Prometheus

Prometheus wants to thrill you with big thoughts, to give sci-fi its brain back — more matter, less splatter. Yet for all the film’s big intentions, I suspect more time will be spent discussing whether it is a prequel to Alien (the events take place before those in that movie) than the ­metaphysical questions it raises.

Prometheus is the name of a commercial spaceship, financed by a dodgy industrialist (Guy Pearce), on an unusual mission: to head for a planet where two scientists, Dr Elisabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her lover and partner, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), believe they will find the alien beings who created mankind. Among the 17-strong crew, there’s a charming but rather chippy android, David (Michael Fassbender); Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), an icy corp­orate type who considers herself to be in charge; and Captain Janek (Idris Elba). They land on the planet of these alien gods, only to find that, having discovered the origins of human life, they may be responsible for ending it.

The screenwriters, Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaihts, have done their best to keep the ghost of Alien out of this film and not offer obvious crowd-pleasers such as face-huggers and chest-bursters. They want Prometheus to stand on its own. Comparisons with Alien are unfair, but inevitable, the most obvious one being between Rapace’s Shaw and Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. Both are typical Scott women: strong, brave survivors. Except that Shaw is less inter­esting. She is defined by the fact that she’s a scientist who believes in God. How, you may wonder, can a woman who believes in God also believe that aliens created humankind?

Prometheus has some wonderful moments. It’s not the big set pieces that are so terrific, but the little things Scott shows us, as when David touches some alien goop in a cave, then tries to open his fingers — the stretched goop resembles the teeth of the Alien monster. It’s a subtle bit of hand puppetry. And the tensions among the crew, especially between Holloway and David, are full of intriguing menace.

That said, the film has some serious flaws. For a start, it’s pretty hard to follow. By the end, I was suffering from creature confusion: what was the big octopus-like thing, and why was it trying to kill the other alien? Events on the ship weren’t that clear, either. David seems to have a secret agenda, and is responsible for somebody’s death — but why? Because the guy suggested he was just an android, devoid of a soul. Ooh, Mr Sensitive!

There’s only one jump-out-of-your-seat moment, and a scene involving the removal of a creature from one of the crew’s insides is truly gruesome. The problem is, I didn’t really care about the fate of these people. They might as well all have been androids like David.

In place of tension and terror, Prometheus tries to create a sense of intellectual awe. It constantly refers to the discovery of the most important truths ever. But that sense of wonder is something we can’t share because the film expects us to take seriously the idea that the human race was created by aliens. This was originally an idea suggested by the once popular writer Erich von Däniken, whose work makes Dan Brown seem sensible. Sci-fi works best when it stays in touch with reality. For all its solemnity, Prometheus suffers from intellectual silliness.

Prometheus
15, 125 mins