2. The Characters
When 20th Century Fox confirmed that Naomi Rapace (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoos Lisbeth and Sherlock Holmes Sim) would be taking up the role as the films protagonist Dr Elisabeth Shaw, I had high hopes that her character would inhabit a hugely different role to that of series regular Sigourney Weavers Ripley. Imagine my displeasure, then, at seeing Shaw infected with virtually the same affliction as Ripley in Alien 3, an unwanted alien spawn threatening to burst through her chest. Admittedly, Shaw takes a different approach to dealing with this, using a medical-pod to perform a hasty caesarean (something she seems to recover from remarkably quickly!) rather than offing herself in a pool of lava, yet all the same that Scott cannot come up with new territory for his heroines to deal with beyond sending the audiences stomachs into disarray is thoroughly disheartening for such an anticipated return from him. We only need to note too that it is only Rapaces character and the mysterious android David (played by Michael Fassbender, easily Prometheus best asset) who make it out of the movie alive- the latter severed just as a counterpart of his was in Aliens- in order to realise how little of this narrative is new to us. If Scott had instead opted to make this a completely separate franchise, perhaps he could have avoided this troublesome archetypal linearityor perhaps not? Indeed, we might begin to consider the likes of the proposed Blade Runner sequel and any possible future works of this sci-fi icon more carefully in this respect.