Over a hundred years after the Prometheus film, it’s time to find out what happened.
Creative Staff:
Story: Paul Tobin
Art: Juan Ferreyra
What They Say:
When the Prometheus never returned from her fateful journey to LV-223, the questions surrounding the origins of man went unanswered. Now a new team of explorers seeks to uncover the dark mystery that holds not only the fate of the original mission, but possibly their own damnation.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While it has its flaws, I really enjoyed Prometheus as a film when it came out since it gave us a kind of science fiction horror film on a large scale with intriguing connections and expandable areas to it that we hadn’t gotten in a long time. With it taking place quite a ways before some of the other properties that come afterwards in the timeline, there’s more than enough material to mine, but what we see here is that they’re looking to move up the timeline a bit and explore things in a more connected sense to other properties as part of this sprawling series of miniseries with Fire and Stone. I’ve been reading some of the other series and have had a lot of fun with them, flaws and all, so digging into the post-Prometheus one certainly seemed like a good thing to do.
The opening issue is all about the mysteries, including just trying to figure out where it all takes place at first. With the original Prometheus film taking place in the 2090’s, this one puts us squarely in 2219, some one hundred and twenty-six years later. The premise involves a specialized scavenger ship called the Geryon that’s heading to LV-223, the site where Weyland went with the crew of the ship to find the Engineers and uncover the truth of the origin of the species. Now, I suspect that over that century and a quarter that other ships went there, but there’s a sense that nobody has been there since, which is a really strange thing when you really think about it and it’s left me unsettled about the book. This crew, lead by Captain Angela Foster, is also being filmed by Clara Atkinson, under the general guise of going to the planet to see what they can mine and retire on if there are solid metals to be had there.
A good chunk of the first half of the book is a touch of back story showing a little of what happened on LV-223 while the rest is introducing the crew. We get the usual range of meat puppets that you know are going to get torn apart in some brutal fashion at some point, so it really is hard to connect with them because of it. There’s a decent mix of your usual scavengers, those with seemingly larger plans and just the grunt types that populate such vessels in these projects. The crew dynamic is decent, but since they’re being lied to by Foster about the truth of it, it’s easy to be relaxed and fun.
So when the book shifts planetside and they start moving along, it’s a shock to them that the largely inhospitable desert planet has a section near where they’re going that has a very strange alien jungle. The alien biologist on board the ship is thrilled with so much variety that’s never been seen before and the exposure to the reader of some of the creatures certainly fills you with a sense of dread as you can see the potential of how deadly they can be. The slow crawl through the jungle, the uncertainty about where they really are or if they’re even on the right planet, just raises the stakes even more when they find a crashed ship from Hadley’s Hope, which certainly shouldn’t be here. Add in the black goo that they want to bring back and whatever may be laying in wait inside the ship and you’ve got a recipe for impending disaster that’s hard to resist.
In Summary:
The world of Alien, Predator and Prometheus are all coming together across these miniseries and there’s a lot to like in trying to bind them together and spin off some new material with engaging stories involving dangerous aliens. With the Prometheus arc, it has some problems for me in regards to trying to wrap my head around the timeline and what may have gone on for over a century, and I have hope that at some point that angle may get explored in some fashion. Returning to LV-223 isn’t a surprise since there are stories to be told there and the angle works well with Foster trying to figure out what really happened. The motivations why remain to be seen in full, but it has a few areas it can work with. The crew is fairly standard with a couple of mysteries to be revealed for some of them as well, but the real fun is when they landing happens and they start to discover that things are most assuredly nothing like what they thought they would be. Which definitely leaves you wanting to check out the next issue to see how badly it goes for them.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: September 10th, 2014
MSRP: $3.50
