In Space, No One Can Hear You Yawn

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2012)

Prometheus stole fire from the gods to grant to humans, and for his crime he was sentenced to have his liver devoured over and over for all eternity.
If you keep that in mind, you'll get a lot more out of Prometheus, Ridley Scott's much-anticipated return to the world he created in 1979's Alien.
Originally billed (and still very much recognizable as) a prequel to that classic sci-fi horror film, Prometheus is a lavishly produced, beautifully filmed and well-acted movie. It has outstanding performances from Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, and (barely recognizable) Guy Pearce.
Archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) have discovered ancient pictograms all over the world showing alien figures pointing to a star pattern, a pattern recognizable in a distant area of space, possibly a map leading to the creators of the human race. With funding from the Weyland Corporation, they mount an expedition to that region, to seek out these beings, and maybe learn the origin of mankind itself. What could possibly go wrong?
Ridley Scott is still very much the great filmmaker we remember, able to keep you glued to your seat and biting your nails as the plot unfolds. The first half of the movie really lives up to your expectation, building suspense and then reaching a point where you really feel like it's about to take off into serious horror.
But that's exactly the moment where the movie spins off its axis, with disparate plot threads falling off into unexplored plot holes, and the thrill ride screeching to a halt so the movie can pontificate.
The problem is that the film, as written by John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, although a chronological prequel to Alien, doesn't feel like a sci-fi movie, rarely feels like a horror movie, and is dissimilar in tone to Alien in almost every way. Scott, Spaihts, and Lindelof have given us mythology where once we had menace, gods in place of our favorite monsters, and turned one of our favorite thrill rides into a somber meditation on mortality, sacrifice, and selfishness. The movie suffers from a slow pace and an anti-climactic finish, and lets its desire to retell Greek myth overwhelm its natural function to make a cool as hell movie. It's good, but it's not as good as you want it to be.
But there's always hope. Hell, maybe James Cameron will direct Prometheus 2.
Game over, man. Game over. (See more of my reviews at clarketaculargeek.wordpress.com)