Movie review: Prometheus ***

Stars: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba
Director: Ridley Scott
Rated: R
Showing: Neptune Cinema week of Friday, June 22. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 125 minutes
Horror/sci-fi

Ridley Scott's Prometheus plays like the Alien franchise's greatest hits. Scott, revisiting the 1979 sci-fi classic that made him famous, samples Alien, James Cameron's Aliens and the later films in the series for this state-of-the-art prequel, using plot points, situations, versions of characters and themes from those films to back-engineer his way into the day humans first ran into the ultimate alien killing machine.

It's good-looking film with a first-rate cast. But it’s merely a watchable revision of the Alien masterpiece.

Late in this century, two scientists, played by Noomi Rapace (the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Logan Marshall-Green, find that one last ancient cave painting that confirms their theory. Giants from the stars must have visited Earth.

A few years later, we pick up their quest on the spaceship Prometheus. They're going to the place in the stars that the cave paintings describe. They're going to meet their makers, they think.

Onboard is a robot designed to fit in with the humans. David is played by Michael Fassbender with a lovely mechanical jerk to his every movement. He is emotionless, curious and always on task. Alas, he has a machine's morality. He is all about the mission.

A future trillionaire has sent a team of 17 to this distant star system. The scientists, Shaw and Holloway, are here, with a geologist, biologist, a working crew and a folksy, Southern-accented captain, played by Idris Elba.

The boss, the lady calling the shots, is Meredith Vickers, played by a steely Charlize Theron in a Doctor Evil/Bond villain suit.

The first sign that this isn't the young Mr. Scott's Alien is in the demeanor of the crew. This is a seriously unprofessional bunch. It's infuriating, the cavalier way the captain "warns" two members of the expedition that he's picked up alien "life" and "movement" on the ship's censors, the idiotic risks Holloway takes, the arrogant bravado of the robot, who randomly punches alien buttons and casually opens alien doors without weighing risks.

The ship is not the dark and cramped working vessel of Alien. It's a bright, open and cheery Star Trek set. That robs the picture of its claustrophobia, its dread.

Rapace is the heart of the picture, and she's wonderfully brave and soulful, as she was in the Swedish films that made her famous. Other's choices don't work out as well. Theron's so villainous she should wear a curly moustache. Why Elba, a Brit, attempted a grammatically suspect Southern drawl is one of the film's great, clumsy mysteries.

But here's what dazzles. Instructions arrive by the best big-screen rendition of a hologram ever filmed. Ancient alien surveillance cameras replay the ghostly pixels of what happened to the people who built the pyramid, which had a function the Maya and the Egyptians never told us about. The ambitious script dabbles in Creation mythology, faith, belief and science's place in that conversation, though it rather muddles its message.

If you've seen the original Alien films in their gorgeous pre-digital celluloid glory, with their damp sets, their surly but professional working class crews and soldiers who make one fatal mistake, Prometheus is bound to disappoint. It looks great, but the rivets on all this back-engineering show. The script is overly complex where the original was lean, with a lived-in sheen.

Prometheus is still worth a look, the first sci-fi film to challenge Avatar in dazzling visuals and eye-popping future tech. But Scott, trying to top himself, fails.

Next attraction: Moonrise Kingdom