Prometheus is the science fiction movie event of the summer. Directed by Ridley Scott and suggested to be a prequel to Alien, the expectations were set very high from the beginning. The viral marketing was well done and included Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland giving a Ted talk in 2023. I finally got a chance to see it this past weekend and enjoyed it. I had a ton of questions afterwards (most of them have already been asked), but would willingly see it again. Let’s see why.

Starting in the future, a pair of archaeologists (Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway) find a 35,000 year old cave painting and get excited by a set of circles. We jump forward to a robot (David) walking around a spaceship and then waking people out of stasis. We’re close to landing on a planet and the archaeologists are finally telling all the people who’ve been sleeping for the last couple years why they are here. Ancient Earth artifacts in several places over several cultures all show people worshiping a giant man with a series of (what they believe to be) planets in the back. They believe they have found those planets.

Once they land, a group of people take some vehicles into a strange looking structure. Once they get inside, they find that the air is breathable (and for some stupid reason, decide to take off their helmets and breathe it). We get a cool scene with some floating laser balls that go flying off into multiple directions to map the entire structure so that everyone knows where they are and where to explore (yet two people wander around lost without telling anyone they are lost). They run across a giant body that was decapitated (along with some sort of hologram that shows giants running and one guy falling down and getting his head chopped off by a door). They enter a door and find the head and some weird vase-type stuff and a giant head. A storm is coming, so they need to get back to the ship. The female archaeologist grabs the head to examine back in the ship. David secretly grabs a vase-type thingy. The two lost guys (get it LOST, since it was written by the LOST writer), end up dead or weirdly psychopathic fighting for…some reason.

David puts a drop of the goo from the vase into Charlie’s drink and he has sex with Shaw. David ends up dying and Shaw is 3 months pregnant 10 hours later. After a quickie abortion (which reveals a squid like creature) in a surgery container, Shaw realizes that something is really wrong. And then the movie gets weird. It turns out that there is still one alien alive and when they wake him, they realize he wants to kill them and destroy Earth (for some unknown reason). We also get Peter Weyland secretly smuggling himself on the ship (hiding for unknown reasons), his daughter (who doesn’t seem that interested to be there) and some other people on the ship who don’t do much and aren’t really sure why they are still there.

The movie looks great. The setup and the spaceship are amazing. Ridley Scott has made a true science fiction movie that looks like and acts like a science fiction movie. It doesn’t have giant ships turning on a dime and shoot magical beams at another ship. It doesn’t have strange settings that are there for no reason. It’s an honest-to-God science fiction movie. It deals with a lot of questions about religion and the origins of life. But ultimately we are left with many more questions and no answers. A lot happens, but we don’t know why. As I said above, I will be willing to see the movie again because it was so well made visually. The script and story were extremely frustrating, but overall it’s was worth watching. Mildly recommended.