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Prometheus Blu-ray Review

Ridley Scott's flawed-but-magnificent return to sci-fi.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, October 8, 2012



The sacrificial Engineer...

In response to mankind's three most pressing questionsWhere do we come from? What is our purpose? What happens to us when we die?the empirically minded suggest that we probably arose through abiogenesis out of a primordial ooze, that we exist to propagate our genetic code, and that death simply returns our atoms to be endlessly recycled. The faithful, meanwhile, take comfort in a supernatural creator who has a plan for their lives, culminating in an eternal heavenly reward. But what if neither camp is quite right? What if we werehere, not by a god, but by a race of corporal beings sufficiently technologically advanced to traverse the universe, seeding the cosmos with life of their own design?This is no new idea, but it first gained cultural traction with the 1968 publication of Erick von Däniken's bestseller,, a work of staggering psuedoscience and blatant anthropological chicanery. If completely bonkers and without any actual evidence, the book still makes for an imaginative flight of fancy, and its key, "ancient astronauts" concept serves well as the basis for, director Ridley Scott's magnificent-but-flawed return to the sci-fi genre. Despite what you may have heard, the filma prequel to Scott's 1979 classic,, although not necessarily aone. It's better to think ofas a semi- distant relative, twice or thrice-removed. The two movies aren't immediately narratively linked, but they share much of the same DNA.Andis all about DNA. The pre-title sequence takes us over a barren, lifeless landscape, and up to the top of a turbid glacial waterfall, where an alien protohumanwho looks like a buff, living marble reproduction of Michelangelo'sstands by the shore, holding a cup of black goo. This is an "Engineer," as they'll later come to be called, and he's here to seed what we can presume to be Earth. He downs the viscous caviar-like substance in one gulp, and immediately his cellular structure begins to break down, causing his skin to rupture, his bones to snap grotesquely, and his body to fall into the water, where it dissolves, spreading genetic material downstream. Et voilà! Life. Eons later, in 2089, we cut to a pair of anthropologist loversthe believer Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the atheistic Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green)as they find a 30,000-year-old cave painting on the Isle of Skye, depicting an Engineer-ish-looking figure pointing to a cluster of stars, an image that's been found in numerous archeological sites around the globe. Shaw believes it's "an invitation," and soon enough they're aboard the spacecraft Prometheusfunded by the supposedly dead industrialist Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce)zipping toward the distant moon LV-223, hoping to find answers to humanity's deepest existential questions.Unlike the Nostromo,'s dingy blue-collar mining craft, Prometheusnamed after the mythological fire-stealeris a state-of-the-art research vessel, carrying scientists from pertinent fields, including spectacled biologist Millburn (Raff Spall) and punk geologist Fifield (Sean Harris), along with a substantial crew of ancillary characters. The ship is captained by former military man Janek (Idris Elba), but the real leader of the expedition is Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a stone-cold Weyland Corp. employee who makes it clear to everyoneShaw and Holloway especially that they report to her. Also on board is David (Michael Fassbender), an 8th generation android who's obsessed withhe even dyes his hair to look like Peter O'Tooleand ironically becomes the very soul of the film, a grown-up Pinocchio who can never become a real boy. Not to demean the rest of the cast, who are generally decent-to-excellent, but Theron and Fassbender are the two acting powerhouses here, the former all icy secrecy and the latter effete and guardedthink a more refined C3PO crossed with Hal fromIn a way,is a more pop, "genre"-oriented version of, both concerned with evolution, artificial intelligence, and the notion that somethinggave the fire of human consciousness its first spark. Where Kubrick's film is a slow-burning intellectual exercise,becomes a tension-ratcheting affair where the big ideas are couched in stylish big-budget sci-fi/horror action. When the ship lands on LV-223, which isthe moon from, the crew quicklytoo quickly to believe actuallyspots and enters an enormous pyramid complex with reniform subterranean tunnels and a chamber that houses a monolithic human head and dozens of cylinders filled with that DNA-altering black goop. Nearby are the piled up bodies of several long-dead "engineers," who were obviously trying to escapebut didn't make it. Without getting into spoilers, it's safe to assume to that one or more team members become "infected," and you can also expect to see some aggressive lifeforms that have never before appeared in thefranchise, although they share the phallic/yonic, H.R. Giger-inspired qualities of the facehuggers and xenomorphs of yore. There are grotesque mutations, frantic firefightsone involving an actual flamethrowerand even an emergency alien fetus c-section, the film's most white-knuckle, squirm-inducing scene.Does the original xenomorph monster show up? Well, sort of. Let's just say it has a fan-appeasing cameo. Written by Jon Spaihts and's Damon Lindelof,expands the universe of the series and unravels a few mysteries from the first filmyes, the "space jockey" in that pilot's chair was an "engineer"but it also raises a host of other questions that it doesn't have time to answer. (Why do the engineers suddenly want us dead? Why leave us a star map guiding us to what's essentially a biological weapons depot? If the engineers created us, who created?) With a sequel already in the works, I don't consider the lingering ambiguities a problemand I love the post-viewing discussions that naturally arise because of thembutdoes have other shortcomings. There are small potential plot holes, and a few scenes that feel forcedinserted for narrative convenience or just to ramp up the actionbut the most noticeable issue is that characters sometimes simply don't act in believably human ways. They contradict earlier established behaviors. They make choices only a soon-to-be-slaughtered teenager in a slasher movie would make. They don't express nearly enough awe at the fact that they're not just on another world, but making discoveries that dramatically alter humanity's assumptions about its own origins.probably could've used another script revision to tighten everything up, but the pacing flows welleven when some of the events don't exactly make sense in retrospectand there's no doubt that the film is an, the kind of grand-scale, high-concept science fiction that's unfortunately rare. (Although, betweenandthis year, sci-fi seems to be making a comeback.) I don't really get the small but rabid cult of haters that's sprung up to deride the film, but I blame the internet hype machine, which skews expectations impossibly. If you're anticipating the be-all-end-allmovie, with mind-melting twists and non-stop horror, then yes,might be a bit of a let-down. But this prequel really is its own entity and deserves to be seen and evaluated on its own terms. Personally, I think it's a terrific reboot of a franchise that had grown ridiculous long before the dopeymovies. Ridley Scott directs the hell out of this thing, the scope is immensecheck out those real, predominately non-CGI setsand call me a heretic, but damn if Michael Fassbender doesn't make a better android that Ian Holm or Lance Henriksen ever did. Onto the sequel, I say, and if Scott isn't going to do ithe's only listed as producer, and he'll probably be busy revisiting the world ofI nominate David Fincher, whosegot bungled by the studio, and who definitely deserves another shot at the series. Anyone second that motion?