PUNISHER'S COSPLAY and COMICS: PROMETHEUS Review

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Sean Harris, Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Logan Marshal-Green and Guy Pearce

Review by Stewart Loud

Ridley Scott's long awaited sci-fi spectacular is here at last. So, does it live up to the hype? I think it does.....well.....apart from the utterly senseless ending but I'll get to that later.

THE PLOT:

After finding similar images of gigantic figures pointing towards the same configuration of stars, on ancient ruins and the side of caves the world over. A team of geologists conclude that this must be evidence of the human race being constructed by an ancient race of space faring aliens, and set off on a Weyland Corp funded mission to the far reaches of space to meet their makers and finally ask them just what they thought they were playing at. Their ship: The Prometheus. Crew: 17

Sadly for them, though, their makers turn out to be complete ass holes and instead of the spiritual journey of enlightenment they'd hoped for, they end up running around shouting and soiling themselves whilst getting killed off in a variety of creatively unpleasant and gory ways for about 2 hours.

THE GOOD:

I enjoyed this film a lot. Saw a couple of less than positive reviews beforehand and even spoke to a mate who asked for his money back when he saw it at the cinema so maybe having low expectations helped but I found it genuinely tense and intriguing throughout. The myriad of strange tech', weird structures, bizarre organisms and dangers the crew face all came across as truly alien. Although it isn't strictly speaking, an Alien movie, it still had a similar feeling of being a long way from home and in a shit load of trouble that the first two films did so well.

Great cast as well. Micheal Fassbender steals the show with his calm yet mesmerising performance as the ships synthetic, David, as he wanders around clearly operating with a slightly different agenda to the rest of the crew. A couple of my favourite actors, Idris Elba (The Wire, Ghost Rider, Luthor) and Sean Harris (Harry Brown, Isolation) play relatively small but well chosen parts as well.

It doesn't fall into the trap of having the crew be a bunch of stereotypes like a lot of other films have done since Aliens was released. There's no tough Latino girl. No idiot who keeps waving pictures of his kids around and no one character who mans up and takes complete charge as the strongest leader once things go wrong. A couple of them are clearly a lot better at handling themselves than others but nothing they do is glorified so it all just seems like normal people reacting to an abnormal situation.

They even managed to avoid slotting in a Hudson character who caves under the pressure and starts crying “game over!” at the first sign of trouble. To be fair once shit hits the fan, most of them start pooping in their collective knickers or asking to leave. Since most of them are geologists and scientists, and not soldiers, this seemed pretty realistic.

There wasn't any needless fleshing out of characters like in AVP either. That pile of toss spent about half an hour introducing all the team in great detail and then killed all but about 3 of them off in the first 10 minutes of action. No, you're told only what you need to know about them and you're never left feeling like you should have been told more, or indeed less.

Visually the film is stunning to look at but you probably don't need me to tell you that if you've ever watched any of Ridley Scott's other films. The special effects and locations early in the film are as good as they get and every scene is expertly crafted to draw the right emotion from the audience. Fear, curiosity, horror, awe. I've never had a tub of pop corn last so long, I was that glued to what I was watching. The self administered surgery bit had me writhing in my seat! Horrible but absolutely brilliant.

All in all it's incredibly well paced with the violence and action being well spaced out amongst the exploration throughout the film and often taking you by surprise with it's ferocity. The 2 hours flew by for me and I will be watching it again.

THE BAD:

It is, however, not perfect. There were a couple of plot points that bothered me -one in particular- but that's down to the writers so I won't fault Ridley Scott for the first rate job he did bringing it to life.

!!SPOILER ALERT!!--If you have not watched the film and you don't want to know about any of the important plot details, shock moments or the shockingly bad ending then stop reading now and skip to the final paragraph marked "THE VERDICT".--!!SPOILER ALERT!!

