Launches, sputters, crashes

Rating: 4/10 (9 February 2013)

If you've enjoyed any of the ALIEN films, be prepared to find PROMETHEUS deeply depressing. Its plot is silly, its characters are unengaging and its suspense is missing. What went wrong? We have a skillful director, a great cast, and wonderful special effects—all undone by a clumsy script. It's as if the credited screenwriters, Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, wrote two separate screenplays and Ridley Scott just stir-fried them together, occasionally mixing in a page or two from a script of his own. The result is a little bit of sci-fi spectacle, a little bit of action- buddy movie, a little bit of medical horror, and even a little bit of the laziest device in sci-fi movies, a character whom alien infection turns into an unstoppable zombie killer.
Part of making a believable imaginary world is that the world of the film must at least be consistent with its premises. When the film's scientists, searching for clues that terrestrial life emerged on an alien planet, find the air breathable and TAKE OFF THEIR HELMETS, only to spend the next hour or so worrying about contagion, it seems likely that the production was filmed from a scattering of pages. Similarly, although the premise of the film is that Prometheus has taken more than two years to travel at great speed to a distant star, at one point its commander Charlize Theron (who, no doubt furious at finding herself in this turkey, plays her ice queen role to grim perfection) complains that they are "half a billion" miles from Earth—meaning that they are only out around Jupiter somewhere.
Scientific illiteracy, irrelevant back stories, uncertain motivation (like the geologist who, when they find an ancient alien skeleton, turns around and heads back to the ship, because skeletons aren't geology)-- it's as if they had given Ed Wood 150 million dollars to make his dream film. Proof of the prevailing contention that all the good screen writing is on television these days, ALIEN fans would be better off watching ALIEN RESURRECTION—now THERE'S a fun movie—or even the much-maligned ALIEN VS PREDATOR which at least, unlike PROMETHEUS, is professionally- done every inch of the way.