Prometheus

No one promised a prequel to Alien or a Space Odyssey. The trailers promised me stunning visuals, a generous dose of tension, and an unreadable enemy. The movie delivered on all of that and added an unpredictable David, determined Elizabeth, and a breathtaking story where the answers to questions must be sought, not just heard. Prometheus thus became a surprisingly delicate sci-fi, which will continue to mature for a good few years. (06/18/2012)

When white and white together give birth to black, the result is Alien without an Alien, like Jára Cimrman’s “Hamlet" without Hamlet. It’s not compatible with the Alien mythology but it overflows with today already cult and specific “Alien" atmosphere more than anything else made after 1979, you have to give it that. Just a shame that it pretends to be cleverer than it really is (even though it’s hard to say, because it’s just the first half) and double shame for the surplus of unnecessary characters. Visually captivating in some of the scenes it’s without exaggeration impeccable (David’s space routine, birth giving through abortion, fall from the heavens), but as a whole so far (at least till the director’s cut or a sequel is made) it just damn good. (06/07/2012)

Prometheus is a pretty decent sci-fi, but at times it has almost fatal sci-fi related flaws. It begins at an amazing pace. The story is timeless, imaginative and it has a great pace due to the strange atmosphere. The second half is much weaker, everything begins to be a routine and the worst of all is, spoiler alert, the alien finale. That really pissed me off. Prometheus was supposed to be pure sci-fi with everything it entails and not the prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. The whole time it made a completely different impression and in the finale he turns it into this and thinks I will fall on my butt… I feel really sorry for that. Visually, it is absolutely amazing, and that also counts for something. (09/03/2013)

Ridley Scott no longer knows how to come up with something new. He intensively copies from Alien and subtly quotes other masters of the big screen (Kubrick, Lean), but he doesn’t manage to put together a sophisticated mythology from a lot of enigmatic allusions. The more consistently straightforward, less ostentatious final third of Prometheus, when broken bones, flamethrowers and heroic gestures take the place of tautologies that go nowhere and the attempt at philosophical sci-fi rapidly morphs into an intergalactic variation on rape-revenge movies (by which Scott again shows himself to be a filmmaker capable of unusual feminine empathy and very clever use of gender stereotypes). The change of approach to the material is so sudden and unexpected that it gives rise to the hypothesis that perhaps the director was playing a cruel joke at the expense of the excited viewers. It’s as if he thought, “fine, they wanted something spectacular, so I’ll really prepare them for it at the beginning, but then I can more brutally bring them back to reality with a guilty-pleasure genre movie.” However, I rather see the reason for that in the necessity of cutting the film short than in the director’s sense of irony, which means that we will have to wait for the full-fledged Prometheus to arrive in the autumn, when the director’s cut will be released (after Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood, I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t actually a clever marketing move – to give viewers the feeling that a distinctive creative work was butchered by evil studio bosses and if they want to see the film as it was originally intended, they will have to spend more money on the DVD). Prometheus is a breathtakingly unstylish product with an unclear purpose. Because it doesn’t offer a satisfactory answer, both its suspense and its stumbling block consist in the prolonged uncertainty triggered by the advertising campaign. I’m afraid that the film’s “point”, which is very funny in its own way, will neither make anyone angry nor elicit a sly smile on the second attempt. If the aim of the film was to cause embarrassment, it accomplished its mission, but it doesn’t offer satisfying summer entertainment. By that, I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy it. I did, but similarly as I did with Pitch Black, in whose case the price-performance ratio was significantly different. 75% (06/02/2012)

Spoiler impressionology! It's been exactly ten years, give or take a few days, since I saw the first Alien, the film that piqued my interest in cinema as a whole, and the question of what came before has actually been gnawing at me for a decade. So from a purely subjective point of view, I have no reservations about it because the film answered my questions. First of all, it confirmed that the aliens are a biological weapon that probably cannot be controlled by anyone. So far, so good. But when I look at it with hindsight, aided by a brief post-film debate, I don't quite understand why the writers had to break the film into survival horror in the second half, endowing the characters with the logic of incompetent teenagers. Visually, including Streitenfeld's excellent audio, there's nothing to fault it for (well, except for Weyland's mask, that's horrible) but there's not a single climactic scene, something that would draw me to the movie theater for a second screening. This is actually a huge shame because, for the first hour, Scott was creating a more interesting world than James Cameron has recently. After leaving the theatre I was ready to give it four stars, given that the marketing campaign had gone beyond me, but I thought about the film a bit too much during the twenty-minute journey home. (06/07/2012)