So I went to see the Prometheus film. The remake/prequel film of Alien, made by non other than Ridley Scott himself, the maker of the original Alien. It wasn't as bad as I had feared, not as bad as lets say the Aliens versus Predator films or Aliens Resurrection but no where near as good as the original trilogy. My overall reaction is pretty much "meh" a mediocre CGI-scifi film. The film had potential to be as a good as the original, but it fell apart with its overly complex story lines and absence of characters that you would care about. These are the two things that annoyed me the most.
The story basically delves into the origins of humanity and the point of view chosen here is the Intelligent Design. Essentially a species called the Engineers, for reasons unknown, decided to create a bunch of clones of themselves on the planet Earth. Over the course of the film we learn that humans are a DNA match to these Engineers, which generates a whole bunch of questions that are left unanswered. The biggest being, if these Engineers created humans in their image, as the physical commonalities displayed in the film would suggest, where did Chimpanzees and Gorillas come from? Humans share a 96% of genes with chimps, so did the Engineers just fuck up the couple of the first attempts at creating humans and the failed patches became other species of primates or did they just think it would be fun little mind fuck to play on humanity by creating genetically very nearly the same species with the punch line being "hehe, if we do this when they become advanced enough to figure out genetics, they will think that chimps share a common ancestor with them"?
This sort of a story discussing Ancient Aliens and origins of life on this planet would have been a fairly good story, but they had to complicate the plot needlessly by the rich dying dude's quest for immortality, that gets introduced way too late in the film and is rushed through at the speed of light, without giving the audience the chance to actually get to know the rich dying dude or the underlying themes of human mortality and facing death. This would have also been material for an interesting plot, but too bad that it was rushed so fast that by the time you start wrapping your head around it, its thrown into the dust bin. It would have been so much more satisfying if we as the audience would have gotten to know the rich dying dude and see this frail old man grasping for that one final straw to prevent the inevitable end. Fear of death is something every human being can relate to and not exploring this theme is probably the greatest wasted opportunity in this film. It feels almost like they had two scripts and instead choosing between the story of finding out the origins of life/human civilization or the quest for immortality, they decided to blend the two into one, leaving the both plots either rushed or full of unanswered questions. The biggest being, what exactly happened on the Engineers' ship to cause the massive amounts bodies the audience was shown?
The character department was equally full of wasted opportunities, considering the actors they had casted for the roles. Most of the cast composed of no-name red shirt cannon fodder, whose only purpose was to die in order to create the appearance of a threat. Two named scientist red shirts, who apparently had some character development but those bits ended up in the editing room floor. Charlize Theron played the mandatory Evil Corporate Person, who was so obvious in the role that they might as well have played the Imperial March every time she walked into the room. Too bad she pretty much amounted to a red herring since she didn't really do anything in the film, besides participating in the only genuinely funny moment, where the ship's captain delivers what must be the greatest pick-up line in history. But all in all she was a poor substitute for Paul Reiser's excellent Mr. Burke from Aliens 2, who starts off as a nice guy and slowly descends into a corporate sociopath who wants to weaponize the aliens and tries to infect Ripley and Newt(an 8 year old girl) as well as being prepared to murder a squad of marines to achieve his goal.
The female lead was the inferior Ellen Ripley clone, nothing much to comment there. The only beacon of shining light was David(the name is another Aliens reference), the android, played by Michael Fassbender. A good performance at playing an android, almost reminded me of Brent Spinner's superb role as Data in Star Trek. All though he did appear to express annoyance of the things that made him different from humans. What made Data wonderful as a character was that he was completely incapable of feeling emotions, he could understand what love, hate and sorrow were on an intellectual level but he couldn't experience them on any level. Fassbender's David seemed annoyed at most of the times at not being human enough or being given in spite of his enormous capabilities relatively menial tasks. But all in all my favorite character in the film.
The one thing that really started to annoy me as the movie went on were the near constant aliens reference. Ridley, we get it, you are making an Alien remake, you don't have to remind us every fucking 10 minutes. Probably the worst was the entire sequence at the life boat after the Engineer ship explodes and crashes. The whole point of that sequence was to give the audience the shot of the Thing-that-looks-like-the-alien-but-for-copyright-reasons-isn't-the-alien, just so that Ridley could hammer it into your head that he is making an Alien prequel/remake, just in case you missed the fucking 30+ other clues. You could cut everything related to that and not losing anything important to the plot.
All in all not a very good film, certainly not when compared with the original, but at least it didn't evoke the same levels of fan boy rage as the Thing prequel did.
