PROMETHEUS Review

The first image in Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" is a pale-looking superhuman man who is probably neither human or man. He stands on the edge of a cliff with some sort of spaceship far above him. Something horrific happens to his body, and he's cast into the water below with what appears to be cellular structures forming in the rushing water. Is this place Earth? Is this person or alien where humans came from? Is this showing us our beginning? From outer space?

Scott's first sci-fi feature since 1982's "Blade Runner" asks big questions about the origins of humankind. The promise is a deep existential journey with philosophical musings on God and meeting our maker. The problem with this quasi-prequel to his 1979 "Alien" is that the movie poses the questions, but the end result doesn't uphold the initial lofty ambition. In trying to expand his sci-fi classic into something more grandiose, an entire universe of possibility, he actually ends up taking a step back and muddling the story.

A spaceship named Prometheus heads toward an unknown planet following the discovery of a prehistoric star map by two scientists. They believe this distant location marks the spot where humankind was originally conceived. One of the scientists who made the discovery is an intelligent and brave woman, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace of the Swedish "Dragon Tattoo" trilogy). She's a woman of faith but holds to the notion of a higher life form responsible for creating us. Shaw's boyfriend, Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green), is a fellow scientist who aided in the discovery. Together they get recruited to lead the mission aboard Prometheus, which is headed by a frigid corporate woman, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron in ice queen mode much like her role last weekend in "Snow White and the Huntsman"). She represents the company who funded the mission; they're not in it for the discovery, just the money.

We could've been satisfied with a top-notch thrill ride in space, but Scott and his writers Damon Lindelof (of TV's "Lost") and Jon Spaihts go for something bigger. This gives the movie a crippling split-personality disorder. On the one hand it wants to be a crowd-pleasing action-packed adventure full of ooey gooey guts galore and gross-out alien creature moments. On the other hand is the Terrence Malick aspirations, a minor version of "The Tree of Life," contemplating where life had its beginnings. Whether you go in expecting one or the other, either way you'll end up unsatisfied. Instead, we get left with an empty feeling of missed opportunity and disappointment.

And what more is a feeling of frustration in seeing just how well-produced the whole project is. What's inside the gift wrapping, however, turns out to be less so. You'll still feel like you're getting your money's worth because it sure doesn't look cheap, but the visual grandeur of it all becomes nearly disheartening to see all the wasted potential because it really is a technically profound and awe-inspiring film. The desired scope and sphere of the whole story, however, is never achieved. You may be fooled with breathtaking set pieces and some harrowing sequences of alien action, but these are only temporary distractions from the glaring plot holes, threadbare plot, incoherent narrative and countless unanswered questions.

What doesn't fail is the superb acting, most notably from Michael Fassbender as the on-board android, David. He's like a mobile and humanized version of HAL 5000 of "2001: A Space Odyssey." We're first introduced to him as he watches Peter O'Toole in "Lawrence of Arabia" carefully arranging his hair and speaking patterns to imitate the actor. Fassbender's performance here is a thing of beauty. He's restricted by a character unable to show true human emotion yet he uses subtlety to build up quiet menace and wit behind his robot's stiff frame.

"Prometheus" does kick itself up a notch in the end, and the last 30 minutes almost forgives what preceded. And if you walk away remembering one scene, it'll be the powerhouse of Noomi Rapace conducting self-surgery with an automatic operating table. It's a visceral and nerve-jangling scene that'll have you cringing and cheering. That moment alone proves this talented Swedish actress is going to have a prolific American film career.

Archive: "American Gangster" (2007)

Ridley Scott's "American Gangster" is a perfectly compelling crime epic. In terms of being an exercise in the genre, it doesn't get any better than this. The movie is a recipe for success to begin with anyway, taking a big name director with a big name producer, Brian Grazer, and then adding in two big name actors to tell one big story about crime, corruption, drugs, and redemption. It's a dense and richly satisfying film based on a true story, and one that opens with a bang: Drug lord Frank Lucas torches one of his victims and then pumps him with bullets as he burns to put him out of his misery.

The story takes place in the late 60s and early 70s, and Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) rules the streets of New York City. After his boss Bumpy Johnson dies, Lucas vows to keep his traditions alive by treating everybody with respect, keeping a low profile in his business, and silencing all opposition, and even passing out turkeys on Thanksgiving. He also realizes that the Harlem drug trafficking business has a fatal flaw of allowing the goods to pass through the Mafia. Lucky for Lucas, it's Vietnam and the soldiers fighting over there are using heroin; and so, he flies over to Thailand to import the goods directly through military cargo planes. He's in control of what's coming in, and he works for nobody. He calls his product "Blue Magic," and it beats all of his competitors because it's half the price for twice the potency. Overall, Frank Lucas is an excellent businessman, but it just so happens that his business is in drugs.

Nobody suspects Lucas because he's a smart man, but more so, because he's a black man. He enlists the help of his five brothers from North Carolina, positioning each of them at different fronts for drug distribution points. He also brings up his mother and buys her a large house where upper-class white people would normally live. Unlike Lucas' flamboyant rival Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) who dresses fly and talks out a lot, Lucas stays low, dresses modestly, and strives to not draw any attention to himself or his activities. That is, until he gets himself a nice wife from Puerto Rico; her sole mistake is buying him a large fur coat and hat. Lucas wears them to a boxing match where he sits down next to a well-known Mafia man just as undercover cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is watching.

