There's a moment in Prometheus when I nodded internally, thought, "So that's what a Space Jockey is," and then an overwhelming depression hit. Because now I know what a Space Jockey is. The original Alien featured an enormous room with a mysterious creature at the center, peering into a giant telescope. The scene offered grandeur, but more importantly, the scene offered mystery. What was this creature? Why was it carrying those eggs? Where was it going? With the concept design from H. R. Giger, it was even difficult to know where the creature stopped and its chair began. We never received answers, because the point was to slow down and inspire such questions. Now we have answers. How could they not disappoint?
In fairness, Prometheus makes its intentions clear from the opening of the film, which begins billions of years ago, with the intelligent design of life on Earth, and then flashes to the near-future, when scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) quickly and speciously concludes that ancient astronaut glyphs prove that humanity was engineered by otherworldly beings. This is a potential boon to her faith in God, although one might think that evidence for a faith destroys the point of the whole thing. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof approached this conundrum with frequency in the television show Lost, where the chief ideological battle was between show-me rationality and new-age feel-goodery.
There's some pleasure to be gained from a film that's willing to ask these questions, but Ridley Scott races through these ideas like a busy parent going through a checklist at the grocery store. Some themes, like the search for one's lineage and maternal desire, thread together successfully, but most feel cursory. Minutes after Shaw laments her inability to conceive, android David (Michael Fassbender) deduces that she's pregnant. This leads to a fantastically squirmy scene of body-horror, but after it's over, Shaw never gets a chance to recognize how horribly her infertility was mocked.
This extends to plot developments too. One minute after someone says a storm is coming, the heroes outrace a gigantic cloud of dust. Ten seconds after somebody warns that a monster’s on the way, the monster arrives. The reveal of a looming human sculpture arrives almost casually in the background, decorative instead of mind-blowing.
Cursory works as a descriptor for most of the cast. The film features seventeen people in the ship's crew, but only a handful make an impression, and the remainder exist to be assaulted by unknown life-forms. A mohawked geologist does little geology aside from tossing radar-balls into the air, and a biologist makes the spectacularly moronic decision of petting a hissing extra-terrestrial cobra. Gruff pilot Janek (Idris Elba) is backed by two co-pilots who could be abandoned without any loss in drama.
The only sequence in the film that takes its time is an opening sequence where David goes through his daily routine. He plays basketball, wheels around in a go-cart, analyzes the people still in cryo-stasis, and watches Lawrence of Arabia. David has an affinity for Peter O'Toole, with his precise diction and blue eyes and blonde hair, and there's a similar mirth to Fassbender's performance that elevates every scene that features him. Indeed, the filmmakers love him so much that, even after he's crossed a moral event horizon, a character that ought to step on his synthetic little head essentially forgives and forgets attempted murder. Not a smart decision, but understandable, because David is just that charming.
Noomi Rapace and Idris Elba deserve some credit, too, for evolving into warriors of mankind by the end of the story, and, on the pro side, most of the special effects are impressive. There's an image in the film that shows Prometheus, tiny, zipping across a static star-field; it wonderfully communicates the loneliness of such a voyage. There's also a cute opening image that recalls the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a planet slowly sinking beneath the frame, and that was a film that also searched for big answers to big questions. Who made us? Where did life start? What is our destiny?
The difference is that 2001 relied on suggestion as much as possible, while Prometheus feels like that film's ADD-addled step-child, wondering the same things but allowing no time for consideration, reflection, or suspense. It's easy to put this at the feet of writer Damon Lindelof, who became a pariah of sorts after the conclusion of Lost, but most of those problems fall at the feet of Ridley Scott, who displays almost none of the discipline that made Alien such a tense and mysterious experience. What’s here isn’t bad, but it’s too quick to feel substantial, too informative to retain a sense of mystery. 2001 and Alien feel like full texts. Prometheus feels like Cliff’s Notes.
RATING: C+
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