Prometheus (2012)

*/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw It's time, probably long past time, to admit that Ridley Scott is nothing more or less than Tim Burton: a visual stylist at the mercy of others to offer his hatful of pretty pictures something like depth. If either one of them ever made a great film (and I'd argue that both have), thank the accident of the right source material and/or editor, not these directors, whose allegiance is to their own visual auteurism rather than any desire for a unified product. For Scott, the conversation essentially begins and ends for me with Alien, Blade Runner, and Black Hawk Down (for most, it's just the first two, with a political nod to Thelma & Louise)--genre films, all, and each about the complications of mendacity given over to lush, stylish excess: the gothic, biomechanical haunted house of Alien's Nostromo mining vehicle and its hapless band of blue-collar meatbags; the meticulously detailed Angelino diaspora of Blade Runner and its Raymond Chandler refugee; and Mark Bowden's Mogadishu, transformed in Black Hawk Down into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Again, there's that utility. Without it, Scott's films are impenetrable monuments to style, as smooth and affectless as a perfume advertisement--and the more you watch them, the less memorable that style becomes.

It makes sense that well into his dotage Scott would return to Alien (next up, a Blade Runner sequel), seeking to recapture whatever lightning there was in that particular bottle, but, alas, key collaborators like screenwriter Dan O'Bannon and cinematographer Derek Vanlint are dead--and whatever O'Bannon's replacement Damon Lindelof is, he's also the idiot who wrote a few seasons of "Lost" before foisting Cowboys & Aliens on audiences that just didn't deserve the punishment. Trusting Lindelof to shepherd an Alien prequel (no, it isn't; yes, it is; no, it isn't; okay, it sort of is) to fruition--to, more importantly, make something of Scott's exhausted panache--is the kind of miscalculation that results in unique disasters like Prometheus. Make no mistake, it takes a lot of money, energy, and anticipation to make a movie this bad. Without anticipation, after all, without a bedrock legacy of one of the finest science-fiction films of all time, there couldn't be this level of disappointment. Prometheus is a film as poorly-written, as badly misconceived, as Episode 1--their greatest common thread that they're products of creators with terminal weaknesses exposed in the gaudiest way possible on the grandest stage imaginable. I should say, too, before we continue, that for all its bad thinking, bad writing, and bad acting, Prometheus is worst of all really, truly boring.

Prometheus is that conversation about God you get suckered into with some moron. Its arguments begin and end with "I believe, so should you" and proceed into "yes there is, no there isn't," and by the end, the accidental (I think) conclusion is that Faith is good, God is an impassive observer if He indeed exists, and the bad guy is, ready? Evolution. It seems that ancient hieroglyphs on Earth point to a constellation of stars around which there is one moon--you know the one--capable of supporting Life. This doesn't explain why said moon, once our pilgrims arrive there, proves incapable of supporting life, but never mind, try to keep up. Prometheus at its heart is a 2001 knock-off, with its unearthing of ancient artifacts pointing to an invitation to exploration, its suggestion that human evolution is the product of alien intervention. But where 2001 correctly avoids trying to decipher the mind of a superior, alien intelligence (like a Christian god's, n'est-ce pas?), Prometheus rails against the question in circular, puerile dialogue that not only stops the film repeatedly in its tracks, but also supports the maxim that any film that namedrops God this much isn't going to have anything to say. If Prometheus begins a question in your mind about Faith and the mysterium tremens, then I hate to be probably the eighth person to already tell you this today, but you're a fucking idiot. Beginning as a ripper of 2001, Prometheus is by its end the gory remake no one wanted of 2010. We haven't come full circle from Scott to Scott, but instead witnessed the devolution--and we've been watching it for decades--of Scott into Peter Hyams.

The archaeologists (or paleoanthropologists, or hikers, or art critics, the fuck knows/cares?) are Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her boyfriend/partner (the fuck knows/cares?) Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green). For what it's worth, Marshall-Green is the spitting physical and spiritual image of Peter Facinelli, who played the same basic character with the same affliction in producer Walter Hill's studio-mutilated Supernova. Could Prometheus be, in part, Hill's underground attempt to cuckold his failed project on a director (Scott) who obviously doesn't really care what the material is so long as he can graft his pictures onto it? There's enough blame to go around. Shaw and Charlie, in the offscreen backstory we perhaps needed but are eventually grateful not to endure, get decrepit billionaire industrialist Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) to fund a space expedition to planet zero in search of God. God! Don't you get it? Don't you? It's God! God! God! Okay, pay attention.

