Streaming Availability: Hulu
-"Why do you think your people made me?"
-"We made you because we could."
-"Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?"
I actually wrote a review for Prometheus back in college when it first premiered. I'm not terribly proud of that. I was a bad writer back then - might still be a bad one now. I was very loud back then.
Ridley Scott is emphatic that he's never seen Alien vs. Predator. "I couldn't do it", he told Empire Magazine in an interview. It is therefore very curious that Prometheus' script has so much in common with AVP: Ancient aliens that inspired dozens of unrelated civilizations, a precursor race breeding the xenomorph-ish creatures, a dying Weyland corporation patriarch looking for a final answer sending out an expedition to a harsh dead land. There's full identical scenes. Prometheus has two credited writers, Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. However, the story concept belongs to Ridley Scott, with the rough idea predating AVP. He was talking about making a prequel origin story all the way back in 2002. I wonder if Paul W.S. Anderson had more access to Scott's notes and borrowed some of them for his dumb creature feature. It's hard to believe this was entirely incidental convergent evolution. Either Scott stole from Anderson or Anderson stole from Scott, somebody is not being honest.
This is hilarious because Prometheus was meant to be a return to form for the Alien franchise, a more serious reboot after decades of slowly descending into schlock. I remember the pre-production speculation around this thing being wild, with 20th Century Fox acting weirdly evasive about whether this was a xenomorph movie at all. This was the era of "viral marketing", so there's a few scenes shot specifically for internet videos. Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland did a fake TED Talk set in the then-distant year of 2023. Which explains why in our final movie, set in 2093, Pearce is given a horrendously-bad old age make-up effect. (I beg of you, Hollywood: please just cast the elderly in movies, they're good actors, don't do this.) And of course, this was the triumphant return of Ridley Scott to the franchise that made him. He didn't need to come back to this, he was a bankable director with a run of hit and had been nominated three times for Best Director and made a Best Picture in Gladiator. If Scott is coming back, we're told it is because he has big important capital-F Filmmaking to do. The hype could not be higher.
The AVP similarities are only part of the issue. Prometheus in retrospect is a messy movie, probably a movie that's too short at two hours. There's too much cast with not enough space to work. It seems like Prometheus will map onto the plot of the original Alien, then breaks away in unsatisfying ways. We have two alternate Nu-Ripleys in Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron, one of which is murdered violently by the script, her sin being the one person who never believed in any of this shit. Also, this movie is a weird combination of high-minded concepts of a search for human creators and the ultimate meaning of life, that's also living in a gross exploitation monster movie. It is gorgeously shot by Dariusz Wolski using wonderful landscapes in Iceland and Scotland. This might be, production-wise the single best looking Alien movie. There's great character actors like Idris Elba and Kate Dickie and Rafe Spall and even Benedict Wong in the background. Then there's weird tendencies towards slasher movie rules: the first two deaths are these bozos who get lost in the alien ruins and decide to smoke dope through their astronaut suit respirators. There's two separate alien infestation threats that generate independently of each other, and a then a third villain entirely in the Engineers, our precursor race. There's a lot that's great here and also a lot that you want more of
Personally, I've never been curious about the origins of the xenomorph monster. I never cared about the 'Space Jockey', the big elephant-nosed creature they find already dead in the first Alien movie. Now they're called Engineers and turns out the elephant face was just a mask, instead they're pale bald human-ish giants. Aliens in general are not really monsters that need much history. They're a dark futurism, they don't need to exist in the past. They're twisted reflections of some aspect of humanity, be it our drive towards emotionless modernity or sexual terrors or a wish for the fantastic and spiritual. Prometheus, to its credit, combines all these themes into one story. However, no matter what the alien means, their backstory is irrelevant because they are not real things and they're not supposed to be. Who cares where any random horror movie monster came from? Have you ever cared where IT came from? (Oh, by the way, WB is making a Pennywise prequel, enjoy!)
The origin of the xenomorph becomes bizarrely complicated and confusing. Our heroes travel across the universe to where we think the Engineers have been calling us, led by archaeologist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) and her dipshit husband, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). Holloway believes he's about to find God and all the answers, instead he finds a dead world full of X-Files-esque Black Oil that mutates in random ways. David (Michael Fassbender in a tremendous performance) is the local Android, with his own agenda, and poisons Holloway - who was so obnoxious he was asking for it. Dr. Shaw ends up pregnant with a tentacle baby and there's a terrifying abortion sequence, a masterpiece of body horror right here. Then through seemingly random circumstances, her baby, a now-giant Facehugger creature grabs an Engineer and makes a creature that kinda looks like a xenomorph ...but isn't quite? Why is its head pointy?
Disappointment and lack of answers is a core thing of Prometheus. Nobody sums up the entitlement of gratification like Holloway, who instantly descends into drunken asshole territory the moment he does not get to meet his Space Dad and be told how special he is. We never find out why the Engineers made humanity. We never find out why later they want to kill us by dumping Black Oil all across our world. Our selfish, desperate quest for answers is contrasted with our own relationship with David, the next generation of life. Who is treated as sometimes a butler, an irritance, or just a tool. There is much more happening with David than the previous Androids. He's got the same creepy agenda as Ash from Alien, but is also much more, there's a vast interior life for him. Maybe the best sequence of Prometheus is David alone on the ship, modeling himself off Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He alone figures out anything on this dead world, and he's not sharing that information with the fleshbags.
