Prometheus (2012) - 3.5/4

Ridley Scott, like James Cameron, is a director I usually approach with low expectations. I am a shameless consumer of narrative; I enjoy a good story. Visuals must be of a highly spectacular nature to make me forget a terrible narrative. Scott and Cameron, however, care very little about narrative. Gladiator is all visual spectacle with a potboiler narrative matched by your average wrestling event. Yet, Scott spent $1,000,000 just to visually recreate the dead Oliver Reed for a 30-second scene. This is not quite a representation of Scott's style, however. Cameron is the meticulous obsessive. Scott is a visionary. He will sacrifice any element of his film to create enormous, visual impressions. Scott is about the cyclopean, the limits of imagination. He's not about the details, but the overwhelming, the truly awe-some.

So when Scott returned to his sci-fi roots in a supposed prequel to Alien (1979), I was for once very interested. He is peculiarly suited to sci-fi and Alien still impresses today. With Prometheus, Mr. Scott does not disappoint. The level of imagination and the visionary power displayed in this film are extremely rare, superseding even the previous Alien films in the sheer enormity and consistency of the vision. You could mute Prometheus and just look at it.

The story of Prometheus, to be fair to Scott, is actually decent. A nebulous corporation sends a team of thugs and scientists to investigate a planet fingered out in Irish archaeological digs. The world is desolate and the mysterious alien compound is filled with malevolent life. Our heroine is plucky and likeable, albeit no Ripley. The story's characters and trajectory seem almost intentionally cobbled together from sci-fi predecessors like Galaxy of Terror (1981) and Inseminoid (1981), and TV series Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002). Stealing from the best isn't a bad strategy and these are very good films. Scott's laziness toward narrative is still showing, but this time he gets a pass.

The connection to the previous films in the Alien series is also intriguing. Any author or filmmaker takes a risk explaining their old work with a prequel. Alien was marked by the mysteriousness of its alien creature. Where it comes from, how such a creature thrives, is never really explained. Prometheus does explain its source, somewhat tenuously, and to its credit leaves more questions than answers. Even more to its credit, I find the new questions even more interesting than the old questions. Motif connections to previous Alien films also pleased me. It just isn't a real alien film without talking dismembered robot.

That said, the plot of Prometheus could have been abysmal and it wouldn't have mattered that much. Prometheus's visuals are awe-inspiring, even to the point of being mystical: One's self dissolves before them and is absorbed in their grandeur. Scott does not just create an amazing fictional planet or a cool-looking spaceship in this film. He does that, but he also creates layers of dream, technological projection, and past that superimpose over reality. He creates intense planetary storms, immense movements of structures the weight of which can be felt, new and strange alien creatures. He creates, using almost exclusively these visuals, that Lovecraftian emotion of human insignificance. That is a profound achievement. Ridley Scott at his best and sci-fi at its best.