Along for the ride is a ragtag band of ruffian space pirates, including the ones who're probably going to be dead first, geologist and ethnic colour Fifield (Sean Harris) and milquetoast biologist Millburn (Rafe Spall). I mention these guys because when they arrive on space moon delta, the geologist exhibits absolutely no interest in the indigenous geology and the biologist thinks it's a great idea to fuck with a space cobra. Their lack of curiosity is a perfect reflection of the film's own lack of subtlety and introspection. The reason Alien and Blade Runner work as larger conversations has everything to do with how deeply big questions are buried in its text; the first reason Prometheus fails is because, by bringing those Big Questions to the surface, it leaves giant empty graves in its text. (The second reason it fails is that no one in it ever behaves as though they could screw in a lightbulb.)

Mission android David (Michael Fassbender) watches Lawrence of Arabia on a loop, bleaches his hair, and is from the start the nefarious HAL 9000 programmed for no good. Why a robot modeling itself after the gay English Che Guevara is evil is up to you to decipher. Though we never get a fix on David as a sympathetic protagonist, it's around to provide the "functional equivalence" portion of the picture's nitwit thesis, the portion Alien and Blade Runner provide organically--the question being that at what point is there no real difference between man and his created things once those created things start thinking for themselves. David from the start acts like a suspicious little twat, having its feelings hurt when Charlie acts like a jerk (and, by the way, if you don't want to kill Charlie and Shaw yourself after a few minutes, you're the android), spending a lot of its time acting like Peter O'Toole while soliloquizing to its finger, and generally doing everything Ian Holm resisted doing in 1979. If David can feel feelings, it brings up another Episode I complaint in that the technology in Prometheus is far, far superior to the technology of Alien. Consider the surgical iron-lung that can perform any desired procedure with its robot arms (although it can't tell the difference between a male and a female). This technology also exists in a timeline where it's apparently still possible for a woman to be infertile, which comes up, lamentably and without any real provocation, in a scene where Shaw--feminists, take note--gets hysterical only to be fucked into serenity by a genetically-altered Charlie. There, there, let me calm you with my penis. I mention all of this because there will come a moment where Shaw (and this is not much of a spoiler, but, hey, spoiler alert) becomes pregnant with something and climbs into the medi-pod to have it removed in the best girl-attacked-by-lasers scene since Michael York faced off against the plastic-surgery bot in Logan's Run.

It's a neat sequence if you ever wondered what a Caesarean section looks like, gonzo POV-style--even neater when you pause a moment to remember that the two crewmembers Shaw overcomes a few minutes earlier have, for no particular reason, stopped pursuing her for the length of time it takes her to endure the entire procedure. As far as stupid goes, Prometheus is an equal-opportunity offender. Throughout, Shaw talks about God and her faith--about how they're out there in the middle of nowhere to "talk to" the things that, millennia previous, during the prologue, "seeded" the oceans of the Earth with their own DNA for their own obscure purposes. When it turns out they're dead, their fate revealed obliquely in a ridiculous holographic effect (and fans of Alien, take note that these alien progenitors are the same species as the "space jockey" the Nostromo's crew discovers in the first film), Charlie whines about how he really wanted to chat with them, which is probably not what whatever his kind of scientist is is likely to whine.

Anyway, Shaw takes a mummified alien head off the alien bunker and sort of reanimates it long enough for it to explode, raising the obvious question of what it is that our heroes have found on galactic rock 222002. Well, it's a weapon, stupid--a head-popping one. It's probably a biological one as well, because it's black goop stored in metal canisters, and the way it works is that a scientist or some other imbecile fucks around with it until it explodes in their eyes and, um, evolves them or impregnates them or kills them or does something that triggers a lot of 3-D special effects. You're in trouble when a viral YouTube video of a hillbilly killing himself by doing something stupid to an animal is your central plot point.

