A lone figure
stands on a dead planet, gazing solemnly at the spacecraft which brought him here,
now flying away. As the mothership soars into the stratosphere, the being—a
tall, hairless biped with chalk-white skin and uncannily human features—removes
his cloak and drinks an oozing, shifting black liquid. In seconds, the compound
brings him to his knees, painfully rending him apart at the molecular level
until the humanoid tumbles down the adjacent waterfall and dissolves among the
rocks below. But from this individual’s agonizing death comes a glimpse of
something new. Decayed DNA strands reanimate, one cell splits into another,
then another. Like seeds cast into the wind, life spreads.
So begins Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s semiprequel
to his 1979 blockbuster—and my all time favourite movie—Alien. I specify “semiprequel” because Scott himself has been
wishy-washy about where it sits in the Alien
continuum. While it’s set in the same fictional universe, it focuses not on
the series’ eponymous monsters but on a species only glimpsed in the original
film. It’s a much grander movie, featuring a more cosmic and existential brand
of horror than that of its darkly sexual proto-slasher progenitor. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by way of Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing, and with a touch of H.P.
Lovecraft to boot; in other words, everything I could ever ask for, give or
take some concerns I have with the finished product.
