unsuccessful genetic experiment

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2016)

HERE BE SPOILERS
Well, it's all a bit of a muddle. Grand in scope and sometimes beautiful, but it feels like far too much got thrown into the mix and none of it really works. Oddly enough, it's as if Ridley Scott of all people lacked confidence in the different elements. The problem isn't that he's repackaging things like 2001 and Contact and of course Alien, but that the recipe works less well than any of the ingredients. (Or, to adopt the film's own theme, the inheritor is less successful than the ancestors.)
There are too many characters to care about any of them. There are too many half-stories for any of them really to grip. There are too many ideas for any of them to make clear sense. Charlize Theron and Idris Elba enjoying a bit of casual whoopee would be ideal if you wanted to create the most glorious line of humans ever, but in Prometheus there's a sense that the big names are cameos rather than characters. I know Scott wasn't trying to remake Alien, but its focus on fewer characters and their affections and antipathies increased the claustrophobia and concern when they started getting slaughtered. Alien made space-travel seem mundane, made spacemen into long-distance truckers, and the literally alien horror was starker against this humanness. Prometheus's hi-tech crew are dehumanized themselves.
There's an argument that all films, of any period and genre, should feature Theron in a catsuit. There's clearly an argument at the moment that all films should feature Michael Fassbender. Both are brilliant in this – Fassbender as Peter O'Toole/android as Lawrence of Arabia/O'Toole as perfect man is a film in itself – but I'm not sure there's enough room for them. Crucially, the half-developed theme of Fassbender the android as the old man's attempt to create a more perfect Theron (if you've not yet seen the film, don't even begin to try to unpick that line) is stifled by all the other half-developments, including the wider stuff around the old man and heredity, Noomi Rapace and her father and her incubation of the alien, and so on.
(What happens if we tidy up a bit? Thin out the crowd, straighten the plot, get rid of some of the superfluous fathers, polish one or two central ideas? Say there's only one father, with two daughters: a natural one (Rapace) who disappoints him despite her efforts at science, and the android (Theron) he creates in the attempt at perfection and obedience. There's a much clearer tension at the heart of the story, between emotional questing human Rapace and cold rational perfect Theron. Lose Rapace's one-night-stand, along with some of the other cannon-fodder; instead have Theron impregnate her with the alien, partly because it's how to prolong the experiment and partly out of spite at the one capacity that human Rapace has that android Theron doesn't – reproduction. Madness, of course, because we'd never dream of losing Fassbender and his O'Toole. But the whole story would be tighter and stronger, and more clearly reflect the underlying theme of how the ancestors tried to shape and instrumentalize their descendants.)
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