After two decades, Ridley Scott returned to the genre he shaped with 'Prometheus'. Being a big fan of the Alien films, and of the director himself (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) I was naturally delighted to watch this movie.
At the onset, its a given that you would appreciate this movie more if you are familiar with the Alien franchise. There are several subtle & blatant references to the mythology, and the director has made it clear that it takes place in the same universe but is not a direct prequel. The visual effects were mind-blowing, and it is recommended for IMAX 3D. It is not exactly like the Alien films. More of an adventure-cum-horror film, rather than a pure horror film. The script is pretty good, although the film lacks those 'moments' for the general audience that you expect from a film of this monumental scale. I did had a couple of awe-inspiring myself, seeing the panoramic view of the universe in a few shots. A particularly breath-taking one was seeing the shots of supposedly the early earth: cooled down, with land, water, yet a lonely, desolate place. The film has an amazing, haunting soundtrack as well. Scott has attempted to create a new mythology with this film, & its clear he would like to make at least one sequel. The film raises quite a few questions, and leaves most of them unanswered, or more like open-ended questions, since the sequel is not guaranteed.
Its these questions that I immediately started to dwell upon, as I began to absorb the experience of the movie. At the beginning, through the explorer & 'believer' Elizabeth Shaw, we are given hints about a supposedly contradictory idea to the facts of evolution that we know. An idea of beings akin to a "God" that engineered us, and therefore referred to as 'Engineers'. Even Scott in an interview, to my disappointment showed more than a hint of ignorance when he said "Both NASA & the Vatican agree that we could not have come this far without a little help". Yet, the open-ended conclusion of the movie gives you the feeling the director has left it to the audience to connect the dots, in terms of their own interpretation, & also their beliefs, or the lack of them. For me, the opening shows the inherent self-centered tendency of humans to believe that "its all about us". The opening sequence actually shows an earth at its very primitive stage, when there was no life here. When the 'Engineer' drinks from the vial he is carrying, he begins to disintegrate, right down to his DNA. If we come back to the real world for a bit, life itself began out of the primordial soup that would form when a planet cools down. I say planet, since scientists think the life we know of, may not necessarily have been formed this way on Earth. Maybe Mars, maybe some distant planet, and just piggybacked here accidentally on a meteor as an aftermath of cosmic collisions between planets & comets. The film does a cinematic take on this to move it a step further. So the Engineer does not directly create humans, he sows the seed of life, which to this point has come up with the humans as we are today. I interpret it as the director first giving us a picture of the idea of 'Creation' as a lot of religions understand it, and then smashing it. As the movie goes further, we find that the 'Engineers' are not the benevolent, serene beings that we pictured as our Creator, but just an alien race of life-forms that has developed the ability to create life in the laboratory, and doing this for no particular reason except "because they could". And from the look of the meeting that takes place between the humans & the lone surviving Engineer at the "manufacturing facility" that is the moon of the system that the ship Prometheus lands on, our makers are pretty disappointed at the results of their experiment. And to smash our misplaced sense of self-importance further, this is, by no means the only experiment. As the movie unfolds, we see a myriad of life-forms being created out of the engineered primordial organic soup, and its 'interactions' with the life-forms it encounters. The Engineers themselves are hardly Gods, being overwhelmed by their own creations and the manufacturing facility itself has been almost destroyed even before the humans arrive. And our creators have also decided to dismantle their Earth experiment, by carrying the vases of the same disintegrating fluid that created us, possibly in the hopes of better results.
The character of Elizabeth Shaw does have an adequately conflicting personality, despite a rather unconvincing performance by Noomi Rapace. For me, Michael Fassbender as the android David stole the show. Charlize Theron wasn't as noticeable as Meredith Vickers. And I was disappointed by the small part Guy Pearce had as Peter Weyland. But there is a very special guest appearance right at the end of the movie, after one of the life-forms created after the Shaw is impregnated by her 'infected' lover. The foetus is expelled surgically by Shaw, yet survives and grows in a matter of hours. The surviving Engineer runs into its tentacles and it grasps him, and its revealed to be much like a giant "face-hugger" that people who have watched Alien would be familiar with. Then, as expected the Engineer's stomach begins to burst open, and out comes another vaguely anthropomorphic figure. As it stands up and you are given a full view of its structure, it is clearly a predecessor/early ancestor of the legendary Xenomorph, or as it is called "the Alien".
I do hope Scott comes up with a sequel and expands further on this mythology. Hopefully, it will follow a more scientific than a mystic/religious path, but I am not averse to a vivid imagination that incorporates elements of the very imaginative mythologies of Indian & other ancient civilizations, such as the one present in the legendary Star Wars mythology. It should be something that broadens, not stifles the imagination of the audience. I haven't really checked but I don't think Prometheus will challenge the might of the "Avengers" at the box-office, or the expected one of "The Dark Knight Rises". But it has certainly opened up the prospects of a very interesting franchise. As David says in a scene from the film "Big things have small beginnings".
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