Prometheus (2012)

A beautiful disappointment. That's the only way I can put it. I walked out of Prometheus genuinely unsure whether I'd just watched something ambitious and bold, or something that had mistaken ambition for achievement. A few years on, I'm still not entirely sure, but I've landed closer to the latter.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first, because there's plenty of it. Ridley Scott still has an extraordinary eye. This film looks absolutely stunning, frame after frame, and the scale of the world-building is genuinely impressive. The Engineers concept, this idea of godlike beings who seeded humanity and who might hold the answers to why we exist, is the kind of grand, mythological territory that science fiction rarely dares to tread. I really appreciated that Scott and his writers were swinging for something big. Creation myths, the origin of life, humanity's relationship with its makers. Weighty stuff, and I was leaning forward in my seat for it.

The problem is that Prometheus asks these enormous questions and then essentially shrugs. The mystery box is opened, and there's another, smaller mystery box inside. And then another. By the time the credits roll, you're left with the nagging feeling that the film has been so preoccupied with seeming profound that it forgot to actually say anything. It gestures at philosophy the way some people gesture at exercise: enthusiastically, but without ever really doing it.

And let's be honest about what this film actually is, stripped of its grand ambitions. It's a spin-off built around a single image. If you've seen Alien, you'll remember the fossilised giant in the derelict ship, sitting at its controls with a hole burst through its chest. One unexplained background detail from 1979. Prometheus is essentially a feature-length, enormously expensive answer to a question nobody was necessarily clamouring to have answered. And to its credit, the Engineers lore is genuinely intriguing when it's explored. But "intriguing" isn't the same as "satisfying."

What really drags the film down is the characters. For a story about some of the most intelligent scientists humanity could presumably muster, they make decisions of breathtaking stupidity. People wander off alone, handle obviously dangerous things they absolutely should not touch, and behave in ways that seem driven entirely by the plot's need for something to go wrong rather than by anything resembling human logic. The script stumbles badly here. You can forgive a lot in a film if you care about the people in it. When the characters feel like chess pieces being moved into position for set pieces, the tension drains away.

There are sequences that work brilliantly, moments where Scott's command of atmosphere and dread reminds you what he's capable of. One particular scene involving emergency surgery is genuinely harrowing, the kind of white-knuckle film-making that makes you remember why you love the genre. But those moments feel like islands in a slightly bloated sea. The film is maybe twenty minutes too long and about forty minutes too vague.

I ended up watching Alien: Covenant shortly after revisiting this, and honestly, the two films share the same fundamental flaw: Scott is clearly more interested in the mythology than in making you scared, and neither film is quite brave enough to fully commit to one mode or the other. They sit awkwardly between philosophical sci-fi and creature-feature horror, and they're lesser for it.

What Alien had, above everything else, was tightness. Every scene earned its place. The dread was patient and surgical. Prometheus is sprawling and occasionally self-indulgent, convinced that bigger and more complex automatically means more meaningful. It doesn't.

Two and a half stars. Gorgeous to look at, fascinating in patches, and frustrating in equal measure. I wanted to love it. I really did.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2012  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Ridley Scott: Black Hawk Down (2001) · Gladiator (2000) · Alien (1979) · Alien: Covenant (2017)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)
More mystery: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · One Way or Another (1975)