Prometheus

This is Oliver, last survivor of The Weird and the Wonderful:


Alien (1979) is my second- favourite film of all time, so I was super- excited to seeing Ridley Scott back in the sci-fi director's chair. 


I have just got back from watching Prometheus, the new film by Ridley Scott. What did I think? It was fantastic.


There are a lot of people going into this expecting it to be a new Alien film and being disappointed. I went in thinking of it as its own film and I was happy. It is a fantastic film. 


The photography in the film is beautiful. I saw it in High Definition version and it looks incredible. The scenes on Earth at the beginning are stunning, almost like watching the recent David Attenborough series. 


The film follows Noomi Rapace, an archaeologist who has discovered a certain design showing humans worshipping a tall figure, pointing to a particular cluster of stars. They find out that there is a planet in that system and travel on the good ship Prometheus to the planet's moon. The moon is called- and this is where I knew it wasn't an Alien prequel- the moon is called LV- 223, whereas Alien (1979) is set on LV-426. So the ship of 17 involving scientists and the pilots (I thought it was odd they didn't take some military and diplomats on humanity's first alien encounter- oh well!) travel to the moon to discover mankind's origins. I'm not sure where the "Scientists" get this idea, but I'm able to overlook that.


The film is rated 15, and at first I thought that was extreme, until one scene involving a medical pod and Noomi Rapace. It was quite disgusting and tense, being trapped in a locked pod with something.I'm going to talk about this scene so <<SPOILER>>. Noomi Rapace's character hinted earlier that she cannot bear a child. Then after a safe intercourse scene with her fellow archaeologist (NO RAIDERS JOKES!), she is impregnated with an alien foetus, which she wants out immediately, so she goes to the medical pod for a cesarean. The pod has these robotic arms which cut her open and use a claw game to grab the foetus (Aww--I could never win those things!) and out emerges this baby squid that keeps trying to grab at Noomi. Then to close her wound the pod just staple-guns her stomach. Thanks Ridley, now I know how to perform a cesarean!! 


The effects were fantastic, even the CGI, except for one bit at the end involving <<SPOILER>> a giant alien squiddy- thing. The new aliens, Engineers as they were nicknamed, were especially cool. I couldn't tell if it was CGI or make-up, I reckon it was Motion Capture. In Spoony's review,(He hated it, but the video is still funny!) he said the Engineers looked like Kratos from the God of War games, which, yeah it does.

It can be annoying seeing as they are scientists, yet they can be idiots, but that is a staple of the genre. Actually the smartest character was Charlize Theron, who at first I thought was going to be a replicant-- I mean, err Android. When one of the crew members is infected she does a Ripley and refuses to let him on board, clearly she's seen the first film. 


It's a science-fiction, plague movie, with creatures in, so if you threw The Quatermass Experiment in a blender with the original Alien films, you'd get nothing like this- but close!)
It seems as though they were trying for a deep, 2001: A Space Odyssey style event, which is it not. I tend to take films as they appear, not trying to find some underlying theme (I mean King Kong and Alien are my two favourite films).


I give this film 4 baby Xenomorphs out of 5: