and Holloway are both onboard, along with a handful of other scientists, Captain Janek (Idris Elba), who is just there to drive the ship, Weyland Corporation representative Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), whose company is funding the trip, and an android named David (Michael Fassbender), who has no soul, but may have ulterior motives.

If you've seen many science-fiction horror films, you can probably guess a lot of the basic plot from there. Of course the naive scientists go poking around where they shouldn't, make stupid mistakes, and have the worst luck. Of course they unleash something horrible that turns their gee-whiz scientific mission into a howling bloodbath. After all the heady talk about finding the "Engineers" of humanity, it's clear that this is really a secondary concern ro delivering a good old-fashioned creature feature with a bevy of deadly CGI and latex alien critters menacing our intrepid explorers. That's all very entertaining. However, with the stunning production design that raided many of its concepts from H.R. Giger, a superb cast full of talented actors, and a couple of really interesting science-fiction concepts in the mix, "Prometheus" could have been so much more. And it's no wonder that some viewers have been frustrated with the film's clumsy handling of so many promising ideas and elements.

Take the character of Vickers, the hostile corporate ice queen who is set up as a primary antagonist. Charlize Theron does what she can, but Vickers is terribly conceived, with trite motivations, a big reveal about her past that is totally unnecessary, and lot of really awful dialogue. Everything about her is conveyed with no subtlety, no art, and in the end she's more of a plot device than a character. But on the other hand there's David the android, whose very existence brings up all sorts of interesting philosophical questions, and who is worked into the story with far more care and thoughtfulness. Michael Fassbender is given the space to construct an impressive performance, and as a result David is one of the clear highlights of "Prometheus."

There's a lot of this maddening inconsistency to the film, where they'll tackle the big science-fiction ideas but get the basic science wrong. Or they'll do all this wonderful worldbuilding that's never used to do more than play out the oldest monster movie cliches in the book. The plot takes so many hairpin turns, and there are so many dead ends, it feels like the script was cobbled together by cherry picking the good parts from several different treatments, but nobody wrote that last draft that would have made sure that everything fit together, and was paced right, so they wouldn't end up tripping over the vestiges of several totally underdeveloped storylines that should have been scrapped or reworked.

However, I did get a wonderful nostalgic vibe from the film, seeing the depiction of space exploration and all the technology of space vehicles and bubble-dome EVA suits. And it has been ages since I've seen such a classically visceral horror movie with really terrifying, really tactile monsters like the ones we get in "Prometheus." Ridley Scott proves he still knows how to scare the audience, and how to build truly eye-catching, unique science-fiction worlds. Noomi Rapace picks up the torch from Sigourney Weaver just fine, and there's some great supporting work from Fassbender, Idris Elba, Rafe Spall, Sean Harris, and even Charlize Theron at least gets a good entrance.

I think it helps that I went into "Prometheus" with very low expectations, after ducking all the arguments and controversy about it in the past few days. It's not a great film, but it has a few moments approaching greatness in it, and that for me was worth the price of admission. I'll take an interesting mess like this over another blandly pretty "Avatar" movie any day.
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