Prometheus
Irradiated by LabRat
Spoiler-free portion:
Whether or not you go see this movie in the theater should be calculated by how much you liked Blade Runner times how delighted you are with epic visuals, divided by your tendency to analyze movies as you go along rather than just taking them in plus how many horror movies you’ve seen. Weight as you see fit, and by the time you’ve finished doing that you’ll already have your answer.
Spoiler-plus portion:
I was going to do a much more extensive breakdown, then discovered that Rob Bricken has already done so, and his internal dialogue watching the movie matched mine to a rather scary degree.
Put briefly, it’s an extraordinarily pretty movie containing an extraordinary performance by Michael Fassbender that suffers from the problem that the entire plot is like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play with the Idiot Ball. It is vastly easier to name the number of times a character made an intelligent decision rather than making an incredibly stupid one for basically no reason. David the android (Fassbender) is the only one who seems bright enough to realize how insane the whole thing is, and given as he’s under direct programmed orders from Weyland the entire time (and implied to really, really resent it), he’s the only character who has an excuse.
Most of what the movie is good for other than admiring Michael Fassbender’s performance is in coming up with various fan theories to explain the overarching plots and themes of the movie, because Ridley Scott apparently felt that should be up to us. (Or, less charitably, his original plan was insanely stupid, someone got up the courage to tell him that, and now there’s basically a void in the movie where the plan was that you can fill in as you please.)
So here’s my fan theories, meant to encompass the four Alien movies that weren’t explicitly gimmicks plus Prometheus:
The entire business plan of Weyland-Yutani, buried in its corporate DNA from when it was just Weyland Corp and its founder was still alive, goes like this:
1) Find a monster. If you have to do this via Instant Monster, Just Add Water or open a sealed can of monster to accomplish this goal, that’s fine, just be sure to go get a monster and set it loose. Depending on position and corporate resources you may be able to build the monsters from scratch before setting them loose.
2) Feed your employees to the monster until the monster is either destroyed or satiated.
3) Profit!
And clearly it is profitable, because Weyland has apparently limitless resources to put toward the goal of finding or creating monsters to eat their employees, that only grow as the timeline of the movies continues. How, exactly, it is profitable will have to be left to better minds than me.
In order to execute this plan, there are rules that must be followed when selecting and deploying employees. If you don’t have the luxury of having a monster ready to go and a plausible excuse to send some lower-level people to feed it, you might have to actually build a team.
First, you need to find the stupidest and least observant scientists on Earth who have still somehow managed to earn credentials in their field. They need to be very, very stupid and unobservant, because if they weren’t they might notice that their stated mission goals are to go to somewhere for no particularly good reason and poke things until something, anything, happens, with as few protective protocols as possible in place, and also that your actual stated policy is for them to be as unprepared for their mission as humanly possible. It also helps for them to be blatantly unstable. If they are not already unstable, you can get them drunk. You can also traumatize them until they are.
The keys here are “unprepared”, and “unstable”. No matter what your monster availability is or what your human resources options are, you need to have a nice fat lot of unprepared and unstable people to feed to the monster, and send an android who IS prepared along to make sure they make the correct stupid decisions. If you just sent a team of androids or people who knew what they were doing and were being paid a lot of money to fetch the monster, it wouldn’t get adequately fed or do the requisite amount of property damage for the Profit conditions.
And, more seriously, my preferred answer to the central question of the movie, why would the Engineers create humanity only to change their minds and destroy it, if not Space Jesus:
The answer to the question is actually stated outright in another movie directed by someone who handled another installment of Alien: “You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you.”
For me the only elements of plot and theme that actually held together seamlessly throughout the movie involved David the android. Between comments he makes and the absolutely pointless spite both Weyland and many of the other characters show him, it’s pretty obvious his creators made him for some reason that is probably just “because they could”, then somewhere along the line came to regret it and to dislike him, for no particular reason stated other than they find him a little creepy. (And given some of the things he does, perhaps they should, but everything actively bad he does, he does under direct orders that he is incapable of refusing, from a human. He seems subtly bitter about it.)
As with David, so with humanity: the Engineers made life on Earth because they could, somewhere down the line they weren’t entirely pleased with the results, and they decided to start over. Why? Also because they could. Because God does not like you. And also because androids are Ridley Scott’s comfort zone.
The xenomorphs, and why they don’t behave consistently across the movies:
The black goop isn’t a mood fluid, it’s a bio-engineered colonizing agent. Anything alive it infects, it breaks down and re-forms. If there isn’t anything else alive around it, it does what it did on earth and rapidly creates the conditions for life, seeded by the suggestion of the host’s DNA, and spreads it. If there is, it mutates to become the dominant colonizer and starts a seed-and-consume-and-seed cycle. The hivelike xenomorphs are one option out of many to settle into a stable life cycle of a rapidly, dominantly colonizing species. In all conditions it destroys whatever life was there to start with and rapidly spreads a new version, it’s just what that represents is rather contextual.
June 16th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Good post, and good deconstruction (by both of y’all)!
June 16th, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Ah, yes…The Corrupt Corporation who wants to turn the Monster into A Biological Weapon for Major Profit!
