I have never seen Alien. So I can’t tell you whether or not Prometheus works as a prequel. But I can tell you that Prometheus absolutely doesn’t work as a stand alone movie. All the hype, all the anticipation, and all we get is a very standard action movie with no surprises, no scares and nothing we haven’t seen before. I don’t care if it’s directed by the legendary Ridley Scott, or that he’s revisiting his most classic sci-fi film. Apparently he’s lost his touch.

Prometheus asks all these big questions about the origins of the human race and where we come from, but then answers them with standard movie violence.

Movie rating: 3/5: Alright.

I can’t bring myself to say that Prometheus is a bad movie. It’s competently made, looks cool and has enough action and Idris Elba to keep someone entertained. But the film has so many plot holes and contrivances that I can’t consider it a good movie. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I also can’t imagine it answering too many questions about the Alien franchise. Everything we learn about the aliens and the Engineers in this movie is just boring and ho-hum. We don’t learn anything about the origins of the human race. And the big moment where it looks like we might see something new, Scott just inserts more needless, pointless violence.

The characters are paper thin, the designs are dark and murky, the aliens are wildly inconsistent and some of the twists just don’t make any sense. I expected much more from Prometheus, but got so much less.

Spoilers and more after the jump.

The biggest letdown of Prometheus is that we don’t even begin to get an answer about the origin of the human race. That is actually a fairly interesting topic, and one ripe for sci-fi potential. It’s probably been done before, but no movies I’ve ever seen springs to mind. So Ridley Scott had plenty of fertile material to work with. And figuring out how that origin also ties in to Alien should have also provided a lot of fodder for a good movie. But he seems to ignore all of this potential for just generic, standard Hollywood violence and action. Featuring characters that amount to little more than ‘the Asian guy’ or ‘the guy with the mowhawk’. Even the main character, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, isn’t very interesting. She’s defined mostly by the weird stuff that happens to her and a religious angle that goes nowhere. She’s played by Noomi Rapace.

She looks quite fetching in her fancy spacesuit with her flashlight

The plot is pretty simple. Shaw and her boyfriend/fiance Charlie have discovered some old cave paintings on Earth from different ancient civilizations that point to a specific star cluster out in space. They think it’s an invitation from whatever made humanity, so they want to go meet their makers, literally. They hook up with a crew and a ship, named Prometheus, sponsored by the Weyland Corporation, which I believe is the corporation from the other Alien movies. Once they arrive on the planet, they visit the very first interesting thing they find and it turns out to contain a bunch of deadly aliens. Not the same xenomorphs or face-huggers we know from the other movies, but just as deadly.

Then rather than actually learn anything about any of these aliens, or the origin of the human race, everybody is pretty much just killed in one way or another.

All these guys? Dead! Their fancy spacesuits do nothing!

So let’s just get right to my main complaint: uninteresting and unnecessary violence. That’s all this movie was. Characters are trotted out, given a name and maybe a personality quirk, and then killed soon after. And they’re killed either exploring a dark, murky alien hallway or back on the ship Prometheus. So the locations and sets are never very interesting either. Unless you’re absolutely in love with the aesthetic of the Aliens movies, the alien ship they find is just a bunch of dark. And if you’ve seen one sci-fi spaceship, you’ve seen them all, so the Prometheus itself is just the same stock corridors and bridge.

Depending on your tolerance for generic, gooey alien violence, the deaths aren’t that interesting either. And they’re not consistent. Whereas in the other movies we knew how the xenomorphs and face-huggers killed, this time there’s no rhyme or reason as to what the aliens do. One guy is killed when a worm-thingy crawls into his mouth. Another guy is possessed by some black tar and turned into a murder zombie. One guy is infected with a tiny spore, which seems to eat him from inside out. It might all sound cool, but it’s all fairly standard sci-fi fare. And since none of it’s the same, it’s all just wildly flailing to try and find new ways to shock us. Or scare us? I dunno.

Well it’s not scary, not in the least.

Oh look, a big alien chair! Spooky!

My biggest gripe is when we actually get to meet one of the “Engineers”, which is the name Shaw and Charlie give to the white-skinned, humanoid aliens who may or may not have created the human race. We’re told that their DNA is a match to humans, so the tease is pretty exciting. Then the crew finds one alive in the alien ship and they wake him up, intent on talking to him and trying to get some questions answered. Not two minutes out of his cryostasis and the Engineer starts killing people for no good reason. He doesn’t say anything, no attempt is made to actually get to know the characters. He just starts killing and never stops through the end of the film.

Come on! I wanted to hear what he had to say! I wanted to see how he might react to being woken up by strange alien people! Instead he just starts killing. La de frickin’ da!

Heeeeeeeere’s Alien!

