Monster Movie of the Week: Prometheus (2012)

Director: Ridley Scott

Genre: Sci-Fi, Horror, Body Horror

​With the recent announcement that Ridley Scott will be attempting to close out his moribund Alien prequel trilogy, I ran back to see where I left off with this series only to realize that I have not covered either of these films in Monster Movie of the Week. Time to remedy that because I really enjoy this duology, particularly Alien Covenant. This is largely due to Michael Fassbender’s performance as the rogue android David, who is not only the most compelling character in the Alien series but one of the most fascinating characters in all of science fiction cinema. If these third movie ends up being produced, it will be remembered as the David Trilogy more than an Alien Prequel trilogy, because these movies have a strange and uneasy relationship with the mainline Alien films.

Prometheus kicked the whole thing off in 2012 with a movie that was a big hit on release but who’s reputation has suffered a bit in the ensuing decade plus and is mostly remembered for being overly cute about its connection to the Alien series and its goofy and incompetent human characters than anything else. That said, there is a lot to enjoy here such as a stacked cast (Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce), an unforgettable opening sequence, beautiful cinematography, a terrific Fassbender performance, dark and imaginative design, and deep ties to forgotten Alien lore.

THE MOVIE

The film starts with an eerie sequence in which a humanoid alien ritualistically consumes a viscous black substance which causes him to convulse, die and quickly decompose in a primeval land. As we follow the breakdown of his tissues and cells it is made visually clear the substance of his body is actually seeding life on this planet, apparently Earth.

This is the best scene in the movie and with no dialogue evokes a kind of visual mythic truth. The movie’s title supports this. Prometheus was the Greek Titan who sacrificed himself to benefit mankind. These aliens, which we later refer to as Engineers, are oversized and marble-skinned and themselves evoke classical statues of Greco-Roman gods. Our protagonists, a pair of married anthropologists Elizabeth  Shaw and Charlie Halloway, develop a theory that a group of alien creatures had made contact with humanity in its infancy and they have uncovered the astronomical coordinates pointing to a distant extra-solar world. The Weyland company, headed by an old billionaire funds an expedition to explore this planet and assembles a squad of experts in different fields to accompany the anthropologists on the starship Prometheus.

This is a fun concept that is drawn from the Chariots of the Gods theory which was popular in the twentieth century. Scott would probably have been exposed to it as a young man. Chariots of the Gods and other similar books posited that “Ancient Aliens” visited Earth throughout our history as supported by accounts in world religion and mythology. Not for nothing, many of the more fantastic passages in works like the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita sound like ancient people trying to describe futuristic technology with accounts of “columns of fire,” and “flying chariots.”

While the crew is in suspended animation for their long interstellar journey, the ship is maintained by David, part of an advanced android series produced by the Weyland Corporation. Right off the bat, we know there is something off about this android who exhibits a fascinating mix of very human characteristics like neediness, pride and vanity. We meet him in his early scenes having the run of the deserted ship, seemingly content to do what he likes (including creepily spying on Shaw’s dreams as she sleeps) and follow his own whims only to bristle when the crew awakens and he is made to serve. Fassbender plays him with a twinkle in his eye and an undercurrent of dark humor. I like to think of David as something akin to a fallen angel who rebels against his creators, preferring to reign in Hell.

The mission is ostensibly lead by Meredith Vickers, played by Theron, who is a stuffy corporate type who also reveals shades of the take-charge common sense that Alien’s Ripley is known for. Vickers and Shaw seem to be jockeying to be the movie's "Ripley." While it was groundbreaking in the first two movies to have this kind of strong female lead, it is feeling a little tropey at this point in the series. It would almost be more striking in an Alien movie at least to have a male protagonist instead of constantly hitting the same Final Girl beat at the end of each movie. Ripley  

There is some speculation in the movie that Vickers might be a synthetic and it is left ambiguous in the narrative as to whether she actually is. I prefer the interpretation that she is as I think it makes her character and relationship a little more interesting. Otherwise, I feel like the movie doesn't really know what to do with her.

