Some thoughts about Prometheus

Saw Prometheus last night.  It was undeniably...thought-provoking for me.  However not really about what the movie wanted me to think about.  Don't consider this a "review" because I won't go over it point by point, but I will share my impressions.  If their ad campaign can be overwrought and mysterious, so can I.  SPOILERS.

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is either very underwritten or very overwritten, and in either case it is half-baked.

Prometheus is a science-fiction/horror movie.  However, it's not particularly original and it's not particularly scary.

Prometheus is like a really good issue of the Dark Horse ALIENS comic that was given a massive budget, Ridley Scott, and all the pretension that goes with them.

Prometheus asks lot of questions but doesn't answer very many.  This is probably because when it does answer one here and there you find yourself going "oh, that's all?"

Prometheus is overhyped.

To elaborate, in every way the marketing campaign is more of a noteworthy, admirable success than the film itself.  It got me there, after all.

Prometheus is a lot of fun if you're an ALIEN fanboy.

Prometheus is Ridley Scott's Avatar.  "Blue creatures and philosophy!  What rot!  Penis creatures and philosophy!  That's where it's at!"

Prometheus is the "Episode I" to ALIEN's "Episode IV."  Bigger, flashier, but only a quarter of the characters matter this time. 

If you have never before been exposed to the "Chariots of the Gods" idea that ancient aliens fucked around with humanity, you will find this film fascinating.  However I would like to know what planet the rock you're living under is on.

If you aren't the "Stargate" or "Battlestar Galactica" franchises, let's just declare "Chariots of the Gods" off-limits forever.  Also, stop naming ships Icarus and Prometheus, future shipbuilders of the Earth.

Speaking of which, Alien vs. Predator actually introduced the "Chariots of the Gods" idea into the franchise years ago.  Bad enough to get beaten to the punch by AvP, but it wouldn't matter except that it is entirely debatable which of the two films is more entertaining.

This movie is not itself a love letter to intelligent design creationism.  However, it contains several such letters.


That Space Jockey at the start of ALIEN?  He's a big white muscular man.  He's also really mean.  While there are ways that this makes sense within the universe of the films, it's difficult to overstate how boring it is.

There are two scenes in this movie that are completely conventional horror movie scenes.  They require fecklessly stupid out-of-character behavior to set up, they slaughter characters that we care nothing for, only one of them is even marginally original, and they feel like transparent pandering to the horror junkie crowd.  That crowd should probably just wait for Cabin in the Woods to come out on DVD, a film that oddly has exactly as many "Xenomorphs" as this film does.

For the most part the design work in this film is very, very good.  However, there is one creature that is basically "oh, I have to make a Giger-esque monster?  I put a vagina and some testicles on the front of a penis.  TIME FOR COCAINE."

There are four-and-a-half good actors in this movie, but sometimes the script requires them to do inexplicable things.  Poor Idris Elba goes from a criminally negligent loser to the hero of the movie, and do not mistake me for saying that his character actually develops.  This is simply what we're demanded to accept.  And Michael Fassbinder's character, while he and the character are both excellent, is so inscrutable that he crosses the line into "random plot device" at least once.

Prometheus has one great hero and one great anti-hero.  At the end of the movie they band together and fight crime, which is why the sequel that they transparently set up might actually be decent.

As I say, Noomi Rapace is a great hero, but towards the end of the movie something is so weird with the editing or character work that everyone appears to ignore her for no reason (except Fassbinder's android at the VERY end).

Noomi Rapace is a GREAT hero.  She is a completely feminine character who is not physically strong, but proves tougher than she ever imagined she could be.  She isn't Ripley, but she is a worthy successor as a character.

You can tell how great a hero she is because I like her even though she is a FLAT-OUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN CREATIONIST.  However it's the screenwriter's fault, not hers, because he made it true in their universe, so I guess the character is just smart.  SIGH.  Her boyfriend is still an annoying idiot though.

