rating ★★☆☆☆
I have been pining to see Prometheus ever since I learned it's the prequel to the Alien franchise. I had had a certain degree of confidence in the film mostly because it is produced and directed by Ridley Scott, the director who, shall we say, started it all. I missed the showing in the theaters, so I ended up buying the Amazon streaming version which has HD quality and is considerably cheaper and can be re-watched to heart's content, =). Overall, the film was good while it lasted. To be sure, the CG of the mysterious and majestic planet in the beginning, of the chiseled and porcelain physique of the Engineers, and of the futuristic technologies as shown by what's on-board the ship Prometheus, does not disappoint. The acting, overall, and notably that of Fassbender's, does not disappoint either. Fassbender delivers a very believable synthetic AI. What does disappoint, big time, is the fateful, and oftentimes, comical way with which things spiral out of control. Understandably, if everything in the film were to proceed smoothly like a script (no pun intended) and everyone were to behave by-the-book down to dotting the i's and crossing the t's, well, we wouldn't have much of a film. So someone has to make a poor decision somewhere. But the frequency of poor decisions, unprofessional ones made by supposedly professionals, is just too jarringly high. The team of scientists who goes on this mission is, safe to say, the creme de la creme of their particular fields. But their amateurism, freshman-level foolhardiness and even downright horse-play, makes one wonder if this sci-fi horror is really a satire/comic in disguise -- I mean, the only geologist of the team cannot find his way around a seemingly straightforward cave? The biologist of the team behaving like a teenage boy showing off in front of his high-school crush upon encountering an obviously menacing looking alien life form (and predictably, met with a quick and painful death)? The beau of the film's heroine (seriously, he does not look like a scientist whichever way you look) taking off his oxygen helmet and bravely starts breathing atmospheric air just because the reading tells him the air is breathable -- hello, do you really trust earth's technology to work 100% everywhere in the universe?!! What is this, a team of high school kids on a field trip?!
On a different front, Prometheus raises more questions, perhaps, than answering the ones we have. Why does the Engineer in the beginning of the film drink the black liquid which seems to break him down at an atomic level? And for what purpose? What is that black liquid? What exactly is the connection between the Engineers and the Alien species? In the holographic replay, what are the Engineers running away from? So on and so forth. These many questions definitely call for a sequal, one I hope, that will at least muster together a functional team of real professionals.