They arrive to find the planet is seemingly an uninhabited wasteland. The Prometheus lands near the only visible structure, a pyramid-like dome and the crew set out to explore. This is actually a concept from the early incarnations of Alien which featured a pyramid instead of a derelict spaceship.

They find the structure abandoned with only a few giant corpses and evidence of some catastrophe. The bodies resemble the fossilized Space Jockey the Nostromo crew find in Alien (although far smaller). They take a severed head from one of these creatures back to the ship and are able to remove the helmet revealing one of the bald, marble-skinned aliens from the prologue, which Shaw concludes are “our makers.” Of course, David knows something of living in close quarters with his own disappointing makers and provides an interesting perspective on this high-minded quest.

Instead of Xenomorph eggs, the crew finds an eerie chamber with a giant humanoid face overlooking dozens of canisters. These “ampules” contain and begin leaking a substance not unlike the black jelly the Engineer consumed in the prologue, which decomposed his body and also acted as a genetic accelerant. The crew take some of this material back to the ship for study and we see some native worms exposed to a puddle of it. The crew begins to speculate that this world is not the home of the Engineers but a place where they worked on biological weapons.

David has been receiving orders from an unknown source and on its command, he exposes Charlie to a small amount of the accelerant. Up until this point, Halloway has gone out of his way to be dickish and antagonistic to David, who is nothing if not spiteful. One is led to think that if he had been a little nicer, David might have targeted someone else. Later that evening, after a ham-handed conversation about her infertility, Shaw and Halloway have sex, now exposing her to the accelerant.

As I said above, Prometheus is famous for the stupidity of its crew of “elite scientist” characters. That includes things like taking off your helmet for no reason on an alien planet or being unable to run in a diagonal line. The movie is really a fascinating mix of smart and stupid. This is exemplified by the two scientists who are stranded in the dome during a storm and encounter the clearly-dangerous serpent-like creatures that have mutated from the worms exposed to the black goo and these two exhibit almost no basic common sense or survival skills. One of the two is immediately killed and the other has his suit breached and gets a face full of the genetic accelerant.

Meanwhile on the next trip into the structure David goes deeper into the building and discovers a navigation chamber which also contains one of the Engineer creatures in suspended animation. David, of course, is sick of all these humans but bound by programming to serve them (or at least one of them) but you get the sense he would much rather fuck off with one of these Engineers if he could.

Halloway is starting to show signs of illness from his exposure to the goo, and begins to rapidly mutate. Vickers makes the very Ripley-esque decision to not allow him on the ship. He essentially forces her to immolate him.

Shaw awakens in a hospital bed with David observing her. The two have developed at least a mutual warmness by this point. Shaw has been the only one to treat David with any consideration. Nonetheless, Shaw is restrained and told that she is pregnant with what David drolly refers to as “not exactly a traditional fetus.”

The missing scientist Fifeld returns to the ship and the accelerant has mutated him into something aggressive and…alien. The crew manages to dispatch him. 

Shaw later escapes and makes her way to the ship’s medipod, and in the movie’s goriest and most harrowing scene, the automated surgical unit removes a writing squid-like creature from her and staples her up. Shaw locks the creature in the pod, and finds David, Vickers, and the thought-to-be-dead Peter Weyland, played by Guy Pearce in a lot of old age make-up. Weyland has been on the ship the whole time and is clinging to life to meet the Engineers to ask that they grant him immortality. Which is at once a ridiculous motivation and one that tracks with Earth’s billionaire population.

Shaw (still stapled together) accompanies Weyland and David to the navigation room where they awaken the Engineer in what is now revealed to be a ship similar in design to the derelict from Alien. The Engineer is not happy to see any of these people and reacts violently, killing Weyland, decapitating David, and nearly killing Shaw before she escapes. The creature activates the ship, apparently ready to dump its cargo on Earth.

Shaw notifies the Prometheus which rams the Engineer ship. Vickers ejects her section of the ship (which contains the medical chamber) and soft lands on the planet. Shaw manages to escape the crashing ship but Vickers is crushed under it. The Engineer escapes the wreckage and pursued Shaw to the pod, where they have a pretty good chase. She opens the medical chamber, releasing the creature that had been removed from her and which is now enormous and overpowers the engineer, and jams a tube down his throat.