There's one bit where, after spending the past few hours saying how scared they are because of all the huge dead bodies lying around and expressing their reluctance to investigate a life signal, 2 guys find a 4 foot long alien snake creature and one of them tries to pet it. It's even flaring it's head like a cobra for God's sake! I know they're geologists not biologists but whenever an animal puffs itself up like that -snakes, cats, birds, lizards, fish, whatever- it is not a good thing. A child of 5 could tell you you should not touch that.

Anyway it bites him on the hand, breaks his arm, melts his mates face off, slips into his suit and jumps down his throat. A terrifying scene, no doubt about that, but the guy was asking for it. It's like Ripley and Newt trying to cuddle the facehuggers Burk sent after them.

Then there's this bio' weapon the Engineers created to wipe out Mankind. If they have the know how to make such a thing and they want to wipe out the human race, why not just make an air born virus that kills them all quickly and painlessly? What do they have to gain by turning a large percentage of them into unstoppable killing machines? If they'd decided the Human race had become too dangerous to exist, I fail to see how this would help the situation as they saw it.

Another thing. My girlfriend once had abdominal surgery similar to what Noomi Rapace's character goes through in this film -although she didn't have a 15 pound octopus vagina creature removed from her insides- and she said it was about 2 months before she could stand up straight. Noomi leaps straight off the table and spends the rest of the film running, jumping, climbing and even lowering people off big ledges with a rope. Didn't buy that.

And finally...THE ENDING:

I don't think I can fully convey just how much the end of this film annoyed me without getting reported for linking inappropriately coarse material onto facebook. This film, despite not having any of H.R.Giger's creatures in it, IS an Alien prequel. The ship from the first film is in there or at least one of the same design so it ending with an alien space craft crashing on planet LV-426 or at least setting off in that direction isn't just what cinema goers expect, it's what we deserve for paying to see it!

The massive aliens or “Engineers” as they're referred to in the film have engineered some sort of doomsday biological weapon that, once it comes into contact with a life form, infects and transforms that life form into a super aggressive, super dangerous killing machine, who's sole purpose is to reproduce itself and wipe out/dominate anything else living that it finds. Depending on what gets infected and how, the resulting mutation is always different so with the whole impregnation and reproduction theme, it's not a huge leap in logic to see how this could have created Giger's Alien creatures.

At the end of the film, an alien ship with a lone Engineer pilot takes off for Earth with a cargo of bio weapons. Never saw the bio weapons when John Hurt and co went on board the ship in Alien but maybe something bursts out of the Engineer, causing him to crash on LV-426, then lays all the eggs and they just missed the bio weapons when searching the ship, I thought. But no. The ship crashes where it took off from. Is this supposed to be LV-426? Doesn't look like it. Ah but then we learn there are other ships and the Engineer pilot gets impregnated by a giant facehugger looking thing.

Everything is coming together and making sense now -in a round about and convoluted way- but it's definitely coming together. Again no. Something that looks a bit like Giger's alien bursts out of the Engineer where he lays on the planets surface and runs off while the only 2 surviving cast members steal another ship and set course for the Engineer home planet leaving a planet that, as far as the audience knows, is now completely devoid of intelligent space faring life and working space craft.

Maybe they already launched a ship full of eggs. Maybe there was another ship and Engineer hidden on the planet. Maybe they're gonna make a sequel to this film that wraps it all up. Why the hell are we left with so many maybes? Why couldn't they just write it so it makes perfect sense? To have such a heavily anticipated and well put together film end like that just gives me a mental image of the writers, both drunk out of their minds, laughing their asses off at all the people who went to see it while they count all the money they made. What the fuck?! It's like they had every opportunity to tie it all in flawlessly with the first Alien film but they just didn't feel like it.

THE VERDICT:

Anyone who tells you this is a bad film, isn't being completely fair. There's a lot to like and a lot of love gone into it. The sets, costumes, creatures, concepts, performances, special effects and atmosphere of the film are all outstanding. It just falls down on a few of the story's details. If you're a fan of the Alien's films or just sci-fi in general, then you really don't wanna miss this. Just don't expect something flawless. I'd have scored this a 9 but the ending just left a bad taste in my brain.

SCORE 8/10