Written by Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba
I thought long and hard about whether to write anything about Prometheus, primarily because everyone's written something about Prometheus. I don't really have much else to contribute. In the end, however, two good reasons convinced me: firstly, that no-one's reading this so, hey!, what does it matter?; secondly, that an awful lot of what I've heard about the film I find myself disagreeing with intently. Too many people are wrong, and if I need to shout in an empty room in order to not change their opinions in the slightest, then that's exactly what I shall do. I shall don the garb of feigned self-importance and pretend that there's actually a point to any of the next 685 words.
Ah well. Tilting at windmills it is then.
Folk out there, the cinemagoing public, dvdbuying public, specialeditionbonusfeatureswatching public, they do seem to love Ridley Scott. Perhaps I don’t share quite the same fondness – for heaven’s sake, when are you people going to admit that Gladiator was hackneyed, predictable, drawn out tosh? – but, sure, I liked Alien. It’s a great film. Subtle, atmospheric, tense, sympathetically and carefully drawn characters, that startling and influential Giger design. We’ll ignore the other Alien films, because they’re not Ridley Scott pictures; instead, Scott made one film thirty-odd years ago, and now revisits the idea for a second, a sort-of-prequel that the director insists isn’t a prequel, presumably because his third and fourth Alien movies will fill in the gap, the final one perhaps being the genuine prequel.
Is it ever wise to go back to an idea, such a long time afterwards (not that Scott appears to doubt it, seeing as he’s setting off to do much the same with Blade Runner)? Financially, it might be, but we’ll give the director the benefit of the doubt here, and presume that he returned to Alien to develop concepts that had been touched upon in the original. And he certainly goes for the concepts, big concepts, concepts that occupy every waking thought of the characters so that they don’t really have the opportunity to talk about anything else.
Which is rather where it all goes wrong. Didn’t I say Alien had characters that are sympathetically and carefully drawn? Prometheus doesn’t. I mean, it really, really doesn’t. The characters in the earlier film were human, they had lives, jobs, things that annoyed them, things that made their time bearable. And now, we have a ship full of cutouts, of off-the-shelf roles struggling to claim a second dimension as their own. There are exceptions – Michael Fassbender’s android David is engaging, as Fassbender invariably is, and Noomi Rapace’s heroine has a backstory… well, she has a fertility problem, but it’s as close to depth as the film ever gets – but the overwhelming majority of the cast exist either to explain a plot point, or to make a plot point happen. Nothing more, nothing less. They might as well be vases on a mantelpiece.
Of course, the film looks terrific. This was inevitable, but warrants praise nonetheless: Ridley Scott does know how to make a film work visually, no dispute over that. And though there may be a lack of creeping paranoia – such an integral part of the original – there are certainly a good number of bangs, flashes, and slimy things going rrrrrngghghhh. There’s even an Alien alien (okay, a xenomorph, though I don’t have much time for pleasing scifi pedants), albeit without any hint of how or why it happened to be there. I imagine, somewhere, there’ll be a reason, perhaps in the next film. I imagine that many of the questions and mysteries raised by Prometheus will be answered sooner or later. No doubt there are already umpteen thousand websites proposing their own solutions.
But I don’t care. I really don’t. And I’m someone who usually would, I’m just the kind of person who’d go trawling online for wise and considered explanations of enigmatic moments in films. This time, however, I just couldn’t give a damn. It’s not enough for a film merely to ask questions – it needs to give you a reason to want to know the answer. You find the reason in an engaging film, a film whose characters and story draw you into their world, so that the mysteries of their world become every bit as important as those of our own. The world of Prometheus is full of shallow, empty characters; I can’t care about them, so I can’t care about their world, and I can’t care about the questions their world raises.
Ridley Scott doesn’t want this to be seen as a prequel to Alien; rather, it’s a film ‘that takes place in the same universe’. The universe he creates is full of life, but sadly, it’s devoid of humanity.
