Movie Review of Prometheus (2012)

I do love a good Ridley Scott film.  He has that thinking outside the box ethos, where innovations are made on a vast scale.

Unfortunately, he then has the propensity to milk said innovations until there's nothing but repeats to bleed dry.  Nevertheless, I was confident here, as Prometheus wasn't a sequel.  (Though, to be fair, Aliens was a classic.)

As soon as I saw his name, I wondered which way he'd jump.  What I hadn't quite grasped yet was that this movie is in the Alien universe.  It acts as a prequel, but so far back as to neither touch nor deliver us anywhere close to opening sequences of those films.

So not about Greek gods then.

I changed a few mental gears and settled down to enjoy science fiction rather than Classical Age mythology.  It's all good. I love the Alien films.

This was not the same old, same old; and Predator wasn't in sight.  In fact, I was reasonably close with my preconceived assumption. 

We join the story as the spaceship Prometheus nears its destination planet.  On Earth, a couple of exploring academics (he's a scientist and she's definitely got surgical knowledge, but their actual disciplines are never disclosed) have found a pattern.  It all leads to the creator(s) of the human race being extra-terrestrial.

The space voyage is therefore a kind of extreme genealogy; gone to meet the ancestors in the solar system.  Naturally, being a Ridley Scott film, things quickly become very, very wrong.

While the majority of theater going audiences associate Ridley Scott with the Alien franchise, us geeks are still harking back to Blade Runner.

In the character of David, we got to have our cake and eat it. This WAS both universes colliding.

Michael Fassbender was fabulous as the android with his own agenda.  His performance really was one of the highlights of the whole film for me.

In fact, it was only his presence which saved some of the ropier scenes.  However, I couldn't help but think that we've been here before.  It was all very reminiscent of Blade Runner's Rachel.  Though that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

There were three named women in this movie, two of whom were major characters. 

Elizabeth Shaw took center stage throughout, but mostly surrounded by men.  As a result, they were the other half in most of her conversations.  Meredith Vickers was nominally in charge of the ship, but her crew was also mostly male. 

Then there was the ship's medic, Ford.  She was the one who actually saved the day, insofar as passing the Bechdel Test was concerned.

These three simple questions are designed to assess the portrayal of women in Hollywood films.  Even in such seemingly safe hands as Ridley Scott - who has a reputation for depicting strong, female leads - the test shows how the casting and the plot can divert us with sleight of hand tactics.

In fact, Prometheus had a lot of overtly and subtly sexist language.  For example, Dr Elizabeth Shaw, for all of her extreme intellect and pragmatic genius, was dismissed in the script as 'the scientist's girlfriend'.  Meanwhile Vickers was persuaded to have sex by a man accusing her of being a robot and an Ice Maiden.

(Note to Vickers: the correct response to to laugh in the face of the patronizing gentleman.)

Are there two or more named female characters in the film?  Yes.  Do they have a conversation?  Yes!  In fact, there are two or three different scenes in which these women share words.

Is that conversation about anything other than a man?   Ah.  That's when everything narrows down to one single, solitary scene:  Shaw and Ford discussing DNA over an autopsy.  Shaw does talk to Vickers about philosophy and the origin of life on Earth; but Vickers just brings the conversation back to men.

Without that scene, Prometheus would not have passed the Bechdel Test.