Prometheus is the most ambitious and the most frustrating film in the franchise, a work of genuine visual grandeur and philosophical aspiration that is let down by a screenplay that cannot sustain the weight of its own ideas. Ridley Scott's return to the universe he created is never less than visually spectacular, and at its best it asks questions about creation, faith, and the origins of humanity that the franchise had not previously attempted. The problem is that it asks those questions without answering them, and the characters who ask them make decisions of such spectacular irrationality that the film's intellectual ambitions are repeatedly undermined by its narrative mechanics.
At a Glance
Director: Ridley Scott
Runtime: 124 minutes
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green
Release: 2012
Critics Rating: ★★★ (3/5 stars, visually spectacular, narratively frustrating)
Audience Rating: ★★½ (2.5/5 stars, a divisive disappointment)
Review Breakdown
Plot
A team of scientists follows a star map found in ancient human cave paintings to a distant moon, where they hope to find the Engineers, the alien race they believe created humanity. What they find is a facility that has gone catastrophically wrong, and a series of biological horrors that connect, obliquely, to the events of the original Alien. The plot's central problem is that its characters, supposedly the finest scientific minds humanity can assemble, behave with a consistent recklessness that strains credibility past breaking point. The film's most celebrated set-piece, the self-surgery sequence, is a demonstration of practical effects work of considerable visceral power, and it is the moment where the film's ambitions and its execution are most completely aligned.
Characters
Michael Fassbender's David is the film's greatest creative achievement and one of the franchise's most compelling android creations, a synthetic of unsettling intelligence and opaque motivation whose relationship with his creators gives the film its most interesting dramatic thread. Fassbender plays the character with a physical precision and a quiet menace that makes every scene he inhabits more interesting than it would otherwise be. Noomi Rapace's Shaw is a less successful creation, a scientist of genuine faith whose arc the film does not develop with sufficient care or consistency. Charlize Theron's Vickers is the film's most dramatically underused character, a corporate presence of considerable authority who is given almost nothing to do.
Tone
Scott pitches the film at a register of epic science fiction that is closer to 2001: A Space Odyssey than to the original Alien, and the result is a film that is more interested in awe than in dread. The horror sequences, when they arrive, are effective, but they feel like interruptions to a different and more ambitious film rather than the natural expression of the material's concerns. The film's visual language is consistently impressive, and Scott's command of scale gives the Engineers' world a physical grandeur that the franchise had not previously attempted.
Meaning / Themes
Prometheus is the franchise's most direct engagement with the question of creation and the relationship between creators and their creations. The Engineers' decision to destroy humanity, and David's own complex relationship with the humans who built him, give the film a thematic framework of genuine interest: the idea that creation is an act of power that the created can never fully understand or forgive. Shaw's faith, her insistence on believing in a creator even after the evidence suggests that creator intended humanity's destruction, is the film's most interesting character thread and the one the screenplay handles with the least consistency.
Direction
Scott's direction is the film's most reliable element, a demonstration of visual craft and compositional intelligence that gives even the screenplay's weakest passages a grandeur they do not entirely deserve. The Engineers' installation is one of the franchise's great production design achievements, a space of such scale and such alien specificity that it gives the film's philosophical concerns a physical weight. Dariusz Wolski's cinematography is the franchise's most beautiful, and Marc Streitenfeld's score gives the film an epic register that suits Scott's ambitions if not always the material's needs.
Cultural Reception
Prometheus was a major commercial success on its release but received divided critical notices, with most reviewers praising its visual ambition while expressing frustration at its narrative shortcomings. Audience response was similarly divided, and the film's reputation has not significantly improved since. It is now generally regarded as a visually spectacular but dramatically unsatisfying entry in the franchise, and the questions it raises about the Engineers and the origins of the alien species were only partially addressed in Alien: Covenant. The self-surgery sequence remains one of the franchise's most discussed individual passages.
Final Verdict: Visually spectacular and philosophically ambitious, but let down by a screenplay that cannot sustain the weight of its own ideas. Fassbender's David is one of the franchise's great creations, Scott's direction gives the material a grandeur it does not always deserve, and the self-surgery sequence is the franchise's most viscerally effective passage since the chest-burster. Prometheus asks the right questions. It simply cannot find the right answers.