Prometheus

There will be spoilers

Written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring:
Noomi Rapace as Elizabeth Shaw
Michael Fassbender as David
Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland
Idris Elba as Janek
Logan Marshall-Green as Charlie Holloway
Charlize Theron as Meredith Vickers
Rafe Spall as Milburn
Sean Harris as Fifield
Kate Dickie as Ford
Emun Elliott as Chance
Benedict Wong as Ravel
Patrick Wilson as Elizabeth Shaw's father

As you should know, Prometheus marks Ridley Scott's return to both the sci-fi genre and the Alien universe he helped created way back in 1979. You should also know that Scott and the cast have been promising that though the movie is set in the same universe as Alien, 30 years before the events of that movie, it would be a standalone story and not a prequel.

The fact of the matter is that they lied. As a standalone movie, Prometheus is perfectly enjoyable, but you'll get a lot more from it if you have seen Alien. The movie opens with a mysterious looking pale man standing beside a river, just dropping dead, literally falling apart. Unfortunately we'll never find out the significance of this, as the action immediately jumps to Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discovering an ancient cave painting in Scotland with the same image as has been found on artwork around the world.

Three years later, Shaw and Holloway are in hypersleep aboard the Prometheus - a ship being sent to the system that they believe the ancient artwork was pointing to, that could provide the answer to where humanity came from. Living a lonely existence aboard the ship whilst everyone else sleeps is the project's resident robot, David - played by Michael Fassbender, in the movie's best performance - who spends his time playing basketball and learning how to act human from watching old movies. Watching Lawrence Of Arabia causes him to change his speech patterns, mannerisms and hairstyle to match Peter O'Toole's. After the rest of the crew is woken up, a bit of time is taken up getting to know the rest of the crew, including the icy Meredith Vickers, and the ship's captain Janek, before an expository scene featuring an unrecognisable hologram of Guy Pearce explains the crew's mission. And then, the ship lands...

It is here that the links to Alien begin to really build up, as the Prometheus crew explore the ruins of a H.R. Giger-inspired building, featuring a lot of dead creatures that look a lot like the dead alien found with a burst chest in the original movie. Unfortunately for Shaw and her colleagues, that's not all that's there. What starts out as a mysterious oil very quickly evolves into a variety of creatures that maim, kill, transform and impregnate the exploring humans. It's not made obvious until the very last shot, but what these things turn out to be are the early evolutionary forms of the xenomorph from the alien franchise. The Empire review of the movie complained that the aliens in this movie are obviously just poor stand-ins for the xenomorph... how they managed to miss that the point is that it is the early form of the xenomorph, I don't know. I figured it out the first time a tentacle forced itself down one of the characters' throat, and then the fact that they have acid blood and new versions grow inside one of the lead characters just drove the point home before what was intended to be the reveal.

And about that impregnation. One of the stand-out scenes in the movie features said impregnated character's desperate attempt to remove the alien from her body. By the end of the movie some of the (unasked) questions about the origin of the "Engineers" are answered, but it seems that a lot of them have been left open for a sequel. Not sure how that's going to happen, as there are so few survivors left by the end (come on, that isn't exactly a spoiler, is it) that the next movie will effectively have to be a one-man/woman show.

As a whole, the movie is excellent in both its story (though less thought-provoking than people had perhaps expected) and its visuals, with some fantastic performances from most of the principle cast. Taking her first lead role since the original Swedish version of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Noomi Rapace proves herself more than capable of carrying a big sci-fi action movie, and should be a massive star if she keeps up the pace. As the ambiguous duo who work for the company, Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender excel. Of the supporting cast, though, only Idris Elba is particularly memorable. That's okay, because they're role is mainly that of alien fodder, though. So in the end, Prometheus is nowhere near as revolutionary as Alien or Blade Runner were (though at the time, Blade Runner was hardly well-received), but it is a great movie in its own right, even if you need at least a basic knowledge of Alien to get the most out of it.

Next up, Ridley Scott is working on a sequel to Blade Runner. Let's hope it's at least as good as this is.