Prometheus Unwound

  The return of a king can be a powerful moment.  Sometimes the people we entrust with our beloved ideas, properties and occasionally children make such a mess of things, that we start to long for the good old days and a return to order, and who better to accomplish that than the king who ruled when times were good?  Fans of the Alien franchise had been looking forward to Prometheus for just that reason.  Every Alien movie after the first sequel has been disappointing on a downward spiral.  So fans were understandably excited when Ridley Scott announced he was returning to the franchise he started way back in 1979.  Hail to the king!

Why we expected him to return wreathed in glory, smiling confidently, in golden, shiny armor can probably be attributed to the eternal baseless optimism of industry producers and the viewing public, bolstered by an amazing trailer.  So after the disastrous “return to genre” performances of recent memory (Spielberg, Lucas, Romero, Carpenter, Kubrick, etc.), watching yet another king ride back into view filthy, naked, and ranting incoherently about gods, monsters and aliens, should not have been a surprise, but still . . . I was surprised at how big the gap in quality between Alien and Prometheus was.  How big a gap you say?  I am glad you asked.

It’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start with the shortest and easiest question to answer:  what did the movie do right?  The cinematography is stunning, as you might expect from Ridley Scott. The technology effects are top-notch, and the imagined world impressive.  The acting will not shake up the Oscars this year, but this was almost entirely due to circumstances beyond the control of the actors.  Fassbender, Theron, Rapace and Elba all did great with what they were given.   Fassbender's acting in particular was fun, and while his character generated a lot of interesting questions, they get lost in the general mish-mash of poor plot and character decisions involving the rest of the cast.  I didn't notice the music at the time, but several friends remarked that it didn't seem to suit the movie.  On the premise that it at least did not get in my way, I'm going to say the soundtrack was acceptable.  Sadly, there is very little beyond that that I don’t find increasingly objectionable the more I think about it.

Prometheus, for all the hype, investment money and big names associated with the project, goes wrong early on a few fundamental levels related to telling any kind of story:  characters, plot, theme.   It is easiest to just work through them one by one.

CHARACTERS

First, let's talk about the cast as a whole.  In Alien, the cast was likable, multi-dimensional and, most importantly, extremely believable as space truckers who get thrown into situation well over their heads and do the best they can with the protocols, tools and training they have.  Each character lost is a distinct blow to the survival chances of the others (and you can see it in the faces of the survivors), and while a few characters turn out to have less than optimal survival instincts, you don’t get the sense that any of them deserved their fate.  Ripley emerges as the lone survivor partly due to the strengths of her character, and partly due to sheer, dumb luck.   Prometheus, for some reason, takes the opposite approach.  None of the characters are particularly likable, they’re largely one-dimensional cartoons, and none of them seem particularly good at or interested in their jobs.  There is little incentive to care about what happens to any of them from the beginning, and they don’t add on layers as time goes on.   In short, the characters are shallow, and if they're not busy reacting to information indifferently in every scene, they're acting in complete opposition to everything we know about their character in the next.  The characters are so bad and/or unlikeable that not only does it not seem to matter if they die, the other characters barely seem to notice when they do (with a couple of small exceptions).  With the partial exception of David, they’re just a mess.

Let's start with the best.  Michael Fassbender as David is by far the most interesting and well-developed character in the film.  Clearly Scott wants to explore similar territory to his OTHER cult classic, Bladerunner, in what makes us human, and what difference there is, if any, between us and an android built to look and act like us.  David is at once a mix of the comfortably familiar and utterly inhuman.  He is constantly disparaged as an emotionless, soulless machine by the crew, but each of these assertions are almost immediately challenged by the subtle reactions David gives to these statements (a tightening of the lips, a clear sense of hostility that seems more than robotic).  This idea is challenged further by the opening sequence where David, while tending the ship on his own, spends his time playing basketball, riding bikes and emulating his favorite movie stars.   So is David really more complicated as a being, or is any humanness we see something we project onto him to make better sense of something we don’t quite understand?  It's an intriguing question, asked in most of the Alien movies,  but it’s never really answered here, and ultimately his motivations remain frustratingly unclear.  With the exception of the word “intriguing”, this describes every other character in the film.  He's the one character that I wanted these questions answered for, I think it’s a cop-out that they never give a more definitive insight into his motivations.

Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw, and indeed every other character, is significantly more unclear and confused in both motivation and character progression.  She is an archeologist who is also a competent biologist and medic because, you know, science.  She believes the aliens (which she dubs the “Engineers”) created us, but has no real evidence for that theory, and apparently, like all good scientist wizards, needs none.  She is a Catholic, and that somehow plays into her motivation for seeking the origin of life, even though this seems contrary to Catholic teaching.  From her dreams in cryosleep, she has lingering issues with her father, but it’s unclear how that affects any of her motivations on this mission or are in any way relevant to the story.  In any case, she wants to prove there are space aliens that made us.  Fine.  From there, her character just gets confusing (I KNOW).  Like all of the scientists in the film, she approaches her discipline with roughly the same sophistication as a toddler.  For instance, she finds a giant alien severed head, and without much in the way of preparation or concerns for safety, she jams a battery into it’s ear and shoots electricity into it until it explodes, as any good scientist would do with the mummified remains of an advanced alien race.  One presumes she marks the result down as “interesting.”  
For most of the rest of the film, things just happen to her and she survives.  She gets pregnant with cthulu’s child through alien magic and David’s machinations, and has to, in one of the film’s most interesting scenes, program a robot surgery table to perform a caesarian (not an abortion, because jesus loves squid babies too) before the thing rips itself out of her on her own.   The foot-long surgery incision that severed many of her abdominal muscles is stapled shut, and she takes a pain pill, staggers off the table, and suits up for the last trek to the alien mound (as you do after massive, invasive abdominal surgery).  She, of course, mentions none of this to anyone, and clearly doesn't seem to care that David was plotting against her.  From this point on, she survives the final rounds of devastation by running, leaping, and rolling from danger, which, again, seems reasonable an hour after having your entire stomach sliced open.  
She finally ends up with David, where she affirms that she still believes in God, and still believes the engineers will give her the answers, so she might as well steal one of their ships and go seek them out on their home planet.  She's clearly a survivor, but she's learned nothing from losing an entire crew of people, and charges off again on the same damn mission, and if there were anyone left alive she'd be dragging them along too (she literally drags David along because he’s in no position to object).  What she's learned from this whole debacle is just about as murky as what she was there for in the first place, besides a bizarre need to discuss her religious belief system (as a good scientist) with space aliens.  Remember kids, when meeting a member of an alien species for the first time, the most scientific approach is to scream, "why were you never there for me daddy, why?"  I’m taking liberties in paraphrasing, but that’s really how it goes.

My biggest complaint with Elizabeth Shaw though, is why she survives.  In Alien, Ripley survives by being tough and smart.  She is a skeptic and she can continue to make good decisions, even in high pressure situations.  Her character is more or less an ode to pragmatic realism in the face of crisis.  The message:   If you can keep a clear head when everything around you is falling to shit, you have a chance of surviving.  Shaw’s character, by contrast, survives by being tough, yes, but mostly by being a believer in things, even though everything she believes in gets proven wrong by science , reason and her two good eyes time after time.  Shaw is an ode to the modern anti-intellectual believer.  The message with her character:  If you go on a foolish crusade against the good advice of every rational thinker you know, and lead everyone around you to ruin and death, just keep believing!  Jesus will probably save you as everything around you falls apart.  So it doesn’t make sense to me that Shaw is supposed to be the new Ripley.  She’s not.  She’s the anti-Ripley.

Her idiot boyfriend's character makes even less sense.  He's probably the most excited of anyone onboard to be exploring an alien civilization, but immediately turns into a petulant child when none of them appear to be alive after 4 hours of non-exhaustive exploration.  Because that's the rational response of a good scientist to a preliminary exploration of an alien structure, complete with extremely well preserved corpses.  So, while drinking heavily out of frustration that the most important scientific find in human history did not also include a welcome video in english explaining all the fascinating technology and well-preserved remains he sees before him, he bitches at David, which David takes as permission to poison him in the name of science.  He then neglects to mention he's got a tentacle growing out of his eye the next morning.  When the mutation becomes too much to deal with, he commits suicide by blond-with-flamethrower in a scene that only seems to matter to Shaw.  His childishness in response to finding exactly what he was looking for defies any sort of common sense or believability.  

Vickers might as well have been merged with the captain's character.  She only appears to be there because an Alien movie needs a heartless company rep on board.  She does nothing much but snarl at people, have sex with the captain, and kill Shaw's boyfriend, all of which could have been accomplished by the captain believably.  Or David.  Or the owner of the company who turns out to be on board.  She then fails the "run sideways" test often proctored in old Road Runner cartoons, and dies pointlessly.  The character simply served no purpose that other characters could have reasonably provided.  Oh, and she's Weyland's daughter as it turns out, which has no effect on anything, but which is delivered like it's a dramatic and shocking reveal.  Which it might be, if her character did anything remotely interesting in the film or was vital to the plot in any way.