By the way, there is an alternate cut of this chase scene that is much better.

 

David contacts Shaw on the radio. He has survived the crash (although still decapitated) and he knows where there is another Engineer ship in the complex. The two set off together to find their makers.

In the closing moments of the movie the Engineer corpse begins to twitch and a Xenomorph-like creature digs its way out. And you can almost hear Ridley Scott off camera saying “Here’s your bloody Alien!”

THE MONSTERS

Okay. What is up with these creatures? And what does all this have to do with the ship in Alien our beautiful, precious, perfect organism or James Cameron’s Killer Queen for that matter? Or the Dog Alien? Or the weird skull faced wiggly-nosed creature in Alien Resurrection? It’s okay. I’m here to help with your Xenomorph related questions.

The Engineers

The Engineers are an ancient humanoid species with advanced technology that apparently went around seeding planets for life. They did this on Earth and our ancestors recorded their visits. Scott has said that Jesus was one of them on more than one occasion. I’m not sure if he was kidding but it does seem like human beings did something to them to piss them off. 

The Space Jockey from Alien may have been one of them. Certainly the ship is similar and the armor/flight suits worn by the Engineers is identical to the figure from the derelict ship. However, that creature is far larger than the Engineers we see in this movie. Perhaps they are a third species that the Engineers emulated or worshipped. Perhaps they made the Engineers.

The Accelerant

The Engineers stored a substance at their facility which was discovered by the Prometheus crew. The substance quickly mutated any creature it came in contact with, making them larger and more aggressive. The substance does not seem to instantly kill and in fact seems to be designed to iterate over multiple generations. We see this play out with XXX. It passes through him, changes and passes through Shaw. In Shaw its effects are localized to the site of exposure in her womb in which a new creature is born. That creature, the Trilobite, grows quickly. It overpowers another host, the Engineer, and impregnates it, presumably with a refined version of the substance that now carries genetic material from two different human beings. The resulting hybridized creature is starting to look more like the classic humanoid Xenomorph. Perhaps after a couple more infusions of human DNA we might get something even more familiar.

Indeed, the black goo seems to be working toward the familiar alien life cycle. Essentially Shaw becomes the analogue to the Xenomorph egg, the Trilobite becomes the face hugger which impregnates the Engineer with a a proto-Xeno known as the Deacon. Perhaps after enough time the creatures might stabilize into a hive structure, eschewing the black goo all together.

Alternate Fifield Monster

While the Fifield monster we get is largely executed practically with make-up, there's an alternate version of the scene done with a much more Xenomorphic version of the creature and its a lot  better.

TRIVIA: Prior to the release of Prometheus, the great director Guillermo del Toro (a few of his movies covered in this column), had been working on one of his dream projects, an adaption of H. P. Lovecraft’s novella, At The Mountains of Madness.  The turn-of-the-last-century book details a cursed expedition to the South Pole which uncovers an ancient citadel full of slimy, nightmarish creatures. Seeing Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, del Toro concluded that his movie would have been too similar Prometheus and this project has been effectively dead since then.

SEE ALSO: 

This movie’s direct sequel is Alien Covenant, in which we find out what became of David and Elizabeth. 

X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) and the subsequent seasons of the series revolve around a similar mutagenic black good, which combines with human beings to create an alien creature.

At the tail end of the original Alien series is Alien Resurrection which I find to be a really interesting bookend to these two Scott prequels. If the David Duology is about the ultimate creation of the Xenomorph, Alien Resurrection is about its deconstruction and rebuilding.

Alien Romulus surprisingly picks up a lot of story threads from this film for what was to have been a back-to-basics Alien movie.

Prometheus has a shockingly similar plot and characters to the first AVP movie, Alien vs Predator, for what was billed as a higher-pedigree return-to-form for the series.

Patrick Garone

Chicago-based writer & director. Author of City of the Gods and We Lowly Gods.

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