by Kendall Newton
Contributing writer
Courtesy photo
Movie still from “Prometheus.”
“Prometheus” is the kind of movie that cinephiles live for. Not only is it one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year, but it has quite a legacy to live up to.
Director Ridley Scott, returning to the genre that he helped create, strung connections throughout the film to his breakout 1979 hit, “Alien.” Although not a prequel, there are enough connections to the world of “Alien” to make a fanboy’s heart race.
This film is set in the future, decades before the events in “Alien” take place. The film starts with a crew aboard the spaceship Prometheus, approaching a possibly life-sustaining planet that was indicated in a series of cave paintings discovered by two scientists, played by Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green.
These paintings are separated by oceans, cultures and centuries, and yet they all depict the same star map pointed at by a giant worshipped by humans.
The crew’s mission is to explore the planet in hopes of finding intelligent life forms who might have had something to do with the creation of human beings.
Inevitably, the peaceable meeting didn’t turn out as peacefully as hoped. As the tagline reads, “They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end.”
The entire film’s plotline was top secret before the release, and while high expectations and wild speculation often destroy a film, “Prometheus’” complex plotline left nothing to be desired. The film is full of twists, and many questions are left unanswered.
This has a tendency to anger moviegoers, and I therefore wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who doesn’t enjoy a good puzzle.
Although loose ends can be infuriating, I relished in the whirring and buzzing of my brain trying to connect the dots after I saw it. Your gut tells you that all the answers are there, you just have to work for them.
Unfortunately, the dumbing down of movies is no less than a plague nowadays.
Directors fear that if they don’t spoon-feed an audience, then the audience won’t eat at all. This is, sadly, often true.
Many moviegoers see movies for the very reason of not having to think. I understand this cathartic habit, but good, complicated plotlines are being strangled because of it.
I like movies, even science fiction, to reflect life. And life is just not that simple.
The science fiction genre has struggled with plausibility since its conception.
Camp and cheese used to be able to hold up the genre, but modern audiences are a lot more cynical. Sci-fi, in whatever outrageous direction it goes, has to find solid ground.
“Prometheus” is grounded by very human characters trying to answer the one question every human has asked himself: “Where did we come from?”
This is one of the touchiest subjects of our time, with science and religion in a constant war of clashing egos.
I was thrilled to see them come together as gracefully as they do in this film. There was no pretension and no preaching. Both sides were looked at with equal amounts of consideration and speculation.
From the moment the movie begins, utter fascination envelops the viewer as every single shot is equally stunning.
The characters are fully dimensional, from Michael Fassbender’s oddly ominous android, David8, to Rapace’s naively hopeful heroine, Elizabeth Shaw.
Scott gave film one of its first strong female action heroes with Sigourney Weaver’s unforgettable Ripley. Thirty-three years later, it’s still refreshing to see a damsel save herself.
The music, composed by relative newcomer Marc Streitenfeld, evokes a very John Williams-esque sense of epic grandeur.
This grandeur is also evident in the technological world of the film that shares enough familiarity with the world of “Alien” to make the connection and yet has a contemporary, progressive believability.
“Prometheus,” which I describe as nearly flawless, isn’t for everyone. It’s not for people looking for a mindlessly violent alien attack sci-fi flick.
But for everyone else, go see it if only to see how a movie should be made.
“Prometheus” is everything “Avatar” wished it had been: It’s sci-fi for a world whose reality is rapidly becoming science fiction.