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Movie Review: Prometheus
Daniel "Pinto" Gunderson reviews the movie Prometheus.
This weekend’s movie was Prometheus, a sci-fi thriller that already had a built in following since it serves as a prequel to the movie Alien. Director Ridley Scott is known for starting the Alien franchise in 1979, along with movies Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.
The movie starts out with two archaeologists discovering a cave drawing that indicates the people that lived there centuries ago may have been visited by alien life forms. These archaeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) both decide they need to go find if these “beings” exist.
They are put on the ship Prometheus by the CEO of Weyland Corp. Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), along with many others, to go and find what they believe is a moon that orbits a planet in a distant solar system that can support life. In their mind, they think these aliens are their creators or “engineers” as they call them.
It takes two years to reach their destination and during this time, the ship is operated by David (Michael Fassbender), a robot designed by Weyland. Weyland also sends his daughter, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) to oversee the voyage for his company.
When they arrive at the moon, they discover a valley that contains several structures. The crew disembarks to go and explore these buildings to see what they contain. While they are exploring the structures, they make some discovers they wish they hadn’t.
Fun Fact: Ridley Scott was knighted back in 2003 and has a younger brother named Tony, who directed the movie Top Gun.
What I Liked:
Hang in there because I’m about to use a pretty big word; cinematography. Scott has always done an amazing job with the imagery of a film, translating his ideas into something magnificent on the screen. He crushes it yet again in this film.
The opening scene, which takes place before the archaeologists make their discovery, takes you on a journey of the landscape of the moon soon to be visited by Prometheus. Every shot in about a 3-5 minute segment took my breath away and put me on the edge of my seat.
It only got better from there as Scott knew when to make the images you were seeing amaze you or put extreme fear in you. I particularly like how dark and damp he made the inside of the engineer’s structure. Making it dark enough to scare you but not too dark that you lose track of what is going on in the movie.
What I Didn’t Like:
The ending of this movie bothered me a lot. Here is a quick synopsis of this scene. David has discovered one remaining engineer. He awakes him in order to ask him questions. In response, the alien rips David’s head off. Evidently he missed out on the seminar when they talked about civil conversations in the workplace.
As David’s head lay beside his body, you find out that he has not been completely destroyed. He is still able to talk and, get this, communicate with the ship! While, I understand this is science fiction I still was a bit miffed at this development.
His head actually plays a big role in how the movie actually ends. His head! It makes me wonder what other options the writers explored before they arrived at this conclusion. Ridley must have been up against a deadline when he got this part of the script. With not enough time to change it, he just went with it and made the best out of it.
I hope in 20 years, when Fassbender is asked what his greatest role as an actor was, he doesn’t respond with playing a head in the last 20 minutes of Prometheus.
GO = Go See It!
This movie deserves to be viewed on the big screen. There are going to be a few out there who find science fiction movies dumb and, granted, this movie has plenty of that. It still is one of those movies where you walk away talking about what scene you thought was the coolest.
While I did see quite a few families at this movie, I wouldn’t advise bringing someone under the age of 13 to this movie. It is rated R, but that’s mostly due to the graphic violence, which gets pretty intense for short periods, but isn’t sustained over the 124 minutes of this movie.
It is a really cool, visually captivating, movie that I would see again at the movie theater to catch what I missed the first time around.
Next up: Rock of Ages