Did I mention ice princess Vickers (Charlize Theron) and irie Capt. Janek (Idris Elba)? No? Never mind. Ignore, too, the senseless bromance at the end involving a couple of other negligible and fast-forgotten characters. At any rate, Weyland and his agent, David, want to collect samples of the weapon, because that's what they always want to do in this series of movies, either by bringing back one of the canisters or, even better (how could this go wrong?), by impregnating the girl hero--because, in this iteration, one of David's special android powers is knowing when Charlie is going to want to fuck his slow-thinking Swedish girlfriend. But wait: In addition to stealing their how-could-they-have-known-about-it goop, they also want to talk to the alien primogenitors, because...um...God. It's God! God! At the end (but not at the end enough), David asks Shaw if despite the shit that went down she still believes, and Shaw affirms that she does while clarifying that the reason she does and David doesn't is because David isn't a human being. Slam! Oh no she di'nt!

The essence of humanity, see, is apparently its unflagging ability and innate desire to Believe in a Sky Wizard and His Zombie Son, thus setting us apart from toasters and gibbons and Muslims and stuff that doesn't believe in all that. Prometheus also sets up the sequel where Shaw and her Basket Case sidekick confront the alien primogenitors with more and bigger questions about God and Creation and why our GOD would want to create something He would subsequently want to destroy. The last line of the film, which I'll resist spoiling for you, is the hoariest, most irritating last line in the storied and monstrously-unimaginative history of such things. In voiceover, even! Let's leave it with Faith is good; God isn't talking; and Evolution is a biological weapon that is an affront to God. Promethean fire in the Alien franchise, if you want to make a fine point of it, is the crucible in which we burn and the explosions from within--the visual representation of the devouring of our demigod's liver in a lonesome crag of the Caucasus. So, does this mean that only the most mindless and unquestioning of the devout will enjoy Prometheus? That Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" was a predictor of the audience for this piece of crap? That's between you and your god.

Comments

[Pol Pot Plant]

Just saw this movie on Blu-Ray. Sometimes I find Walter C's reviews can be a tad self indulgent... but as an 'Alien' fanboy since seeing those first previews in Starburst magazine in 1978 (desperate longings to watch a movie I was too young to get in), it's got to be said that this review is spot on.

Plot holes, retconning, bad effects, pseudo-intellectualism, terrible writing, hateful cardboard characters, clanging dialogue, and *spoiler*! Charlize Theron's ludicrous cartoon death. There's nothing to redeem this movie, absolutely nothing. It's frustrating, stupid, empty and lacks any tension or drive. Oh yes, and the music is way off tone for the mood.

Alien Resurrection looks like a masterpiece compared to this. I guess the take home message is: No Dan O'Bannon -> no canon.

Shame, because the marketing was really effective. I'd love to have been able to wear one of those t-shirts with the big head on them without getting pitying looks.

[ChrisOR]

Actually MWD...Alien wasn't so much brilliantly scripted as it was brilliantly shot. Technical limitations make for amazing use of other devices to get your point across..keep this in mind, Alien was originally proposed as "Jaws in space" and suffered from the same technical limitations which oddly enough, redeemed both films. Steven Spielberg was once a canny film maker and he knew his pneumatic shark looked awful (the only time we see it is in the near destruction of suspension of disbelief when it mounts the boat) so he used music and camera techniques to suggest danger which made the danger all the more terrifying. Jaws 2 and 3 show what happens when someone 'lets people see the monster' and they were awful. Now, onto Alien...there are approximately two scenes where we see it and both times it becomes obvious it's a guy in a suit (one is a horrendously deleted scene that would have wrecked the entire film..if anyone who reads this doesn't know what scene it is, check cracked.com or the scene where it attacks Lambert and Parker was once LONGER...) so they didn't show it much. That and the use of light, reveals and suspensful sound effects and music along with Sigourney Weaver's vulnerable survivor character make Alien so memorable. Script-wise there was not a lot to it, just normal dialogue until the big reveal (which no one knew was coming...check Lambert when the blood spurts, she was terrified), questionable science (which gets more to the created nature of the monsters...) and the mysterious 'Space Jockey' that apparently inspired the direction of this film. Great movie and Aliens (aside from producing the Alien queen, Ridley Scott's solution for egg creation is just...terrible) pretty much took a shit on the original. Oh well...at least Alien 3 for all its faults was much closer in both suspense (the problem was the horrible CGI (bluescreen?) creature shots when it's obvious it wasn't there...) nature and tone with the original...163 of the Aliens from Alien and Alien 3 would have easily killed a platoon of marines...okay, I still like the movie but come on!

