Prometheus (2012)

I think I did everything I could to try and avoid being disappointed by this film. As soon as I saw a trailer that started to show specific plot elements I cut myself off from any more promotional materials and tried to forget what I had seen. When a few friends saw it before me and their feedback wasn't very positive I tried to prepare myself to judge it as a film on its own and not to view it purely as an Alien film. However all of this wasn't enough to avoid making it the most disappointing film of the year so far.

I almost want to start with what I did like about it to get that out of the way, it's going to be a shorter list than what I had problems with. On the whole it looks fantastic, with the opening shots looking especially other worldly - even when I knew in advance that a lot of it was filmed in Iceland. I liked the Prometheus ship and alien structures, though both felt a little lacking in scale. Michael Fassbender is utterly convincing as David, a prototype android while Charlize Theron and Idris Elba were both interesting to watch, though not as good as I thought they might be. I saw it in 2D so I can't comment on how the 3D was used but I can imagine that some of it would have been impressive if it was originally filmed for 3D.

I'm writing this before reading most reviews but the first that I actively read was from the Strange Shapes blog. Knowing that the writer was obviously a huge Aliens fan I wanted to see if their opinion was similar to mine. I'd say that we were both disappointed by roughly the same issues but had different thoughts on the source of the problems. Valaquen concentrated a lot on what was down to editing, whereas my first instinct was to criticise its writing. This is despite the fact that I didn't want to be part of that group that was so quick to jump to criticise Damon Lindelof on Twitter, blaming him for everything that was wrong with the film.

What first bugged me was how it seemed to be full of lazy expository dialogue, that only seemed to serve to highlight what would be important later. "This is a totally separate unit?", "Yes, I can survive for years on my own if separated from the ship". "Wow, a Med Pod 720i, they only made a few of these. They're capable of performing surgery unaided, I know all of this because I'm an archaeologist". One or two lines like this I could let slide but they just seemed to build up and give the film a really cheesy feel that was out of character with the tone of the rest of the film.

Speaking of out of character, the characters in the film seemed very underdeveloped and confusing to follow. The familiar post-defrost meal which would often introduce you to the characters in the Alien films only really gives you a glimpse of a few new characters here, with one in particular giving you completely the wrong impression. Almost like a scene from a high school movie, a 'geek' sits down at the 'jock's table' and gets verbally berated for it. Antagonistic attitude, mohawk, only in it for the money - surely this guy must just be hired muscle along for protection. No? A short while later we find that this guy is actually a geologist who "loves rocks" and isn't as tough as he initially seemed.

This is one of the first points where I can't say for sure how this came about - was it written badly in the first place or did the way the movie was edited contribute to the confusion? Thinking about it later, an anarchistic punk rock geologist could actually have been an interesting character but his introduction was so screwed up that I didn't really care about him at the time. In a sense this character was lucky to even get a bad introduction, I couldn't tell you much about the rest of the crew at all. The 'geek' who I mentioned is supposed to be a botanist but I don't remember it being mentioned. That knowledge might have gone some way to explaining the attitude he has during their first alien encounter but at the time the guy comes across like a complete idiot.

In fact, for what was supposed to be a team of super smart scientists, they come across as the dumbest bunch of people ever to travel in space. The crew of the Nostromo in Alien weren't geniuses but most of what happened was down to bad luck and unbeatable odds, they weren't literally making the worst possible decisions at every possible turn. Making bad decisions is pretty much a staple of horror movies but you have to give the audience a reason to believe that characters could make the wrong decision. Unless of course it was trying to show that people can make dumb mistakes in the pursuit of science, compared to the pragmatic approach to survival the 'normal' people in Alien take...

It is also difficult to figure out who has more sinister motives for alien contact. Charlize Theron initially seems like she will be a figure like Burke in Aliens but she also warns the lead scientists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (Rapace and Marshall-Green) not to make contact with any creature (shame they didn't pass that message on to the other scientists eh?). David seems to have a very clear goal of infecting someone with what they find, which initially seems like it could have been his main purpose as programmed by Peter Weyland. However when Weyland finally makes an appearance he seems to have no interest in anything other than speaking with the Engineers. In the end I can only assume that David was performing his own experiments just to see what would happen, he was quite a nasty piece of work when you think about it.

As for Peter Weyland himself, I found it very distracting that he was played by Guy Pearce in rather unconvincing ageing make-up. Obviously he played the role of his younger self in some of the promotional materials but they weren't used in the film. While I was watching it, all I could think was that perhaps he was going to get his wish and transform back to his younger self. I suppose that makes his death kind of a surprise to us as well as him but I think a different actor of the appropriate age would have made it easier to focus on what was happening.

Weyland's desire to meet with his creators and potentially make use of their technology was obviously the heart of the film and the reason for its name but it wasn't really the most interesting part to me. I felt that Shaw's alien 'pregnancy' was the best seed of an idea and if that had been the focus of the film I could have got behind it much more. Even if it was obvious that someone would need to use the Med Pod, the robotic surgical extraction was still the most disturbing scene of the film for me. The knowledge that her character was unable to have children naturally made the whole process even more horrific. To then completely forget about this extracted creature until the climax of the film seemed utterly ludicrous.

I would say that all of the alien encounters in the film end up feeling fairly throwaway, there are no real consequences after them. It's not clear whether the snake like creature went through some kind of transformation as it flees the scene and is never seen again. Shaw's partner Charlie's infection and then death is abruptly forgotten as it leads into the aforementioned pregnancy scenes. Even the return of the horrifically deformed geologist doesn't have much impact as we have barely been introduced to the crew members he beats to death. Valaquen's comments about the trailers initially suggesting that Shaw would take part in this scene feels like confirmation that all of these events got very cramped as minutes earlier she was undergoing the procedure in the Med Pod.

All of these issues seem to create a film that feels as if it needs to be cut down and extended at the same time. I keep coming back to the idea that it should have been more focused, perhaps losing some of the pointless plot lines and giving the film a chance to breathe so that you could get to know the characters. I wouldn't be surprised if there's eventually a directors cut of it but I wouldn't expect that to remove anything, it would likely just add more scenes and I think there are some mis-steps within it that would be difficult to fix with any amount of expansion.

It's difficult to know for sure whether my disappointment is still tinged by being a fan of the other Alien movies but I think that I gave it a fair chance. Without knowing exactly where the blame lies in terms of writing or editing, all I can really say is that the buck stops with the director. Aside from any studio pressure, Ridley Scott should have had the final say over things like editing and dialogue so it just gives the impression that he didn't really care as much about coming back to the world of Alien as interviews seemed to suggest. While the ending leaves things open for a sequel, I don't think the film ever did enough to make me care to find out what happened next.