Then there are the huge plot twists/contrivances that make no sense! We have David the Android (played by Michael Fassbender), built by the Weyland Corporation to man the ship during its two year journey while the human crew is in stasis. From scene one, we know that David isn’t quite right. Which is fine. It’s good to have someone with sinister motives…but then those don’t play out in any logical way! Why is David sinister? Because apparently this mission has a secret agenda: bringing the 90+-year-old founder of the Weyland Corporation to meet the Engineers, possibly so that they can show him how to cheat death. That’s fine.

But why is that a secret agenda? The old guy, Peter Weyland, is kept in secret stasis, unknown to the rest of the crew – though nobody seems particularly bothered when he shows up towards the end. Weyland is played by Guy Pearce in ludicrously unconvincing old-guy makeup. Shaw and Charlie didn’t know he was on the ship. And why not? Peter Weyland is funding this mission. Why would he need to keep it a secret that he wants to go with them and meet the same aliens that they want to meet? Because he hopes the aliens will help him cheat death? It’s his money, his mission, his ship, he can go meet them for whatever reason he wants!

And why does that desire to cheat death require David the Android to murder Charlie?

Because all robots start murdering people eventually

Seriously, that serves no point. David sneaks an alien pod onto the ship, and then extracts from it a single spore of some kind. For absolutely no reason whatsoever, he slips the spore into Charlie’s drink. Sure enough, the next day, Charlie gets eaten alive from the inside and has to be killed. What purpose did that serve? How did killing Charlie in such a gruesome fashion bring Peter Weyland any closer to the Engineers?

And it just so happens that Charlie had sex with Shaw that very night. So she’s got some kind of alien egg inside of her. How could David have predicted that? Did he predict it? He doesn’t seem at all bothered when a diagnostic scan reveals that she’s pregnant. In fact, he seems to want to keep the alien inside of her. Shaw doesn’t, of course, and so she decides to have an emergency abortion. On a spaceship. In space.

But don’t worry! There was that one-minute scene earlier in the film where they casually mentioned that there is a surgery machine on board, built for invasive surgery. Exactly the kind Shaw needs! The machine was brought on board by a woman, but earlier she refused to answer the question as to why it was brought on board. And then when Shaw tries to use it for the abortion, the machine reveals that it’s programmed only for male biology. What!? Why? Why did a woman bring the surgery machine on board if it can’t be used on women? Why even program a machine like that? Or why even put this temporary hurdle in the film in the first place? Because Shaw presses some buttons and gets it to extract the egg from her body anyway in a gruesome surgery scene.

As I watched, I just kept thinking that she could use a shower

What did any of that – killing Charlie, impregnating Shaw – have to do with getting Peter Weyland out to meet the Engineers? Nothing. And it likewise had nothing to add to the movie. It was just pointless violence and gruesomeness for its own sake.

Why couldn’t we see a movie about everyone working together, Shaw, Charlie, Weyland, to go out and meet these fascinating aliens and learn the origin of the human race? I want to see that movie! I don’t care if Space Character #4516 is killed by Evil alien #89030 in Space Movie #119.

And it’s not like the spectacle is worth the price of admission. None of the aliens look very interesting. The Engineer is just a big, pale humanoid. The aliens we do see are just wriggly, wormy, squiddy things. And both the Prometheus and the alien ship are just your standard spaceships. There is no awe or wonderment in this movie. All of it has appeared in other, better movies.

The only really good thing about Prometheus is Idris Elba.

He planned it that way

Elba plays the captain of the Prometheus as a working-class, blue collar sort of guy, and it’s quite entertaining. I like the idea that this big, fancy, scientific spaceship is captained by the kind of guy you might see driving a bus. It adds a layer of flavor to the whole scenario, a sense of realism that blue collar people still exist in the future. Elba’s captain is very human, without any secret agendas or sinister plots. He just wants to do his job, protect his people and eventually go home. He’s entertaining. But that hardly saves the movie. His crew are little more than faces, so his big dramatic goodbye to them at the end rings hollow. And at one point he randomly, out of the blue, comes up with an explanation for what they found.

According to Elba, the Engineers designed some kind of biological weapon, but lost control of it and that’s why they buried this ship (and several others) out on this barren planet. OK, how’d you come to that conclusion? And if that’s the case, why were all those ancient civilizations pointing to this planet? And what does this have to do with the origin of the human race? Then the movie tries to expand on this biological weapon idea while sidestepping the origin questions. The Engineers were going to take the weapons to Earth…but either they changed their minds or the aliens got out and killed them all. Which is it? At one point, the answer seems vitally important to Shaw.

But when she tries to ask the Engineer he just starts killing everybody.

Which pretty much sums up this movie nicely. Anytime we might actually learn something fascinating about the aliens or the origin of the human race, we instead get standard movie killing. And I guess that’s just not very entertaining to me anymore.