All questions, no answers: it's almost as if the screenwriters who penned Prometheus thought that by posing an endless stream of empty rhetorics on pretty much all the "big" subjects, including science, religion and philosophy, that Prometheus would naturally feel like a smart movie with a lot to say for itself. Uh-uh. Ridley Scott's long-awaited prequel to his 1979 film Alien, a classic of science-fiction and horror cinema, proved that posing questions with no clue as to the answers is the cinematic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot... over and over again. Ouch. Prometheus follows the crew of a ship who - having discovered a series of markings in a cave on Earth that suggest the human race might have been "engineered" by an alien species - travel the lengths of space in order to meet their makers. Having spent half an hour setting up the plot, Prometheus chooses to spend the remaining 90 minutes restating the same questions it posed in the beginning. The characters spend the whole movie restating the exact same questions, with no progression made; the movie goes to space, and yet it goes nowhere at the same time.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
