Prometheus 3D (15)

HHHH

Dir: Ridley Scott

With: Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender

Running time: 124 minutes

NEVER mind the zillions of fan boy comments that will doubtless fill the internet on release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. Here are the three things you need to know.

First, the phrase, "What is that?", still chills like an ice cube down the spine.

The second is that when it comes to kick-ass heroines, Noomi Rapace makes Sigourney Weaver's Ripley look like Tinker Bell.

Third, and most important, after the quivering uncertainty of Robin Hood, Scott has found his groove where he left it – in science fiction.

Let us be clear. Prometheus does not have the blistering rawness of Alien, to which it serves as a prequel. Nor does it possess the visionary splendour of Blade Runner, where one image surpassed the next for originality.

It is, however, packed with enough spectacle, big ideas, bleak laughs and squirm-in-your-seat moments to give both fanatics and normals like us a thrilling jaunt.

And it all starts here in Scotland. Skye to be precise. Scott opens with a montage of spectacular landscapes. Here be black mountains, rivers of ice, peaks jagged enough to take a spaceman's eye out. Here be mother nature is the message, green in tooth and claw; question its creation and wonders at your peril.

As in Alien, the mother vibe in Prometheus is loud and insistent – mother as giver of life, as nurturer, as guide, and as much else besides. At first, though, it is a father figure who is key. Two scientists, Doctors Shaw and Holloway (Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered a common image running through ancient cultures of a man pointing to a cluster of planets. Believing this could hold the key to the origins of life on Earth, the good doctors have persuaded the Weyland Corporation to pony up one trillion dollars to fund an exploratory mission. So the space ship Prometheus ventures forth in the year 2093.

Once again, we are back in Alien territory where space travel appears not to be undertaken for the betterment of mankind, but for the improvement of some company's balance sheet. Here, the unacceptable face of capitalism is represented by Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a company woman to her core, and a boss with a firm attitude towards employee insubordination.

Just as the setting and set-up will be familiar from Alien, so some of the crew bear a certain resemblance to a certain 1979 gathering. Notable among the crew are a swaggering ship's captain (Idris Elba, Hackney's finest, once again doing the best American accent you'll hear outside America), Kate Dickie's officer Ford (Dickie keeps to her ain tongue, lending a touch of the Scotties to proceedings), and, best of all, David the robot, played with eerie exactness by Michael Fassbender.

Like some King Cobra of the acting world, the star of Shame has a tendency to swallow every film he is in, so powerful is his presence. Here, he is the tick-tock beating heart of the movie, his every movement Swiss-calibrated and utterly fascinating to watch. It is David who generates the grimmest laughs, provides the mystery and keeps the story rattling along.

One of the film's best sequences shows David whiling away his time, waiting for the moment when the ship reaches its destination and he can wake the human crew. Besides learning ancient languages and shooting hoops, David watches, what else, movies. A favourite viewing choice is Lean's majestic Lawrence of Arabia, featuring the line: "There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing." It's the kind of package that Scott does so well – take some marvellous images, add a dash of apparent profundity, sit back and let the audience make of it what they will.

Fassbender is spellbindingly good, but in the end it's the girl who takes the picture. Make that woman. From Weaver's Ripley to Thelma and Louise, Scott has created some of the screen's strongest female characters.

He had a high benchmark to beat, but in Rapace he chose just the woman for the job. A mix of fragility and flintiness, reason and faith, sharp intelligence and innocent wonder, she is exactly the sort of gal who should be sent to explore life outwith Earth. Why, she's probably even got qualifications and stuff.

If only the story had the smoothness of David and the substance of Dr Shaw. The screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelhof (the latter from Lost and Cowboys and Aliens) is lumpy stuff, though it improves towards the end as the (inevitable) cue for a sequel approaches.

In Prometheus, the story sits in the passenger seat while the spectacle takes the wheel. Scott duly delivers bangs for your cinema buck.

Everything is the souped up, super duper, 3.0 version of what has gone before, from the spaceship to the special effects. But this is an older and wiser movie, one more fearful about what's out there. An Alien for our times indeed.