Prometheus

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2012
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Ridley Scott
Genre:	Sci-fi majesty
Starring:	Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/
Tagline:	They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end.
Favourite line:	"A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable."

Ridley Scott returns to the Alien universe, with spectacular results.

The plot:
It’s 2093, and man has achieved great technological advances. Now able to reach beyond our own solar system, to the stars beyond, with manned craft, a team of scientific explorers head off on the trail of clues.
Cave paintings, stone tablets, ancient inscriptions, all with a common link: a six star configuration, etched in history.
Only one star system matches the data available, and only one planet viable: LV 223.
Searching for the origins of mankind, will what they find be our salvation, or our demise?

With Scott at the helm, you know you can safely presume spectacle, and he delivers it in spades. From the opening moments, as the camera swoops through dizzying ravines and scales great heights, before settling on a panoramic view of the most stunning waterfall it is possible to imagine – a real one, I suspect. CGI is good these days, but not that good, surely? – the promise is epicnessnessness, and that it surely is.
There’s a strong cast, in particular Noomi ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Rapace.
And Michael ‘ every film going’ Fassbender.
Not forgetting Idris ‘so beautiful, you good gaze at him all day long’ Elba.
Oh, and Guy ‘is that really you?’ Pearce.
Ahh, also Charlize ‘egoless beauty’ Theron.
I think that’s your lot……
Where the first three Alien movies pitched very much in favour of claustrophobia – the corridors of the Nostromo, the half ‘alienified’ colony on LV426, the tunnels on the prison planet – here it’s all about scale, all about sweeping you away with the sheer majesty of it all.
There’s plot, too.
Bucket loads of it, no more of which will I reveal here for risk of ruining it for folk, though I will confess to not quite following all of it.. No bad thing, as it demands a rewatch or five.
In a simply fantastic year for movies, this one goes the distance and surpasses the lot, becoming the movie of the year so far, beating off pretty stiff competition from The Raid, Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers, and that’s just in the last month or so.
To the naysayers - and there are some - well, fair enough, they can have their moan.
Probably not quite what they were expecting, but did they really expect Scott to just trot out more of the same and deliver something insipid and tiredly generic?
I think not.
So, they can take your complaints, take their forum mutterings about it being too slow and too confusing and too much like Star Trek and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine.
I’ll say it again, for the slow ones at the back: it’s the film of the year so far.
Go see it.