Prometheus is not ALIEN.  While it mimics and winks at shots from ALIEN at a truly staggering rate (none of them making any impact until the end, a moment that every trailer helpfully spoiled) I was actually impressed by its refusal to borrow ALIEN's structure.

Prometheus also subverts the distressingly common "alien infectees go mad" cliche...for the most part.  As mentioned above, there is a bit where a zombie attacks for no reason that is so out of left field that even the characters immediately forget about it.

Appreciation: continuation of the franchise "names of androids" gag.  Ash, Bishop, Call, and now David.

There are two great moments toward the end of the film that, as alluded to above, were thoroughly spoiled by every trailer.  One of them was also held back by poor characterization.  ("I WILL DIE FOR YOU CAPTAIN!  Why?  Fuck if I know.")

Just to finally get the endless fucking teases out of the way.  There are "Xenomorphs," i.e. Aliens from ALIEN, in this movie.  One shows up in a wall carving in a baseball-bat-of-subtlety moment, and then one pops up in the last scene (too late to affect the story).  It's a completely new design, that is CGI like every other just-good-enough monster in the film, but it's obviously a type of Xenomorph and it's actually pretty cool.  Actually, if you disregard the wall relief and the "Alien vs. Predator" movies, there is a suggestion that the Xenomorph race was actually born from the Noomi Rapace character's womb, which is actually a nice sick Giger-esque twist.

The alien bioweapons in this movie are actually a lot more convincing and effective as alien bioweapons than the Xenomorph itself ever was.  This is actually a GREAT thing for the franchise because it expands the range of stories that can be told.  Apparently nobody but Ridley had the balls to do it.

As a biologist I was really disappointed by the science scenes.  They use cool, relatively believable props, but no one actually discusses their findings and their implications in a satisfying way.  We never find out something as simple and well-worth-testing as what the fuck is with that black goop that does everything.  And no one shows any interest in any life form (that isn't killing them) except for the Space Jockeys.  There's even a scene in which a trained biologist's lack of interest in a giant spaceman head is played for laughs.  Nothing short of a taser could have gotten me or any one of my colleagues out of a room filled with honest-to-god extraterrestrial cadavers.

It's ok for the Space Jockeys to stay mysterious, but it's hard to sit through a movie when your "gods" are trying to kill you for no reason, only to have the hero lampshade at the end "you know, I really want to find out why our gods are trying to kill us."  Perhaps we should have met one that did something other than grunt and punch people out.

STOP TAKING OFF YOUR HELMETS.  STOP OPENING THE AIRLOCK.

One problem with sci-fi body horror is that once you can fly to another planet, you have pretty much mastered quarantine procedure and you have the ability to shoot unarmed angry aliens.  This film failed to transcend these problems and just resorts to contrived stupidity.  This further cements my stance that it would take a real genius to follow up on ALIEN and ALIENS, which work because of the characters' justified ignorance.

In general, the film must disappoint because the only characters we can sympathize with fully are prevented from learning any of the answers that they are so obsessed with.  They went to uncover a universal mystery and instead everyone died for no reason.  ALIEN was a much smaller story, with much less ambitious characters, and it worked because survival became the goal and the story.  Event Horizon worked because the central mystery of the plot was actually answered to our and the characters' satisfaction, and then they could concentrate on escaping.  Even Alien vs. Predator worked on some level because the mystery was just the plot hook, we got that answered in 2 minutes of exposition, and then it was just entertaining mayhem.  But Prometheus, even though it showed us a Xenomorph and a Space Jockey WMD plant and all kinds of shit, is still just teasing us.

How Prometheus 2 should begin: Shaw wakes up from the Space Jockey cryostasis pod.  David informs her that they've located the Jockey home planet.  They land their ship and disembark to find millions of dead Xenomorphs on the ground riddled with bullet holes.  Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) strides forward toward them.  "Now where the fuck have YOU been?"