Director – Ridley Scott – 2012 – US – Cert.15 – 124m
*****
UK release date 02/06/2012.
Western social attitudes to women have come a long way since Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) gratuitously stripped down to her underwear prior to fending off the malevolent creature in the finale of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi shocker Alien (1979), but would appear still to have a long way to go.
You might think the glass ceiling has been abolished with the expedition on spaceship Prometheus being run by ice-cool blonde Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), but subsequent plot twists (which we won’t reveal) suggest otherwise. Scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), impossibly pregnant with a mysterious and rapidly growing embryo, is unexpectedly forced to improvise when the automated medical operations facility with which she had hoped to perform her own Caesarian turns out programmed for male surgery only. If sisters are now doing it for themselves, plenty of male-designed hurdles are still making sure they don’t do it it that easily.
Elsewhere, as Prometheus pre-empts the Alien franchise’s “which one of the crew is an android?” gambit by introducing us to the non-human David (Michael Fassbender) walking around the ship before he awakens first Vickers then her subordinate crew members from hyper-sleep, the android male still appears to possess more final authority than anyone else on board.
As he explains as a holographic broadcast recorded before his death, industrialist Peter Wayland (Guy Pearce under a ton of old age prosthetics make-up) has commissioned this expedition to newly discovered planet LV 223 capable of supporting human life believed to be the home of the race who created humankind. Wayland hopes that the team of scientists his image addresses can find the answer to the questions that have concerned mankind’s greatest philosophers and thinkers down the ages: who or what created us and why are we here?
Since this is on some level an Alien prequel, instead of direct answers the explorers (eventually) encounter hostile xenomorphs who fatally impregnate them out one by one (via devastatingly impressive, state of the art visual effects). But that doesn’t stop the questions en route being interesting.
As in Alien, Ridley Scott’s visual style augments rather than overwhelms the content. Prometheus retreads many elements of Alien (crew waking from hyper-sleep, extreme storm weather on an alien world, architecture resembling bodily interiors, parasites entering/exiting their prey, the decapitation of the male android, the empowered final girl).
However, it also echoes Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) (the human in unfamiliar territory confronted by a small creature which appears to him friendly, but turns out deadly) and, possibly more significantly with Scott getting on in years, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) (a lone character moving round the ship while other crew members hyper-sleep, an ageing passenger preparing to embark upon the ultimate journey into the next life).
Prometheus more than satisfies on the level of its marketed pitch – i.e. as, if not exactly an Alien prequel, a companion piece made in that same universe exploring similar themes – and like its predecessor serves up an empowering female lead. Shaw quickly emerges as the new survivalist heroine for our times. Unlike fellow scientist Ellen Ripley, Elizabeth constantly wears a crucifix pendant round her neck, is outraged if anyone tries to take it off her and defends religious ideas. She’s passionately hopeful mankind will meet the creator race on LV 223. Instead of seeing the existence of such a race as a negation of the existence of God, she asks who created the creator race.
The nearest Alien got to direct expressions of religion was the Godless funeral scene where the Captain’s homily-substitute question prior to jettisoning a corpse into space, “does anyone want to say anything”, got no response. While Prometheus has no comparable scene, it’s clearly fascinated by larger questions even as it delivers its requisite violent spectacle in spades.
Review published in Third Way.
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