'Promerheus' finally bursts from screen

Everybody remembers when they first saw Alien.

Maybe it was that chest-bursting scene aboard the Nostromo that blew your mind as a teenage boy, or was it the final showdown between the H.R. Giger creature and underwear-clad Sigourney Weaver? Whatever, it’s all burned into our collective memories forever. 

Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror/sci-fi/thriller reinvented all three genres for the millennium to come: nobody could sit still for boring monster movies or tinny-looking sci-fi after Alien (and his next mind-blower, Blade Runner, in 1982). His spaceship looked like a real ship would, after plowing through space for several years: grimy, claustrophobic, used.

Though the three Alien sequels have their respective adherents, they have their faults, too. James Cameron veered the series in a Rambo-ish direction that was typical of ’80s Reagan-era cinema; David Fincher’s third installment still seems leaden, lacking the naturalistic dialogue or spark of Alien; and Alien Resurrection seemed more like an excuse to inject a then-hot young actress, Winona Ryder, into the equation.

Now Ridley is back. And he’s out to trump that chest-bursting scene of three decades ago. Prometheus (opening today, in 3D, for greater freak-out mileage) is not just an Alien prequel, though that’s what the cyber geeks have been whispering for months; it actually expands the Alien franchise and hints at uncharted new directions — hunter rather than hunted — while bringing back the vitality and visceral power of the original.

Girl with the dragon on her tail: Noomi Rapace, the new Ripley, will make you believe she can survive even H.R. Giger’s worst nightmares.

A gifted cast makes Prometheus run on all cylinders. It’s 2093, and Michael Fassbender is David, an android who runs the Prometheus vessel on its two-year mission to visit a distant moon that matches a star configuration found in several prehistoric cave drawings by scientists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). “So, we traveled a million miles because you two kids found a map in a cave?” quips one of the geologists on their team (and we all know what happens to wise-ass geologists). Anyone who’s seen the Prometheus trailer knows the locale of this moon looks a lot like the place where Ripley and the Nostromo crew first met up with their alien unfriendly back in 1979. But with so much riding on Ridley Scott’s prequel, it’s good to report that the script (by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof) doesn’t stop there; it keeps on delivering thrills, shrieks and laughs in heavy rotation. In fact, the second you’re on board the Prometheus, you feel you’re in safe hands: these people look, talk, scowl and joke like they’ve been stuck on a spaceship for two years, and they want to finish the job so they can go home already. This sense of space as just another contract job, done for the bucks, rings true: it’s probably what commercial space travel will eventually be like, and Ridley Scott nailed it back in 1979. (Kevin Smith offered his own unique take in Clerks, of course, noting that blue-collar construction workers were largely the ones building the Death Star, so they didn’t deserve to get blown to smithereens by Luke Skywalker.)

Vickers (Charlize Theron) and Janek (Idris Elba) think about survival… and other things.

There’s always a possibility of disaster when directors return to their best material: Coppola botched it with Godfather III; George Lucas offered fans three shiny, hollow turds with his Star Wars prequels. Director Scott craftily avoids this fate: he’s on his game, plus he cares about the details — like building real sets, instead of applying layers of CGI fakery. As Idris Elba (a.k.a. Stringer Bell from The Wire) says of his experience working on the Prometheus set: “It was like being on another planet.” Scott’s “used future” still looks plausible, one of the reasons why Blade Runner and Alien endure as classics.

Also onboard the Prometheus is Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a tough gal in the Sigourney mold who cares more about self-preservation than scientific or theological curiosity. Watch her confront android David with cool menace, and you start to wonder about her interior circuitry as well. “She’s a lurker,” Theron says of her character in Empire. “She’s always somewhere in the back, being very suspicious. She’s the red tape everybody has to go through.” It’s no wonder ultra-cool ship captain Janek (Elba) has to ask if she’s a robot, just to goad her into the sack.

Fassbender is typically cool and unruffled as a droid who dyes his hair blonde — to match Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia, his favorite movie — and sinks three-pointer hook shots while riding a bicycle without breaking a sweat. He has the voice of HAL in 2001 and the unblinking gaze of a droid whose concern for the mission is rivaled only by his scientific curiosity.

Slyly, Prometheus returns to many of the fears that made the original Alien movies so effective — rampant military and robot technology, being stalked by a superior species, the horror of penetration, unwanted pregnancy, and primal fears about sexuality — but updates and re-imagines them: it never feels like it’s repeating earlier hits.

Monster’s ball: Find out what happened to that dude in the big chair as Prometheus reveals all.

And there’s a deeper philosophical debate going on — about what God intended in creating us, and whether or not He’s happy with the results — that never once detracts from the action or the thrills. Prometheus, as we know from our Bullfinch’s Mythology, was punished by the gods for stealing fire; he was chained to a hillside, where vultures would peck away at his liver, which would grow back every day for all of eternity. A fitting image for the thrills we keep coming back to again and again in Ridley Scott’s nightmare vision.

The real key to Prometheus, though, is Rapace, who showed the world how tough she was in the Swedish version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels; here, she owns each frame, showing a tender, vulnerable side along with her cool, steady gaze. Mark it: the pint-sized actress will make you believe she can survive even H.R. Giger’s worst nightmares.