Majorly flawed, with some very poorly written characters, but overall a very entertaining, genuinely frightening sci-fi/horror flick

Rating: 8/10 (11 June 2012)

Despite a number of glaring flaws, Ridley Scott's long-awaited return to science fiction is excellent. A sort of prequel to Alien, this film stars Noomi Rapace as an archaeologist who has discovered a number of star maps in cave paintings. She convinces a corporation (run by a dying Guy Pearce in old man makeup) to bankroll a space voyage in search of those who she believes engineered the human race. For the record, one of the major flaws is that there is absolutely no reason for her or her boyfriend, Logan Marshall-Green, to think this, and they give Rapace an ill-defined religious background that just never makes any sense. On this expedition, among many, are Charlize Theron, the representative of the corporation, Idris Elba, the captain and Michael Fassbender as the android who, much like Ian Holm in the original Alien, may have a hidden agenda. The expedition discovers a pyramid and they go exploring. The civilization is the one who built the ship where the crew of the Nostromo discovered the aliens, but this film is not about xenomorphs. While the structure of the film is much like Alien - after all, it's a sci-fi horror film - it mostly feels like its own thing. The biggest problem is that it introduces a lot of characters and concepts and has to deal with them all really quickly. I don't know that I'd say that I would want to see a cut that ran an hour longer, but they really needed it to ratchet up the suspense and make the character motivations make more sense. The one thing I really do like about the film is that so much of it remains delightfully unexplained - I know it's cliché to bring up Lovecraft when discussing a horror film, but the horrors of Prometheus really do feel Lovecraftian - they are often unseen, the way things morph into other things. We never really understand the motivations of the race they discover, just that whatever they were doing did not work out too well for them. It's all really creepy. Of course, the script was co-written by Damon Lindelof, one of the major artists behind Lost, so that sense of unsolvable mystery is definitely in his wheelhouse. The actors are all fine, though this is definitely more of a showpiece for production designers and special effects workers. Technically, it's about perfect. Between this and The Avengers, this has already been a really good summer for movies (okay, we'll just forget that Battleship exists - it'll be forgotten anyway). I saw it in 3D which, as always, was worthless. I can't keep letting people talk me into that!