Charlize Theronwon an Oscar for playing real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos inPatty Jenkins’Monster, but when it comes to lighter genre fare, she generally plays heroes — albeit tortured, tragic ones, like Furiosa inMad Max: Fury Roadand Andy inThe Old Guard. She finally got to be an outright bad guy inThe Fate of the Furious, but she actually played a quieter kind of villain years earlier inRidley Scott’s undeservedly divisivePrometheus.
A prequel to theAlienseries, which Scott launched when he directed the 1979 original,Prometheusseeks to answer some of the larger questions of that universe. It’s less about people being trapped in an enclosed space with a perfect killing machine and more about why people exist in the first place and why life seems to be an inherently violent concept, though a monster does come out of someone’s stomach and terrorize everyone on a spaceship eventually. It’s probably the closest thing theAlienseries has to homework, but that doesn’t mean it’s not great — because all of theAlienmovies are, except for theAlien vs. Predatorduo and the disastrously misguidedAlien: Romulus.
Who Does Charlize Theron Play in ‘Prometheus’?
InPrometheus, Theron playsMeredith Vickers, a representative from the Weyland Corporation (the predecessor ofthe mega-evil super-corp Weyland-Yutanifrom the other movies) who is overseeing a research expedition that has found proof of alien life. Though she comes across as cold, she seems like a much-needed voice of reason when she has a crew member killed after he gets infected with alien goo. Unfortunately, her pragmatism has less to do with saving her crew than it does with following the orders of her father, who is none other than the power-hungry and immortality-seekingPeter Weyland.
It turns out that everything the crew had done had essentially been a cover so Weyland could ask the aliens to help him live forever as a rich weirdo, which becomes the original sin of the whole series. The reason this makes Theron a bad guy is thatthe villain in the canonicalAlienstories is always, always, alwayspeople. The Xenomorphs may rip everyone apart, but it’s people who throw each other into their jaws and use their blood to grease the gears of capitalism, all in the name of a little bit more money or power or — in Weyland’s case — life.
What Vickers wants is, apparently, the approval of her father. She’ll step on whoever she needs to to get it, which is the same for every bad guy in these movies. Theron’s Vickers might not be as bad as her father orPaul Reiser’s feckless company man inAliens, but they’re all different kinds of monsters.
Prometheuscan currently be streamed on Hulu.
Prometheus