[jmorocha2005@yahoo.com.ar]

OH! And I also like the new format of the site.

[jmorocha2005@yahoo.com.ar]

Great review!!! You really have to hate this movie to make a review like this.
BTW, I slept half of the movie, but I got this: Centuries ago, god created life on earth and went to another planet. True believers sent a ship full of atheists to capture god and questioning him. In the end, god kills them all (as he does with all atheist that try to question him, like you, mwahahaha) and the only one saving her ass is the one that led them there, 'cause it had to be a girl.

[Martin S]

It was a good movie, VISUALLY, alas it had it's plot problems andthe script was full of holes. I really like Mr. Chaw's Reviews. They are thought provoking, challenging, compelling, and {quite frankly} ENTERTAINING. I like the Alien Franchise, I am BIASED, as a result, it becomes the Movie-goer's Right as a Consumer or Purveyor to exact a little bit of the 'ol "Self-Fullfilling Prophecy". In other words, IF I think Something {a movie, MY 24 hours in a DAy will be Good, then, mostlikely it will be "GOOD". O nthe other hand, If i Think I t will SUCK, then I will unconsciously Find any reason, valid or on the peripheral of Semantics to act in ways to make it BAD}. Same goes for anything.
I don't like, however, Filmmakers/actors, et al, Saying, a movie isn't "really a prequel", when in Fact, it Obviously Is: Chronologically, Characterization { Rapace does her Best SW impression back lacks the Innate Sympathetic traits of Weaver's Beleagured Protagonist.}
Walter, as usual, I do AGREE with you AFTER watching the movie{s}. Your points are valid, and, to be honest my Friend and I went on a Couple of Free passes. If I had to pay FULL AMOUNT, {and I may have} my intellect may have been lacking that day/week. Hey, sometimes it is ok, to be an "Idiot" and I don't PERSONALIZE what your critiquing and I don't take Cinema too seriously, not saying you do. At the end of the Day, ultimately, It fulfills the intention of Being Entertained FIRST, and then {after some debacles filter down in my Brain!} Elightened or Educated. "God" day, 'yall.

[Jay Wyrd]

What, no complaints about all the Asian racial stereotypes in Prometheus?

[Dan C.]

Also, maybe I missed it, but shouldn't they have payed off the early allusion to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA? Given that the android character repeats O'Toole's line, "The trick is not minding that it hurts," there is absolutely no reason that he shouldn't repeat it when (spoilers!) he is inevitably dismembered admidst jets of milky blood. Just sayin'. Wasteful.

[Dan C.]

PROMETHEUS struck me as the mid=point between a remake of Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and a half-hearted adaption of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS. Ridley Scott has always been a high-budget Bava, committed to atmosphere and pictorialism to the occasional detriment of plot and sense, but I'm not sure Bava ever made a film this diffuse. ALIEN was minimal and suggestive; this one is just vague.

The effects and design in PROMETHEUS are pretty enough that a straight-ahead adaptation from any of the probable sources would have been an interesting film, but I have no idea why Scott decided to indulge the kind of new-age nonsense that made LOST shrivel from the poor-mans Vonnegut into the illiterate=man's LEFT BEHIND.

Further evidence for the theory that Ridley Scott has been thriving on the intellectual generosity of his admirers ever since BLADE RUNNER, which (to my eye) was the last time that his design sense has any kind of plot under it. BLACK HAWK DOWN is better than most of his other recent work, but it still leans to obviously and heavily on the political null-zone of those fade-to-blue washes. Transcendence my ass.

