Apparently Ridley Scott started out with the idea that Prometheus would be a prequel to his 1979 classic Alien, a prequel that explained, among other things, the marooned ship with the weird-looking elephant man sitting at an enormous instrument panel and telescope who seemed to have exploded from the inside.
Having now seen Prometheus, here's what I can tell you. The alien creature was apparently engineered by the elephant man as a kind of weapon of mass destruction, and the creation turned on its maker.
The film is as gorgeously photographed as any I have seen. It was shot using the digital Red Epic camera, which is quickly becoming an industry standard. It was also shot in 3D, if you are in to that sort of thing. The performances by the major characters, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fasbinder, Charlize Theron, and Idris Elba (yea, Wire!) are all superb. However, though the story contains some intriguing and even thought-provoking ideas, the screenplay is something of a mess.
The largest source of irritation for me was the apparently intentional unwillingness of Scott and his screenwriters to explain several key events in story. Presumably, these will all be dealt with in a sequel, but this is a gip. Wasn't this supposed to be the film that answered unresolved questions from the previous films? Now we have to wait for yet another film to answer new questions raised in Prometheus! This is endless.
Here is my list of the mysterious, implausible, or just plain embarrassing plot points that Prometheus left us with.
- What actually occurs in the opening sequence? Does the Engineer commit suicide or was his destruction after drinking the dark liquid an accident? Regardless of how you answer this question, why was he there (wherever "there" was) and what was he trying to accomplish?
- The Fassbinder character acts as though he is "in" on the whole biological-weapon-gone-bad story, but this is never explained. He apparently intentionally infects Holloway with the black liquid, and then when Holloway has sex with Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes impregnated with one of the squid creatures. Fassbinder's David seems to understand all of this and brings it about on purpose, but to what end? Unlike in Aliens in which the evil corporation intended to impregnate Ripley and then bring the Alien back to earth to use for weapons research, in this film we are led to believe that the corporation's sole motive is that its on-death's-door CEO wishes to attain immortality. Anyway, how could robot David even know about these creatures? No one else from planet earth does.
- The scene where one of the crew members is startled by a snake-like alien that emerges from the black liquid and then goes to it, because. . . he wants to pet it or something, was just ridiculous. If you had watched me while I watched this scene I think you would have noticed that I literally rolled my eyes.
- When the Engineer is wakened from his stasis, he is apparently so enraged by the presence of the humans that he immediately starts trying to kill them all. Why is he a kill-crazy psycho? Even if he has some deep, philosophical reason for wanting to extinguish all of humanity, is the matter so pressing that he must immediately start killing everyone in site after being asleep for two centuries? Maybe have a cup of coffee and a danish first? You can always kill them after you have lulled them into complacency.
- The anthropology of the original Alien is now quite complicated. It all starts with black liquid that either:
- Dissolves your body
- Turns you into psychotic murdering mutant
- Spontaneously creates the snake creature. When the snake creature gets inside of you, it turns you into a mutant and also gives your sperm the ability to impregnate barren women with the squid creature.
The squid creature then enters another body and lays yet another kind of egg, and when this emerges rather spectacularly from the unfortunate host's abdominal cavity we finally get the Alien we first met in 1979. Got all that? Black Liquid-Mutant-Squid Creature-Alien, more or less in that order.
- When Theron reveals that the CEO of the Weyland Corporation is good ol' Dad (despite the fact that she clearly wants to throttle him), I rolled my eyes again. Jez, this was a direct lift from The Empire Strike Back where Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father.
- Since the Weyland CEO character is only played as a very old man, why in the world did Scott cast 45-year-old Guy Pearce in the role and then force him to spend hours every day in the make-up chair? Why not just hire an elderly actor?
- Finally, the biggest question of all--the question that Rapace asks directly as she leads us off to Sequel Land in the final scenes--is why did the Engineers go to all the trouble of genetically engineering the human race only to then decide to annihilate it? It sure seems like a lot of wasted effort.
Just watched this at the cinema last night
ReplyDeleteI 100% agree with all of the above (and the anthropology bit made me laugh)
I saw this the other day, then ran into this analysis:
ReplyDeletehttp://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html
Interesting.
I agree with you that there were plot holes and unexplained stuff, but I tend to think that at least some of them will come together in the sequels.
This movie had the coolest sets and hardware I've ever seen, that alone made it worth price of admission.
Yes, this was interesting. I never considered the "Space Jesus" theme. I enjoyed the YouTube videos on that site even more, especially the first one. If you haven't watched it, please do. It very humorously goes through the gazillion unexplained, implausible, or contradictory elements of the screenplay.
ReplyDeleteSomething none of these commentators even attempts to answer is the issue that troubled me the most, which is the mystery of David character's motive for infecting Holloway with the Black Slime. How can it be that the robot is in on this elaborate plot to do something--not sure what, but whatever it is, it isn't good--when he not much more about the Aliens than everyone else. I mean he knows a LITTLE more because he could apparently read some of the writing inside the alien lair, but that's it.
Finally, one thing that the essay said that I thought was completely wrong was this.
"The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable."
The "serpent-like form" he refers to is almost certainly a mutated kill-crazy version of the little worms that are shown when they initially enter the chamber. It didn't take serpent-like form because of some desire to symbolize The Fall, but because this is the shape of the worms they transformed.