Prometheus: striking sci fi with a tinge of horror

Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge.  What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).

In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system.  The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.

Don’t think too much about the premise.  The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here.  We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters.  And the space monsters are damn scary.  The final sequence, however,  makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.

If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.

Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk.  Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.

Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.

3D or not 3D?  If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.

1 thought on “Prometheus: striking sci fi with a tinge of horror”

Leave a Comment