An intriguing sci-fi film which should have been better

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2013)

Ridley Scott's classic horror film Alien (1979) explores a setting of ancient mysteries, its characters seeing things they do not and could not understand. These mysteries give a feeling of depth to the film, even when left unexplained. This prequel film sets out to offer explanations, and the scope of those explanations is as large as suggested by the original film -- it involves godlike aliens and the creation and destruction of the human race.
Prometheus is an ambitious film and it has big shoes to fill. It is both a stand-alone adventure and a prequel to the Alien franchise, but doesn't really want to be either. Jon Spaihts' original script for the film provided a clean bridge between this and the first Alien film, but that was scrapped from the film. The events leading up to that bridge are still in the film, however, they just don't add up the way we expected them to, and that is slightly frustrating. (We see a spaceship just like the one in Alien and a creature just like the "space jock" in Alien -- but the whole thing happens on the wrong planet and the details don't match.) This leaves us with the option to view Prometheus as a stand-alone film. It starts with very beautiful shots of otherworldly landscapes (which were filmed in Iceland, apparently) and features an intense investigation with amazingly important goals on a foreign world. Things fall short when the characters reveal their shallowness and irrationality and when the monsters are just not as cool as the original xenomorphs.
The film largely stands on the shoulders of Michael Fassbender's performance of David, an android prototype with superhuman skills and mysterious motivation.