Prometheus: Small Beginnings

First off I’d like to bellyache about the length of time it took me to view my latest obsession, Prometheus, after its nationwide release. 5 whole days. Saw The Avengers on opening night. Even saw Men in Black 3 on opening night. But the film I’ve been dying to see for months now? 5 days late. Stupid life getting in the way of more important things.

Secondly I’d like to complain heavily about Cineworld’s crumminess. My ‘local’ multiplex is a relatively large, 12 screen cinema. And yet, the management decided to put an evening showing of a 5-day-old major blockbuster in one of their tiniest screens. So by the time my friends and I showed up inevitably late of the advertised starting time, the few available seats were practically full, meaning we had the displeasure of sitting in the very front row, mere feet away from the screen. FUCKING CHEERS. Love cranking my neck and twisting my head to see everything going on. This is definitely the way movies were meant to be seen. Bravo.

Seriously, the screen I saw The Artist in, several weeks after its release, and at a late night showing time, was larger (and much emptier) than that for Prometheus. This is part of the reason cinema figures are declining, because of the idiocy and complete lack of basic logic that goes on behind the scenes, i.e. monstrously dumb screen choices, psychotic food prices, and apathetic staffing. Get it together.

Onto the film itself. For a good long while, I’d been building up Prometheus as a prospect for genuine masterpiece material. Those wonderfully mysterious trailers, the intriguing casting, and Ridley Scott’s sci-fi pedigree all seemed to add up to a product that would have trouble going wrong. Sure, Alien never needed a prequel, and I don’t think anyone really asked for one. True enough, the unexplained nature of the so-called ‘space jockeys’ was just another important part of the tension that clouded the first act of the film. But then Alien never needed a sequel either, and look what happened: Aliens was the BEST SEQUEL EVER MADE (The What-Father Part II? LALALALALA). So necessity wasn’t really an issue with Prometheus, and with Scott back at the helm, it could only be a thing of majesty, right?

Well that’s what I thought. But then the reviews bled out, and everywhere was a sea of mediocrity. 3 out of 5 stars, a 60-something Metascore, a 70-something % on Rotten Tomatoes, nothing even approaching the acclaim of Alien. And naturally, my expectations suddenly plummeted, and I went into that poorly-chosen Cineworld screen on a very diminished buzz, expecting a decent, but not nearly mind-blowing, experience.

Essentially, that’s pretty much what I got. There’s an array of ups and downs present during its considerable running time, but there’s very little here to compare with Alien. That is, save for one scene in particular. (Spoilers onward)

One of the main facets of Alien that has always made it fascinating to me is the lasting impact of the famed ‘chestburster’ scene, in which John Hurt’s character Kane has a bit of a bad time during a meal. It’s an unforgettable sequence, one of shock and chaos, of progress and evolution, of watershed and significance, and eventually of silence. I’ve always wondered how one would respond to that scene on first viewing, particularly in the tense and hushed cinema environment, which is something I never got to experience (having been born 12 years after its cinema release), and unfortunately I don’t really recall my reaction to seeing the chestburster on first viewing. Luckily, Sir Ridley saw fit to include another such scene in Prometheus.

This time, it’s not a xenomorph forcing its own way out of Kane’s chest into the world, this time it’s a squid-looking creature about to be born from Shaw’s lady parts before being forcibly removed in a medical pod. Something horrifying about this sequence had me absolutely gripped, more than any other chunk of the film. I sat, neck wrenched upwards, mouth literally agape, watching this semi-parallel horror unfold above/in front of me. There was something different about this one.

Over the numerous viewings of all 4 Alien films, I’ve become accustomed and effectively desensitised to the chestburster trope, but that still didn’t prepare me for the bloody thrashing and constant danger of Prometheus’s caesarean scene. It stands alone from the chestburster scenes, much as Prometheus stands alone from the Alien franchise. What was in Alien a bizarre and revolting scene of sudden helplessness and disruption, is in Prometheus a fresh scene of urgency and panicked survival. This showcases a new tone and a new creature, and despite a similar narrative frame, it’s a relatively different shock. It’s really quite difficult to describe that feeling of ‘sweet merciful crap, what in the fuck is that?!’, but it has been a long, long while since I reacted so noticeably to a film, and that’s something incredibly meaningful in today’s Hollywood of repetition and regurgitation. The fact that a setup that I’m so familiar with can be reimagined to affect me in the way it did makes Prometheus, for all its flaws, a success.

