Thanks, I Hate It: Prometheus

"What if I deliberately watered down the iconic images of my sole good film and its sequels such that building back up to them could be stretched over multiple films and treated as a story worth telling in and of itself?" isn't exactly an artistically electrifying idea. It's sort of like inventing the car and then thirty years later you reveal your next big idea: a car without doors, wheels, or an engine. Prometheus, English director Ridley Scott's followup to 1979's Alien, is that empty automobile put up on blocks: a familiar frame with nothing going on inside. It's hard to imagine a film less necessary, or one less adept at dissecting its own origins and meaning.

Alien owes its most fascinating elements to artist H. R. Giger and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, both of whom consciously developed the inherent sexual violence of the film's creature in a way Scott's subsequent work has made it abundantly clear he is either incapable of or uninterested in. Prometheus is almost totally sexless in spite of the presence of actual sex scenes. Its inconsistent special effects -- Guy Pierce's old age makeup/CGI is the worst I've ever seen -- render what few sexual images it offers cheaply inauthentic, devoid of the drippy authenticity of the original film's little-seen monster. The best of it is a tentacled vaginal horror removed from the womb of the film's lead in a gripping, panicky automated surgery sequence. 

Scott isn't an incompetent. The film's early sequences of Michael Fassbender's turn as David the android going about his routine aboard a sleeping ship conjure something of the slow sweep through the mining vessel Nostromo at the beginning of Alien, and the swift, brutal physicality of the Space Jockey once he's woken from his slumber is framed with arresting patience and stillness. These are isolated elements, though, afloat in a soup of uninspired musing on exploration, the origins of life, and human fear of mortality. The film's ideas are too big for its limp, listless script and straightforward story, Biblical in scope but with no ambiguity or fire in its imagery or dialog to justify that reach.

Prometheus is a failure not because it falls short of its ambitions but because it doesn't appear interested in trying, as though the operatic heft of its opening sequence in which a Space Jockey commits suicide to begin the genesis of life on Earth is entirely unrelated to what follows. A horror movie interested in ideas like selflessness and the fraught and fragile beauty of creation has to dig into the guts of human experience, has to show something the breaking of which might upset or threaten our ideas about the way we see and move through the world. Prometheus has none of that. It has no ethos, no vulnerability, just empty recreations of the work of better artists.