Prometheus has landed with a plop

Rating: 3/10 (2 June 2012)

I just came out of the cinema and then watched the trailer for Prometheus for the first time and I can safely say that you might as well stick with the trailer. It's the entire film in fast-forward.
This is an origin story in the most fundamental sense, claiming to offer profound insight regarding our distant beginnings. But rather than raising questions about the meaning of existence and the notion of creation, you'll be asking some searching questions about the quality of what you just saw.
The Alien universe has been hijacked in recent years by twaddle like AVP and its execrable sequel. The seams began to fray back in 1993 when a rookie David Fincher was hired to direct a script that came across like a clone gone wrong, and it was followed by the woefully misguided comedy-horror Alien Resurrection. So upon hearing that Ridley Scott, director of the original Alien – a B-movie elevated to art – was planning a return to the series, I was genuinely excited.
The result is a narrative disaster with an embarrassing script, which is further undone by some irrational casting choices.
The Prometheus mission must represent the most reckless, impatient, unprofessional scientific expedition in the history of mankind. Biologists prod and poke with gay abandon while geologists go wandering like they're kids exploring an abandoned farmhouse. Why not perform a meteorological survey before leaving the ship, so that you aren't cut off by a biblical storm? Why are you getting blazing drunk just after making the most important discovery in the history of mankind? Why are you, captain, allowing this crew-member, pronounced dead moments earlier, back onto the ship without the merest whisper of quarantine? All sense of wonder or intrigue is stolen by baffling motivations, incongruent characterisation, and infuriating plot holes.
Ridley Scott, even at his worst, usually makes movies that are undeniably his own, with distinctive production design. But Prometheus, sadly, could have been envisioned by any talented hack. It looks more like Brian De Palma's garish flop Mission to Mars; a far cry from the artistic gleam of JJ Abrams' Star Trek or the convincing grubbiness of Duncan Jones' Moon. Perhaps it's the over-reliance on CG, or the insistence upon 3D, but Prometheus is tainted by that uniquely modern sheen: a blandly precise computerised look, like an uncanny aura that surrounds all the human beings and steals any sense of immersion, locking us out of the frame.
For some reason Noomi Rapace was chosen to play the part of Englishwoman Elizabeth Shaw, and while she's fine for the physical stuff (including a brilliantly conceived operation-from-hell) she delivers her lines poorly. Charlize Theron is eminently watchable but like many of the characters she often acts in a somewhat contradictory manner. Guy Pearce was presumably chosen for the part of the extremely elderly Weyland for the sake of his viral promo – he simply looks like a young man in make- up. Michael Fassbender, as the robot David, is the star of the show, building on the sinister twitches that made Bishop (Lance Henrikson) and Ash (Ian Holm) so subtly menacing in the first two films.
I'm struggling to find positives. There is the occasional effective set- piece, such as the storm sequence, some icky first encounters, and the aforementioned invasive operation, but the characters are so inconsistent and/or underdeveloped that all sense of threat is undone by audience indifference.
Now I'm going to watch Alien and Aliens, back-to-back, and then perhaps, grudgingly, Alien 3. I'm starting to think that's all we ever needed.