29.6.12

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

First thing first, let's lay the fact, Prometheus is a spin-off from Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), a loose prequel if you insist. It is set in LV-223, a different moon LV-426 in Alien and Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)); a different derelict alien spacecraft; a different Space Jockey, but here they called it Engineer, in Alien (1979), it was a much bigger size and last but certainly not least, a different efficiency of director Ridley Scott. He returned to sci-fi  territory after lengthy absence from his influential haunted-house-in-space Alien.

Every time I re-watch Alien (1979), I always wonder what is all about with the fossilized creature with the elephant head, sitting eerily at a crashed cockpit spacecraft. Certainly I am not the only one who is curious about it. Well, the director Scott answered our query at last by expanding the back story of the Space Jockey in moon LV-426. Prometheus is set decades before the incident where Ripley and crews first discovered the fossilized spacecraft pilot. A deep space expedition funded by Weyland Corporation (later as Weyland-Yutani Corp in Alien movie series) set out looking for answers of who created human in the beginning and what is our purpose on earth. Darwinism, this is not.



















An Alien movie will not be without a strong female protagonist, Noomi Rapace fits the bill as one of the archeologist in expedition. Sadly, she is no Ellen Ripley, period. Even more so for an Alien movie will not be without a human-like android on board. As usual the one thing we need to find out is whose side he is allied to. Michael Fassbender really excelled to bring his android character to, should I say, to "life"? He is almost a child-like inquisitive machine, more human than another human on board, a calculative, icy Weyland Corporation representative played by Charlize Theron. 

Prometheus belongs to that type of flick which does not offer answers in many questions it poses. The plot holds back way too much without resolving many mysteries it put forth, perhaps it want to saves for subsequent sequels until it tie nicely to the original Alien movie, I do not know. But one thing I am sure is, I am not keen on watching something that requires me to make huge assumption about a lot of things, and that, is a MAJOR problem. Great movies sometimes leave space for viewers to interprete themself and I have no qualm accepting a little notion called narrative ambiguity. To make things worse as the plot thicken, the movie suffers from a absurd script to have narration move onward, the logic stretches beyond salvage, if not, how do you explain a pivotal moment in this movie where immediately after a Ceasarean section was performed, the character went up and running as if the wound is an insect bite?

If I knew Ridley Scott and co have made such a banal attempt of elaborating the back story of Space Jockey, I would rather have it remain mysterious fossilized. Basically, the sky is the limit for them to kickstart a new direction yet still set within the same Alien to Alien Resurrection (Jeunet, 1997) universe that we all familiar with. No Egg, no Facehugger, no Xenomorph, No Alien Queen, I am OK with none of that, perhaps some minor references to the Alien series here and there will be delightful for the buffs. What is in my mind now is, If the tagline of Weyland Corporation is "Building Better Worlds", perhaps Prometheus means "posing more questions" to us.








1 star = Pathetic, SowYau feel ashamed of watching it
2 stars = Off the mark material, approach with caution
3 stars = Generally good, you should watch it if it's your favourite genre
4 stars = Excellent, strongly recommended
5 stars = A classic status? Only time will tell. But it is definitely in SowYau's Hall of Fame List



2 comments:

Happy walker said...

well, i would rate it 4 stars since i like science-fi movie~

SowYau said...

But this sci-fi movie leave you more question than you can chew, haha