Prometheus (2012) Review

Official trailer

Prometheus wastes a director among the most visually gifted in contemporary cinema on a script that requires its characters to be catastrophically stupid for the plot to function. These are supposedly the best scientists humanity could assemble for a trillion-dollar mission to find humanity’s creators. Within hours of landing on an alien world they’re removing helmets in environments that haven’t been verified safe, approaching and attempting to handle unknown organisms, separating from the group in an alien installation, and making every horror-movie mistake in the genre’s playbook.

The suspension of disbelief required to accept these people as scientists can’t be maintained.

Few films have annoyed me this much while looking this good. The film had me admiring every set and wanting to throw something at the screen whenever a scientist opened his mouth. Scott gave this script the best-looking production he could, and the script repaid him with a crew of geniuses dumber than the teenagers in a slasher movie.

My rating: 3 out of 10. The production design is extraordinary and gets the 3 on its own. Everything attached to the script costs the film the rest.

The Visual Achievement

Ridley Scott’s visual intelligence is operating at full capacity throughout Prometheus. The Engineer spacecraft, the space jockey chamber, the holographic orrery, the black goo’s specific quality of alien menace, all of it is shot with the precision and atmosphere of a filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants every frame to communicate. The sets and locations feel ancient, biological, threatening in ways that suggest a civilization operating on principles that human understanding can’t reach.

The production design is the correct continuation of Giger’s Alien aesthetic.

What Giger built in 1979, the combination of biological and mechanical, the suggestion of sexuality weaponized into predation, Prometheus develops into a fully realized civilization’s architecture. The Engineer installations look like they were grown instead of built, like the product of a sensibility that doesn’t distinguish between technology and organism the way human engineering does. That’s the right aesthetic for what the Engineers are supposed to be.

I’ll give Scott this much: I’d happily watch these sets with the sound off. The Engineer rooms are the only reason I didn’t rate it lower, and design this good was wasted on a story this careless.

The Character Stupidity Problem

The scientists in Prometheus make decisions that no actual scientists would make and that no competent science fiction writer would give them without dramatic justification. Fifield and Millburn get lost in the installation, the geologist and the biologist, the two people on the team whose instruments and training should make finding their way easiest, and then, when they encounter an alien organism, approach it and attempt to handle it.

No scientist encountering an unknown organism in an alien installation would try to handle it. That’s the most basic principle of xenobiological caution, and anyone on a scientific mission to an alien world would have had it drilled into them before departure. The script sends them toward the creature because the plot needs something to happen. When the plot’s needs trump the characters’ intelligence, that’s bad writing, and the film lost me for good when they reached for that thing.

The helmet removal is a comparable failure. Shaw and Holloway remove their helmets inside the installation because the atmosphere is breathable.

Real scientists on a trillion-dollar mission to an alien world would follow quarantine protocols regardless of atmospheric composition, because the atmosphere might be breathable while still carrying biological threats they have no immunity to. The script requires them to remove the helmets because the plot needs them to be vulnerable. Their vulnerability is purchased at the cost of their credibility as scientists.

The helmet scene made me groan. These people flew a trillion dollars of hardware across space to meet their makers, and then they pull their helmets off like they’ve walked into a nice restaurant.

The Theological Ambitions

The film raises its most interesting idea, that the Engineers engineered humanity, that our creators are out there and might not want to be found, that the relationship between creator and creation might be anything but benevolent, and then doesn’t develop it coherently. The script gestures toward these questions without working out their implications. The Engineers’ motivations are unclear in ways that feel like unresolved writing instead of deliberate mystery.

Genuine mystery requires the film to know the answer and withhold it. Prometheus’s vagueness about the Engineers’ motivations reads more like the writers hadn’t decided what the answer was. The difference between deliberate ambiguity and unresolved scripting is visible to attentive audiences, and the theological questions Prometheus raises fall on the wrong side of that line.

That failure costs the film the most, because it’s the one that mattered. A film that asks who made us and why they might want us dead has a terrific premise, and Prometheus shrugs at its own question. I’d have taken no Engineers at all over Engineers nobody bothered to figure out.

Should you skip Prometheus?

Prometheus gets its 3 on Scott’s eye alone: the production design, the ancient and threatening alien spaces, and the continuation of Giger’s aesthetic into a new context.

The script fails all of it, with characters who behave stupidly on demand and theological ambitions it couldn’t execute coherently. David is the exception, and everything around him is the rule. I’m angrier at this film than at plenty of worse ones, because the people who made it had every tool they needed and still let convenience write the script.

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