Ridley Scott Returns To Familiar ALIEN Territory

Rating: 8/10 (14 June 2012)

The 1979 film ALIEN took the modern-day lead in alien invasion and/or possession movies with some fairly gruesome special effects (remember the alien bursting through John Hurt's chest?), and making it so that any film of this sort more or less has had to utilize those same methods from that point on, with the most noticeable example being John Carpenter's 1982 opus THE THING. And now, in a new century, thirty-three years after that huge box office achievement, ALIEN (and BLADE RUNNER) director Ridley Scott has returned to this theme with PROMETHEUS.
Named for the Greek god who stole and gave the gift of fire and was cast out from Mount Olympus, the spaceship "Prometheus" and her crew are venturing through the galaxy to find the origins of the strange lights in the sky that ancient Earth civilizations, including the Egyptians and the Mayans, reputedly saw some thirty-five thousand years before—an idea floated around by theologian Erich von Daniken. When they arrive on a planet hundreds of billions of miles from Earth, they find evidence of this in a huge hollow mountain on the surface. Unfortunately, what they also find is that this alien presence is extremely hostile; and one by one, they die very horrible deaths. In between, they come to realize that these aliens are actually intent on hitching a ride on "Prometheus" and coming to Earth in order to either destroy or possess every living human being there. In doing so, they have to sacrifice themselves, often in the most horrible ways; and in the end, one of the female crew members (Noomi Repace), who had initially been infected and impregnated by one of the alien beings, manages to escape the planet in one of the various spaceships left over from the alien race. But there's something she doesn't know yet....
In essence, Scott is going back to the basic premise of ALIEN, so much to the point that it could be argued that basically PROMETHEUS itself is a basic reworking of the 1979 blockbuster, with a "Chariots Of The Gods" plot thrown in, and some up-to-date and extremely graphic alien special effects. The crew of "Prometheus" here is far less well known than the cast that comprised the crew of "Nostromo" in ALIEN; only Charlize Theron, who had won an Oscar in 2003 for portraying a serial killer in MONSTER, and Guy Pearce, who was in the 1997 film noir hit L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, have any real "name value." As a result, whatever success PROMETHEUS can claim, though it is substantial, must rest on how well the entire cast, the gruesome plot, and Scott's direction hold up under very close scrutiny.
And given how many dozens of alien invasion movies there have been since he made ALIEN, one wouldn't understand what more Scott could do to make PROMETHEUS really stand out. And in truth, he really doesn't. But the one thing he does different from most alien invasion films is that he is given a good plot outline from Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof (based on unused elements from the original Dan O'Bannon/Ronald Shusett script for ALIEN), a good cast, and credible production values, the kind that somehow seem to fly out the window in most blockbuster films because of the need to concentrate on spectacle. Therefore, despite some imperfections and a lot of gruesomeness, PROMETHEUS succeeds better than most others of its kind today.