‘Prometheus’ is all about Your Genitals [Review]

 

So the way the Greek myth goes, Prometheus is the guy who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. It would be foolish to assume director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator) could pull off something similar, handing Hollywood a flaming 3D beacon of “This Is How You Do It, guys”, but with this sort-of-but-yeah-totally-prequel to his 1979 film Alien, he damn well tries. Reviews are coming in steaming hot or colder than your nipples on a Jo’burg day in June, and I can totally see why. It’s because while Prometheus isn’t Hollywood sci-fi’s “second coming”, it does do a lot that Hollywood hasn’t done well in a while, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Check out my review below.

Another-Day’s own Jordan Koen has been saying, for the last couple months, that no matter what kind of movie Prometheus turned out to be, we could be certain it’d be filled with beautiful imagery. Between Ridley Scott, his production team and original xenomorph Alien designer H.R. Geiger, he wasn’t wrong. Four minutes into the movie, when the camera takes us underwater, hones in on chains of DNA slowly crumbling apart and then fixes on a bloody cell, and it is one of the most beautiful images of cellular structure you’ve ever seen, I pretty much wanted to turn to him and say “Yeah, ok, I’m done. That was beautiful.”

Bear in mind that this is after several gorgeous shots of massive natural vistas. You may come out of Prometheus shaking your head in disappointment, but it will not be because you disliked the visuals. They are phenomenal.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a few complaints about the movie’s story already, and I guess I can see where folks are coming from on this. Unlike most of the big Hollywood 3D spectaculars we’ve seen this year and before this, this film doesn’t really follow all the basic conventions of Hollywood’s three-act structure. Yes, the three acts are all in place and the cast is definitely riddled with the typical clichés that give us a quick and easy understanding of who they are and what they’re about, but where Prometheus deviates from the norm is that it doesn’t give us the one thing the modern audience is used to getting: answers.

At pretty much no point in the film does anything get fully explained, and when characters throw out theories as to what’s going on around them, we never get any solid indications that they’re on the money. This is where the horror comes in.

Make no mistake, this movie owes as much to classic horror film elements as it does to the world of science fiction. It’s not a torture porn slasher flick where five annoying white teenagers and their black friend get “homicided” away by a big guy with a tool from the garden shed and overwrought mommy issues, sure, but it’s definitely horrific. The alien goop, penis tentacles and man-eating vaginae on display weren’t abused as children (well, sort of). They’re not terrifying because we know them, but precisely because we know so little about them or what drives them. It’s just like Ash points out in the original Alien; the murderous alien is operating on pure instinct. Putting aside the fact that its instinct is to occasionally chase around a cat, it is pretty terrifying when you imagine a giant black eyeless creature just cold walking around your oil rig spaceship, looking for people to stick its tiny second mouth into.

Just like in that film, Scott plays off of humanity’s fear of the unknown, and the confusion that comes with running around in the dark, not knowing what to expect from the things that are all around you. That’s because this is exactly like the kind of experience you would have if you went to an alien moon, looking for answers from the godlike alien beings that may have helped create humanity. They wouldn’t speak your language. They wouldn’t necessarily want to talk to you. They may not even be home by the time you arrive. And this is what’s so horrifying about the experience of being onboard the space shuttle Prometheus. Strip away the sci-fi setting, and Prometheus is about a bunch of scientists walking through a massive tomb filled with things that kill them and the bodies of those already slaughtered. That is a pretty awful place for humans to be stuck in.

Having just watched Alien with the old #Avengerthon2012 crew, I can say that this is something he’s gone back to from his original film. The terror of not knowing what corner something is going to come around next, and even worse: not knowing what the thing that may come around the corner even is!

That being said, there are also a few problems with Prometheus. If you’ve seen Alien, this movie will feel remarkably similar. The plot and some of the key moments feel so similar to the original that you’ll half-expect Sigourney Weaver to pop ‘round a corner any minute, brandishing a flamethrower and a cat in a box. In many ways, this was Ridley Scott’s chance to use impressive modern technology to retell and re-present old ideas of his that don’t hold up as well from 1979. Where Alien couldn’t actually show you the dopey guy in the Giger-designed bodysuit for fear of making him seem less terrifying, Prometheus can fully represent alien beings in lush detail. Then again, creative minds often revisit the same ideas over and over, reworking them for every new age, and so it’s not like it hurts the eyes to see Scott harness modern visual technology in a way he couldn’t even afford to way back when.

And the designs and revisiting of old imagery here are pretty amazing in this movie. I mean, he obviously still hates women a lot, because so much of this movie’s horror comes from fears surrounding pregnancy and genitals again. But that’s nothing new from this world. The first Alien is basically about a giant black penis that bleeds acid, storms a ship and kills all the white men before finishing off the two women and the black guy. And then a sweaty android tries to murder a woman by choking her to death with a rolled up porn magazine!

The one benefit Scott can bring to this film over his work in the 70s is modern pacing. Whereas the original Alien came out in the late 70s – a period where pretty much every film was mired in endless scenes of people walking up and down streets and corridors – this film breezes along through its relatively short (by modern standards, at least) running time and never really lets up except to prepare you for the next horrific or gorgeous image. The cast is fantastic, even when they’re playing to cliché, and manage to hold all that tension together.

Ultimately, Prometheus isn’t the absolute revolution in science fiction and horror that some people may want it to be; it isn’t the torchbearer, stealing fire and lighting the fuse on a billion new ideas about aliens and space travel. But it sure as hell struck the match.