Prometheus: A Review/Insane Ramble

This may end up becoming more of an insane ramble as we end the review, but I need to get my thoughts out there. Please be advised that there will be spoilers from here on out, as well as a full discussion of the film, what I thought, what I'm still thinking about it, and many other things.

So it'd be best for you to turn around now, see the movie, and then come back, if you haven't already. Or see it a second time to let it just get inside the grooves of your brain. Because I'm planning on going back, at least once. Maybe two more times. Maybe three. Maybe I might see it in 3D Imax. Maybe. But please be aware, this movie is a slow burn to a full reveal. It offers questions and answers, probably more questions, but if you like science fiction films with horror and thrills sprinkled throughout, then watch this movie.

Anyway, still here? Then read on....






Okay, the review. The movie opens with a big tall white dude, who is called an Engineer or a Space Jockey depending on your own nomenclature, who takes a big swig of what appears to be a Venom symbiote 40, and then dies, breaking apart in water. My understanding of this is his action brings life to humans and possibly countless other peoples and groups and animals and sexes and this, that and that other thing over there.

Basically, he's Space Jesus, as a few people have mentioned before me. He's opening doors for the rest of the universe by dying, sacrificed for our future sins. What a guy/alien.

Beyond that, the movie is beautiful. But we'll talk beauty as we move through this thing. We're in Scotland now and two crazy scientists (one a Girl with a Dragon Tattoo and one some douche who was in a crappy movie produced by M. Night Shyamalan and looks like a low-budget Tom Hardy) find these runes/cave drawings and learn the secret of the universe, or what they think is the secret: That there is a group of people/aliens/beings/gods that want us to find something. They are calling us to the beginnings of our own creation.

It's weird. It's insane. But it gets weirder and more insane.

Ellie (Ripley basically) and Tom Hardy lookalike and a crew of about 15 or so go off to said planet, LV-223. And before you freak out, yes it's a different planet from Alien. Yes we can explain that. No you're fine, stop shaking, it'll be explained. The crew consists of the badass motherfucker named David played by Michael motherfucking Fassbender (as he shall forever be called) who just so happens to be an android who loves the movie Lawrence of Arabia and playing basketball on a bicycle; Meredith Vickers played by Charlize Theron in the best thing she's done in for-fucking-ever, and she's a stone cold bitch who might or might not be an android also; Idris Elba, and really, it doesn't matter who he plays because he could play Madea in Madea's Big Fat Fuck You Tyler Perry and play every single comic book superhero in one movie and I'd still love the guy; Benedict Wong, keeping his pimp-hand strong, as one of the crew of Prometheus (fun fact, he's in Sunshine and Moon, both amazing sci-fi movies that not enough people ever saw and goddamn you for not seeing it); Rafe Spall (playing a nerd like only the Spall men can, but with an American accent no doubt); a dude with a mohawk who's a scientist and has cool tattoos, and hologram Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland (again, make a superhero movie with Idris Elb and Guy Pearce as every character, and I'd see it a million times/hell, they should play Luke Cage and Iron Fist: DO IT MARVEL RIGHT NOW!!!). And a bunch of fodder, basically beyond these people. Some people with weird accents and just a strong desire to die, basically. They signed up to get paid.

Okay, back on track. They go to LV-223 because Ellie and the douche have an idea that the Engineers/Space Jockeys want them to know about their beginnings. And Peter Weyland pays for the whole trip for a group of 15 people to fly across space over a 2 year span and figure out what this all means. That's a giant leap of faith, Pete, hope it pays off for you.

They get to LV-223 and begin exploring. They find these globes/domes/dunes and go to it in their space buggies and space dropship trucks. It looks like they're in Platoon in Space and Mario Kart in Space at the same time, but hey, space! They get inside the dunes and the crazy mohawk-tattooed guy (played by Sean Harris, a British guy) uses his brain power to send off these two drones that apparently he had from before and uses them (and I guess he had more than just two, but whatever) to scope out and map the dune. Boom, done, right? Let's all head back to the ship.

Fuck that shit, let's keep exploring, says the scientists everyone is really starting to fucking hate on this crew.

They all go along with it and keep exploring and then find a dead alien missing it's head. There's also some strange hologram/weirdo space wet dream thing going on where they see the space jockeys running around as if they were a missing loop in a video feed or whatever. Anyway, they find dead alien with missing head and figure that he lost his head because the door cut it off. David uses his badass motherfucking robot brain to open said door and read the glyphs on it (instead of using his sweet Magneto-powers) and boom, door opens, head found, woohoo. We should go to the ship and check this shit out, right?

Fuck that shit, let's keep exploring, says the scientists we're all secretly hoping get chest-bursted immediately.

They continue inside the dune and find some vases/plants/crypts and shit gets real here. This is where my breakdown of the movie is going to become more of a review/discussion on the film. The vases were safe and sound, hidden behind this door and many others in the ship, for god knows how long. Centuries, possibly. And with one footstep of humanity, they fuck everything up.

Basically, the way I look at it is, the vases start oozing because they've been left alone. The door closed and they were left to their own devices. Who knows what killed the space jockeys, but here they are, vases full of goop. And the motherfuckers look at them, inspect them, touch them, and get shit really going nutty. David takes a sample with him and they leave, somehow finding a way to split up the crew and leave the Spall and Mohawk guy separated and alone.

