Now that the dust has settled...

Rating: 6/10 (27 June 2012)

A titan roams across a primitive Earth, and dies. Millennia later, a human expedition travels to a distant star to make contact with the race that might have engineered it.
After promising answers to the unsolved mysteries of the Alien saga, and creating historic hype with one of the cleverest viral ad campaigns of all time, Ridley Scott's Prometheus arrived on the world's screens to somewhat mild disappointment. Some will say this was inevitable, and surely the film promised enough that it would be worth seeing whatever its flaws. To most eager fans - and I am one - the greatest mystery was: how close would Prometheus be to Alien?
The reason Prometheus was at least moderately financially successful despite its rating, is the same for which many viewers were frustrated: at its core lie many very promising ideas, and in good part, the execution is excellent. The actors do not disappoint, with Fassbender, somewhat unsurprisingly, a true delight. The 3D is immersive, in fact the film is often a true visual splendor, and, this being a Ridley Scott film, the design is impressive, although....
And here is the film's failing. Ridley Scott is a great visualist, but he is not an ideas man, and he does not operate in a vacuum. Whoever designed Prometheus often did a commendable job, but never touches the lofty, terrifying heights of Mobius and Giger. In fact, the film is at its best when it distances itself from the Alien saga as a whole, which is why David's subplot - refreshingly different from Ash or Bishop's - and the engineers' inner workings are its best elements, and why scenes that stray too close to Alien feel flat by comparison, particularly the unnecessary epilogue, without which the film would deserve up to two extra stars.
Perhaps the biggest conceptual problem with Prometheus is its relative demystification of the Gods, a foundation for the film's theme: so much emphasis is placed from the get-go on David's relation to humans possibly echoing their relation to their makers that they lose some of their menace. A threat of Lovecraftian potential is in great part deflated by this, and rather than unspeakable and incomprehensible horror, the creators mostly frighten by their scale, their basic motives almost too easily comprehensible by the human characters. This as the risk of turning mysteries into plot holes.
All in all, how much you enjoy Prometheus will depend on how familiar you are with the Alien saga, in an inversely proportional way. Since I place at least the first two on a cinematic pedestal with at least high aesthetic regard for the third and fourth installments, that should be a bad sign. In fact I appreciated some of its braver aspects. The best we can now hope is that Prometheus has the courage to branch off into not "Alien 0", but "Prometheus 2" and really becomes its own beast. That it finally keeps its promises.