When he directed Alien back in
1979, Ridley Scott's game plan was simple: take a B-movie premise –
a monster running wild on a spaceship – and dress it up with
first-class actors, expensive special effects, a brooding tone
cribbed largely from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and plenty
of blood and guts. But the experiment got away from its instigator:
Scott couldn't have guessed that his film would spawn three sequels
(five, if you count the Alien Vs Predator spin-offs), nor that
the continuing character of Ellen Ripley, played by the extraordinary
Sigourney Weaver, would evolve into a figure closer to a full-fledged
tragic heroine than a standard damsel in distress.
More than three decades later, Scott
has returned to the scene of his past triumph with Prometheus,
which is something like a prequel to Alien – unless it's a
companion piece set in a parallel universe. Either way, the year is
2089, and the Prometheus is a spaceship headed to an alien planet on
a mission aimed at uncovering the origins of the human race or
(depending who you talk to) the secret of eternal youth. No-one on
board has anything like Ripley's gravitas, but Scott has persisted with the series
tradition of giving women central roles: Meredith Vickers (Charlize
Theron) is the sleek, pragmatic corporate head of the expedition,
while Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is the film's vulnerable moral
centre, an archeologist who hopes to find meaning in outer space
while retaining her faith in Christ.
By far the most intriguing character is
the soft-spoken android David (Michael Fassbender), the ship's butler
and a detached observer of humanity in general. Early on, while
the rest of the crew remain in suspended animation, we learn he is
able to spy on their dreams; shortly after, we see him watching
Lawrence of Arabia, then mimicking Peter O'Toole's voice and
gestures with fetishistic precision. It's a tightly controlled,
weirdly camp performance, hinting at a sterile yet alluring
narcissism – an intriguing choice for a film so insistently
repelled by anything that evokes procreation.
On arrival, various crew members set
out to explore the alien catacombs, usually solo or in pairs. Along
the way, they encounter traces of advanced technologies seemingly
left behind by a lost civilisation, while other unfriendly critters
turn out to be very much alive. This dingy labyrinth is similar to
backdrops used in the earlier Alien movies, and there's little
here to support Scott's reputation as a constantly inventive visual
genius; the sound tends to be more evocative than the imagery,
particularly when a storm hits, though Marc Streitenfeld's music is mainly routine horror movie stuff when it isn't borrowing from Jerry Goldsmith's original Alien score. In fairness, the most effective scenes here are the straightforwardly horrific ones, especially an effort to top
Alien's legendary “chest-burster”.
Just about all the iconic moments from the Alien series can be understood as grotesque
parodies of sex and childbirth, but never before has this Freudian
subtext been so lumberingly explicit. The “philosophical” themes
of Prometheus, such as they are, revolve around the dangers of
children coming to know their parents too closely, and vice versa.
Could it be that our true creators are malignant, alien beings, like
the Old Ones in H.P. Lovecraft – and if that were so, what would
that say about us? As we ponder this question, we're invited to
compare and contrast David's ambivalent view of his own human
“parents”: there are echoes here of the “replicant” played
by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Scott's other major
science-fiction success.
There's no doubt this ambitious project
originally had potential; often it feels as if Scott hoped for
something with the metaphysical heft of 2001 but lacked the
energy to work out what he wanted to say. Probably his biggest
mistake was teaming up with the screenwriter Damon Lindehof,
best-known as one of the show-runners of Lost – the great long
con of modern television, forever exploiting audience goodwill by promising dazzling revelations just round the corner. Given the
expectations built up by Prometheus, anticlimax was probably
inevitable, but the ugly, incoherent ending is nothing if not an
admission of defeat.
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