[Philip]

Bryan Gatwood:

I found the score interesting enough (if underdeveloped thematically); it just didn't seem to fit the images that it was supposed to be connecting with.

However, I was also disappointed with the film overall (as so many others were).

[Eamon Ymaus]

Wot no mention of The Duellists?

[Karl]

I'm pretty sure you don't have to worry about either of those things happening.

[Kyle]

"These aren't people looking for probing, intelligent discourse about the state of cinema. These are sneering hipsters who think that liking Synecdoche New York makes them interesting at parties."

Would much prefer to chat with those sneering hipsters than somebody trying to corner me in a conversation about Prometheus.

[Byron Gatwood]

Is it just me or was the musical score a letdown as well? Forgetable.

[ridley]

this review is amazing. i dont think ive seen a worse movie in my entire life. so much stupidity packed into 2 hours.

[ColinS]

The point Whaw is religion is NOT science, never will be (and "intelligent design" certainly isn't science.) Therefore, science cannot be a religion. Science requires the rigors of the scientific method. It's not just a culture belief system. You can use the pejorative if you want, that's your belief. The quest for God is futile, there is no proof. I do understand spirituality is a probable requirement of our human intellect, but a God head, the Creator, the overseer of all things is fiction. Are there other REAL life forms somewhere out there in the universe other than Earth? Probability tells me yes, not the Bible (and as far as I know, no other religious text either.)

[Chalter Waw]

"This Whaw is and always will be scatological rumination nonesense. One can ALWAYS challenge science with SCIENCE, and there is zero to no science in religion"

Yes, you just defined scientism. Now, what is your point?

[angel]

I personally loved the movie! I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise, went in with no expectations but to see what R. Scott's take was on this prequel. I thought it was rather good. I think most people, including this critic, had great specific expectations about this movie and thus were disillusioned, feeling robbed in the process. Mr. Scott, job well done, you are still a talented genius, don't mind the haters.

[jim]

Really boring movie. Another "Hugo", if you will. People want to be entertained when they go see a movie--on this point alone Prometheus fails miserably.

The worst part of this movie is that the story is so stupid and riddled with plotholes that it insults your intelligence and just kills your suspension of disbelief.

Ridley Scott hasn't made a good movie since Black Hawk Down. I think part of the problem is that he has not chosen good scripts lately. Visually, Ridley Scott is a genius but movie audiences want a story and characters they can relate to--Prometheus is such a huge disappointment in this respect. Nice visuals but no heart. Prometheus never connects with the audience at any point, and this is a real problem. Even the corny Dances with Smurfs by James Cameron was miles better than Prometheus because audiences could relate to some aspects of the story and characters.

Honestly, since 1986's Aliens, there hasn't been a truly great sci-fi movie. Aliens just hit all the right buttons--great characters, solid plot, great suspense and thrills, and great action. Who can forget Ripley in mum mode kicking the alien queen's ass? It just connects instantly with audiences--there was no need for tons of meaningless semi-mysterious dialogue like in Prometheus. Everyone understands how ferocious a mum can get when defending her child, people get this instantly. There is nothing like this in Prometheus, just emotionless dialogue and characters doing stupid irrational things.

Wish that movie directors in general would study Aliens and get back to basics. Seriously folks, this is not rocket science--people just want to be entertained. If you're going to spend hundreds of millions on a movie, (1)don't insult the audience's intelligence and (2)make sure the movie is entertaining. Look at Avengers 2012, not a classic by any means but entertaining and it cleaned out at the box-office.

Heck, even The Artist 2011 was way more entertaining and thought-provoking than Prometheus--and it was made on a $15 million budget in black and white! If Blade Runner 2 is going to be more drivel like Prometheus, seriously Scott--don't bother.

The best science fiction movie in the past 3 years remains District 9--made on a small budget yet was superbly entertaining and thought-provoking. Even "Moon" by Duncan Jones (another sci-fi movie made on a small budget) kicks Prometheus' ass bigtime.

[Rob Crampton]

Enjoyed the movie. Wasn't expecting it to be another Alien, like some of these commenters. Glad it wasn't. If you were hopin' for that, then you should ask the Crap brothers that shitted out AvP:Requiem to write and direct and you would have had a piece of crap.

