Prometheus came out in 2012 as a prequel to the Alien franchise, set a couple hundred years before the other movies. I’ve reviewed nearly all the movies in the series here, and they really run the gamut. The first Alien movie is one of only two horror movies I’ve reviewed to receive a perfect score, while its follow up Aliens got a rating of 6.5, or Pretty Good. Alien 3 scored only a 3 out of 10, with a slight recovery for Alien: Resurrection at 4.5. I also reviewed the highly mediocre Alien vs. Predator spin-offs–Alien vs. Predator got 3.5 points and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem has the distinction of being the lowest rated movie I’ve ever reviewed, with only 1 point. Finally, the most recent movie in the series, Alien: Romulus, got a respectable 6.5 points.
Prometheus is different than the other movies in that it’s not truly a horror movie, but a science fiction movie with some dark elements. Really, I wouldn’t review it on this site if it weren’t part of the Alien franchise, but I include it for the sake of completeness. Like The Bad Seed or Freaks, other movies I reviewed under the impression they were horror movies but which turned out to fall outside the genre, this movie will probably not do that well when I run it through my scoring rubric, despite objectively being a well-made, thoughtful, and even fascinating film.
The movie opens with a humanoid alien standing on the edge of a cliff near a huge arc of waterfalls, with a giant saucer-like ship hovering overhead. The alien looks somewhat like a very muscular human male but with odd, rounded facial features. He picks up a bowl of black liquid and drinks it, and it courses through his body, breaking apart and rearranging his DNA. The alien dives into the pool at the bottom of the waterfalls and his body dissolves in the water, presumably infecting the world with his altered genetic material.
We jump to a scene with an archeological team in a cave on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The team is led by archeologists Elizabeth and Charlie, who stare in awe at a new discovery: cave drawings that are 30,000 years old depicting an alien pointing to a distinctive constellation.
Another jump, this time to a spaceship, the Prometheus, flying through space. On board, an android named David (played by Michael Fassbender) keeps watch on things while the crew slumbers in suspended animation machines. David spends his time listening to classical music, watching old movies (Lawrence of Arabia seems to be his favorite), and exercising. There are serious shades of the astronauts going about their daily tasks in 2001: A Space Odyssey in this part. David can also access the dreams of slumbering crew members via their brain wave readouts. He likes to observe the dreams of crew member Elizabeth, who dreams of her archeologist father giving her a cross as a young girl before dying.
The computer announces they’ve reached their destination and wakes the crew from suspended animation. They’re taken to a briefing given by Elizabeth and Charlie, who explain that on Earth, they found pre-historic cave drawings from widely dispersed civilizations who had no contact with each other, but all showing an alien pointing to a certain constellation. Now they are approaching the only star with a planet in that constellation, where they hope to find the aliens that inspired the drawings, who they call the Engineers. Peter Weyland, an elderly man and owner of the Weyland corporation, appears in a holographic image where he explains that he is financing the mission with the hope of finding the aliens that created early mankind. The crew is very skeptical of this mission. Captain Meredith Vickers (played by Charlize Theron), a cold and icy woman, asserts her authority over the expedition at the end of the briefing.
The ship lands in a big, rocky valley near a series of artificial structures that look like hills but were obviously made by some intelligent creatures. Charlie and Elizabeth lead a small team in an exploratory trip, while the remainder of the crew remains behind. Inside the first structure they find eerie chambers and artifacts, including a room with stone pillars. The android David notices black liquid oozing from the top of a pillar and takes a sample without anybody else noticing. There is writing on the walls in an ancient language that David can read as it is similar to the oldest languages known to archeologists back on Earth. They also find a decapitated Engineer and decide to take the head back to the ship. Two of the crew are spooked and try to leave early, but get lost in the structure. Meanwhile, a big dust storm is coming up and the rest of the crew make it back to the ship just in time, but the lost crew members will have to stay in the alien structure over night.
Inside the ship, a lab analysis of the Engineer head reveals that it’s actually a helmet, and when they remove the helmet, they take a biological sample of the head inside and conclude that its genetic material matches human DNA. Meanwhile, David spikes Charlie’s drink with some of the black ooze. Later, Charlie notices a parasitic black worm coming out of his eye and removes it. He and Elizabeth have sex. Back in the structure, the two lost crew members spend the night in the room with the pillars, but an eel-like creature attacks and kills them.
The next day, the team returns to the structure and come across the bodies of the lost crew members. David separates from the rest of the team and finds a room with a living Engineer in suspended animation and a control chair. When he sits in the chair, it produces a 3-D star map showing the way to Earth. Charlie becomes very sick and the team returns to the ship, but Captain Vickers refuses to let him on board. When it appears that something inside him is trying to get out, Captain Vickers burns him to death with a flame thrower.
Elizabeth, fearing she might also be infected, scans herself and learns she’s in an advanced stage of pregnancy. David comes into the medical bay while she’s conducting the scan and tries to prevent her from leaving, implying he had something to do with Charlie being infected and wants her pregnancy to go to term. She escapes him and runs to Captain’s Vickers’s private quarters, where she climbs into a very expensive private surgery unit and has the fetus removed from her body. The “baby” turns out to be a monstrous creature.
Recovering from the surgery, Elizabeth stumbles down a corridor and finds that Captain Vickers and David have awoken Peter Weyland, who was on the ship in suspended animation the whole time. He is an old man near death, and wants to meet the Engineers so he can discover how to live forever. A small team including Weyland sets out to the structure. They wake up the sleeping Engineer and David speaks to it in a proto-Earth language. The Engineer seems to understand him but attacks the party, killing them and knocking David’s head off. Elizabeth escapes and flees to the ship. It turns out that the hill structure itself is a hangar, and it falls away to reveal an alien ship (in fact, it is the same ship the crew in the first Alien movie will come across two centuries later).
Ellizabeth explains to the pilot of the Prometheus that they have to stop the alien ship immediately as she believes the Engineer is going to fly to Earth to destroy humanity. But the creature she had removed from her body in the surgery unit has survived and grown up–it now looks like a primitive form of the xenomorph in the other Alien movies–and is loose in the ship. Will they be able to kill the xenomorph, stop the Engineer’s ship from taking off, and survive the ordeal?
Prometheus (2012)
Story/Plot/Characters— A fascinating plot, an intelligent script, well-crafted dialogue, and charismatic big-name actors who are interesting and believable to watch. A little more character work would have been nice–the first two movies had a real knack for sketching full characters with a few well-chosen lines and gestures–but overall that’s just a quibble. This is a very well-made movie. (3.5 points)
Special Effects— As usual for the Alien series, extremely effective special effects. (2 points)
Scariness— Definitely a couple scary scenes, but really this is a science fiction movie, and the frightening parts are fairly minimal. (.5 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness— A lot of atmosphere, but it’s science fiction atmosphere, rather than horror atmosphere, if that makes sense. The alien structure is somewhat eerie, but not especially gothic or spooky. It’s just not a horror approach. (1 point)
Total=7 points (Excellent)
A well-crafted, intelligent science fiction movie that scored well enough in my rating rubric, but suffers for being a movie from the wrong genre on a horror movie review site. If you just want a scary movie, don’t bother with Prometheus, but if you want a worthy installment in the Alien franchise that’s a bit different from the other movies in the series, this is highly recommended.