Atop Mount Olympus the gods kept knowledge in the form of fire for themselves. The clever titan Prometheus slighted Zeus by stealing fire and giving it to the mortals below. Angered, Zeus punished him by chaining Prometheus to a rock where a great eagle daily devoured his ever-regenerating liver. Prometheus's quest for knowledge led him to commit the sin of theft (though one could argue that Zeus's greed was worse), and for that sin--for his curiosity--he endured the pain of knowing too much.
Ridley Scott's newest venture into the Sci-fi realm introduces the Prometheus, a great ship carrying 17 scientists, anthropologists, doctors, technicians and other experts on a two year route to a mysterious moon orbiting a distant planet. Cave paintings and hieroglyphs from civilizations all throughout time depict the same image of a cosmic system and a man praying to those bodies. They are the modern Prometheus on a quest to discover the origins of man and possibly disprove the existence of God.
Floating back into the beautiful and dark worlds of "Blade Runner" and "Alien", Scott has once again created an epic landscape for these intellectuals to meet a dismal fate. Like "Alien" the director has strong women as the protagonists. Noomi Rapace is Elizabeth Shaw, one of the two anthropologists who earned money for the expedition from the Weyland Corporation. Charlize Theron is icy and ruthless as the Weyland exec who heads the mission. Their wills collide, but circumstances become too gruesome too quickly for that to take precedence.
The film starts out so grand and beautiful, raising all sorts of thought provoking questions about the origins of man and the danger of curiosity that it becomes a shame when it devolves into a particularly uninteresting game of cat and mouse. True, most of the film's audience will be there looking to see more of the same slimy thrills they got from the first "Alien" films, which this does provide amply, but the atmosphere is lost and replaced with gore and stunning special effects.
Part of the problem may be the antagonists. The entire film makes the evil creatures a complete mystery, raising question after question while knowingly never providing answers. There are two main creatures on the moon, only one of which do these people seem to have any interest in although the other seems like the logical one to be concerned with. Instead we hear endless conversations on the need to discover the properties of a black, gooey substance generated by unsettling, humanoid-looking beings.
Viewers may feel a similar sense of deja vu to what I experienced. After Scott created a new face of horror in 1979 he seems to have decided not to stray to much from a money-making winner. More power to him I suppose, but for a film that is tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions I feel the plot ought to be a but more unorthodox than it was. Some scenes appeared to be taken directly from the original space tale and were more disgusting than actually frightening.
To push it further the set of characters were more simply pawns than actual people, creating fodder for all of the sickly ways to die on this slab of rock. Both female leads did fine jobs, but Logan Marshall-Green as Elizabeth's boyfriend gives awful acting. Other characters simply don't have enough screen time to matter.
The one notable exception to this is the mesmerizing Michael Fassbender. He plays David, a super smart robot who, like Ash in the original, has motives other than simply helping the crew. Fassbender plays the droid with such eloquence, such grace and with a face full of childlike innocence he steals every scene he was in. David is the true Prometheus. His insatiable curiosity is reckless and even dangerous, but his desire to be human makes him more real than any of his breathing counterparts. Seeing him reciting lines from his favorite film, "Lawrence of Arabia", makes it all the more unsettling when we see him dip a poisoned finger into a glass of alcohol.
As it should be, the film is a visual marvel. It normally takes me time to get acclimated to 3D, but here it is flawless, never striking the wrong note and absolutely worth the extra money. Everything is crisp and glorious to look at, especially one striking scene in a massive dust storm. There is no doubt that Scott has the eye to make a beautiful picture, but this film was surprisingly dry and unsatisfying. The audience was very aware that it was simply the setup to an inevitable sequel, but judging by the content and the information given it did not need to be. In the end this was two hours of pondering and nasty monsters, neither of which makes for a very strong film.
2.5/4
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