I always wonder what makes the xenomorph so attractive as a weapons system? If you have FTL travel, you also have a means to easily blow up planets real good. Seeding a planet with a nasty, uncontrollable batch of critters what can spread like a virus is just trading a one group of enemies for another. But, instead of a group that can possibly be induced to surrender or agree to peace terms, you get a bunch of fearless critters that are even harder to kill, and you wind up having to blow up the planet real good anyway.
June 16th, 2012 at 4:50 pm
Profit.
Weyland-Yutani actually makes a lot more sense if you think of them as what happens when Wile E. Coyote winds up running Acme. Acme-Coyote if you will.
June 17th, 2012 at 8:47 am
Actually, if W-Y is like GM, maybe they are just trying to deal with a really onerous union? That might be a situation where spending a lot of scratch to get your employees eaten makes sense.
June 17th, 2012 at 11:30 am
Weyland-Yutani is controlled by the xenomorphs psionically.
The exploration team was infected with Toxoplasmosis Gondii during the trip, so they would step right up and be the alien god’s new star chariot to earth.
June 17th, 2012 at 11:50 am
“So you’re saying that you want to replace our workers with a bunch of wild, face eating, uncontrollable xenomorphs that are likely to wipe out all human life?”
“Well, yeah, you ever try dealing with the Spacer’s Union?”
“… You do have a really good point….”
June 17th, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Blade Runner is high on my list of favorite movies and I despised this disaster. I though it was a remake of Alien by stoners with too big of a budget.
June 19th, 2012 at 11:18 am
Popehat has been onto Weyland-Yutani’s scam for near two years now.
June 20th, 2012 at 12:37 pm
ya know you make it sound not dissimlar to cabin in the woods
June 20th, 2012 at 1:41 pm
If I were to compare it to Cabin In The Woods, it would not be favorably. All the thinking I’ve done about that movie after watching has made its construction seem more intelligent and thought out; most of what I’ve done about Prometheus makes me wonder to what extent Ridley Scott was trolling me.
June 21st, 2012 at 1:38 pm
“…to what extent Ridley Scott was trolling me.”
Or setting you up for the inevitable big-buck ultimate Blu-Ray director’s final complete cut total pak edition, which will come out in twenty years after a quarter-dozen pseudo “Director’s Cuts” have finally been released.
Signed,
-A Devoted Blade Runner Fan
June 23rd, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Just saw it tonight.
I’m only going to comment on one part of the movie that somehow held my attention: the whole substory that leads to the engineer “giving birth” to the xenomorph.
Does anyone get this sense that this is essentially: “I’m my own grandpa” .
Look at it this way: the engineer (father), creates humans and Noomi Rapace (child), who in turn “gives birth” to “space squid” (grandkid), who in turn does something obscene to engineer/father and “gives birth” to an Alien (great grandkid). That Alien is .. what? brother to his own grandmother?
That’s weird enough to fit this movie quite well.
But we can actually take this weirdness somewhat seriously.
There is an assumption by all characters (and audience to some degree) that it all progresses down a straight and more or less clean line. Something created the engineers, they created us, we create androids and so on. Humans want to go back up the line to ask “fundamental questions”.
What if the line is neither straight nor clear.
I’m no scientist but one thing I believe I understand is that evolution is essentially mutation. Mutation is far from always clear as to its ‘whys’ and ‘hows’.
Also, one great theme in all sorts of stories is that flawed creatures (read humans for most but not always) should not take on the role of deities. When they try to be God, it always creates a mess. The mutations are full of unintended consequences that the “flawed creator”, because he/she is flawed, could never anticipate and this leads to destruction in the end.
The engineers aren’t divine, though they sure act as if they are. They have an extreme sense of entitlement or so it feels, but there is nothing divine about beating up your creation with a robot head in a fit of pique (how dare you do something other than what I want you to do). They’re just as flawed as their creation, they’re essentially arrogant assholes; just the way humans can be when they think they know everything.
The unintended consequence of all this “creating of life and acting like God” is not only that the created turn on the creator but that the “line of origins” is nowhere near straight and clean but totally messed up. If the Alien is sort of “his own grandpa”, there is no line to climb; there is no one to ask “how did we get here and why?”. The mutations turned on and into themselves and created a jumbled mess from which we can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, make neither head nor tail.
The message there is “try as you might, no one can make sense of the ‘why’ of life”; we are in it, we influence it, we change it, it changes itself constantly and these very facts make us too easily blind to what actually could have happened.
Then again, it’s past midnight here, I’m drinking Jamison’s quite heavily and thus willing to take too seriously any idea that floats through my own alcohol addled brain.
Whiskey is truly the elixir of life
June 24th, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Compared to W-Y’s business plan, Aperture Science is run on sound and sober economic principles.
June 25th, 2012 at 3:02 pm
PROMETHEUS is what happens when you try to make a movie with a point….but forget the point as soon as the film rolls. It’s visually stunning…and mind-numbingly pointless. Maybe the next one will answer all the questions that only PROMETHEUS cared about….
June 29th, 2012 at 4:18 pm
Someone was asking me what I thought of Prometheus, and I gave them the same instructions I gave to a friend that wanted to see the last Die Hard movie:
Enter theatre, turn off brain.
Optional third step: avoid thinking about the plot at all costs.
For me, Prometheus was scenery porn that had a weird alien side-story going on.