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A few decades in the future: Scientists Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and
Holloway (Logan Marshall Green) find some cave paintings in some caves
from 35,000 years ago with some stickmen pointing to a star system I don't
know how many light years away - a pattern very consistent with other cave
art found all over the world that must have been created independently
from one another ... unless of course there are some aliens out there that
want to invite us. A few years later, Shaw and Holloway are on spaceship
Prometheus on a privately financed mission to the planet the stickmen were
obviously pointing to, accompanied by a motley crew of - well, of
everything one can think of, including cold blooded mission commander
Vickers (Charlize Theron), good-natured captain Janek (Idris Elba), and
the prerequisite android with an agenda of his own, David (Michael
Fassbender). Well, of course they find some kind of "structure"
on that planet that seems to be full of mystery and that eventually turns
out to be a spaceship created by extraterrestrials that ... apparently
created us humans or are at least our forefathers. But there seems to be
something alive on this extraterrestrial spaceship, as two crewmembers are
soon horribly killed. For unexplained reasons, David poisons Holloway with
something he has found on the planet, and Holloway dies a horrible death,
but not before having (consensuous) sex with Shaw ... who suddenly learns
she's three months pregnant - and after convincing a robotic medical unit
to perform a makeshift cesarian, she gives birth to ... a homicidal
octopus. Shaw survives the ordeal though relatively undamaged, and soon
she learns the real purpose of their mission: Their frail and essentially
dying financier of the expedition, Weyland (Guy Pearce) - as fate has it
Vickers' dad - has come with them to literally meet his maker (= the
extraterrestrials) to ... ask for a few more years. Once on the
extraterrestrial spaceship, David manages to wake up one of the
extraterrestrials from his stasis chamber, but the extraterrestrial
immediately goes berserk and kills Weyland and pretty much everyone else
in his way. Only David survives decapitation because ... well, he's an
android. And Shaw survives because ... well, she's the lead character. The
extraterrestrial launches his spaceship though and it soon becomes clear
he wants to destroy earth (why?). So the essential crew on Prometheus led
by captain Janek decide to crash their spaceship into the aliens to make
both of them explode, even if it costs their own lives. Only commander
Vickers bails out, and for that she's later condemned to die a coward's
death. It seems like Shaw is the sole survivor of the whole ordeal, but
she soon has to fight the extraterrestrial from the (now crashed)
spaceship, which she somehow manages to pit against her octopus baby that
has grown rapidly since we last saw it. Once that's done, she picks up
David's head, which tells her there are other extraterrestrial spaceships
on this planet, and since the android apparently can fly one, she
persuades him to take her to the extraterrestrials' home planet for some
answers. Oh yeah, and the battle of extraterrestrial vs octopus
eventually ended in the birth (?) the alien from Alien. Long
announced as the maybe-prequel to Ridley Scott's finest hour, Alien
(and by the way, it is a direct prequel), thgis was also tied to hopes
that Scott would find to his old form again and deliver another
streamlined little space-set shocker fueled by ideas, suspense and tension
rather than bombast and an overuse of special effects. Well, these
expectations were crushed, in concept, Prometheus is far away from Alien,
it borrows freely from the earlier film, but much more so from the many Alien-rip-offs
that followed in the 1980's and - when it comes to the film's esoteric
undercurrents - from second season Space
1999, without ever reaching that series' so-bad-it's-good
quality. Which is a pity, really, because Prometheus is pretty
badly written, many of its key plotpoints don't make total sense, and the
narrative necessity of quite a few subplots is at best questionable. Add
to this characters ranging from bland to one-dimensional, and you're not
left with too much. And then there's Scott's direction, which literally
drowns the film's story in an overload of special effects, computer
graphics and the like, he seems primarily concerned about showing the
audience that a busload of money was spent on his films. What he isn't
concerned about is creating tension or suspense, and even the
(theoretically) best shock scenes come across as ... nothing much. On
the acting side, only Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron manage to
really convince. Sure, their characters are one-dimensional, but at least
they fill them with some life. Noomi Rapace in the meantime tries to give
a compelling performance, but fails to get a grip of her totally bland
character, and Guy Pearce is unable to make the audience forget his
ridiculous old-man-makeup. The rest of the cast - total void, actually,
but the emptiness of their characters is at least partly to blame. In
all, a bombastic movie, made the Ridley Scott-way, and if that's what you
like, you'll like Prometheus, but if you're looking for tension,
suspense, shocks, depth, whatever, look somewhere else ...
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