- Location: Century Boulder
- For the sake of my own sanity, allow me to try to summarize the life cycle of the alien. From Ridley Scott's original film, we know that those crustacean-like face-huggers (what a lovable name!) hatch from eggs, attach themselves parasitically to humans, and implant larvae inside their hosts. Over salad or whatever, these larvae violently eject themselves from the hosts and grow to enormous size seemingly without using either of their two mouths to eat. From the sequel Aliens, we discover that the eggs are laid by a "Queen," who is somehow more horrifying than any of her grotesque offspring. And let's just ignore the question of whether she produces sexually or asexually, shall we? I seem to recall that Alien 3 showed that aliens could inhabit dogs, too, and honestly I never saw Alien Resurrection under the assumption of diminishing returns.
- But now there's Prometheus, which suggests that the first alien-like creatures came from a black bioweapon infecting a human who impregnated another human. That fetus grows up to look like a huge face hugger that "implants itself" on a humanoid, who in turn serves as an incubator for some sort of proto-alien that could very well be an evolutionary cousin of the more familiar xenomorph. Also, that race of humanoids (known as "Engineers") has DNA that precisely matches that of Earth's human race, even though they appear to have a different number of abdominal muscles. Remember the anonymous space jockey from the first Alien? Yeah, he was one of them. But not specifically, since none of them ended up sitting in his chair at the end of the film. Also, they are surprisingly genocidal. I always thought the poor space jockey had just gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd, but now I see that he had it coming.
- If this all sounds pretty convoluted, that's because it is. Prometheus is a film that contains a few interesting ideas and many terrible ones, and it makes no attempt to discriminate between the two. Contained somewhere in this film are fascinating stories waiting to be told about an amoral android (Michael Fassbender) who idolizes Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia when he isn't voyeuristically watching people's dreams. Likewise, there could have been some thoughtful commentary on the intersection of religion, anthropology, and science as experienced by someone (Noomi Rapace) who loses her fellow researcher and lover (Logan Marshall-Green) to disease, just as she lost her father. Maybe there's even the potential for an engrossing tale of man's quest for eternal life, epitomized by the grizzled old goat (Guy Pearce) who funded this space mission.
- But in Prometheus, these stories are buried far beneath the clutter and rubble of some truly weird and unpalatable decisions concerning plot, characterizations, and acting. Why are the scientists (including Sean Harris and Rafe Spall) smart enough to get chosen for space travel, but dumb enough to touch a live alien, not to mention sticking an electrode into a dead alien's head? Why would the eminently likable captain (Idris Elba) ever be attracted to the truly frigid and awful business manager (Charlize Theron)? Why put Guy Pearce in old-man makeup? Does any of this have to do with the original Alien series, or are we to assume that the Engineers were so incompetent that similar events are happening everywhere in the Galaxy? Aside from a memorable surgery scene that captures some of the visceral grotesqueness of the first two films (it's abortion instead of rape this time around) and the occasional dash of inspired set design and cinematography, Prometheus is painfully disappointing and forgettable. Will somebody please reanimate the cryogenically preserved Ridley Scott from 30 years ago?
- I'm pretty sure some of those cave paintings came from the Chauvet caves featured in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
