Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is arguably the greatest sci-fi film release of the year.
Obviously we’ve got a lot to say about it. Beware of spoilers, and find out what we thought, after the break.
Junior Varsity:
It was very tightly connected with the story. A little less focused on aliens eating people and more focused on the philosophy behind finding our creator(s)?/ looking for intelligent life. It tackled the big questions, within the exposition of a larger drama.
Of course, the filmography was very pretty. The concept art behind this must’ve been amazing. The effects were well done, and I still can’t get all the slimy appendages out of my head. Blugh. There were lots of them. And they were horrifying, in true Alien style.
It added a lot to the mythos of the Alien series. It told us about the space jockeys, and who they were, about the beginning of the xenomorphs, and where the ship came from. It even told us what the emergency signal was that the Nostromo picks up in the future. (In the original Alien, they decode the signal, and they say that it sounds like a warning…kind of like Noomi Rapace’s final lines in Prometheus, and it has to be decoded, because she took off in the alien ship).
Doc Watson:
Words cannot describe how excited I am that Ridley Scott is back into hard science fiction. If you liked the first two Alien movies, you really should watch this soon. If not, it’s still a solid body horror film that’s well-worth the price of a ticket.
I agree with Junior Varsity on the scope of the film; while Alien was a tight focus on how detailed characters reacted to the alien presence and each other, Prometheus was about the bigger picture surrounding a more dynamic central protagonist, expounding on the hazards of scientific discovery where the other movies left off. Alien already put forward that we may not want to find alien life because of its potential power, but Prometheus takes it a step further in showing just how fragile we are in the grip of an uncaring universe.
Overall, solid movie. It’s definitely watchable if you haven’t seen Alien(s), but seeing both before seeing Prometheus really enhances the experience; there were parts that gave me the chills as I recognized different objects and locations from the original Alien movies, a point I’ll be expanding on in a later article.
As with any classic horror movie, get ready for a point-blank round of 00-buck symbolism from Scott’s soft-science shotgun; if that sort of thing turns you off in a movie (for whatever contrived reason), then you might want to sit this one out. Don’t ask me — apparently some people just don’t like that kind of thing. Go figure.
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