The meaningless search for a meaning gets lost

Rating: 4/10 (4 June 2012)

From the outset, the promise of Prometheus managed to hit home every Alien fantasy I had concocted. It seemingly did everything right: more back story with a maintained sense of mystery, wonder discovery and horror. The images of the head started emerging early in the marketing campaign. And my god, the head! It was a genuine feeling of eerie mystery with a promise of demise and death. The backdrop for the film further fuelled this notion: a group of optimistic scientist naively and cockeyed searching for the beginning of human life; the eternal search for a meaning. Noomi Rapace as a religious scientist, a believer, further set up the inevitable downfall of this optimism for one of grim and brutal nature. Since after all, a running theme throughout the Alien-films is fire and nature; the animal within, the eternal womb which bursts us open from inside. Giger's creatures and art are so effective precisely because it taps into our sexual libido with a metallic horror that makes us aware of this horror inside us; we are made aware of the horror of ourselves. With the promise of Prometheus, I was assuredly awaiting the crushing of religion, an investigation into the meaninglessness of a search for a primordial meaning of life. Terrence Malick went much further and more successfully in this direction than Ridley Scott ever manages with Prometheus.
Why is the film called Prometheus? Again, it is all part of managing to tap into our every desire for the Alien-universe; our fantasy, at least, for what this universe is and holds in store, just waiting for that right film to materialise it. As mentioned, part of the appeal of the Alien films is its theme of the breaking of the man - nature dualism through the use of fire and pregnancy (again why Giger's art is so unnerving; it is a rather horror induced pregnancy, one of our most primordial horrors). In Greek mythology, Prometheus challenged the omnipotence of the gods by stealing fire from Zeus to give to the humans. Subsequently he was punished by said god for an eternity of suffering. The promise of the film Prometheus tapped into the exploration of man vs. nature by now also evoking religion and belief, forming instead a tripartite division of man, nature and God (as to which numbers one should assign within this division is left open for discussion). The Greek mythology of Prometheus is seemingly mirrored by the film. The spaceship, on which the team of scientists set out to explore the origin of a star constellation, is dubbed Prometheus, and we as an audience are seemingly in for quite a ride: the promise of punishment, the noble goal crushed in front of our eyes. But by whom? Zeus is nowhere to be found in the film. Instead it is nature which punishes us, and thus Prometheus is the antithesis of James Cameron's Avatar. The number seven is nowhere to be seen, neither as punisher nor saviour. This is the brilliance of the promise of Prometheus, and why it managed to receive such high expectations. The problem, as always, is that it had to be into an actual film completely caught up in economic forces which, however uninteresting such an analysis might be, made sure the outcome of yet another Avatar.
The film is never made into the promise it set up. The problem isn't "the story". The problem is the execution of the story, both in script and direction. It is rather the build up around the story that never manages to draw the audience into the world it has created (visually stunning though it might be). Sometimes it does, and those times are rather special and deserve extremely high praise. But most of the time the audience is kept at a distance, never drawn into the intrigues of the crew of the ship, never invested in the stakes, and are never challenged in their belief. Because whichever way you come into the film, as a religious person or an atheist, the film never makes you question anything at all. Instead it is left to pandering to the audience by "satisfying" both sides. Some dumb dialogue mentions it here or there, but it is just there for the sake of being there, never to drive the story forward or bring the audience into the film by identifying with the characters. It also fails to explore the themes of fire and nature and the meaninglessness of a search for meaning, and as such merits nothing to be titled Prometheus. Imagine the film Alien being called Nostromo; it would tell us absolutely nothing of the film, and the title Prometheus tells us absolutely nothing of the film within the promise so successfully set up by the title itself.
The android David (Fassbender's performance is show stopping, then again it is an eccentric character role that easily pops out) occasionally have dialogue with the humans about the meaningless search for a meaning of life, but the dialogue never does anything other than pander to the promise and expectation of the film; it is there because it has to be, never to aid the story by narrative.
There is no need to go further into the details of the stupidity of the script, suffice to say that the audience never get invested in the characters, the stakes at hand or the themes promised to be explored. One criticism of Prometheus has been that it's not scary, and that it is true (again, the disconnection between the film and the audience). However, the film never sets out to be scary, and we have to take that for what it is. What it manages quite brilliantly however to achieve is a profound sense of weirdness. The mystery and the world, through its visuals, is unnervingly and excitingly weird. This is one good redeeming quality that is quite unique, in what otherwise amounts to an uninteresting and ultimately bad film.