Prometheus

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Jess, James, Paul, Brett, Alex, Josh, Tyler, Sam, Aaron, Jordan, Ben, Steve, Kate, Tara, Marko, Ellie, Ant, Merlin, Trevor, Ethan, Dominic, Zoe, Stacey, Chris, Andrew, Kim, Tom and all the rest.

A more beautifully design modern sci-fi film you will be hard pressed to find. This film is gorgeous. That's the one thing we can all agree on yes? That and how awesome Michael Fassbender is.

I really like the rest of the film too but there's dissension in the ranks. Ridley Scott returning to the Alien universe after 33 years has certain expectations attached to it. Tonally this is very different to the original Alien film and only tangentially related.

This is a more ponderous big-question sci-fi film and my main concern with it is how it raises many interesting points but get bogged down in horror fan service without developing any of these themes properly. I love the horror stuff. I love the existential sci-fi stuff. But the two halves never form a complete whole in this film. A pity, because I really did love the two halves I saw. Is this another case of just setting up a franchise reboot? I wish it weren't so but that's exactly what it feels like.

So many questions. I guess you should expect that with a script from Damon Lindelof, the man who was more concerned wrapping up character stories on the show Lost, rather than answering all the big mythology questions that I was more interested in. Unfortunately the same attention to characters doesn't seem to have been paid here, at least not compared to its predecessor. Ironically Fassbender's robotic David is the most fleshed out for me.

Guy Pearce in old man make-up. Questionable. Unless they had planned that TED talk in advance and new they needed him to be young there, or possibly in future films.

The Engineers are hot, right? All buff and tall with nice pale skin. Their motives remain largely unanswered. But they make some nice looking creatures. As a facehugger fan, I particularly liked its giant shoggoth-like pre-evolved relative Noomi Rapace births. John Hurt's birthing scene is a tough act to follow but the film makes a great attempt and manages to evoke stomach-squirming without excessive gore.

On the whole the FX, cinematography, sound design, all that stuff is great. 3D works a charm, shot natively on the Epic. They made Laurence of Arabia into 3d!!! Interestingly the first time I saw the film is was in 3D but presented in the widescreen scope at Vmax. This time at the fake Imax it was full frame. I wonder if it is square at a proper Imax? Seemed like there was extra image on the top and bottom. Unfortunately the sound at fake Imax is echoey. They really need to dampen the sound reverb in there.

I really like the music in the film, and the small nod to Jerry Goldsmith's original score. I just don't necessarily agree with how much of it there was. Sometimes silence is scarier. Scott seems to have forgotten that. Or he's further trying to distance himself from his original.

The film is set about 30 years before the events in Alien. And on a different planet. Presumably they can link the two with more films. We've yet to see how a ship with a cargo of eggs lands on that planet driven by an impregnated engineer that we see in the first film. I guess it's easy enough to speculate and join the dots yourself. You'll need to be doing a lot of that though.

Despite the vagueness of theme and character, the things that work, work very well. It's certainly has its moments and throughout is constantly a joy to gaze upon. Really makes a case for good sets and location work (or reference, the FX were good enough to make it hard to tell). At the moment it just feels incomplete.