Rudimentary Tools
Ridley Scott’s new prequel to the Alien franchise, Prometheus, may not be what you were expecting. I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing. What I am saying is that you may want to clear your expectations off of the shelf before you take a seat at your local theater.
After seeing the trailer, I expected an intense and possibly horrifying look at the events leading to Alien, also directed by Scott. I was partly right. While Prometheus doesn’t really play into the horrific feeling of Alien, it does offer a substantial amount of intensity. Mostly. Prometheus is not a white-knuckle movie. It may not keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time, but it will force you to creep forward more than once.
Keeping with the overtly sexual art of H.R. Giger, the movie is quite stunning to look at. The movie seems to put on display just how sexual these creatures are in the form of phallic and vaginal representations. But after having seen the previous movies, did you expect less?
The story overall doesn’t explain a whole lot. It poses so many questions that in the two and a half hours it was on screen, it couldn’t even begin to answer all of them. The thing is, that’s not such bad thing, and I’ll get to that in a minute.
I was mostly impressed with the cast. I liked that they kept the central character a woman, just as they did in years previous. Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, was very Ripley-esque. Guy Pearce, for his small roll as Peter Weyland, did a fine job for what he was given. Michael Fassbender, who played the emotionally devoid synthetic David, was terrific. Frankly, he was unnerving.
Now, I say mostly impressed with the cast because of Charlize Theron. By no means did she do a poor job. I just expect a lot from her and I feel she didn’t really push herself with this one.
There has always been an unspoken rule that we as an audience are to suspend a certain amount of belief so that a movie can progress. The thing is, that can only go so far. There will come a point in Prometheus, and I’m not going to tell you what that part is because it’s crucial, that they cross the threshold into a realm where the audience will question its validity. It goes from being a sci-fi to a medical masquerade.
I expected a clear and succinct ending. This goes back to what I was talking about before with the questions. Prometheus leaves itself open for one or what could be two more movies. It asks all of these questions, but we still have time to have them answered. More or less, Prometheus acted as what could be considered an expository episode in a much larger saga.
-Nick
“Wow, he just made the international sign of the doughnut.”
