I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Scott wanted this movie to be, but I’m positive it didn’t turn out the way he envisioned. If anyone is unfamiliar with PROMETHEUS, he was a Greek God or titan who either helped mankind in spite of Zeus or was our original creator and molded us out of clay. It really depends on what myth you like the sound of the best. Either way, PROMETHEUS helped humanity become what it is today.
The first scene in the movie depicts a humanoid alien seeming to sacrifice himself in order to propogate what I assumed to be the Earth with his genetic code during the primordial stages of the planet, thus fulfilling the PROMETHEUS reference. So far, so good, the movie is taking a page out of the myth.
Afterward we, the audience, are informed that the ship is named PROMETHEUS for reasons that still escape me. They’re on an exploratory mission to find the original creators of man (aka PROMETHEUS) who they decided to refer to as engineers instead. No intelligent quips about the myth can be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, I’m fairly confident at this point that Ridley Scott has no idea who PROMETHEUS actually is and just liked the sound of the word; he branded the ship with it so he could hear his actors say it as many times as possible throughout the movie. In retrospect I suppose I took the title too literally and it’s my own fault for believing Hollywood could get anything right.
Much like James Cameron’s giant loogie to the face of quality film making named AVATAR, PROMETHEUS is one giant cliche from beginning to end. Scientific mission? Let’s get a couple of scientists together who abhor violence of any kind, then recruit some assholes who will be sure to fuck up somewhere along the line and end up getting people killed. First of all, any real scientist is going to understand and appreciate protection in an unknown and potentially hostile alien environment. Somehow, after all these years, Hollywood still believes all scientists to be as dipshitted as Timothy Treadwell.
Let’s also consider for a moment that this is a privately funded expedition by a trillionaire CEO of the largest and most important corporation in the galaxy, and they can’t seem to afford a disciplined crew? Instead they end up with the kind of retards you find hanging out and getting shitfaced at your seedy local bar. Self-righteous scientists, say hello to meatheaded asscans–how many times has this movie been made? Sixty? More? We can’t get a more intelligent premise than this out of Ridley Scott? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After AVATAR I thought science fiction had nowhere to go but up, turns out Mr. Scott proved me wrong.
Anyway. Our troop of diverse stupidity runs into vats of alien DNA. Fast-forward and they’ve taken a 2,000 year old head of an “engineer” onto their ship, which somehow manages to explode. Apparently it was infected with alien DNA and the result was that it blows up. Seems fine, except that a few minutes later one of the primary characters ends up infected by the same DNA and it doesn’t cause him to explode. In fact, at some point later in the movie yet another crew member is infected by the DNA and it also doesn’t cause E.F.S.–explosive face syndrome–it just turns them into angry zombies with super strength. So you’re thinking, hey, the DNA must react in unique ways when combined with a different species–WRONG! You also find out during the movie that the engineers share the exact same genome as us, meaning they ARE us, meaning the alien DNA should react in a similar fashion BUT IT DOESN’T.
Okay, rewind. Why does Fassbender’s character put alien DNA in the drink of one of the self-righteous scientists? He’s supposed to be a cybernetic being, incapable of emotions, including malice. I guess it could be argued that he was under orders from his father figure to perform research, but to what end? He has already shown that he is capable of reading and understanding the engineers’ language, you’d think he already knew what was in those vats just by reading about it, but somehow he felt it necessary to infect one of the crew members with it, regardless of the fact that once exposed to the DNA the crew member could have, and very nearly did, become a danger to both himself and his father figure.
Cybernetic being, incapable of emotion, but not incapable of reason. In another scene he diagnoses the primary female character with pregnancy, is aware that what is inside of her is not human and displayed three months of growth in the span of ten hours, yet he seems entirely unconcerned with helping her to remove the entity and quarantining it for the safety of the entire ship. The character just doesn’t seem to have proper motivation for any of his actions.
Fast-forward again. It is discovered, or assumed, that the vats of alien DNA are a biological weapon and will be used to eradicate the population of Earth (and probably other planets along the way). However, like I touched on earlier, it doesn’t actually seem to do anything to humans other than turn them into violent zombies. What’s the point? My wife brought up an idea that the DNA is actually a parasite and it requires a variety of hosts in order to go through the many stages before it finally becomes -the- Alien. The problem I have with that is violent zombies don’t have sex with each other to create squid-huggers that then implant the seed of -the- Alien into someone’s body.
I ask again, what is the point of the DNA turning humans into violent zombies if it’s actually supposed to be a biological weapon? You haven’t performed genocide on the planet. You haven’t released -the- Alien en masse on the population. If anything you’ve made an even stronger enemy–they’re really hard to stop, they’re super strong, and they want to kill anything that moves. Turn the entire planet into that and your only accomplishment is making life more difficult for yourself, if a global cleansing was your goal in the first place. So that didn’t make any sense in the context of the movie either.
Most of the things that happen in PROMETHEUS don’t make sense in the context of the movie. Like the aforementioned meathead asscan who turns into a raging, violent zombie. He first shows up again crumpled over into what looks like a contorted scorpion pose, and then demonstrates that he is actually quite capable of bipedal locomotion when he proceeds to kill half the remaining crew. What was the point of him being in some awkward pose if he could move around like normal? It seems like Ridley Scott just wanted to see certain things and hear certain words and phrases in his movie, and he had no intention of actually putting any effort into the making of it.
The movie goes from making no sense to somehow managing to make even less sense. They introduce conflicts that shouldn’t have even existed and served no purpose. Take the cesarean section scene for example. Why, with all their apparent infinite knowledge of technology (they’re flying through space, have mastered putting people in, and taking people out of, stasis, manufactured an intelligent cybernetic being, etc) but their operating table/system is calibrated for men only? It also doesn’t serve any purpose, because the protagonist just puts it on manual mode and inputs a cesarean section anyway.
What was the point? To make her plight seem more frantic? Or to make the guys writing the script seem like uneducated jackasses? The machine was obviously capable of performing the operation just fine, which means it wasn’t a matter of hardware, it was a matter of software. In the future, when you’re zipping through space in your supermassive, I would think you could press a fucking button and BAM, software configuration switched from male to female. No problem.
The more I think about this movie the more I realize how terrible it really was. Scrape away the pretty special effects (minus Guy Pearce’s makeup job, which was shit balls) and you’re left with a story that isn’t so much confusing to us as it illuminates how confused Ridley Scott must have been while making it.
Throughout the film we see holograms of the engineers running from something, scared. One frightened to such a degree he manages to decapitate himself on a sliding door. Yet, later, when we actually meet an engineer, he doesn’t seem to remember/give a shit/is indifferent about the plight of his people two thousand years past and immediately picks up where he left off: destroy all humans. Whatever.
Was there anything I liked? The movie looked pretty. I enjoyed seeing Noomi Rapace half naked a couple of times. I liked Fassbender as David, even though the character was shit, lacked any sort of motivation, Fassbender still managed to be good. I was a fan of the selfless act of the captain as he rammed PROMETHEUS directly into the engineers’ ship.
I didn’t like the final scene where Vickers and Eli are running from the engineers’ ship as it crashes and rolls down hills like an overgrown metal doughnut. They run in a straight line, directly in the path of the ship. STRAIGHT LINE. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt when Rapace’s character (Elizabeth) trips, falls down, and manages to roll TWICE which somehow magically moves her out of the radius of crush your face. If rolling twice is all that was required to save your ass from the path of the ship why did neither character think of running on a diagnal from it? Because Ridley Scott is an idiot, that’s the answer I’m going with.
So there you have it. PROMETHEUS is terrible.