My Review

Had to vent my disappointment after seeing this in the UK last night... CONTAINS SPOILERS.... We were teased with a promise many moons ago of an Alien prequel that, according to many, had legs and could have rebooted the Alien franchise in a big way. When we heard Ridley Scott was interested in directing said return to his 1979 seminal gritty horror/sci-fi creation, Alien fans around the world drooled in anticipation of a return to form for a quadrilogy that had crashed and burned after James Cameron’s bug hunt. Then the bad news started to filter out, Ridley was ditching many of the Alien elements and turning the movie into a watered down predecessor that would “Share DNA with the Alien films” and would be “Set in the same universe as the previous outings”. This was both disappointing and tantalising in equal measure. After the disappointment of Alien 3 and the ridiculous Resurrection, it seemed that Ridley had seen enough of his baby ripped apart by the industry and merged with other franchises. Alien had lost its way and was now a thing of ridicule that only him and Cameron managed to get right. After the success of Avatar, Ridley then looks to the “King of the world” to help with Prometheus and give guidance on using 3D to help the story telling. Now Alien fans are almost drowning in their own drool! For three years these drooling fans are now mushroom workers...kept in the dark and fed shit! It sounds harsh but after spending 2 hours watching Prometheus I came away feeling sadly disappointed and cheated. Don’t get me wrong it starts with great promise, as we pan across our earth's landscapes to the edge of a great waterfall where a god-like humanoid alien life form with white translucent skin and black eyes drinks some strange living black goo and mutates and disassembles before our eyes, his internal DNA strands seen splitting and corroding. We then jump to Scotland 2089 and a group of geologist discover another hieroglyph that matches other found around the globe, an invitation to visit our makers maybe? All’s well and good you say? Well yes and no! Things just seem to happen too damn fast at first and it just doesn’t feel like Alien. It’s no longer gritty and dirty and loses the fly on the wall feel and ends up looking like any other summer blockbuster with too much shine and CGI razzmatazz. This is set decades before Ripley and the Nostromo crew encountering the now infamous Egg/Hugger/Xenomorphs but it looks like it’s decades after, with holographic landing displays and flying probes and a pod that can perform automated operations. Characters have little back story and I had no empathy for any of the crew, as most were unlikeable whingers and moaners. Yeah they griped on the Nostromo but it was real world chatter at the dinner table with crew talking over crew and John Hurt complaining about the food. Here we have Cameronesqe dialogue like “I’m just here for the money” and “Prometheus has landed”. The introduction of the “Space Jockey” is great, with eerie ghostly recordings of their last moments played on a fuzzy holo system, but it’s spoilt by a sequence where the decapitated head of one of these aliens is almost brought back to life using doggy CGI. This was a pointless exercise that was the first turning point. Then we have crew members who are supposedly scared and want to get back to the ship ASAP but treat a new slimy alien worm like life form like a lost puppy with a “Here girl, c’mon it’s okay I won’t hurt you…isn’t she beautiful” The film is based on something profound but fails to deliver the message in a concise and logical manner. We have Fassbender’s David android, who can do anything. He can open doors in the alien craft with ease and speak fluent SpaceJockeyeze and we know from the outset that he’s going to be a bad guy. The auto operation scene is laughable, as it performs a C-section with a spray of local anaesthetic and a few staples not until the alien foetus has been removed by what looks like a seaside grab machine. I swear I was expecting it to pull out a Bart Simpson doll! Then our new Ripley clone does lots of really intense physical activity with the odd stomach grab and a cartoon “ouch!” The whole Old David Wayland plotline was pointless and in the end seemed to centre on this as the main story line, with Weyland as a god for creating Fassbender’s David 8 . Why would this man think he deserved saving? Why was he played by a young actor (Guy Pearce) in terrible latex makeup? Why have him in a comical walking device? It was just another set piece that turned this movie from what could have been an amazing thought provoking film to a silly summer blockbuster. If you are an Alien or Aliens fan, you’ll probably hate it just as I did and expected more from Scott. Before anyone asks if I was expecting an Alien clone, no I wasn’t, I was expecting a gritty thought provoking sc-fi drama with a hint towards Alien evolution. I loved the idea of creators/engineers messing with primordial ooze to create us and other strange beings and deciding when to terminate them and in turn losing control of their creations. Finding out more about the Space Jockey was an Alien fans wet dream and was done pretty well until we find one is still alive while all others are fossilised. This was such a great concept taken a step too far on the silly meter! Expect to be disappointed!