On the ship, David does some looking about the vase/goop and starts to become dastardly. Again, this whole movie could feature no one else besides Motherfucking Fassbender and it would still be all kinds of awesome. He fucks with the douche and basically infects him with the goop, for a slew of reasons. They had a discussion about what all the douche would do to prove his thesis. The douche said anything, all while talking shit on androids, Magneto, Irish people and I'm sure people with blond hair. So David does what any of us would do, puts some of the goop in a glass that he hands to the douche and boom, testing begins. By the way, if you didn't notice the insane amount of detail in this movie, they show David's finger in a close-up right before this, and there's a Weyland W on it as part of the fingerprint. Too awesome.

So shit really hits the fan starting here. The douche impregnates, with an alien baby, Ellie. Ellie and David have words about her baby after the douche gets lit up with a torch. Shit goes down, and the movie really kicks off.

The mohawk guy and Spall become something else, I think. Spall might just die, as he is facehugged, essentially, by a worm Alien, and the mohawk guy is just infested with the black goop, basically. The mohawk guy makes it back to the ship, takes out some of the no-name people on the ship with super-punches and uppercuts and flipkicks and then gets torched himself. And space shotgunned, I think.

Shit keeps going down and then it gets real. There is a space abortion. The space abortion scene is one of the craziest things I've ever seen in a movie that had as a big a budget as this and as far-reaching of an advertising campaign. I've seen Troma films, I've seen Re-animator and a bunch of Peter Jackson's early stuff and I've seen weird movies with penis-aliens, but this was something else. A big budget, on screen, space abortion. Woo. Ellie has the space abortion and then proceeds to haul ass back to others, get a spacesuit on, and then go back and finish the motherfucking alien/engineers because this shit got real for her when she yanked out an umbilical cord attached to an alien fetus.

Okay, I can't spoil everything, but from here we get an android getting his head ripped off, we see Pete Weyland is actually alive and on the ship, Meredith might be an android, and Idris and his pimptastic team of badass motherfuckers help take down the alien ship from escaping. The flick ends with the possibility of a sequel, as all good/great movies should.

The questions I'm still asking myself after this movie are below, with some of my believed answers:

Why is it on LV-223 and not LV-426?

I believe that there were different groups of jockeys/engineers. Some that worshiped life. Some that worshiped death. I believe that the dude who died at the very beginning is what caused the split in ranks between the engineers. Some believe humanity to be the next step in evolution, others are super-fucking pissed for humanity destroying Space Jesus and want everyone to pay for what we did. I believe that maybe on LV-223 the vases/goop could become whatever they wanted it to become, and maybe the fact that humanity stepped foot in there before anyone else caused the vases/goop to become a destroyer. It was the last act of a desperate group of people to stave off their own extinction.

I also think that LV-426 is one of 5 planets, total, that the engineers/jockeys used to create life. LV-223 and LV-426 are the two we know. But what don't we know about? Maybe the engineers/jockeys created the Predators as a way to keep everyone in line. They are hunters, they destroy, maybe they are the only thing that can truly destroy the aliens/Xenomorphs. Think of it this way, they both have green blood (Xenomorphs are acid blood). They both destroy. They both have hiding mechanisms. They both hate humans, especially ones that carry weapons. The Predators even look a bit like the Engineers/Jockeys, which I think was done on purpose. The other thing is, The Predators go about nuking shit if it gets too real and they can't hang anymore. So I believe that they are interrelated, even beyond what 20th Century Fox and Paul WS Anderson tried to force us to believe.

Why do they hate humans?

Because we killed Space Jesus. Easy question/easy answer.

This movie has more Christ-like/religious metaphors and allusions than any I've seen in a long time. It deals with evolution and creationism all at once, and it's hilarious at that.

How can there be a squid, a worm, and then finally, a Xenomorph, in the same movie?

Again, another easy question/answer. The Engineers/Jockeys created a vastly different group of biological weapons, and we're only seeing a small portion of them here. The worm alien was created by the goop mixing with a worm, the Mohawk guy mixed with the goop and turned into a crazed super-zombie motherfucking face crasher (might be bath salts), the squid was the inside/face-huggery/thingie that came out of Ellie's womb, and the Xenomorph is what happened when you mixed the human embryo with the the squid hugger and the squid hugger with the Engineer. My thought on this is that this is the first, true Xenomorph, and yet, it's still not exact. That Xenomorph will probably become a queen, as it had the extra-extendable elongated head and extra-inside head, and will lay a shit ton of eggs that will all have face huggers inside of it that look much closer to the huggers from the Alien Quadrilogy and when they mix with humans they beget the true Xenomorphs. Chicken and egg scenario, really.

If this works, then LV-426 will have to have something similar on it to breed/mix with another human, or even possibly with Ellie. Otherwise, the Queen in Aliens makes no sense and the shit ton of eggs makes no sense. We'll see what they do in the sequel, Prometheuses or Prometheus 2: Electric Boogaloo or Prometheus 2: Prometheus Harder or Prometheus 2: Ellie Poops Out Another Embryo or whatever they call it.

It will have to to make some sense. Or they can leave it as is. Prometheus 2 can be Prometheus 2: Ellie and David's Head's Wild Ride and Alien can be the sequel to Prometheus. Then we leave it open to interpretation, which in my mind, is what they should do.

That's all I can think about now. I'm sure I've got more crazy, creaky theories and more crazy wacked out ideas, but my brain is officially fried for the evening. Hope you like my odd-ass review of this movie, but in a nutshell, I loved it. I love that it made me think and is still making me think. I love that it changed the game in a way so much better and so much more exciting than Space Pocahontas. I really do.

And I hope that this is the beginning of a new genre. Something bold and exciting like this needs to keep happening. Hollywood needs it.