In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus gave humanity the gift of fire. Given its uses—cooking and warmth being paramount among them—this divine gift was secondary only to life itself, something he was also responsible for. As punishment, Prometheus was bound to a rock, and was visited each day by an eagle who feasted on his liver. As Prometheus has it, our Titan was a large, humanoid alien; our clay his genetic make-up and the planet’s water cycle. The alien who grants us life vomits, breaks apart, and ultimately disintegrates in a river. The price of aiding and abetting humanity is obviously quite high and, given human nature (read: fickle), not entirely worth paying.
Untold thousands of years later, scientist couple Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a shocking commonality in ancient artwork spanning time and continents: Gigantic beings pointing the way to a cluster of stars that, the couple postulate, could lead humanity to the origin of life on Earth. They find a corporation willing to fund them—the Weyland Corporation—and take off for a habitable moon thousands of lightyears away in a trillion-dollar spaceship. The two most important people on the ship are representatives of the Weyland Corporation; Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the mission’s corporate overlord, and David (Michael Fassbender), an android programmed to service the crew and look after the interests of the recently deceased Weyland (Guy Pearce), who is as much interested in the origins of life as Dr. Shaw. The Prometheus carries a spartan crew that includes a captain (Idris Elba), a biologist (Rafe Spall), and a geologist (Sean Harris), all of whom are your somewhat standard horror movie fall guys. The captain is stalwart and dependable, responsible for his crew and his ship. The biologist quickly reveals himself as an idiot. The geologist is the audience guy, knowingly afraid of tunnels, caverns, and the dark. (more…)