Charlize Theron Was the Real Monster in 'Alien' prequel 'Prometheus'

Charlize Theron won an Oscar for playing real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’ Monster, but when it comes to lighter genre fare, she generally plays heroes — albeit tortured, tragic ones, like Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road and Andy in The Old Guard. She finally got to be an outright bad guy in The Fate of the Furious, but she actually played a quieter kind of villain years earlier in Ridley Scott’s undeservedly divisive Prometheus.

A prequel to the Alien series, which Scott launched when he directed the 1979 original, Prometheus seeks 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 the Alien series has to homework, but that doesn’t mean it’s not great — because all of the Alien movies are, except for the Alien vs. Predator duo and the disastrously misguided Alien: Romulus.

Who Does Charlize Theron Play in ‘Prometheus’?

In Prometheus, Theron plays Meredith Vickers, a representative from the Weyland Corporation (the predecessor of the mega-evil super-corp Weyland-Yutani from 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-seeking Peter 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 that the villain in the canonical Alien stories is always, always, always people. 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 in order 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 or Paul Reiser’s feckless company man in Aliens, but they’re all different kinds of monsters.

Prometheus can currently be streamed on Hulu.