Grade B+: I’ve been a big fan of the Alien franchise of films for a long while now, and when the movie Prometheus was announced with it being rumored to be an Alien prequel film my interest was piqued. But Prometheus got enough bad press when it was released that I skipped seeing it in theaters and only recently caught up with it on DVD. What a mistake that was!
While Prometheus isn’t a film that’s going to win a lot of awards come Oscar season, it’s a really fun sci-fi flick that’s also nice to look at.
In Prometheus, the crew of the ship of the same name set down on a far off planet that might contain the remnants of an alien species that had a hand in seeding life on the Earth. But what this crew instead uncovers on this planet are unimaginable horrors that if released would threaten all life everywhere.
Honestly, Prometheus reminded me a lot, fairly or unfairly, of the Alien “inspired” flicks of the 1980s like Creature (1985) or Galaxy of Terror (1981). Essentially, those “inspired” movies all told slightly different versions of the Alien story — namely the crew of some spaceship fending off some sort of primitive force/creatures on some far off part of the galaxy — and that’s essentially what Prometheus does too, riff on that theme. But I’d argue that Prometheus is the BEST riff on Alien since Alien which is good enough for me!
If Prometheus has any weak points it’s that the movie seems oddly edited, like lots of exposition and story elements that might better explain what’s happening on screen were seemingly cut out in order to make the running time shorter and the writers of Prometheus seemed bound and determined to insert as many references to Alien as they could in the film no matter what.
A few of these references are cool, too many and they lose their impact.
