* * Prometheus. Written by Jon Spaihts & Damon
Lindelof. Directed by Ridley Scott.
 |
| Noomi Rapace kicks a hornet's nest in Prometheus. |
Considering
Hollywood's fixation on "origin stories", would anybody want to tell
the prehistory of the highly lucrative Alien
franchise? Silly question. But here's an even sillier answer: an origin story
that where the marquee creature—the multi-jawed, gut-busting alien—hardly appears
at all. By analogy, imagine an origin story about a certain superhero that
dwells for an hour on the politics and culture of the planet Krypton. Imagine
it gives another hour to the lonely struggle of a certain scientist to get his
planet to save itself. Envision this movie gives us a glimpse of the infant
Superman, being loaded into his Even-flo space-pod--and then it's over. Imagine
that movie, and you'll get a pretty good idea of the relationship between Prometheus and the other films in the Alien series.
The fact that Ridley Scott himself, the maker of the original 1979 Alien, made Prometheus has generated fairly high expectations. In films like Blade Runner, Gladiator, and Thelma &
Louise, Scott has earned visionary status; his films look like nobody
else's, which is saying a lot in an industry that rewards conformity. Alas, the
gap between the "prequel to a modern icon" and Scott’s final product apparently
scared the hell out of somebody. The fact that Prometheus is the Alien
origin story--the very reason 20th Century Fox backed the project in the first
place--was therefore, paradoxically, played down in the pre-release run-up.
Next to John Travolta's taste in massage providers, it’s been the worst-kept
secret in Hollywood.
Now we have Prometheus
and, unfortunately, it turns out not to be visionary stuff at all. The script
by Jon Spaihts and Damon
Lindelof is set in the late 21st century, when a husband-and-wife
team of archaeologists (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) discover
evidence that an extraterrestrial civilization had a hand in the origins of
humankind. The ancient astronauts—so-called “Engineers”—are traced back to a
certain moon orbiting a planet around in a distant star system, to which an
expedition to mounted by a certain familiar-sounding industrial conglomerate (the
“Weyland-Yutani Corporation”). The explorers include the archaeologists, a
spooky cougar (Charlize Theron), a too-polite replicant (Michael Fassbender), and
the gang of space-truckers typical of the Alien
movies. There they discover a creepy pyramid, and inside that, evidence that
the Engineers were once cooking up more than human beings. Much more.
Now this “ancient astronauts” premise isn’t exactly
fresh. It was already familiar in 1968, after 2001: A Space Odyssey and the publication of Erich von Däniken’s
bestselling Chariots of the Gods?. More
recently, it was played out in Battlestar
Galactica, both old and new. Indeed, it seems like the kind of thing we see
dramatized every other week on the Discovery Channel, in almost as vivid,
portentous fashion as in Prometheus, and
with about the same breezy obliviousness for all scientific evidence to the
contrary. (Here, Spaihts
and Lindelof dismiss centuries of evidence of Darwinian evolution with a
single, throwaway line--but doesn't everybody?)
Worse, the movie fails to answer the riddles it poses
itself. It's never a good sign when, after a movie ends, we're left wondering
"now why did he do that in the beginning?" or "why did the
Engineers bother to leave their return address again?" or "how
exactly were the aliens the result of all this?" The scripts have never
been the draw in even the best of Scott's movies (Blade Runner, in particular, had more than a few plot holes).
But if Scott and Co. were determined not to premise all this on encountering
the marquee creatures themselves, they had to make an old idea compelling. To
put it plainly, they don’t.
One thing in common about the best of the Alien movies--Scott's original and James
Cameron's Aliens--was that they both
took their time to 1) set the mood, and to 2) introduce the characters. Alien is a haunted house story, its mood
of imminent dread built up with lots of small, crafted moments. So deliberate
is Scott's pace that the opening title, A-L-I-E-N, takes a couple of minutes to
materialize on the screen. Aliens was
a war movie, where the fight pays off because we get to meet (and bid farewell
to) each grunt in the platoon, and the monsters themselves don't appear until
more than an hour in.
By contrast, Prometheus
feels rushed. With the exceptions of Rapace, Theron and Fassbender, most of the
characters are given only token development. It's hard to care much for any of these
anonymous slobs. Indeed, there's one good scene between the captain (Idris
Elba, otherwise known as "Stringer Bell" from The Wire) and Theron, involving an indecent proposition and a
concertina once owned by Stephen Stills. But that bit of humanity just whets
the appetite for a meal that never comes.
Visually, Prometheus
is light-years beyond the other films. Like a master composer inventing
variations on his best-known work, Scott plays on the striking design motifs he
pioneered in '79. Now as then, he generates suspense just out of production
design, as those familiar H.R. Giger biomechanicals are gradually revealed. Yet
one unavoidable consequence of the CGI revolution is that this kind of
vividness just doesn't seem that hard anymore. The problem with being able to
visualize anything is that, sooner rather than later, we've already seen
everything.
Rapace (The Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo) is no Sigourney Weaver. She doesn't take over the
screen in that way that seemed so risky in '79, before female action heroes
became the cliche they've become today. Instead, the show is stolen by
Fassbender, who plays the robot with a silky passive-aggressiveness that feels
like a knife in the back--albeit a knife with a velvet handle.
More Fassbender and more Stringer
Bell--and less von Däniken.
That would have been a prequel worth busting a gut over.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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