Prometheus *spoiler*

Anyone see it yet?

I was expecting a lot from this one, being a Ridley Scott film.











Spoilers below. Don't read if you are going to see it.









Huge disappointment.

There was very little I liked about it. Rather than rant on about it I found an early review that is spot on.



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Review: 'Prometheus' is a Visually Stunning Epic Failure

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Truly, this isn’t a post I anticipated writing, or at the very least had hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. As it turns out, I’m still not writing it, but instead have asked a friend and movie reviewer, John Shade Vick, to do the honors. John is a writer, composer, traveler, photographer, and life-long film buff, and I’m glad he accepted my invitation. A word of warning: many spoilers follow, so if you intend to see the movie and don’t want any plot tip-offs, I urge you to save this read for a later date.

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Do you remember the first time you saw Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-horror classic, Alien? Do you remember the dark, derelict alien spacecraft on planet LV-426? Do you remember fearing for the rag-tag cast of humans who ventured inside, wondering what they would find? Do you remember the large, fossilized, vaguely humanoid creature sitting in a pilot’s seat in the middle of the ship, its ribs exploded from its chest, and wondering just what in the hell that thing was?

Scott’s latest film, Prometheus, pulls back the curtain on this 33-year old mystery, and what is revealed is truly horrifying: a thoroughly vacuous prequel to the series he kicked off, masquerading as a film about the cosmic origins of humanity.

What was touted as the next genre-defining sci-fi masterpiece is instead a completely unoriginal mash-up of other movies, and the architects of the film seem to think that we are too stupid to notice.

I cannot say that I expected more from Ridley Scott. I love Alien and Blade Runner like any other self-respecting fan of the genre, and recognize his influence over every science fiction film that has come after. But, the rest of his oeuvre, in my opinion, ranges from overrated (Gladiator, Thelma & Louise) to mediocre (Legend, Kingdom of Heaven) to downright terrible (Hannibal, G.I. Jane). A gifted world-builder and an excellent shooter, the success of his films has always hinged on the quality of his screenwriters.

This time, he has chosen to rely on writer Damon Lindelof — who, depending on the fans you ask, helped ruin ABC’s hit series LOST with a nonsensical final season and the mother of all cop-out endings. And few will argue that his script for Cowboys & Aliens was anything but canned and clumsy. So, if your goal is to make an ambitious, provocative science fiction film about human origins, this might not be your guy.

Building on a script by fellow sci-fi hack Jon Spaihts (The Darkest Hour) who tried to realize Scott’s dream of melding the Alien universe with Erich Von Daniken’s ancient astronaut thesis, Chariots of the Gods, Lindelof has helped craft what is arguably the most profound underachievement in the history of sci-fi cinema.

While stunning to look at, Prometheus contains none of the class or the evenness of tone of the first Alien, nor the substance of the lofty subject matter it portends to explore. It is a silly movie, filled with characters and situations that aren‘t remotely believable, driven by blatantly obvious plot developments and devices.

Beginning with a prologue set sometime in Earth’s prehistory, meant to explain how the planet was seeded with human DNA, we are soon introduced to paleo-biologists Elizabeth and Charlie (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) in the year 2089. They have just discovered mysterious cave paintings in Scotland which suggest prehistoric human contact with extraterrestrials. Using clues found in similar sites around the world, Elizabeth and Charlie become the nucleus of a scientific voyage to a distant Earthlike planet that may hold the answers to the single greatest riddle of our species: Who are we, and where did we come from?

Joined by an android science officer (the singularly good Michael Fassbender), a scheming corporate suit (the robotic Charlize Theron), a devil-may-care captain (the wasted Idris Elba), and a legion of disposable stock characters, our scientists set out on the spaceship Prometheus to this distant world and ultimately find themselves in a plot stolen wholesale from Brian De Palma’s idiotic 2000 space-bomb, Mission to Mars. Though I am loathe to recommend watching not one but two bad movies, if you view them side-by-side, the core stories, settings, and numerous set-pieces are virtually identical. Also shamelessly stolen are characters, concepts, themes, and designs from Dark City, Contact, Stargate, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Indeed, finding a single original idea in the entirety of Prometheus is a chore.

