Sci-fi simply out of this world
Film review:
Rating: ***
Some 30 years after directing the first Alien film, Ridley Scott returns to the franchise to give it a shiny new paintjob. And as franchises go, the Alien movies certainly needed some maintenance work.
After the superlative Alien, and James Cameron’s effortlessly entertaining sequel Aliens, the series ran aground on a number of underwhelming follow-ups and ill-advised cross-over flicks with the Predator series. Scott’s return to the helm therefore feels a bit like a man coming to the aid of an ailing friend; a last ditch attempt to save the series from oblivion.
And he’s certainly spruced things up a bit. Set some years before Alien, Prometheus sets out to explain the history of the mysterious space ship (complete with gooey alien cargo) encountered by Sigourney Weaver and her slack-jawed cohort in the first movie.
Without giving too much away, the crux of the plot is a von Däniken-esque conspiracy theory about ancient astronauts purposefully “engineering” human life on earth. A group of scientists, led by plucky archeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), set out for a distant moon to search for traces of these mysterious beings.
It would be difficult to imagine a set-up further removed from the original concept of Alien, which was simple to the point of absurdity. Whereas Alien was essentially a haunted-house-in-space movie, reliant on atmospheric chills for its impetus, Prometheus is a big, blowsy space-opera with plenty of action and computer-generated spectacle.
Overall, the effect is a little mixed. Fans of Scott’s original film may find the contrast rather jarring; the claustrophobic interiors of the Nostromo exchanged for the vast landscape of an alien world, and the perfunctory plot of Alien supplanted by a wealth of mythology and back-story. There are also some duff notes among the performances, most notably Guy Pearce, completely miscast as the aging industrialist Weyland. I’ve never understood Hollywood’s ostensible fear of casting old actors to play old characters. If the part requires a frail old man, then cast one. Casting Guy Pearce, and slathering him in unconvincing prosthetic makeup, struck me as a very odd move.
There are a few notable highlights, however. Chief among them is Michael Fassbender as the eerily Teutonic android ‘David’. Fassbender reportedly based his performance on Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia, and the resonance comes across beautifully in every icily delivered line. Fassbender’s performance is so good it runs the risk of stealing the film’s dramatic focus (we’re supposed to be caring about Liz’s search for the aliens, after all), but in a movie as big and noisy as Prometheus it’s heartening to see some space left for this quiet, assured performance.
Prometheus is a very different beast to Scott’s earlier film, and suffers from some of the muddling and excess that accompanies a big budget and a hefty running time. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy myself. Ridley Scott remains an astute and capable director, and Michael Fassbender’s turn as David is outstanding. More importantly though, there’s something faintly idealistic and ingenuous about the central metaphor in Prometheus: that travelling up to the heavens can still be exciting.
