Movie Review: Prometheus (2012)

Prometheus is an ambitious but heavily flawed return to the Alien franchise for director Ridley Scott. It’s sort of a prequel, and honestly kind of a remake of the original Alien, as it tells a remarkably similar story but with no real xenomorphs. Instead the monsters here are the Engineers, these giant humanoid things that we saw a fossilized version of in the original Alien.

Prometheus starts out promising enough. Well not exactly, as the first scene shows an engineer dying after drinking something, and honestly it’s pretty funny. But when the plot actually kicks off, it’s kind of interesting. A bunch of people from Earth head to some planet because they think they may find keys to their evolutionary history. It’s a pretty interesting concept, but the characters fall flat.

The most interesting character isn’t a human. It’s David, an android played by Michael Fassbender.

It’s a really great performance and it makes up for some lousy, lousy writing, which is how I’d describe this movie overall. It’s a bad script but with solid direction, some great visuals.

And there is one fantastic sequence that reminds me a lot of the chestburster scene from Alien, but it’s not a ripoff or anything; it’s its own thing. But other than that, the movie isn’t all that great, and I don’t really know why it was made.

But it’s still worth watching, as long as you don’t have great expectations for it.

Rating: 6/10