In space no one can hear you script.
Prometheus is the sort-of prequel to Alien. I say sort of because the events don’t lead directly into Alien but rather lay some of the groundwork for the series. Sort of. Unfortunately that groundwork is a shambles, hobbled by a muddled script and characters that serve as little more than vessels for plot devices. The saving grace, as one might expect of a Ridley Scott film, are the visuals. They are arresting and spectacular but ultimately provide nothing more than a gloss to a rather poorly-made movie.
Starting from the premise of disparate ancient civilizations all producing the same star map, Prometheus goes on to have billionaire Peter Weyland in the year 2093 launch a ‘trillion dollar’ space expedition (so I guess he’s actually a trillionaire) to find the ‘engineers’ that apparently seeded life on Earth and inspired the star maps of all the different ancient civilizations. The expedition features the titular space ship and a crew of 17 whose names are conveniently written across the front of their space helmets so the audience can remember who is who.
They arrive at LV-223, just a hop and skip over from the infamous LV-426, home of face huggers and other bad things but no one on the Prometheus knows anything about aliens with double mouths, acidic blood and a strong desire to kill all humans. They are on a mission of science! Except they actually aren’t because the infirm Weyland, who has faked his death for no apparent reason, is secretly onboard the ship and hopes the engineers will help save him from his old man disease or make him young again or something because if they could make humans, surely they can fix old man disease, right? Right.
Also onboard is Vickers, who is revealed late in the movie to be his daughter, as if it’s supposed to be a shocking moment. Her character is the alleged commander of the mission, though she seems hostile and indifferent to everyone and everything, possibly related to unspoken daddy issues. Her character is completely superfluous and unlikeable as a bonus. That she gets squashed by a rolling space ship would be considered a small payoff if it didn’t come so late in the film.
Naturally there is also an android, this time played by Michael Fassbender. He is the son Weyland never had or some nonsense like that. Mainly it seems like every Alien movie, even a sort-of prequel, needs an android so here is David. David might be described as a paranoid android, as he engages in a lot of quirky and vaguely (and sometimes overtly) menacing behavior. While Fassbender is interesting to watch, the character is a puzzle piece that is never explained, an Ash without motive.
After discovering artificial structures on the surface of LV-226 — by someone literally spotting them through a window on the Prometheus — the movie sets about with the worst science team in the history of forever exploring the mysteries therein. It starts with cool shots of ATVs scooting off of Prometheus and heading to the structures because there seems to be a rule that you can’t park your space ship close enough to just walk over. Maybe they were worried about getting a ticket.
The crack team begins its work. As they enter the structure the doctor guy notes that it has a breathable atmosphere (explanation: none). To prove it he laughs, takes off his helmet then laughs some more. When he doesn’t keel over dead everyone takes off their helmets. This is bad procedure for several reasons. Firstly, without knowing the source of the breathable atmosphere you also don’t know if the unknown source might suddenly cut off, leaving you to die within seconds from the otherwise deadly poisonous air. Secondly, with their helmets off it makes it that much harder to remember the character names.
After finding a room filled with vases that leak black goo that is probably alive, possibly sentient and very bad indeed, the crew returns to the ship. But no one notices that two of the crew have wandered off. One is a geologist who is ‘in it for the money’ and shows his contempt for the mission via a Mohawk haircut and piping weed through his space helmet. But he does have fancy probes that scoot through the alien structure and map its interior. Then he gets lost. The guy with the mapping probes.
Getting lost with him is the biologist. He goes back to the room filled with mysterious and seemingly alive black goo. When the goo resolves itself into a snake-like thing that rises out of the goo, the biologist does what any trained professional would do — he leans forward and tries to pet it like a kitten. He ends up being killed by the snake, which is pretty surprising! Didn’t see that coming.