Richie Roberts is an ex-detective who is recruited to work undercover to go after drug traffickers and corrupt narcs in the city. He got a bad reputation in his previous department for finding $1 million and turning it in instead of easily keeping it for himself and his buddies. And that's not the only thing on Roberts' mind; he has a wife who makes him choose between his family and his job, and they eventually get into a lawsuit. Well, the job triumphs, and Roberts dedicates himself to catching Lucas even against tough opposition (Josh Brolin). The irony here is in each of these men's lives. Lucas has values and devotion to his family and takes his mother to church every Sunday, and he's extremely successful in business; the problem is where his success comes from. Richie Roberts, on the other hand, has a troubled family with a life in shambles but a job that works towards good. So, who exactly comes out to be the better man after it all? It's tough to really say.

The plot is unique in that it's told through two parallel story lines. Lucas does his thing, while unknowing to him, Roberts is slowly working towards his capture. The movie's writers do a superb job of holding our attention all the while these two separate streams of narrative occur simultaneously without converging until the final scenes of the entire movie. The two protagonists don't come face to face until the very end in a final confrontation that is justly rewarding. It's no give-away that Lucas gets captured; his sentence, however, is shortened because he helps Richie reveal that three-fourths of the narcs in the city were corrupt. It ends on a conversation between two intelligent men who realize they have met their match and that they need each other.

Denzel Washington is mesmerizing with his best work to date as Frank Lucas, the man who knows he's in charge; he is reserved and calm on the outside but can be entirely ruthless if necessary. Then there's Russel Crowe's Richie Roberts, the polar opposite of Lucas, as a man who has the uncanny ability to alienate himself entirely. He's like a badgered bulldog just plodding along until he finally reaches something worth struggling for. If it weren't for these two men, there would be no story; if it weren't for Richie, Lucas' business would still be going, and if it weren't for Lucas, Richie would still be stuck somewhere else.

Washington and Crowe turn in strong performances, enabling "American Gangster" to never have a dull moment. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, the movie is fully engrossing. It moves briskly and smoothly, it's finely made, and it's a meticulously detailed look into a captivating true story.

Archive: 'Body Of Lies'

Movie Review
Body of Lies (2008)


"Body of Lies" is a terrible title not only because it sounds like a porno but also just because it's a bad name for a movie about terrorists, secrets of the CIA, and espionage action. It's far too generic, but it turns out that the movie itself is equally so. This latest from director Ridley Scott is a very slight offering and a large step backwards from last year's "American Gangster." The movie feels a year behind the times yet again dealing with our post-9/11 world. I guess the multiplex could handle yet another sharply edited thriller about the Middle East and U.S. occupation there, but there's honestly nothing here that we haven't already seen in many other movies. Whatever themes Scott is spewing about the war in Iraq, we've all heard it before.

Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a CIA operative who has become close to Middle Eastern royalties and uses these connections and his ability to speak Arabic to infiltrate potential terrorist threats. He's a puppet to a man named Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), a middle-aged CIA veteran who spends his days sitting in front of his laptop and on the phone in the convenience of his home in the suburbs or in his office in Langley, VA. He tracks all of Ferris' movements and basically commits evil when he believes he's helping for the good. The interplay between DiCaprio and Crowe as these characters could've and should've been a lot more, but there's something lost in between because most of their scenes together aren't even face-to-face. They are remarkably flat even when there's a sense they're trying to light up the screen. Despite their best efforts, it seems that it's just poor writing that is holding them back. It's slyly comical, though, to see a fat, graying Crowe peering over his glasses spitting out folksy lines of smugness. He controls everything in Iraq while attending to his everyday life loading his kids into the minivan or eating some Goldfish crackers on the sideline of his daughter's soccer game. DiCaprio, however, appears to yet again just be putting on his same hero face over again.

The plot is mostly formulaic, and the movie masks this fact by becoming unnecessarily intricate and difficult to follow. As things continue to unravel, it only turns more conventional, detached, and surprisingly unemotional. There's a romance between Ferris and a Jordanian nurse that feels tacked on to give the character of Ferris a little more depth; it also works as a mere plot contrivance. The first hour feels widely unfocused and is quite a hodgepodge of a mess until one interesting twist arises that should've cropped up earlier. It involves Ferris devising a scheme to invent a terrorist group in order to lure out the real terrorists. From here, the movie tightens up for the end but never really delivers a satisfying punch. It feels as if Ridley Scott thinks he's made a movie more important than it actually is.

The biggest problem "Body of Lies" presents is that it has shockingly found a way to be a movie about torture and terrorism that's boring and dull. Isn't it wrong that the concerns with Middle Eastern political intervention and terrorism have been summed up into a lifeless action thriller? Here's a movie that could've sparked some interest because Ridley Scott has no less created something that is slick, looks good, and has quality production values, but, where's the sense of urgent conviction? It's tired, and it's tiring to watch.