There are few horror franchises that are as popular as the Alien franchise. Despite the fact that there are more bad movies with the Alien name attached to them, they’re still extremely popular, and I’m sure that any new movie in the franchise will be a blockbuster, regardless of its quality. Take a look at Alien: Covenant if you don’t believe me. That movie was terrible, managed to be the worst movie I watched in 2018, and yet it was a huge money maker at the box office. But before Alien: Covenant, there was Prometheus. This movie had a metric ton of marketing leading up to its release, hyping it up. It was to be a return to form for the franchise after the cheesy schlock of Alien: Resurrection and the over-the-top stupidity of the Alien vs Predator movies. Ridley Scott, director of the original film, was given a massive budget to tell his Alien prequel story, promising fans a deeper and more thoughtful take on the franchise.

It was going to be so thoughtful a take on the franchise, it wasn’t even going to have “Alien” in its name. It was going to be something else entirely. I was actually excited about the idea that Prometheus would be something different. Some were disappointed before even watching the movie that it was removed from the iconic xenomorph creatures and that it was only loosely related to the Alien movies, but I didn’t mind. I wanted something more than just another Alien movie. I wanted a new horror story from Scott, or an Alien movie told in a new way. I somewhat got what I requested, but I got a lot of other things with it that I didn’t like.

From the day I saw Prometheus in theaters, I was filled with mixed emotions about it. Ever since I started writing these Fair/Foul reviews, I knew that Prometheus would end up with one at some point. I have had lengthy discussions about this movie with friends to highlight the things I like and the things that disgust me, but I’ve never committed them to an article on this site. Having watched the good Alien movies multiple times this year in celebration of acquiring my new dog, Ripley, and listened to some lengthy dissertations by movie enthusiasts and content creators about the Alien franchise, I felt it necessary to finally put my thoughts to digital paper.

Spoilers ahead…

Plot

Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) of the infamous Weyland/Yutani corporation from the previous Alien films has selected a small group of scientists and experts for a very special space mission. Their fields of expertise range from archeology, to geology, to entomology, etc. It’s that common scenario in movies in which a government or corporation needs the best specialists in their field to do something of paramount importance. What does Weyland need with this particular group of individuals? Well, thanks to the efforts of the unbelievably attractive archeologists Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) & Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), a star map has been discovered in various ancient cave paintings and carvings that points out the location of a planet in a distant part of the galaxy. They and Weyland believe that this planet will hold the secrets of the origins of the human race, particularly because the cave paintings indicate there was a race of “engineers” who were responsible for our creation. So, this select group of specialists is sent on an expedition aboard the ship called “Prometheus” to the planet to uncover its secrets. Upon arriving, they discover a long-abandoned underground facility/vessel, filled with mysteries. However, as you would expect from a horror film, they find more than they bargained for.

Fair: Cinematography & Most Effects

When I saw Prometheus in theaters, there were multiple moments in which I muttered “wow” under my breath at just how beautiful the film was. The moment at the beginning in which we see a ship drifting through space with utter silence was a shot that, while very simple, was extremely effective at creating that sense of awe. It reminded me that I was watching a Ridley Scott film, as the director has always had a focus on making his movies visually impactful. It was clear that Scott was given free rein to spend the money of 20th Century Fox to make the prettiest film he wanted to make.

While I will always prefer the practical effects of the previous century in filmmaking over the digital effects of modern films, the special effects of Prometheus hold up pretty well. This is partially because, in addition to the digital effects, there are some actual practical effects used, along with some decent makeup. However, the digital effects themselves still look really good for a 2012 movie.

Foul: Guy Pearce’s Makeup

For all the nice things I can say about how good Prometheus looks and how well the special effects have aged, there is no defending the look of Guy Pearce in this movie. When you see how amazing everything else looks, including the makeup of other characters, the old-man makeup applied to Guy Pearce is even worse by comparison. If all the makeup looked bad, it wouldn’t stand out as much. It’s just distracting. It’s like someone vomited on a Rembrandt painting.

