Review: Prometheus
By Christine Petralia
Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox
June 9, 2012
*May contain spoilers*
I'm going to say right off the bat that I never saw any of the Alien movies, for two reasons, one - I was very young when they came out, two - my fascination with aliens and alien films didn't really start until a few years ago, so I was always scared to see them. Now, after seeing the 'pre-quel' to them, I am intrigued.
I was told that Prometheus is the ship that they are searching for in the Alien films, so that answered one question for me. But I was also told that I didn't have to see the other films to really understand what was going on. All I really needed to know is that the alien that is 'created' at the end of the film, is eventually a race of the aliens in those films.
Prometheus starts off with an alien race form drinking a black substance, disintegrating into a waterfall and releasing his DNA into the water. Cut to the year 2089, when archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover yet another star map of ancient cultures, one that they have found in other digs. Cut to the year 2093, where the crew has been asleep on a spaceship that is heading to the planet where they believe these 'engineers' who created the drawings and star map are from. The android, David (Michael Fassbender) is running the ship while the crew is in stasis. After David wakes everyone up, the crew is told their mission by an assumed-dead Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) - find these 'engineers' who may be the original humans. The mission director Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) tells Shaw and Holloway that if they do find these engineers alive, no one is make contact with them or talk to them.
The land the ship on the planet and go exploring. As the crew finds a decapitated engineer, David finds a black substance, which is similar to what the alien form drank in the beginning. He takes a cylinder while crew members try to bring the head of the engineer back to the ship during a storm. While Shaw does testing on this head, they realize these creatures are in fact human. Meanwhile, David is off testing this substance and slips some in Holloway's drink.
After some sexy times and a good night's sleep, Shaw, Holloway and the crew are back on the ground searching for the two missing crew members left behind in the 'cave.' As Holloway gets sicker, crew members find the missing members dead, having been attacked by something. Holloway essentially commits suicide as they rush him back to the ship.
At this point in the movie, you really have to pay attention because a lot is going on. David tells Shaw after a scan that she is pregnant, but we learned earlier she is infertile. She realizes she's pregnant with an alien creature and wants it out of her. While David informs her they will bring her back to Earth, with the creature in her, in a stasis form. While she essentially performs a surgery on herself in a medical pod, one of the missing crew members, now taken over by an alien, comes back and attacks the ship. Then we learn that Weyland is actually still alive, and the whole point of the mission is revealed, that he wants to meet these engineers in the hopes they have some sort of way to live longer. David in forms Weyland that on one of the trips to the cave, he finds one of these engineers still alive, so they all suit up, including a now alien-free Shaw.
And as all of the above is happening, the ship's captain, Janek (Idris Elba), realizes that the black stuff is actually a weapon of mass destruction that this alien race was creating to destroy Earth. But the black stuff essentially creates another alien form, which turns on them. Hence why the planet is so desolate, etc, etc, etc.
After a brief battle with this engineer alien, he tries to take off in his ship, set to destroy Earth. Janek and the only two crew members left decide to sacrifice themselves to destroy the ship, and in turn destroy Prometheus. Shaw is left on the planet and retrieves supplies from the escape pod, meant for Vickers who meets her end at some point, and finds the alien that she removed from herself has grown. When the engineer comes for her after the ship crashes, she releases the alien on him and flees to find David, who is still 'alive' somewhere. The pair eventually find another alien ship and leave the plane to find the engineers' homeland and to get more answers. While the alien attacks the engineer and creates, as I said above, the alien we see in the other films.
That pretty much sums it up. It was an edge of your seat film, especially because I really didn't know where it was going. Elba provides some comedic relief, while Theron plays someone who you know just has a different agenda as the rest of the crew. I'm assuming for Alien fans this is a good film. But as I said, if you haven't seen them, this is a great film in itself. A little gory, but not scary at all. Enjoy!
3 stars.
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