Movie Review: Prometheus (2012)

Ridley Scott's ALIEN films have been a grand source of entertainment for me, exposing me to the interesting works of Swiss artist H.R. Giger.  It was his art that inspired the shape of the Xenomorph, the primary antagonist of the ALIEN franchise.  Science fiction writer Dan O'Bannon provided the screenplay, allowing for the atmosphere and many of the thrills, mystery and suspense of the film.  Later writers (namely the franchise's proper writers David Giller and Walter Hill) and directors (The Avengers' Joss Whedon, Titanic's James Cameron) left their mark on the franchise, with a mixed bag of results.  Mr. Scott's latest outing with the ALIEN franchise, Prometheus touches on the background story of a very important but little-explored race of extraterrestrials who are intertwined with the Xenomorph: their indirect creators.

These indirect creators are referred to as "Engineers" by Drs. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), archaeologists that find connections between several ancient cultures on Earth that all point to a grouping of stars in the heavens.  They have interpreted it to be the location of the homeworld of mankind's creators--their Engineers.  They soon pack their bags and join a crew for an interstellar flight on the starship "Prometheus" to the location indicated, funded by Weyland Industries (precursor to Weyland-Yutani Industries in the later ALIEN films) under the instruction of the hologram of the late Charles Weyland (Guy Pierce) and mission director Meridith Vickers (Charlize Theron).  They find a planet with a moon, marked as LV-223, in 2096 and land to investigate the strange structures found on long-range scans.  Their findings reveal that the structures are ancient and abandoned alien spacecraft, and that something that left behind a litter of alien humanoid corpses and several cylinders filled with an animate black liquid.  A sensible group of people would simply walk away and fly back home, but David (Michael Fassbender)--an android--has been secretly tasked to retrieve samples or a live specimen.  In his attempts to achieve his goals, hijinks ensue.

Strangers in the niiiight...exchanging glances....

It's safe to say that Mr. Fassbender steals the show even in light of Idris Elba's performance as Janek, captain of the "Prometheus".  Much of that has to do with the marketing campaign for the movie, which featured a character profile on the android.  It showed how complex of a creation he was, from interpreting different genres of art to complex mathematical and spatial computations.  When it came to concepts that would generally make a person sad (i.e., murder), David offered tears of sadness; when it came to accomplishing a task that his human counterparts would find unethical (ex.: violating a person's physical being in some manner) to achieve a goal, David stated that he would not have a problem doing such things.  These two examples of an incongruous and conflicting thought process along with a face devoid of emotion really sold the idea of Mr. Fassbender's android character.  Not bad for an 8th-generation Weyland Industries android fresh out of the box.

The film was sufficiently suspenseful, and entertaining as an exercise of human frailty and folly when faced with one of the most dangerous things in the cosmos: desire.

CHOICE CUTS:

• Hey, if you were in outer space and you saw a vase with black liquid moving around in it, would you put your hand in it?  If you said yes, then you too could join the Colonial Space Marines and die an unnecessary death.
• Idris Elba's Captain Janek sang it best: "And if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."
• I LOL'd at the Ocarina of Time reference.
• They could have gone left, they could have gone right...but these geniuses who have mastered space travel somehow found themselves traveling in a straight line.
• Charlize Theron as Meridith Vickers. DAT ASS. DAT BITCHY, FRIGID ASS.
• No pun intended, but an Easter egg hatches at the end of the credits, tying the franchise together.  I did find the connection strained however, as neither contributing sire had the necessary components to produce the cosmetic affectations of the reviled xenomorph seen in the other ALIEN productions (barring the creatures in  ALIEN: Resurrection and Aliens vs. Predator).
• The android David gives great head.

It's a great film, stupid scientists and astronauts notwithstanding.

RATING: 9/10