Liked the little ties into the origin of the alien creature and it's potential to become what eventually the crew of the Nostromo encounters. Like how the moon they landed on was not LV-426, which leaves open the possibilities of the ship that the crew of the Nostromo found. Liked the potential evolving relationship of Shaw and the beheaded David.

In some ways it is visually stunning and in other ways, Ridley gives in more to money rather than art, but still fun.

[Justin B-H]

Saw it yesterday-trust me, Walter's review makes perfect sense if you've seen the film, which is hardly an endorsement of it. Apparently edited in a blender and demanding not only suspension of disbelief but suspension of logical faculties...

[Themoviefreakblog]

Phenomenal review, but I had a severely different reaction:
http://themoviefreakblog.com/review-prometheus

[Rick]

What a complete piece of crap!!!!!

[josh]

Walter, thank you for this completely accurate review. I also agree with other commenters that it somehow doesn't go far enough. It is utterly depressing that anyone is defending this movie on any level. To defend this movie is to hate movies as movies. It is so sad that fandom will not stick up for itself and insists on excusing this dreck, they would get better films overall if they kicked this stuff to the curb.

Emil, you are also great for pointing out that this is anti-cinema. Completely true and deserving of an essay in its own right.

Not only that, but it is anti-cinematic. People gushing about the eye-popping visuals and somehow thinking that his exonerates the film are sadly misled. Anyone who allowed Guy Pearce's old-man makeup to make it past the screen-test must have their "visual genius" bona-fides revoked. Not only that, but there really wasn't anything terribly memorable, innovative or interesting about the production-design work. More shiny space-stuff. R2's Leia hologram inspired more fascination and curiosity in audiences than all the hologram work in this Prometheus no matter how screen devouring and 3D it got. The medlab was memorable, but as Walter says, made ridiculous by an unnecessary contrivance. The cartography balls were fun. I'll give him that.

It is worth considering that the early shots of David simply walking through the corridors and riding the bike are the only genuinely cinematic moments of the entire show.

[Mike Bay]

Imagine the agony of receiving a concrete enema...then waiting for it set. That's what reading a Chaw review feels like.

[Van Iblis]

If you're going to bash a movie, at least bash it for things that are accurate. You make a number of flat out incorrect points.

[Alex Jackson]

PROMETHEUS is more KNOWING or EPISODE 1 than ALIEN or 2001. I don't exactly mean that as pejorative. I actually like KNOWING and EPISODE 1. Some arresting images and/or good performances, along with an overall sincerity and meshugganas (sic?) is enough to sustain me. I think it's enough to make the experience worthwhile. The film is kitsch, but I really don't think that you can address the God question without lapsing into kitsch. It's ridiculous, Man in the Sky and zombie son and everything. But believing in the ridiculous may be preferable to confronting the abject terror of a universe where there are no consequences for our actions (except those irregularly applied by society) and where life has no intrinsic value or meaning aside from that which we construct ourselves. To the degree that I admire PROMETHEUS, I think it's because it's frankly a little tacky and that tackiness has it's own kind of truth.

Aside: not commented on enough that the film basically follows the same plotline as the first ALIEN film. Kind of didn't payoff that promise of being a prequel set in the same universe. Also, EPISODE 1 connection, it makes explicit what we could have reasonably surmised from the first film about the nature of the Space Jockeys and the xenomorphs. If anything, the film has been masterfully marketed. For such a questionable product, it has fostered a very deep emotional response among fans and audiences.

[Mwddavison]

Alas--in a way deep down somewhere we all knew this would be true about Prometheus. It would be good in its own way (it is Ridley Scott returning to the Alien universe/genre he created), however it is not the Alien prequel or anything 'really related' to the Alien story we all hoped for.

