8.5/10

I saw Prometheus last night and I absolutely loved it!  Ridley Scott showed no signs of rust in his long awaited return to the sci-fi genre and delivered a really good sci-fi film that in my opinion, lived up to the pre-release hype.  Though, it wasn’t without its flaws, as shown by its good but not great 74% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But honestly, I can’t remember enjoying a movie this much since I saw Inception in theaters almost 2 years ago.

(SPOILER ALERT by the way!)

Set before Alien, the story revolved around a crew who made the voyage to a planet that they believed was home to the creators of humans.  And as the movie was marketed, “the search for our beginning could lead to our end” as they found that these great gods (or “engineers” as they call them) were not as friendly as they had hoped and that the planet was actually their military base.

Fueled by some awesome CGI (the Prometheus ship looks incredibly bad-ass), an ominous atmosphere and some great acting (specifically from David Fassbender as David the android and Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw), Prometheus takes off and delivers a very entertaining sci-fi adventure that also brings up some really interesting philosophical questions such as “where did we come from?” and “what is our purpose?”  I really enjoy movies and TV shows that address the idea of God from a scientific point of view (whether it is with another race who created us or there is evidence of intelligent design in the cosmic microwave background radiation), which is partly why I loved the 2009 Syfy show, Stargate: Universe so much.  Though Prometheus answers some of these questions (that human life began from a directed panspermia from our alien engineers) but not all of them, it was still great to see and I hope to see more sci-fi look at these sorts of ideas.

Some other highlights from the film include the “surgery machine” that Shaw forces herself into to before her little alien baby explodes out, Janek’s (the captain of the Prometheus played by Idris Elba) “are you a robot” conversation with Vickers (played by Charlize Theron), and the final scene where the first Xenomorph from Alien crawls out of the dead engineer’s body.

It had a lot of similarities, of course, to Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien.  From this, Prometheus became a little predictable at some parts, such as the obvious finding of the aliens on the planet or that the android David was following a secret agenda and not looking our for the best interests of the the rest of the crew.  Despite this, I wasn’t bored for a second during it and really loved the return to the Alien universe that I believe still has a lot more story to tell.  Sequels seem to be very likely as Prometheus is projected to bring in around $55 million or more this weekend according to Deadline and looks to be a financial success.

Overall, Prometheus is a great sci-fi summer blockbuster and welcome addition to the Alien franchise that it has breathed new life into!

What did you think of Prometheus?  Do you want to see a sequel?

-Tom