Prometheus - Alien 0?

With all this football on at the moment I am getting even more behind in films than I've been recently. I'm not going to use my monthly quota on Lovefilm for the first time in ages. But I did get out of bed early enough last Saturday to catch the 11:15am showing of Prometheus at Bracknell Odeon. It had only been out a week, but I already felt well behind the times as friends of mine had to natter about it behind my back. Now normally I don't give a crap about spoilers, but the level of secrecy surrounding this film encouraged me to find out as little as possible. As such, I went into the cinema Saturday morning knowing remarkably little aside from the fact that this was meant to be Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien.

Before I start I need to get my cards on the table - Alien is my favourite film. Why? Because it's both the greatest horror and science fiction film ever - all rolled into one. It has a beauty in the design and aesthetics of its sets, costume and obviously its alien antagonist that set it apart. The plot is deceptively simple, yet with believable 'ordinary' characters, tangible shocks and SFX that still hold up even over 30 years later it packs in a huge number of hidden layers and themes. From its opening scenes establishing the distant isolation of space, through its natural character development, the greatest shock scene of all time and its desperate visceral finale (they always come back) - for me it sits a the apex of 100 years of cinema.  Plus it's absolutely terrifying. Follow that Prometheus - I dare you.

Pometheus' plot is thus - after the discovery by archaeologists on Earth of a series of coded messages that appear in the cave-writings of stone age dwellers, the research vessel Prometheus is sent to the stars to investigate the possibility that aliens have left a message for humanity on a distant planet. On the crew of the ship are scientists (Noomi Rapace, Logan Marshall-Green), an android caretaker (Michael Fassbender), the ship's captain (Idris Elba) and some corporate no-gooders (led by Charlize Theron). Not a bad cast by any standards. The crew begin an exploration of an alien construction on this foreign world, one which contains all sorts of mysteries about aliens past and present that look worryingly like all the junk the crew of the doomed Nostromo found on their mysterious planet back in 1979. Soon things start to go all horror film, and all hell breaks loose.

The film's central theme seems to be about what it means to be human, and to what lengths people will go to discover the meaning of their humanity. For our scientists they are looking for the aliens that created humanity - in particular Noomi Rapace's character is deeply religious, searching for the gods in alien form. Charlize Theron represents the interests of the Weyland corporation - AKA The Man, Peter Weyland is a dying man who wants to find out the meaning of life before he goes. Lastly, and best of all, is Fassbender as the synthetic life-form David - trying to work out if a) he can be human and b) if not - what can he be. Fassbender easily retains his 'best actor of the moment' crown with his performance here.

Clearly Prometheus was never going to be as good as Alien, but there's no reason why it can't be a very good science fiction film - which I think it is. There are a lot of plot holes that I wont go into (spoilers and all that) and a fair bit of stuff that doesn't seem to tie in to the Alien mythology, but Ridley Scott assures us all these problems will be dealt with in a series of future prequels. I enjoyed some of the nods to the original Alien series and I think I benefited from an unheightened expectation about what the film would give me. There is one scene of horrible ickiness involving a bit of self-surgery that keeps the film firmly in the horror genre (plus plenty of minion types getting butchered).  If you go into this expecting something as groundbreaking as Alien you'll be disappointed, but if you're prepared for a solid science fiction film that simply adds flavour to the Alien universe I think you'll come away pleased.