Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' Tries To Rekindle That 'Alien' Magic

Prometheus is a movie worth watching solely for Michael Fassbender's performance, but does it capture the intensity of Ridley Scott's 'Alien'?

In the myth, Prometheus was a Titan credited not only with the creation of man out of clay, but with the theft of fire from the gods, and the gifting of flame to mortal man. For his punishment, Prometheus is tied to a stone and fed on by an eagle for all time – until Heracles comes and frees him.

Naturally, whenever a mythological figure is the titular inspiration for a modern film, we look for symbolic parallels. In Prometheus a team of corporate-funded scientists go looking for human kind's makers – an alien race thought to have constructed humanity thousands of years prior. It turns out that this search for origins is merely a front for a more timeless quest: to find the fountain of youth, to scrape across the stars for some miraculous key to immortality.

At times, Prometheus is a frightening, tense movie that rekindles some of the horror of Ridley Scott's original Alien. At times it falls flat.

Since this is a sci-fi horror film, what our heroes encounter is not what they set out in search of but instead something far more frightening. And mostly, the film works. It's not memorable in the way Alien was, nor so groundbreaking. Rarely are sequels or prequels as earth-shattering as their predecessors. Originality is too potent, and Prometheus has little original about it, even if it is an engaging, tense thriller.

David, played with cruel precision by Michael Fassbender, certainly stole the show. An android at once loyal to his creator, Peter Weyland (played by an over-made-up Guy Pearce) and eager to be rid of him – "Don't all children really want their parents dead?" he asks at one point – David is as frightening as any of the aliens encountered out in space. Perhaps he is frightening to us, his Makers, in the same way that we are frightening to ours (or, at least, ours in the film.)

Beyond Fassbender, the cast fell somewhat flat, though Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw emerged as a fascinating character by the end of the film. Ridley Scott is a capable director, but he struggles at times creating characters we care to care about. This was the case, once again, in Prometheus, at least outside of David and Elizabeth.

Meanwhile, the choice to try to make Guy Pearce look like a decrepit old man was as convincing as you would expect, a choice that now appears to have been done merely so that Pearce could give a TED talk in a viral marketing video as a young man.

I was less troubled by the silly ways some of the characters behaved at times, though there were annoying moments that pulled me out of the story. A biologist encountering a strange snake-like creature deep in an abandoned alien building, who only moments before was near petrified with fear, suddenly lights up and chatters on about how cute the creature is – before being, inevitably and unsurprisingly, killed by the monster.

Worse still, there's no real coherency surrounding exactly what each of the various aliens we encounter are, how they're related, how they emerged from the wreckage of the Makers' civilization. Indeed, one has to almost entirely suspend one's disbelief when it comes to the aliens and their interactions with humans in this film, which is too bad because we're already suspending our disbelief, and having to work extra hard at it is no fun.

Of course, maybe we don't need to understand these things, or get answers to our questions about the Makers, or the fascinating suicide at the beginning of the film, but at times the lack of puzzle pieces coming together makes the film feel a bit wobbly at times. Indeed, one of the film's writers was Damon Lindelof of Lost fame, and the film shares many of Lost's most frustrating features – less like an actual story and more like something patched together out of inchoate ideas.

More exploration of Weyland Corp. would have been nice, as would more character building, especially for some of the more heroic minor characters. The movie ends on something of an open note, leaving me to wonder if we should expect a second Prometheus down the road.

I left the theatre glad I'd seen the movie. For all its flaws, the film is entertaining and well-produced, from its cinematography to its score. It's also likely best on the big screen, where tension and fright are so much better conveyed.

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