The captain likes Christmas, smoking indoors, flame-throwers, abandoning his crew to uncertain fates and then sacrificing himself for the planet.  Complex to say the least.  He's yet another character who's basically terrible at his job.  He lands his ship without scanning the planet or analyzing the atmosphere first.  Fails to notice that 2 crewmen cannot find their way out of the alien structure, when he should have noticed immediately.  He then abandons those same crewmen to go have sex with Vickers, leaving them unattended and unrecorded, even though he’s picking up intermittent movement readings.  You know, it's a scary alien mound with death imagery, nothing to be TOO concerned about.  His only concern?  That they not have gay sex while they're over there.  When the crewman missing, presumed dead, shows up for a zombie rampage, he's not quick enough to question the situation.  He seems to believe the mounds are an alien weapons facility, even though he provides no evidence for that assertion.  And then he drags two perfectly good pilots to their death, because Shaw believes something she can't prove again.  "I know my beliefs have killed everyone else, but this time it's really necessary, I swear!" she sobs over the com, and he just shrugs and goes along with it.  His pilots are hardly worth mentioning.  They have a bet about something unimportant and then do the wave while suiciding themselves.  I'm not sure they knew they were committing suicide or on camera, and like every other character in this movie, they seem oddly detached from everything that's happening.

The biologist and the geologist, are two-dimensional fools with "going to die first" stamped across their foreheads in large, friendly letters.  The geologist isn't there to make friends, “loves fucking rocks” and smokes weed in his spacesuit.  Oh, also, he maps the stone interior of the mound, but is also the only character who can't read the map to find his way out.  Also, he finds all the new stone formations he's just found boring.  Which means he fits in great with the rest of Keystone Planetary Explorers Society.  The biologist, has a believable enough personality for a scientist, in that he is kind of introverted, but, like every other scientist on this mission, has clearly never been THAT interested in his field.  He finds a perfectly preserved 2,000 year-old corpse, and just doesn't care.  In fact, he finds it creepy and wants to leave ("Wait, you brought me along to dissect things?   You monsters!"), which would be the reaction of ANY good biologist of course.  And then, later, finds a terrifyingly shaped snake thing, which behaves in what would be considered traditionally hostile ways on Earth, and, contrary to his character's reaction to a perfectly safe dead body last scene, is suddenly completely unafraid to touch the very real, very clearly angry penis-snake that pops up out of black goo in the chamber of death.  These two characters alone were enough to make me dislike the movie in retrospect.

Guy Pierce as Weyland, makes no real sense.  He tells the crew he's dead in a pre-recorded hologram, then turns out to be alive and frozen in the back of the ship this whole time!  Not that anyone cared, he has no enemies on board.  And his daughter already knows he's there.  It just had to be a big secret, okay?  God.  And his big plan is that he's going to march up to an alien species and demand immortality.  This works out just about as well as you'd expect, and less well than he should have expected.  The need for his intrigue is never explained, and he’s never given enough screen time to earn any sort of empathy or antipathy from the viewer.  He’s a wasted opportunity of a character in a long line of wasted character opportunities.

THEME/STORY

 

Prometheus tries to tell too many stories at once, and ends up telling none of them well.  It tries to tell a cheap slasher movie story, where a bunch of crazy, drunk idiots stumble into the wrong temple on the wrong planet in the middle of pledge week.  It tries to tell a big, philosophical story with Grand Meaningful Statements about the Engineers who created man, and the men, who in turn created A.I., and the complicated family dynamics that result.  And it tries to tell the story of one crazy patriarch, who leads his family and not-so-competent yes-men on a disastrous quest for immortality.  Any one of these stories might have been really fun, given enough time and focus on developing the characters for each, or given a writer that could seamlessly weave the 3 stories into a series of satisfying pay-offs (the ever elusive multiple plot-gasm).  Alas, there is not enough time given to any sub-plot to make it convincing, nor do the genres being mixed play particularly well together.  What results is a seamfully hacked together collection of ideas, mixed with a little lens flare, with the words “BLOCKBUSTER” stamped on the front.