Originally, the first working draft of the Prometheus script before it was presented to one of the previous writers(David Lindelof)of the Lost TV series, was in fact more a true prequel tie-in to Ridley Scott's original Alien, complete with eggs, chestbusters, etc... This was the movie all of us were more or less hoping for. David felt (along with his co-writer Jon Spaihts of course--there were two writers of the Prometheus script we're seeing today)and took his feelings/convictions to Ridley Scott, that they should steer away from the Alien story altogether, not touching it, and instead let Prometheus be in the same "universe as Alien" but essientially tell another story all together and do its own thing leaving the Alien mythology well enough alone. After listening to Mr. Lindelof and Jon Spaihts, Ridley Scott then decided/or was convinced that this new direction for Prometheus was the way to go, and thus long and short of it, that's why we didn't get the Alien tie-in prequel everyone was hoping for or having such high expectations for.

Truth be told, I think everyone was feeling the pressure of "delivering the goods" so to speak with this movie when it was in the pre-production phase. Alien is one of the few films that Ridley Scott has left relatively untouched/unchanged all these years except for a very few minor things(which didnt change anything about the film) in his directors cut release, and for good reason. Could he match that again with the Prometheus prequel? Would it mess up or have the potential of messing up what he did with the original Alien? Everyone's expectations for Ridely Scott's Alien prequel would be sky rocketed to the heavens. I think Ridely was feeling all of that pressure to deliver, and I can guarantee you that two writers trying to tackle this monster of responsibilty script re-write were feeling the "weight of the world on their shoulders". Nothing they came up with probably seemed good enough, or done do death. How could you do something that lived up to the original Alien/etc....? So realistically, what happens? The two writers maybe stress out, get scared a little maybe, back away a little from that daunting of a task and try to hide that running away by trying to tell another 'daunting and complicated story to distract us from the fact that they shrunk away from the Alien tie-in prequel story we all wanted--why? Because honestly, know one knew how to tell the story. In the end they got cold feet and decided to go another way with it.

Can you really blame them? I can at least understand. I, as a Alien fan, would be really upset and disappointed if Ridley Scott had released a true Alien tie-in prequel that was subpar and truely a flop. At least this gives him some breathing room and still leaves the door open to eventually come back (maybe/hopefully) one day and give us all the true Alien tie-in prequel we have all been waiting to see for so long by Mr. Ridley Scott. No other person has any other business bringing that story back to life at this point from a prequel perspective. Ridley Scott can still breathe live back into and actually give it a new life not just a ressurection with it still being Alien and not just an Alien spin off in the same universe. Ridley Scott enjoys a challenge, he always has. He is an innovative film maker and one of the best at what he does. I don't think he should back down from this because he's afraid of messing it up. It will be difficult, and Ridley knows that. But he also knows he can do it. It will just take a long time and a hell of a lot of work and effort. The question is, is Ridley Scott ready and willing to put in that kind of work right now into Alien(because with Prometheus he was just flirting with Alien again). Is he truely ready to revisit Alien again. That's just truly up to him as a director and what he wants to do artisticly and professionally right now with his time/life. Hopefully, for all the Alien fans out there, he will. But alas, its entirely in Mr. Scott's control. Isn't waiting frustrating?

[Will]

Walter, I agree with most of your review, but I would make the point that Michael Fassbender's David requires some recognition as the Embodiment of Technology. It's a hamfisted way of delivering the message that using technological advances to a) seek immortality or b) discern a higher purpose just leads to getting people killed. But recognizing this, I think, makes the ending of the movie a bit more subversive. It doesn't save the movie, but I think does make it a bit more coherent.

Perhaps I'm giving the screenwriter too much credit. What do you think?

[Tom Strong]

Seeing a lot of idiot nerds who don't know a good movie from shit like Transformers. Just go back to watching Transformers!

[Atchesonate]

Awesome, hilarious review. I can't disagree with most of it even though I enjoyed the movie. I am the ultimate ALIEN-sequel apologist, though the scene where the biologist and the geologist act like fucking idiots and get killed as a result is really bad. And Charlie just sucks.

I would argue, however, that the movie is a little more sly than you're giving it credit for. In Weyland's final moments, he utters something which I found telling of the film's overall perspective -- that the talk of "God," at least in this context, is a lot of nonsense, and by the end I think Shaw's idea of what God is has changed. It's far from revelatory, but hey, at least it didn't piss me off.