This is always hard, being honest about a movie I’ve been looking forward to for so long and then being let down. Prometheus is another case where the hype out measures the film. When a film leaves a lot to be desired it can be frustrating, especially in the unique case of Prometheus. Before you continue reading, see Prometheus. It’s great, but be warned it is very flawed and the hype oversells it. As I say with almost every Ridley Scott film, I have a feeling there may be a directors cut on the way.

Billed as a “quasi prequel” to Ridley Scott’s Alien, Prometheus starts as the journey to a large moon to explore a star system that has appeared in markings of ancient civilizations spanning thousands of years and vast distances. Egyptians, mayans, and even early settlers at the Isle of Skye have marked the same system of stars in their cave markings and carvings. A team, funded by the Weyland corporation and led by the excavators who discovered the markings, is sent out to find what some believe would be the origin of life on Earth and “meet our makers.” One of the crew, David, is an android and knows his makers well. If an android can register emotions than David has certainly learned to harbour resentment and disappointment. He is largely taken for granted as a machine, something meant to serve the conveniences of humans, his own makers. When the crew arrives on the moon and begins exploring, the things they find are horrific but not exactly explained in any way.

That’s the major problem with Prometheus. There is a lot going on, and there is a lot of information for us to interpret, but a lot of questions are raised and a lot of character’s motivations are uncertain. The script is very confused to start with. With the story that Scott, Damon Lidelof and John Spaihts have chosen to tell, there were many scenes that were left lacking. Lindelof, still working in Lost mode, is more content to raise questions than deliver answers. This is good for a television show where there is more time to develop a world and make it mysterious, but in a film the payoff has to match the mysteries. Lindelof is relying on the Alien franchise to help answer some of those questions, but it doesn’t, because many of the things that Prometheus clears up, i.e. the motivation for the Weyland Corporation’s continued insistence of capturing the Xenomorph, aren’t as satisfying as he thinks they are because of the bigger questions he raises by not clearing up the motivation of the characters. We’re left asking why someone did this or that, because it feels mostly inconsistent.

The script is not the only thing that hurts Prometheus, some of the special effects take us out of the film. I’m not a fan of CGI because almost always it takes me out of the film, no matter how “state of the art” it is, we go to movies to be immersed in a world and story, and CGI just doesn’t look real and it rarely can do the job better than practical effects. The most glaring special effect is a certain piece of casting which for sake of spoilers I won’t mention, but the use of makeup makes the casting of one character completely unnecessary and whats worse is it lessens the dark tone of the film because it looks so comical.

I don’t know how much of this I want to detract from Prometheus. It’s ambitions are high but I think Scott listens too much to studio execs. I know he can make the movie I wanted to see. His ventures with Fox always end up like this, Kingdom of Heaven was so heavily cut that the film we saw in theatres was nothing compared to the Directors Cut which restored character beats and narrative cohesion, not blood and guts. Scott is a smart filmmaker and he realizes the business angle. He’s only making movies because he works with studios, he is a negotiator. I think the studio meddled a lot with Prometheus, because it really only feels like half of the movie we were supposed to get. I want to say I liked it more, but there wasn’t more to like. This studio meddling is responsible, I think, for the last shots of the film. It’s poorly paced but has the largest implications for the themes of Prometheus and the Alien franchise.

In the end, there is a lot to think about with Prometheus. It’s themes and narrative save it, because the story itself is great and with better execution it would have been a masterpiece. Thematically complex and in many parts visually stunning (when there are no special effects to hinder it) Prometheus is about the use and misuse of the power of creation, and the film handles that with proper care, but juggling that with special effects gone awry, studio interference and a running time that could have been padded out a little to secure a stronger script, something got dropped along the way.