Beyond that, it’s really rather hit-and-miss. On the pro side, it’s beautiful. Once again, Sir Ridley provides a wondrous collection of shots and edits, including some magnificent establishing shots. The film’s first act contains a series of breathtaking outer space shots, focussed around the titular spaceship, which combine Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography with the excellent visual effects of Moving Picture and Weta and various other companies to create something truly awe-inspiring. Gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh.

The scale on show in Prometheus is what really separates it from Alien in terms of style. This film constantly deals with grander issues in a grander frame. We’ve got a much bigger crew with a much bigger mission asking much bigger questions. And stylistically, the film has a much bigger aesthetic. Large chunks of Alien were presented through very claustrophobic cinematography, while everything in Prometheus feels more open and breathable. We get more and bigger creatures, and ultimately we get more questions than we get answers.

Which leads me to a con. At some points, it feels a little unfinished – like it’s holding back, or setting up for something more. Something like Alien? Possibly. But Sir Ridley said he was going to make an individual film (and that he did), so why would he produce a near-2 hour prologue for a film he wanted to distance from? Perhaps it’s setting up for a sequel. The big questions that were teased in Prometheus trailers and in Alien are mostly left unanswered, frustratingly so, leaving plenty of sequel potential. Honestly though, I hate when filmmakers do that. Like in The Hunger Games. The very end was a clear “Next time on...” ploy, which I refuse to play along with. Fuck you Hollywood, don’t treat me like an obedient fucking dog. Bad Hollywood. Slap on the wrist for you.

Further pros include Michael Fassbender, about whom I frequently complain (despite his undoubted acting talent) because of his status as the current “let’s cast him in everything” bloke in Hollywood. He’s once again a revelation in Prometheus. Perfect casting choice for the android David. Plus that sequence of him prowling the ship alone near the beginning, imitating TE Lawrence and putting Ripley’s clone’s basketball skills to shame put a smile on my face. The rest of the cast follows suit, with Noomi Rapace giving a consistently not-Ripley Ripley, Charlize Theron gives a good standard cold corporate bitch (which was actually jarring after watching her play Rita on Arrested Development...), Guy Pearce is... odd... as the aged Peter Weyland from the TED conference video, and everyone else is generally good.

There’s also a great score, a passable screenplay, and some genuinely exciting action – which is surprisingly hard to come by in this age of giant fighting robots, superheroes, and alien invasions which all somehow find a way to be boring. So, good job for actually entertaining me.

Back on the con side, though, is the pressing issue of pacing. Part of Alien’s slow-burning glory (I KNOW it wasn’t supposed to be another Alien and I should stop comparing them like it was blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH) was that it built up the tension to boiling-point and released it all out of one man’s chest. Prometheus doesn’t take much time to do that. We start off with the why the crew’s going where they’re going, then they get there. Then after the initial exploration, it’s set-piece after set-piece after set-piece, without much breathing time in between. In Alien, after each set-piece (in this case each crew member death) there was time for the characters and the audience to settle, take in what had happened, and reflect, which further allowed for us to bond with and understand the characters. Not so much of that in Prometheus. For instance, after the aforementioned scarifying caesarean sequence, we go almost immediately into the next sequence, wherein the surviving crew go back onto the planet to ‘meet’ the space jockeys (or ‘engineers’, as they are so-called in Prometheus), leaving very little time to take in the insane, panicky body horror we’d just witnessed.

So in summary, Prometheus offers a mix bag of greatness and not-so-greatness, resulting in something transcending mediocrity, but not quite reaching brilliance. I think the key to enjoying the film is to try and view it separately to Alien. If you try and compare the two, you’re gonna have a bad time, because Scott didn’t intend this to be a new Alien, nor a direct prequel. It’s a rather different film with an independent atmosphere, with minimal (though deliberate) links to Alien. But it seems to be confused. It can’t make up its mind about what it wants to be, flipping and flopping between horror and action, never quite nailing either in the way Cameron’s Aliens did.

What Prometheus needs is another viewing or four. And inevitably a sequel that may or may not answer the questions it opened up, and may or may not tie it more closely into the Alien series. And if James Cameron were to direct that sequel, I might just explode.