Movie Review: Prometheus

It's gonna be hard to do a spoiler free review of Prometheus, but I'll give it a try.  As a stand-alone sci-fi horror/action movie, it's not bad.  As a tie-in to the Alien films, it's got a lot of cool stuff to think about.  And that second point makes it hard to avoid spoilers, but for the sake of the people who haven't seen it, I'll try.  I may come back and discuss the implications it has on the Alien movies later.

And again, since I get lots of Google search results for "curse words" in any movie I review, there were VERY FEW.  The one time the F-word got used, it was garbled by static.  Not a lot of swearing in general.  It has some fairly intense and grotesque scenes though, so I wouldn't advise bringing kids under 13 to see it.

Now, on to the movie.  We've got what basically amounts to a combination of the Ancient Astronauts crank theory with the Gilgamesh myth here.  Of course, the overall themes of the Alien movies are present - female lead who finds her strength when tested by alien adversity, a primal fear of rape/parenthood imposed by alien gestation, evil corporation with shadowy reasons for wanting to get their hands on alien stuff, and of course the Pinocchio/Frankenstein theme of androids gone wrong.

The story was pretty good.  It didn't feel quite as tight as it could have been.  There were a few places where the characters' motivations weren't clear or were contradictory to their previous actions.  But the story holds together, and again as part of the larger Alien (and Predator?) franchise, there's a lot of good stuff here.

Special effects were good (saw it in 2D), but a few times things looked a bit too CGI.  Don't want to spoil too much, but there's a Cthuloid horror in the movie that looked really good in one scene, and kinda crappy in another.

One thing that did bother me was a "James and the Giant Peach" moment.  Giant disk-shaped thing rolling toward characters.  They run away from it along its path instead of running to the side.  One falls, then rolls over twice and is out of the thing's path.  Sorry for that one spoiler, but by the time it happens you kinda know that this character isn't going to die from being smooshed. 

Something I really dig was the design aesthetic.  The inside of the Prometheus was reminiscent of the Nostromo and the Sulaco.  Of course the "Engineers'" ship looked like the Space Jockey's ship, since it was the same type of ship (pretty sure that's not a spoiler, since it's in the trailers). 

And similar to The Avengers, the bit that I assume is an after credits "Easter egg" was edited to be before the credits here in Korea.  If you're watching it anywhere else, stay through the credits. 

Overall, this was a decent sci-fi movie, and a decent addition to the Alien universe.  Not the greatest sci-fi movie I've ever seen, but better than many I've seen.  And yeah, I've kinda got an urge to run or play in an RPG in the Alien/Predator universe again now...