Here is a Greek name that Mark Reynier and Jim McEwen should keep at arm's length from their product identities. For anyone who was 9 years old in 1979, Ridley Scott's Alien is the archetypal sci-fi horror flic of our times. It is one thing to be taken over by aliens, cloned, zombified, or brainwashed, but to become the egg for some alien creature, that was the essence of horror in the day. Now some may ask, where is the CGI? Why did they have such crappy effects? These people are missing the point. It was scary because of the story telling, not the whiz-bang effects created by pimply-faced teenagers at Lucas Arts.
Less than a decade later, in 1987, came Aliens, directed by James Cameron. This was a guy who needed a win. Titanic had not yet been filmed, but have you seen Battle Beyond the Stars, starring John Boy?...'Nuff said. Well, they picked the right man for the right movie. This was one half Green Berets, and one half Dawn of the Dead. It had some great A-list actors, and some lesser B-listers, who went on the make names for themselves, sometimes in A-list movies (Bill Paxton, Titanic). Can anyone say: "Game over man! Game over!"? In the movie Aliens, the art of the sequel was elevated to new summit. It had to be.
The script was well thought out and unlike the first movie, it was the prolific appearances of the aliens scared the piss out of us, rather than their scarcity. The balance in the writing was great, you were comforted by the military's presence, their superior weapons (compared to flame throwers), yet still awed by even more formidable aliens (such as the Queen). Yes, they used a few plot cliches: need to go back for the girl, or the cat, or the dog, we can't leave without them! A little romance between a military grunt and Company grunt (Sigourney Weaver). The antics from Bill Paxton's character are still heard on the golf course, and deliberate Company subterfuge provided a counterpoint to the mindless killing served up by the aliens. Great movie, great ending...I only wish it had ended there. I've spent the last 13 years trying to forget the next two.
So it was with great anticipation that the public awaited the return of Ridley Scott to the genre with the release of Prometheus. How could this go wrong when the story was being told by the dude who invented Alien? Sort of. So many questions to be answered, yet the best part of this movie was waiting for it, trying to infer the story line from the trailers that abounded on YouTube. This movie, as Forbes put it, was a "visually stunning epic failure". But, to be fair, the movie did not begin on that note.
One cannot miss the 2001: A Space Odyssey imagery that was ubiquitous. The opening scene is one of majestic vistas filmed with the most exquisite lenses, culminating with the view of a huge shadowy "monolithic" spaceship. Later, it is a archeological dig, though not on the moon, but on the Isle of Skye (maybe Talisker should name a bottling Prometheus) which then leads us to the predictable interstellar expedition where a lone astronaut is left making the rounds of the ship with the rest of the team in stasis. At the end of the movie, we even the eerie voice of a malfunctioning robot, calling out the name of the lone survivor, imploring her to save him to help her escape. If this was his tribute to 2001: ASO, the only thing to be proud of here were the top notch special effects and cinematography.
The moment this movie started to go off the rails was shortly after landing on the alien planet. Instead of the corporate bigwig, or even the captain insisting on developping a plan to bring a successful conclusion to this trillion dollar mission, the reigns are handed over to green-horn academic who declares that "it's Christmas!" and orders everyone into their suits and onto the planet. Even the actual Titanic expedition run by Dr. Ballard used remote subs to probe the wreck first. The next moment of dread was when the same pencil-head decides to just take his helmet off...this is about aliens right? Keep the helmet on.
From here on out, this movie was a disaster. There was no character development. The entire cast was a cast of "red-shirts", with the exception of a lone female. Hey, we've seen this movie before, I paid to actually see a NEW movie! And the acting wasn't the problem, it was the scripting. The dialogue between characters was so unrealistic as to render implausible most of the climax of this film. I mean, why would a bunch of grunts smilingly do a kamikazi run to save human-kind? Why would a mission carrying the trillionaire who funded this mission staff it with low-life grunts sporting mohawk/head tattoos? Silly.
Finally, this movie didn't only NOT answer questions or NOT create more questions, it simply confused people with inconsistencies. The alien that appears at the end of the deux ex machina is similar, but NOT the alien we know. The alien engineer is killed in the escape pod, not in his pilot's chair. The trillionaire's body was left in the ship, so this could not have been the same ship they discover in Alien. In fact, it took some digging on Google to determine that the planet in Alien is LV-426, while the one in Prometheus is LV-223.
Finally, if LV-223 had actually housed spaceships with technology and genetic technology, and the answer to humanity, then wouldn't we have visited that planet first, if not only to recover the billionaire's body? Or was it a covert mission? And how exactly would you keep that a secret? And how did we develop interstellar travel in a mere 70 years from now. We'll be lucky to make it to Mars by 2093. And as to the escape by the heroine on another alien ship, who will repair the android? An archaelogist? What will they eat on their journey to the engineer's homeworld? Too many questions can destroy the suspension of disbelief, doesn't Ridley know that?
No, I think that the best thing to do would be to avoid the use of Prometheus in any product identity development. No Talisker Prometheus, no Port Charlotte: Fire of the Gods. No, it is best that this film be laid to rest and a marketing quarantine be placed on its patron God. I suppose I have another few years ahead of me trying to forget this one too.