I don’t know the details regarding the production or at what point Guy Pearce was involved in the shooting, but I really wonder why they didn’t just get an older actor for the character who is barely in the movie. His character is more prominent in the marketing leading up to the film’s release than in the film itself. He’s young in the marketing and “old” in the movie, so there were certainly some ideas surrounding Peter Weyland the filmmakers/Fox wanted to explore. Unfortunately, I don’t think it was worth the decision of getting a younger actor to play an older man if they couldn’t get the makeup right. Would it have been possible to just get someone older when they realized the makeup looked terrible instead of committing it to film? I don’t know, but I think it would have been worth the cost if you’re trying to make such a pretty movie.

Fair: Conceptual Design

The designs of the ships, interiors, costumes, world, and creatures in Prometheus are all incredible. It may be a little too clean and futuristic in the canonical sense when you consider that this is supposed to take place many years before the events of the original Alien. The Nostromo in the original film was a much more analog environment that looked archaic by comparison. Perhaps it’s just because the Prometheus is a high-class science vessel and the Nostromo was just a mining freighter? Regardless of the reason or the fact that it breaks the timeline of technology a little, everything looks amazing in the way you expect something by Ridley Scott to look. The sets are elaborate and stylish. The creature designs are truly alien and interesting. It’s almost a shame this movie isn’t just an art book.

Fair: Michael Fassbender

Perhaps the most important point in this movie’s favor is Michael Fassbender. Fassbender’s performance of the android, David, is the real point of interest. Similar to how Heath Ledger’s Joker always captivated my interest when he was on screen in The Dark Knight, Fassbender does so with David.

David is a complex character and it’s thanks to the subtlety of Fassbender’s acting and expressions that we are able to understand and enjoy the complexity that much more. As an android, he feels second class, especially thanks to the unnecessarily rude attitude of Charlie Holloway towards him. You get the sense that he is struggling to find his identity as something that has programming and logic, which clashes with a sense of morality that he doesn’t necessarily have. The scene that highlights this best is when he drops a tiny amount of the mutagenic material they found in the alien ship into Charlie’s drink. The conversation leading up to this moment paints Charlie as a dick that David has every reason to dislike. However, he only poisons the beverage after Charlie answers David’s question with an emphatic reply:

(David) “How far would you go to get what you came all this way for? Your answers. What would you be willing to do?”

(Charlie) “Anything and everything.”

Even if Prometheus doesn’t explicitly spell out that androids are programmed not to hurt humans (this is something I. Robot does in its opening sequence, for example), the ambiguity of the moment lets the audience assume that might be the case. It justifies David’s actions and allows him to get his vengeance against someone with their permission. If only another film didn’t exist and destroy the interesting complexity of the character in the process!

Foul: Everyone Except Fassbender

Almost everyone else in this movie sucks. Noomi Rapace does a decent job at being the empathetic protagonist, but she’s no Sigourney Weaver/Ellen Ripley. The script does her no favors either, but we’ll get to that.

I’m not joking when I say I can’t stand a majority of the characters in this movie. If the characters aren’t forgettable, they’re infuriating. First of all, the expedition party selected to go to is supposed to be the smartest and most talented expert scientists of the world. Yet, they manage to come across as the dumbest, most naïve group of morons you could have sent to space. In particular, the geologist and entomologist are the standout doofuses of the bunch.

The geologist provides some futuristic mapping tools that show the entire layout of the discovered caverns to the displays on the Prometheus. Yet, when the little wuss, who has tried his best to seem tougher than everyone else, gets scared by a few noises and the decapitated head of an Engineer, he runs off from the team. He and the entomologist then somehow manage to get lost. The rest of the team is able to just go back the way they came and the map maestro is the one who gets lost! This is a knock against the script, of course, but I have to ask: Why not make another scientist who knows less about maps and who doesn’t provide mapping tools get lost or separated? It at least wouldn’t stand out so much.

The stupidity of these two only increases to exponential levels when they encounter an alien eel creature in the facility. Despite the thing clearly displaying hostile body language like a cobra, captain dumbass entomologist decides to keep trying to touch it instead of doing what a sane person would do and try to maintain a safe distance from it at all times. It’s an alien creature! You don’t know what it’s capable of! It’s more acceptable in the original Alien for John Hurt’s character Kane to get too close because he’s not a specialist. He’s just a regular grunt tasked by the company to investigate a distress call and he happens to come across some eggs. Not to mention, the facehugger does not give him any time to react, unlike here in Prometheus.

