People with a strong sartorial sense know the difference between what?s elegant and what?s merely elaborate. It?s not the same in the movie world, where big and overcomplicated is so often mistaken for better, when really it?s only...big and overcomplicated. Ridley Scott?s Prometheus, designed as a sort-of prequel to the director?s 1979 terror-in-space aria Alien, is elaborate all right. But it?s imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity ? it doesn?t feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars ? but it doesn?t inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either. Prometheus has been one of the most anticipated pictures of the summer, but its lackluster payoff is summed up perfectly by one of its chief characters, a scientist who travels a long way from Earth in the hope of meeting the allegedly superior beings who created us humans: ?This place isn?t what we thought it was.?
[Some spoilers follow.]
That character, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), is an archeologist who, in one of the movie?s early scenes, circa 2089, stands hand-in-hand with her partner and beau Charlie Holloway (the exquisitely, painfully dull Logan Marshall-Green) as the two gaze in wonder upon an Earth cave drawing they've just discovered. The pictogram shows a couple of unearthly creatures standing tall and pointing at something-or-other. Are they gods who created us, or just random visitors? Shaw thinks they may be the former, and she's eager for a meet-and-greet. ?I think they want us to come and find them,? she says, voicing one of those really bad ideas that make the world of science fiction go ?round. Before long the two have joined a crew of 15 others, all headed to…
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