Ridley Scott returns to the universe of Alien asking where we came from. For an hour the pictures are good enough to carry the question; then the script has to answer it, and cannot. Fassbender’s android is the reason to stay.
Ridley Scott has not made a science fiction film since Blade Runner in 1982, and he comes back with the largest question available: who made us. Prometheus sends a ship of scientists to a moon at the far end of a star map, and for an hour it is the film his admirers wanted. Then the crew reach the place they came to find, and the script by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof has to say what is there. It is superbly made, and the writing lets it down.
Arthur Max gives the Prometheus a bridge of glass and pale panels and a white medical bay, and gives the moon a dome with ribbed tunnels underneath. Dariusz Wolski shoots the landing from far above, the ship a small thing dropping into grey rock under a grey sky. Inside he keeps the light with the actors, so the walls appear only as they pass. A holographic star map in one chamber, blue pinpoints turning slowly around the crew, is the best single image Scott has put on screen in years.
Fassbender is the film. David has spent the two-year voyage awake and alone, riding a bicycle around the hold, learning dead languages, and Fassbender plays him with a stillness that reads as good manners until you notice he is never surprised. We were moved by these early minutes, an android filling the years with hobbies because nobody has told him what else to do, and the film never again gets that close to anyone. Janty Yates puts him in a fitted grey uniform a size neater than everyone else’s, which is right.
The rest of the crew are the problem. Noomi Rapace’s Shaw is a believer who wears a cross and wants to meet the beings who made her, and Rapace plays the want with force; the script gives her a dead father in a dream and calls that a character. Logan Marshall-Green’s Holloway is a sulk in a hoodie. Sean Harris and Rafe Spall, as the geologist and the biologist, are written to be frightened and then to do what frightened people do not do. Charlize Theron’s Vickers is held in reserve too long. Idris Elba’s Janek has the only relaxed body on the ship and wins every scene by lounging in it.
Spaihts and Lindelof want the film to be about makers and the things they make: a company that built an android, a father who disappointed a daughter, gods who might feel about us the way Weyland feels about David. It is a decent idea and it is delivered entirely in speeches. Shaw tells Holloway what faith is for. David asks Holloway why humans made him and gets the film’s thesis back in one line. Nobody does anything that shows us these things, and the last half hour swaps thinking for running.
There is a sequence around the midpoint, in that white medical bay, that had us rigid, and it is the one stretch where the horror and the idea are the same thing: a body, something made inside it, a machine not built for the job. It lasts a few minutes. By the last reel we were bored, and then cross about being bored by something this well built, while Pietro Scalia’s cutting turned brisk and careless. Marc Streitenfeld’s score swells on every landscape when Wolski had already done the work.
Alien worked because it explained almost nothing: seven people, one ship, one creature, and a script that trusted the audience. Prometheus has more money, more crew, more ideas and less nerve, and treats every unanswered question as a promise to a sequel rather than a choice. Scott can still frame a landscape better than almost anyone. He has forgotten, or been talked out of, how little he needs to say.
See it for the first hour and for Fassbender, and see it large, because the moon does not survive shrinking. It runs 124 minutes and carries a 15. Bring low expectations for the ending and a high tolerance for people in helmets asking each other what things mean.