Where Scott & Co. have innovated on these stolen ideas is by making their characters — who are all bizarrely unfazed by the philosophical weight of their mission and discoveries — do ridiculously dumb things. When they see black alien ooze, they touch it. When they find a giant severed alien head, they bring it on the ship and perform inexplicable experiments on it in an open environment with no protective clothing. When the answers Charlie seeks are not immediately offered by the alien temple — which would be an earth-shattering discovery in its own right — he foregoes further inquiry and gets drunk. When members of the science team are lost in a gigantic, danger-filled alien structure, the mission leaders all go have sex. When a giant wheel-shaped object is rolling toward a couple of characters, they don’t run right or left, but stay directly in its path, like the security guard and the steamroller in Austin Powers. There isn’t a moment in the film where the human characters do something that humans would actually do, and the laughter of the audience in the screening I saw confirmed this.

But, the humans aren’t the only dummies here. The aliens–who all resemble buffed, albino Woody Harrelsons–are just another version of the brutish, humanoid killing machines we see in garbage like this year’s Battleship. You would think that aliens who engineered human beings–and who have some unstated reason for wanting to wipe us out–would be smarter than the Xenomorphs from the Alien series. They aren‘t. Apart from having spaceships–and technology that conveniently shows pixilated holographic recordings of their fate to people who happen to drop in and push the right buttons–there is nothing advanced about them. They weren’t even smart enough to keep their deadly bio-weapons safely locked-up, choosing instead to keep them in jars on the floor. This is the equivalent of keeping buckets of poisonous snakes, viruses, and toxic waste in your family’s minivan. What advanced race would be that careless?

Some may argue that this is the point of the film–the cynical notion that all civilizations, on Earth and elsewhere, ultimately become warlike and self-destruct. Open up a history book and turn on the news, and I can see their point. I would suggest, though, that in the case of Prometheus, what’s responsible for the vacant barbarism of the aliens is merely the limited imaginations of their authors.





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And it is not entirely their fault. We are only human, and though we are continually making discoveries about the universe we live in, the big questions will surely elude us. Screenwriters and directors are not scientists, and will likely fall back on the kinds of formulaic, non-scientific ideas that would occur to people who work in the entertainment industry. But, because of this, when we tell stories that speculate on things beyond our knowledge, perhaps less is more.

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke wisely never revealed the alien intelligence that drives the path of mankind in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their greater purpose remains a mystery. Audiences have been chewing on that mystery longer than Ridley Scott has been making films, longer than Damon Lindelof has been alive, and will continue to do so long after viewers have forgotten Prometheus.

But, this is largely irrelevant now–Prometheus exists and can‘t be taken back. There are many more problems worth chronicling, but the film’s ultimate failure is that there aren’t any real characters to invest in.

Alien worked because of Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ellen Ripley. She was a normal person like you and me, who found enormous inner strength when thrown into the middle of the ultimate claustrophobic nightmare, with nowhere to run. There were no giant, rolling spaceships. There were no screaming, alien-ooze-infected zombie attacks. There were no deus ex machina squid monsters to save her. There was a woman and her fear, and nothing to save her but her wits and an indomitable will to survive. She was the opposite of the Xenomorph, the opposite of the murderous android, Ash. Ripley was human, and she embodied the very reason why scientists would travel to distant worlds to find out who and why we are.

Prometheus has no Ellen Ripley, no humanity, and as a result, says absolutely nothing about us worth hearing.

The discussion about Prometheus and its symbolism continues at The PopScience Review, where the reviewer addresses several points that have been swirling about since his original review was published.



You can find me on Twitter @neuronarrative and at my website, The Daily Brain
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