The problem with the cheap slasher flick storyline, is it doesn’t fit the setting.  Traditional slasher flicks, as I understand it, rely on introducing stupid characters, stamping the reasons they’re probably not going to survive the impending crisis on their foreheads (too stupid/slutty/arrogant/smarty-pants usually), and then proving the point in grisly detail, one by one.  The characters are usually too dumb and shallow to feel TOO bad about their demise, while also providing that twinge of satisfaction at seeing all those fools pay for the sin of not being as smart as the viewer.  However, the premise of this movie is, for the sake of the other two sub-plots:  a bunch of really smart, professional, highly-educated people, are recruited and trained for a first contact mission.  So cramming the slasher formula into this film, requires an immediate reformulation of the premise, which is now:  a bunch of straight up terrible scientists are recruited but not trained or prepared for a first contact mission and sent on their way with sack lunches and no protocol.  Forcing the characters to act stupid for the sake of the slasher flick formula negates their believability as scientists, in that they never act like people acquainted with critical thinking or protocol or professional detachment, nor as people particularly interested or knowledgeable about their fields.  Because they have to be idiots who have it coming for the slasher formula to work.  So not only does the slasher formula not work with the setting or characters, it undercuts immediately the other two stories/themes the director/author are trying to explore.  It’s hard to explore deep philosophical issues with the Keystone Explorers Society prat-falling constantly, and it makes one wonder if Weyland’s mission was not doomed so much because of hubris, but by incompetent employees.

The Big Philosophical Story falters on it’s own regardless, because the creators don’t seem to understand the difference between mentioning an idea and exploring an idea.  Shaw mentions her faith early on, and that her father’s religious beliefs had a large impact on her, but they never particularly explore why she believes in space alien Jesus as fervently as she believes in her Catholicism, or why she continues to believe in space alien Jesus even after he personally tries to kill her, or how that really ties in to her daddy issues or her scientific work ethic.  They just kind of mention it.  She’s just a person of faith and that’s important for everyone to know for some reason.  She has faith that alien Jesus has answers, and after all her crew mates die to alien Jesus and his monsters, she has faith that the next Alien Jesus will have answers, if she just believes hard enough, evidence to the contrary be damned.  From the tone, it seems we’re supposed to applaud her continued faith, but whatever message they’re trying to send about how awesome Christianity is is severely undercut by how much trouble her faith gets everyone else into and how little they explore how her faith in God in any way relates to alien Jesus.  She’s just a person that believes things like Catholicism and ancient astronauts strongly without letting a little critical thinking get in the way, and that’s awesome apparently.  Take that reasonoids!

Beyond the inherent scramble of whatever they were trying to say about Shaw’s religious nature and why it benefits her, what they’re trying to say about science is equally garbled .  Damon Lindelof has stated that he was attempting to write a story that explores the idea that scientists can also be religious.  What he actually ends up exploring is the idea that religious zealots don’t make particularly good scientists or expedition leaders.  From interviews and the content of the movie, both he and Scott seem to have a spectacularly uninformed idea of what a scientist is, what they do, and why it’s important that they do it in the way that they do.   Which makes it hard for the viewer to care about whatever the hell it is they’re trying to say about science versus religion.

It’s also clear from the opening shot of the movie, that they’re attempting to explore the theme of sacrifice.  the first Alien Jesus sacrifices himself to create life, Shaw’s boyfriend (whose name is not even worth remembering let alone googling) sacrifices himself to save Shaw, and the captain and pilots sacrifice themselves to save Earth.  Basically, the message is that self-sacrifice is more noble than screwing other people over for selfish gain, which is hard to argue with.  But the problem here is none of the characters are important enough or likable enough for their sacrifices to have any impact.  The Captain and pilots sacrifice themselves with all the gravitas of a trip to the beach, with no apparent fear of their imminent deaths.  Even Jesus didn’t want to die.  What’s sad about this is that it is yet another missed opportunity.  Merging the Captain’s character with Vickers might have made the sacrifice more poignant.  The heartless bastard who killed Shaw’s boyfriend because of protocol turns out to be noble after all might have been compelling.  Shaw sacrificing herself for the sake of her religious beliefs might have been interesting and even had some emotional impact.  Admittedly, she had good reason to believe she was as good as dead already, what with staples being the only thing holding her guts in and no other immediately evident mode of transportation off of the planet, but still.  The fact remains Shaw’s death would have been by far the most meaningful, if sacrifice was really an important theme.