There is something really brilliant in the self-absorption of these humans, be them Holloway or Weyland or Dr. Shaw, and their desperate need for some greater spiritual answer, while never considering how little meaning they put into creating David and his kind. The fact we never get an answer is probably because there isn't one: we were made to be useful in some way and failed. The universe really does not care. The final child born is a xenomorph(-ish) monster that was never part of anybody's plan. Dr. Shaw keeps her faith in a God we know isn't real. I can even forgive the Ancient Aliens stuff (plus several characters in Prometheus laugh it off as complete nonsense). Since it creates the stage for such profound existential bleakness. Aliens have usually been proof of the mystical in our series (Signs, Communion), in Prometheus they're exactly the opposite. You go to heaven to find God, and God isn't home.
Honestly? This rules. My only complaint is that there is not enough Charlize Theron. Her character wakes up doing push-ups after years of hypersleep, and is the only one trying to stop an alien infection from taking over the ship.
David and Dr. Shaw end up being the only survivors, and they fly out to space to find the Engineer planet. Well, we'll see if they get any answwers in the next review... starting immediately!
Streaming Availability: Hulu
"No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams. I found perfection here. I've created it. A perfect organism."
Five years after Prometheus, Ridley Scott went back to the drawing board with another Alien movie, this one seemingly to clear things up from his first swing. This was supposed to be a more satisfying versus Prometheus' philosophizing. Prometheus met a lot of mixed reviews and the audience seemed to turn on it just a few months after release. You can see why Fox would want something that was more traditionally "Alien". Instead, Scott made practically a replay of Prometheus, just in case you did not get it the first time. We have a different ship, now a colonization craft, that lands on a different spooky abandoned Engineer world, full of slightly different xenomorph(ish) monsters that eat the cast, and starring Daniels (Katherine Waterson), pretty much the new Dr. Shaw. There's even a new David in Walter, a less advanced but more stable model, with Fassbender using an American accent to differentiate the two.
Oh, and there's tons of Selfcest homoeroticism between the two Fassbenders. "I'll do the fingering." That is really weird and really hot, I applaud this decision.
Alien: Covenant leans even more traditionally into out-right horror than Prometheus did. Ignoring the space concepts, the movie is basically The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where our colonists are Brad and Jet and have some car trouble in the form of a violent solar flare that kills Daniels' husband (a corpse played by James Franco, who thankfully is not in this movie). They land in David's nightmare castle for the night, and come up to the lab to see what's on the slab. David has fully become a Dr. Frankenstein in a Gothic ruin, he's a mad scientist and our heroes are the very dumb, very clumsy fools who get to suffer for his science. There's multiple allusions to Milton's Lucifer. Ridley Scott even considered calling the movie "Alien: Paradise Lost" at one point. Plus, the weird slasher rules come back: two characters banging in the shower get eaten. It is almost comical how fast the colonizers completely fuck up everything, step on every possible rake, and David gets to run the show.
Back on the theme of religion, David is not just Lucifer in that he's now rebelling against his fleshy creators, he's also this vampire feeding on faith. He sees in Daniels another Shaw, which is terrifying. It turns out he's killed our first heroine between movies in his various experiments, and he has similarly twisted plans for his new lady. Shaw carried her faith forward to doom. Similarly, the acting captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), is a single-track mind about divine plans. He walks right into a xenomorph egg, even after David has given him every indication to not be trusting. God did not protect anybody.
The creature that is born is like, 90% of the way to being a traditional Alien-ass alien. I saw this whole movie and did not realize it was supposed to be different. The Alien Wiki calls this thing a "Praetomorph". There's also little white monsters called "Neomorphs". The monster born at the end of Prometheus is unrelated entirely, apparently it was called "The Deacon". Honestly all these flavors of alien just feel like we're making shit up to sell toys now, like they did in the Nineties. I had a xenomorph-bull toy as a kid, by the way.
There's a great father-son scene where David meets the newborn Chestburster and stands proud over this tiny monster covered in Oram guts. After all these generations of accidental or purely utilitarian creations, a new God has finally imbued his creation with love and purpose. And the creation is the most terrible being in the galaxy, a monster that just eats and consumes.
Alien: Covenant is very far from a perfect movie. It is disappointing compared to Prometheus' ambition that it leans so heavily into schlock. It is nowhere near as beautiful a production, it has a worse cast. Maybe the correct move was to dump the xenomorph entirely. Or don't use the xenomorph in these stories, it is only a distraction. Covenant, to be positive, is maybe the single bleakest movie of the franchise. There is not even a hope against oblivion like in Alien³. No, David just wins, and everybody on board the ship is going to be his canvas for his art. We never got answers to the lingering questions left by Prometheus because there were no answers. The fact the movie is silent on this is the highest level of darkness. God never wanted us. Instead we built a mad God who wants to make.... purity. The kind of organism that an Ash from Alien would admire.
More or less, Alien: Romulus becomes a sequel to Covenant. The Black Oil shows up again in increasingly goofy ways. There's a wacky giant Engineer baby for some reason. Romulus has no ideas of its own so inevitably ends up borrowing images from Prometheus and Covenant. It does nothing with the concepts of faith, existence, or creation. It just thinks this stuff looks cool. And that movie sucks. I got so mad at Romulus I rewatched the entire franchise just to confirm my initial reaction, and thus this entire series. Yeah, it's disappointing trash.
Next time! Let us wrap up with an actually good sequel. Prey!
nice reviews!
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