Movie Review--Prometheus

"I have spent my entire lifetime contemplating the questions: Where do we come from?  What is our purpose?  What happens when we die?  And I have finally found two people who convinced me they're on the verge of answering them."

--Peter Weyland, Prometheus

By far the most ambitious and yet random film of the now-long Alien franchise, Prometheus sets out to accomplish the enormous task of setting up the eventual main series while never showing a xenomorph and remaining rather vague about a great many things.  What it does right, it does very well, but the strongest aspects are the philosophical themes and the very distinct visual identity of the film.  The explicit exploration of religious issues as they overlap with broader existential philosophy, the sexual horror of how plenty of other creatures of the Alien universe besides xenomorphs often attack prey by raping them, the comparison to how the Titan Prometheus was punished by the Olympians for trying to elevate humanity, and the subtle Lovecraftian cosmic horror overtones come together to create a very thematically unique film, but one that is at times nowhere near as focused as it could have been.  Like the first Alien, Prometheus is a slow burn film.  The first hour gets spent on the buildup to and of the discovery of Engineer remnants.  The second hour is devoted to the more cosmic horror-oriented elements, and this is where Prometheus gains the most momentum.

Production Values

From the early shots of the Prometheus vessel descending into the atmosphere to the interior of the Engineer base to the eventual inhuman creatures shown near the end, Prometheus is full of great effects that are not just included to make the planet, ships, creatures seem artificially exotic, but that are used to make the world seem ripe for the kind of philosophical reflection that almost every main character engages with, though of course there is not a single rationalist to be found anywhere in the story's cast.  Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, and Katie Dickie do an excellent job with their roles, but only Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw and Michael Fassender's David are developed more as individuals than as necessary presences in the plot.  Fassbender does something incredible that builds on this in Alien: Covenant, but in both Prometheus and its 2017 sequel, the subtleties and skill of his delivery, facial expressions, gestures, and line recitations alike are the absolute best in the entire franchise.  Noomi Rapace and a stellar supporting cast help the film too, to be sure, but none of them have characters quite as complex as Fassbender's android David.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A lone pale humanoid stands before a waterfall and consumes some sort of black substance that begins to dissolve its body from the inside out.  This alien creature seems to voluntarily give its life.  Many, many years later in the late 21st century, archeologists have discovered numerous identical cave drawings or other art in geographically separated regions, some of them from civilizations also separated by large amounts of time, which show a set of stars and a giant bipedal creature pointing to them.  Elizabeth Shaw, one of the archeologists, thinks that these images are an invitation to find the extraterrestrials depicted on them.  She has the fortune of gaining funds and equipment for an expedition to this distant star system from the Weyland Corporation aboard the Prometheus.  Once they reach a planet with traces of what Shaw refers to as the Engineers, an android called David recognizes symbols on the interior of the structure as linguistic parallels to ancient Earth languages.  Soon, the crew of the Prometheus finds that Engineers seemingly created humans, but then tossed them aside.

Intellectual Content

In contrast with its grand themes, Prometheus is full of idiot characters, but not just for the popular mistakes of a much more practical than abstract kind, such as Meredith Vickers running straight when the Engineer starcraft is rolling in the same direction despite running to the side being an obvious path to safety.  Shown early on, Elizabeth Shaw's father says he just chooses to believe people go to a paradise when they die, and Elizabeth seems to believe in her vague pseudo-Christian theism on the basis of emotionalism, though she does imply she believes in an uncaused cause when someone tells her there is no need for her cross necklace once the Engineers, humanity's creators, are found.  She simply asks who created the Engineers.  There is also one onboard consultants who pretends like a terrestrial Darwinistic origin of humanity is epistemologically verifiable and pushes back against the possibility the Engineers created humans on this basis, though he is only making assumptions and confusing Darwinistic natural selection as a mechanism of how life that already exists adapts and changes over time with the means that life first came into being.

Just how humans came into being in this universe is the philosophical focus of Prometheus from start to finish.  David the android asks Dr. Holloway in one scene why humans designed androids like him, to which Holloway replies "We made you cause we could."  David's response not only emphasizes how at least some people could be very terrified or let down by such a reason for their kind being brought into existence, but it also is one of the multiple hints across Prometheus and Alien: Covenant that he, and perhaps other androids as well, can indeed feel emotion and experience desires that can be impacted by these feelings: "Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?"  The expression on his face and the way he moves from one statement or question to the next serve as evidence that he just might truly feel in addition to truly have general consciousness, sensory perceptions, and the ability to grasp reason to some extent.  However, this personal disappointment Holloway and David talk about is at most lack of subjective fulfillment; the moral ramifications of creation as it starts with the uncaused cause is much more significant than this personal excitement or disappointment could ever be, and the uncaused cause is necessary to have created matter in the first place whether or not it directly created biological life or if aliens like the Engineers made the first humans.

This is where the cosmic horror, which really only became a prominent part of the franchise with Prometheus, and the sexual horror of how life might be created in the Alien series meet together.  The cosmic horror of this film is about the desperation of the characters to learn what they can about human origins and of course about the gravity of the creation of life, whereas the sexual horror that has been part of the series from the beginning, sometimes just so subtly that it could be easily overlooked, is more about the visual imagery of the creatures and way the xenomorphs (and other aliens) reproduce.  After all, the facehuggers are orally raping victims to implant xenomorphs inside them, just as the massive squid-like beast at the end of Prometheus orally rapes the Engineer to death.  The visual indication of this creature undergoing an orgasm once it forces a body part down the throat of the Engineer is maybe the strongest sexual imagery of the entire series.  It is not a human man or woman raping another human or even an animal, but it is a unique cinematic case that still exemplifies how something that can be so relationally intimate and so introspectively powerful can be alternatively used to bring extreme misery and degradation worse than mere death, even if the victim if not a human at all.

Conclusion

More aimed at philosophical exploration than Alien (though a more minor Lovecraftian atmosphere and less direct moral or metaphysical issues are brushed up against) and and less action-heavy than Aliens, the two best films in the core Alien series, Prometheus aims the series in a bold direction full of potential.  So many aspects of the franchise come together to form a very strong thematic unity that now grapples with religion, creation, and existentialism in ways that the prior entries never did, just without the smoother plotting and more universalized character development for more than a handful of the excellent ensemble cast that would have made it even better.  Had the very random way that the different creatures of the movie come about from cross-species mating been explained better, some unecessary vagueness would have been eliminated as well.  With these flaws or forfeited chances at being a better film, Prometheus is still very well-constructed and deals sincerely with things of more substance than many other recent science fiction movies do.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  In a few scenes, humans fight other humans or creatures, using bloodless flamethrowers, guns, or hooks.  A decapitated extraterrestrial head explodes onscreen in one part and showers a glass containment area with body parts.

 2.  Profanity:  The likes of "fuck," "damn," "bitch," and "bastard" are used in dialogue.

 3.  Sexuality:  Even moreso than the facehuggers and mature xenomorphs that were intended to be sexually predatory creatures, the squid-like animal at the end of Prometheus is utilized in an explicitly sexual way.  It rapes the Engineer to death so that it can produce a hybrid offspring.  While even the shots before what would be a consensual sex scene with humans are brief and do not show the act, this is one of the most overt scenes of an animal engaging in sexual behavior in a mainstream movie, and sexual behavior that is nonconsensual at that.