While these two idiots are certainly the most easily chastised morons of the group, they’re not the only ones who annoy me. For whatever reason, the writers couldn’t come up with another reason to make Charlie and David not get along than by making Charlie an absolute prick to him. There’s no character-driven reason like “androids killed my parents” or anything to justify why Charlie is such a jerk to David at every opportunity. It just makes him extremely unlikable and devalues any sympathy I would have towards him or Elizabeth’s feelings when things start going sour. He ends up being the primary motivator for David to go AWOL because he’s so insulting, but it’s such a weakly written character plot that it just seems unnecessary. If there was an actual legitimate reason for him to be so despicably rude to David, it would at least make the whole thing a little more interesting.

The rest of the cast is made up of characters who are just meant to be there for a body count or to fill the time when nothing is happening. I frankly forgot Idris Elba was even in this. And Charlize Theron, while the owner of the worst line of the movie, brings very little to the overall experience.

Foul: The Script is terrible

This is the main foul point, which I’ll need to break down into three primary sub-points. Buckle-up!

A Swiss-Cheese Script Seasoned with Clichés

A lot of Prometheus comes across as a movie written entirely around some lines that a writer thought were cool instead of a movie that had a story with well-written characters and a naturally progressing plot. There are multiple moments in the film where it’s clear that the writers didn’t spend enough time hashing out the major plot points, resulting in a script that has various plot holes and moments that are driven by predictable cliché dialogue. Here is one example.

The whole reason the group of explorers came to the planet in the first place was because of artifacts that seemed to be left as a clue for humans to find the Engineers once they achieved space travel. Yet, it’s revealed later that the facility was not of a benevolent purpose as they all thought. It was a weapons facility and the ship parked there was going to attack Earth before its journey was halted. So the cave painting was pointing to the origin of our destruction? Why would cave people who interacted with the Engineers want to immortalize the star system with weapons that would wipe them out? Maybe you could argue that it was a death-worshipping society when they painted it. Maybe it was a warning by one Engineer, but the movie doesn’t spell it out so we’re just making stuff up that the writers didn’t bother to do. I just don’t get it.

In regards to the dialogue, there are several particular moments that stand out because of how they’re tied to a significant plot point. It highlights how the writers couldn’t come up with a better reason for something essential to happen. I already mentioned how Charlie was a dick to David just to make it so David had a reason to poison him, which is a good example, but I got another example that is tied to this point. David poisons Charlie, who then sleeps with Elizabeth without knowing he has been infected. This event then allows for the sequence in which Elizabeth learns she’s pregnant with an alien fetus and does the self-surgery to remove it. Where am I going with this?

For some reason, the writers felt that in order for the audience to better grasp the significance of her sudden pregnancy, we had to be aware of the fact that Elizabeth’s reproductive organs were not capable of bearing children. This would be fine if the detail was handled with some subtlety and grace, like a sequence where Elizabeth shows jealousy towards a sibling’s ability to have children through a few coy lines and references. Or there could have been some envelopes on a desk that had a fertility clinic address. Something in the background that can show instead of tell.

No. Prometheus doesn’t have a script like that. Instead, Charlie says something innocuous and she tearfully responds with a question along the lines of “You mean like how I can’t get pregnant?” It’s foreshadowing, yes, but it’s done with such a heavy hand that we immediately know she will get pregnant because she said she can’t, and because this is an Alien-adjacent movie—it’s Chekhov’s gun if the gun was a uterus. For a film that tries to tackle the big concepts and philosophies around life itself, getting the characters into the sticky situations of the film was apparently too difficult to write, so it’s done awkwardly instead.

A Script so Far Up Its Own Ass it’s Too Busy Asking Questions Instead of Answering Them

Since I already owned the Alien films in a physical form, I felt compelled to own this movie as well. When I bought it, I still was willing to give Prometheus the benefit of the doubt. However, just what the back of the box says in bold letters is enough to make me reconsider keeping the Blu-ray: “Questions will be answered.”

What a bald-faced lie. No, they will not.

