Did that script look f*cking right to you, Sir?"The light is wrong," grumbles Sir Ridley Scott. “What's wrong with the light?” [empire]
Thoughts on Prometheus. Spoilers ahead.
The good news is, Prommie is a typical Ridley Scott movie. It comes with great mood, superb music and atmosphere, neat pacing, thought-provoking themes sewed into the story, some of the best actors out there (Noomi Rapace is a treat to watch, and I wouldn't be too surprised if The 'Bender got an Oscar nomination for his role), characters who can hold your attention, even if you don't particularly care about them, and given its budget and genre, some really spectacular visual effects.
The bad news is, Prommie is a goddamn typical Ridley Scott movie. The plot is an incoherent mess, violating your mind with sci-fi logic (read: logic from a whole different reality than ours), painful, nonsense twists, and stinging questions, just for the sake of not answering them. Remember how Hannibal fell into pieces in the shark-jumping third act? Expect the same thing here, and that ending, meh, don't even get me started on that. It's theatrical Blade Runner all over again.
Great mood, atmosphere, and music, terrible story - just like Alien 3, isn't it?
Yup, Prometheus is of course also a semi-prequel to the Great Quadrilogy, the Alien legacy, that was originally ignited by Sir Ridley. It gives a face and backstory for not just ol' Weyland, the guy behind the dreaded Company (the two AVP movies rightfully ignored from the canon), but also to that mysterious, giant humanoid race - the Space Jockeys, as the fandom calls them - that indirectly brought the menace on us in the original Alien. And this is where my and most fanboys' nerdy problems start.
Major spoilers from here, but as soon as you saw the trailer you could figure it out that the Space Jockeys - best to describe them as 20 ft tall elephant men from an Inception-esque shared nightmare of H.P. Lovecraft and H.R. Giger - have been turned into pale bald guys wearing a biomech suit, just a little taller than average human beings because of... well, screenwriter Jon Spaihts or/and re-writer Damon Lindelof thought they'd work better like that for this story. No explanation or any mention of bigger "Engineer" cousins whatsoever. Basically, it's the worst sci-fi retcon since the Immortal's backstory in Highlander II, and the movie expects you to accept it within a second, shouting "But wait, there's more!"
Further complicating the Jockey's WTF status they add Däniken's ancient astronauts / alien gods theory (the same thing was forced on the Predators in AVP, it felt tired and clichéd even back in 2004) to the mix, and their bio-weapon, some kind of black ooze that plays around with the victim's DNA, leading to a lot of nasty monsters and mutations throughout the movie, and in the end even creating something that reminds us to our beloved double-jawed Xenomorphs. Essentially this ooze is just like "Purity," the black oil from The X Files, the stuff the greys used to rip-off the parasitic reproduction cycle from Alien. Things coming full circle, eh?
So the plot in a nutshell: nonsense shit happens, characters have a few interesting theories, nonsense shit that reminds you of Alien happens, characters die, the movie is over, and in the end nothing is confirmed or explained. You left with a million questions, and - at least in my case - wishing for a sequel that could give answers and make some sense out of this mess. Maybe.
All in all, if you want a real opinion from me, Prometheus is just another Terminator $alvation. An interesting, brave take on a franchise with some really good moments, that tries to look more than what it actually is, but it makes some laughable mistakes while trying to please the intellectual sci-fi crowd. It's no 2001, but neither The Phantom Menace; a decent enough flick that I was glad to see, but in its current form has no place in the Alien canon.
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