Meanwhile the android infects a doctor onboard Prometheus with the goo for no given reason. The doctor starts to Go Bad but it’s okay because Vickers is there to ice (er) him with a flamethrower. Also the geologist, who got lost with the biologist, turns into a zombie but he gets taken out, too. Then Vickers sleeps with the ship’s captain. Or maybe that happened before. Anyway, the doctor also sleeps with his wife, whose name is SHAW because that is on her helmet. Shaw becomes pregnant with a babby except it was earlier revealed that she can’t get pregnant but now she is — HOW WEIRD IS THAT? She tears off into a room with an all-purpose medical pod and programs it to REMOVE THE BABBY. Except the medical pod is made for men only, kind of like Dr. Pepper or Irish Spring soap. Shaw is smarter than the machine, though, so she orders it to just cut open her stomach and yoink out whatever is in there (well, not her stomach, obviously, but whatever she might be ‘pregnant’ with). The machine complies and in loving detail pulls out a tentacled something or other that squirms about terrifically in the pincers that hold it. Shaw leaves after getting her stomach stapled and thanks to advanced 21st century drugs seems no worse the wear.
So, the black goo. It apparently is what creates or modifies life. The engineers abandoned the goo moon of LV-226 but left piles of their ships buried beneath its surface for some reason (the ships are the same as the one discovered at the start of Alien). They dress up in suits that explain the look of the famous Space Jockey from Alien. There are weird holographic ‘security camera’ projections that show these guys all fleeing in terror from something then dying somehow in a big pile. Why these holograms show them running but never reveal what they are running from is never explained. Maybe the tell-all hologram got corrupted by black goo. One of the engineers had his head cut off so the crew take this two thousand year old head back to the ship and somehow their medical machinery revives it and it explodes. SCIENCE.
All right, it seems they aren’t getting the answers they want here what with everyone dying and things exploding, but Weyland is not to be deterred. There is a single life sign being picked up by lost dead geologist’s probes and they find out that it’s an engineer in a stasis tube. David the android has been studying their language, which I guess did not evolve in any way over thousands of years, and speaks a few words of greeting to the engineer after they force him to wake up. The engineer rips David’s head off and kills everyone he can get his tremendously large albino hands on. This is what you call waking up in a bad mood. SHAW and VICKERS escape.
Back on the ship, the captain (who is not actually in charge of anything except for flying the ship) and two crew whose names I can’t recall because they never got helmets and only had a few lines each thinks it might be time to leave. The engineer thinks the same thing and jumps into the pilot seat of his Uterean craft. David the android tells Shaw, who escapes the alien ship, that the engineer is going to deliver some goo to Earth. Probably not a good thing for Earth. Shaw tells the captain the alien ship must be stopped but they are a team of SCIENCE , not the military so the best the captain can do is ram the Prometheus into the alien ship as it takes off. Which he does. Shaw and Vickers are scrabbling about on the surface as the alien ship comes crashing down in slow motion. Shaw leaps out of the way but Vickers forgets how physics works and as the alien ship rolls like a giant wheel toward her, she keeps running away from it in a straight line, hoping that somehow she will outrun it. She does not and gets smooshed.
Shaw goes back to the lifeboat/medical pod left behind and oh dear, that tentacled thing is now 50 times its original size and probably hungry. David the android’s head is still functional despite being removed from his body and landed conveniently close enough to a communication device. He contacts Shaw and warns her that the engineer is out and about. Sure enough he shows up and is very mad because they smashed his ride and he’ll show that woman what’s what. Shaw then introduces tentacled thing to the engineer and escapes again. The tentacled thing shoves a tentacle down the engineer’s throat in order to deliver a final shot SURPRISE.
Shaw and David the android’s head decide to commandeer another alien ship (remember, the moon is littered with them) and take off to the engineer’s home planet because, well, because.
THE END.
Okay, looking over this, I realize it’s more a plot summary than a review but in summarizing I am hoping to capture how inane, illogical and plain dumb the plot is. This is a movie trying to be deep, profound and meaningful and failing. And it fails because Alien was a neat horror movie set in space and trying to build it up into more was a bad idea in the first place. It also fails even when you strip away its metaphysical musings and simply take it as a horror/action movie because it is neither scary nor filled with satisfying action.
But yes, the visuals are great.
I give Prometheus 4 out of 10 Uterean ships and one of those is for the visual effects. Maybe two.
I recommend checking out this Broken forum thread on the movie for a rollercoaster ride of anticipation, disappointment, resignation and in a few odd cases, absolute love for what Ridley Scott hath wrought.