I don’t know what questions they think they answered in this movie. It certainly wasn’t “where do the Xenomorphs come from?” It also certainly wasn’t any of the questions it asks: Where do we come from? Should people still have faith in knowing that an alien created us instead of God? What does it mean to be human?

The script seems like it was written by and for people going through an existential crisis who wanted to better understand their purpose in life and challenge the conventions of God and religion. It wasn’t a script for people who wanted to watch an Alien prequel. Prometheus is too busy using clumsy symbolism to play with ideas of “creation vs creator” to properly set up the big moments that take place. Charlie’s infection, Elizabeth’s pregnancy, the arrival of Peter Weyland at the end of the movie, and the destruction of the Prometheus ship and its crew are all casualties of sloppy writing that was too focused on its concepts and not on the basics of storytelling.

Father!

Towards the end of the film, Guy Pearce shows up in his crappy makeup to the surprise of no one. It’s at this point Charlize Theron utters the worst line of the movie. It’s just one word, but it manages to be the single thing I hate the most about Prometheus.

The way everything is shot and how much emphasis is placed on the scene, you can tell that it’s supposed to be a big revealing moment. The dooming music swells for impact. The camera zooms in. Meredith Vickers is brought into focus. Staring up at Peter Weyland, venom drips from her mouth as the word “Father” leaves her lips. And my eyes roll so hard they fall out of my head.

Who thought this was a good line to include in the movie? Who thought this was necessary? Who cares if this young man playing an old man in makeup that makes him look like a Shar Pei’s butt is the father of this side character who barely did anything during the movie?

First of all, everything leading up to this moment already implies that Weyland is the father of Vickers. In the theater, I was repeating to myself, “Don’t say it,” as the camera got closer to Charlize Theron’s face. It’s so predictable, I knew it was coming upon my first viewing. Even while watching it again, I muted the movie when it happened and imagined how much better the scene would be if she said nothing at all but just stared at him. The film treats its audience as idiots incapable of understanding symbolism without forcing it down their throats with a shovel.

Secondly, the fact that these characters are related is completely irrelevant to the plot. They’re both secondary characters of significantly less importance to the events that are playing out in the movie; it’s not like Darth Vader pronouncing his procreation of Luke Skywalker. It serves no real purpose in the plot. It’s just a thing to make Vickers dislike David and clumsily play with that “creator vs creation” concept some more.

A single word manages to encapsulate everything wrong with Prometheus’ script and demonstrate how the writers were incapable of earning any sort of impactful and emotional moment.

Foul: Alien Covenant Exists

While this particular Foul is something external to Prometheus, it is something that has more or less tipped the scales for my now-predicable verdict. Much like how certain sequels can do damage to their predecessor by taking things too far, or screwing up the lore and making the original less interesting, so too Covenant does to Prometheus.

The best quality of Prometheus was the character of David. He was complex, with a lot of nuance and potential, especially in comparison to the rest of the cast. Covenant takes this character and rips all of that away for the sake of turning him into a complete villain. In Prometheus, David does immoral things that are somewhat justified. He’s sociopathic, and yet, he’s sympathetic and compelling. So we end up a little on his side, even though he’s doing bad things. In Covenant, he goes to the Engineer’s planet to wipe them out and manipulates the people of the Covenant vessel into becoming victims of his experiments. All this is done without any of the nuance or subtlety that made him interesting in the first place. Instead, it’s all cheesy, ham-fisted, flute-playing nonsense. There’s a martial arts fight between Fassbender and himself for crying out loud. The fact that this character became so dull later on makes Prometheus that much more disappointing.

Verdict: Foul

Every time I’ve watched Prometheus, I’ve liked it less and less. I even tried watching it with director commentary to see if there was something Ridley Scott would explain that would change my mind. Unfortunately, he only seemed to further cement my views. I’ve always played with the idea that it was a half-good movie; I would go back and forth on whether I liked it or not. However, having written all these points out and watched it again recently to help my memory, my opinion has finally settled on the fact that Prometheus is a bad addition to the Alien franchise. Sloppy writing, dull characters, and an ultimately unsatisfying adventure that creates more questions than it answers propel Prometheus into Foul territory.

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