Prometheus

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2012)

This film was advertised like it would be a blockbuster, and like a prequel to Alien, which would make sense as Sir Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator) was directing. Basically, millions of years ago a race of humanoid alien creatures inhabit the earth; one drinks a dark liquid that disintegrates his body, his remains scatter down a waterfall, his DNA is broken, and the building blocks of life are spread. Then forward to 2089, scientist couple Elizabeth Shaw (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) find ancient cave drawings in Scotland with a star map from an unknown culture, they believe it is the key to discovering how life on earth was created, they call it an "invitation". Elderly CEO of the Weyland Corporation, supposed dead Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), has funded a mission for a crew of scientists to board the vessel Prometheus and travel the three-four year journey to the calculated location of these findings, the distant moon LV-223, where they hope to meet the race they call the Engineers. The crew includes Shaw, Holloway, android David (Shame's Michael Fassbender), ship captain Janek (Luther's Idris Elba) and mission director Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), and when they arrive by the year 2093 they land successfully and begin to explore. Finding a large artificial structure, like a pyramid, they enter in the spacesuits, finding many stone cylinders on the ground, a large humanoid head monolithic statue, and the corpse of one of the humanoid alien creatures, and in the process of this exploration David takes one of the cylinders for his own means. When a storm approaches the crew are forced to head back for Prometheus, but Fifield (Creep's Sean Harris) and Millburn (Rafe Spall) are left stranded inside the temple, while the scientists match the Engineer corpse's DNA with human DNA, so they have found it predates human life. Meanwhile David opens the stone cylinder he collected, it contains a strange dark liquid, and he uses a small sample of it to put into Holloway's drink, and shortly after he has drunk it he and Shaw have sexual intercourse, while the trapped scientists in the structure, without the other knowing, are attacked by a snake-like alien creature. When the crew return they find the corpses of the men they left behind, while David in a further part of pyramid discovers a control room with a surviving Engineer pod, and he also activates a digital star map highlighting the earth, and of course the effects of the dark liquid infect Holloway's body. Vickers refuses to let the infected Holloway back into Prometheus, and he is rapidly disintegrating, so with his wishes he wants to burned by a flamethrower to death, and this is done to Shaw's devastation, but she gets a shock of her own when David carries out a test and she appears to be months pregnant, despite only having intercourse a few hours ago, it is an alien offspring. She demands an abortion to remove the creature inside her, and after the android refuses to help her she uses the special medical machine herself to take it out herself, and despite the pain she does manage to remove the squid-like creature from her stomach. It is confirmed that Weyland is still alive, and he explains that he is hoping that the discovery of the Engineers could help end his ageing process and prevent him from dying, and then Fifield returns to the ship, having been mutated, and tries to attack the crew, before being killed. Janek speculates the structure was an Engineer military base and they lost control after something went wrong with the biological weapon, the dark liquid, and he determines that the control room is a spaceship, and sure enough the crew wake up the humanoid preserved inside the pod. When David tries to communicate with it, the humanoid decapitates the android, and kills Weyland and the other crew members there, Shaw manages to escape just as the creature activates the spaceship to take off, but it must be stopped from leaving the moon or it will take the biological liquid weapon to earth. After being convinced to stop it, Janek and the remaining crew sacrifice themselves and crash Prometheus into the alien ship, and when it crashes back to the ground Vickers is crushed attempting to escape. Shaw appears to be the last remaining crew member, but the alien that she aborted from her body has grown in proportion and is still inside the ship, and the head of still activated David warns her that the humanoid astronaut survived the crash and is trying to kill her, but the giant squid-like alien stops him. The end sees Shaw and the head of David leave in another of the alien spaceships as they plan to travel the Engineer home planet in an effort to discover why the race want to destroy humanity, and we also see the humanoid Engineer have a large alien creature burst from his chest. Also starring Emun Elliott as Chance, Moon's Benedict Wong as Ravel and Kate Dickie as Ford. Rapace has similarities to Ellen Ripley, but she brings her own style to the role, Fassbender is great as the apathetic but very likable robot, Pearce is almost unrecognisable as the crazy old man, and Theron in her moments is pretty bitchy. You can see why this is considered, probably confirmed, as a prequel to the Alien saga, because it sets up many of the concepts to come, such as the androids, the chest burster moments, the alien pods (cylinders here) and ultimately the terror is space concept, obviously it may not be as scary as the original Alien, and you could joke that this is an insight into the Scientology "religion", LOL, but it is a clever enough, engaging and watchable science-fiction horror. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and it was nominated the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects. Very good!