As for the final story they tried to tell, I think it’s the biggest missed opportunity.  Weyland personally leading a fool-hardy expedition to explore a alien ruins with the secret purpose of saving his own life could have been fun.  In the process, they could have fleshed out the relationship between Weyland, David and Vickers (perhaps with flashbacks), and then showed how their collective daddy issues (David and Vickers in relation to Weyland, Shaw in relation to her father, and Weyland and Shaw in relation to the Engineers) gets everyone else killed.    Unfortunately, they hint at that story, but never really explore it to any satisfactory level.

PLOT

The plot is probably the most egregiously bad aspect of Prometheus.  In a good science fiction movie, it is important to set the rules of the universe, establish the setting, create a compelling series of questions for the characters to untangle, and then have events unfold in a believable and hopefully compelling fashion within the established rules and setting.  It’s possible, and of course, common to explore deeper themes than the surface plot throughout the story, but for that to work, the basic plot structure has to make sense on it’s own terms, the characters need to operate believably and consistently throughout the story, and the audience should never have to suspend it’s disbelief for anything more than the rules of the setting (You can stipulate that a man can fly, but he should behave in a recognizingly human manner otherwise).  Prometheus, for whatever reason, does none of these things.  They get so deep into trying to tell the deeper layers of the story, that they completely neglect whether the basic plot makes sense.

The basic problem with the plot, is the viewer is constantly going “wait, what?  Why did that happen?  Why did they do that?”   It takes the viewer out of the story quickly when most characters don’t seem to behave rationally on a human or professional level.   I’ve already mentioned how inconsistently the characters behave.  What’s also notable is how little reaction they have to each event.  They have no apparent sense of the excitement of discovery, or the awe of an alien world.  I mean, we gather that space travel is somewhat humdrum in this universe, but you’d think there might be a little more excitement at the prospect of first contact with a new species.  The other startling thing is the complete lack of procedure, organization or protocol.  They just get in the van and trundle back and forth between the ruins with no preliminary scans, and expose themselves unnecessarily to potential infection at every available opportunity.  It’s just not the behavior one expects from a group of professionals looking to make first contact.  Most characters, at almost every opportunity, fail to act rationally or realistically given the setting, their profession and what little we know of their character.

The next major problem, is how seemingly random each scene is, and how little connection there is between many of the scenes in the movie.  For example, no one seems to care when the first two scientists get lost.  The death of Shaw’s boyfriend just seems random, and it’s unclear what David learned from his little experiment or what he was really attempting to accomplish in the first place.  Shaw juicing up the alien head until it explodes just happens.  That whole scene made no sense on both a scientific level or in any sort of impact to the plot.  She gets a DNA sample yes, but she could presumably have done that without sticking a battery in it’s ear.  Shaw’s surgery, while intense, has little relation to anything that comes before or after.  Not only does she run and jump like it never happened (except for a few token winces), she never bothers to tell anyone David is not trustworthy.  The crew members she bludgeons never seem to hold it against her.  David and Weyland let her tag along to see Alien Jesus for no apparent reason.  Holloway’s zombie attacks in a scene that doesn’t seem to fit either.  We’re already aware the black stuff is very bad, and neither we nor the characters learn anything new from the attack.   The surviving crew doesn’t even seem particularly freaked out by it afterwards.  Alien Jesus attempts to kill everyone for little to no reason.  He’s especially mad at Shaw, for reasons that are equally unclear.  Vickers death is just comical.  Her character serves no real purpose to the plot before or after her death.  There’s a face-hugger and a kind-of Xenomorph at the end, but why they’re there remains extremely unclear.    These things just happen, and it’s never clear why.  The plot simply does not unfold in a believable fashion, and disparate elements  and characters are never woven together in a way that makes any kind of sense.

In the end, I just didn’t believe any of it.  I might have forgiven plot holes like the baby squid growing to giant size with no available nutrition, or the alien ship falling, somehow, directly on top of Shaw and Vickers, or David being able to magically control the alien technology instantly, if the rest of the film had made any sort of sense on a thematic or basic structural level or if the characters had been remotely likable.  But it didn’t and they weren’t, and a promising premise just ended up as a miserable mess. 

Which brings us to the ultimate problem with the film: it billed itself as a smart, scary science fiction movie, and failed to deliver on either count.  Instead we got yet another generic block-buster that insists you turn your brain off in order to enjoy it.  Say what you will about dreck like Transformers, at least Michael Bay has the decency not to pretend his stories are anything other than a vehicle for big robots and bigger explosions.  In any case, for me, the message for future movies, ESPECIALLY for “return to genre” creator events is simple:  keep expectations low.