Some thoughts on Prometheus

I am glad that Prometheus got made.

I had the chance to see it last night, and the amount of hype, discussion, and thought that it has stirred up has been, I think, very valuable for the SFF community, and the exposure for the SFF community to the mainstream world.

However, Prometheus is still a terribly flawed movie. This has been covered by plenty of folks already. But I thought it’d be interesting to take the elements of the movie that didn’t work for me, and suggest how I’d personally tweak them to try and make the movie more coherent.

This is arrogant, yeah, but I can’t resist because this movie had elements of such enormous potential. Its bones were solid: the end product just wound up jumbled. This could have been the 2001 for a new generation: instead, it is a basic horror/action movie with some mild philosophical pretensions.

So let’s go over what didn’t work, shall we? As a note, spoilers abound.

THE MAIN CHARACTER

Problem: Noomi Rapace’s main character, like nearly all the characters in this movie, suffers from a total lack of agency. (You can find my definition of character agency here.) The characters’ primary action is solely to show up on this alien planet: exactly what they want to do, or are supposed to do, is ill-defined, and they spend the rest of the movie acting as pinballs, bouncing from horror to horror. They’ve showed up, and that’s all the movie asks of them.

Rapace’s motivations are abstract from the beginning, which can work quite well for an abstract, cerebral sci-fi movie. As I saw it, her motivations are:

She wishes to find out more about mankind’s creation, because
Her father, a devout man, died tragically, and
She wants an explanation for why the world is the way it is, and she thinks the alien “engineers” can provide it.

Please note that number 3 is never made clear in the movie. That’s my own assumption: the movie just barely suggests this.

But, her motivations get further watered down when she reveals she’s barren, and is incapable of “creating life” like the alien engineers. How this is connected to her desire to see the alien engineers is never much explored. But the way it is suggested puts a very bad taste in my mouth, because this, I think, is a pretty poor character motivation: she has inspired a trillion-dollar space expedition to explore the roots of mankind’s history in order to make up for her own perceived failure to be a mother? This is not a strong rallying point for the character. (Note: adoption costs significantly less than 1 trillion dollars, usually, and gives a home to a child in need.)

But what’s really worth noting is that, poor as some of these motivations are, they are all only relevant up until Prometheus actually lands on the alien moon. Because from there on out, the driving forces of the character become irrelevant. Her process is:

Need to find answers.
Show up on moon.
Poke alien shit.
OH MY GOD MONSTERS

And that’s really it. Her actions have no bearing on the remainder of the plot, and her goals are completely unclear. This problem applies to nearly all of the characters in the movie.

What’s more, her character’s big moment – the “caesarean” (or abortion) scene – adds absolutely nothing to the character, plot, or theme. It’s almost as if the “forced pregnancy” trope was required for this movie because hey, it’s part of the Alien universe, and that’s kind of their thing. But her pregnancy and abortion contribute nothing except for a “gotcha” moment at the end of the movie.

It’s worth comparing Rapace’s character to Ripley from the original Alien movies. The contrast is startling: Rapace is powered by insecurities, fear, anxieties, and uncertainties. She accomplishes very little in the movie. She has no concrete motivations or goals: she does not act, she is acted upon. Ripley, however, was confident, shrewd, and brutally pragmatic, and always had very clear objectives in Alien and Aliens. She wasn’t willing to put up with the bureaucratic bullshit of the company (Weyland-Yutani) or the military: if something needed to be done, by God, she was going to do it.

So Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw, more or less, fails as a main character, due to her own poor motivations, and the failure for those motivations to connect to the overall theme and aspirations of the movie.

And having a douchebag dumbass boyfriend certainly doesn’t help, “babe.”

Possible solution: Make Vickers the main character.

Vickers, played by Charlize Theron, is another character whose presence and actions seem more or less superfluous, unfortunately. She’s the corporate stooge there to look over the space expedition, but what she’s there to do is not specific, besides pick a random point in time to care about alien bioweapons infecting the ship (more on that later) and fuck Idris Elba (good for her?). However, she’s also the daughter of Peter Weyland, trillionaire owner of the company, with whom she has a contentious relationship.

This puts her in conflict with who everyone more or less agrees to be the most interesting character in the movie: David, the android played by Michael Fassbender. Weyland thinks of David as his surrogate son, despite being created and programmed for purely functional purposes. David both revels in his relationship with Weyland, and resents it: Weyland is, after all, his creator and master, forcing David to heed his beck and call while also doting on his not-real boy. And Vickers, while a “real” child, appears to desire the affection Weyland gives to David, but is denied.

There is a hell of a lot more meat on these bones than those of Elizabeth Shaw’s. I mean, there’s just naturally some seriously Freudian shit going on here! And you can see how this ties in perfectly to the plot: the rejection of children, the inaccessibility of the progenitor (an old man, of course – we’re tied down to that image of God, I suppose), the creation of children for functional purposes, etc. When the humans arrive on the moon, and discover they were manufactured creatures possibly engineered as bioweapons, that dovetails beautifully with the idea of Vickers and David both being marvelous creatures whose efforts and aspirations totally disinterest their creator.

And while Vickers is primarily featured as something of an antagonist – her actions, like those of everyone in the movie, are not coherent enough for me to pin down as either good or bad – if the plot were retooled to her taking up this huge quest to try and make her “father” happy, I think the way her actions in the movie are perceived would shift accordingly. She is, at the very least, a much more confident and concrete character than Shaw, with much more confident and concrete aspirations.

PACING/STRUCTURE

Problem: Discoveries and revelations lose their impact if they happen immediately, without consequence.

So the crew of the Prometheus thinks alien engineers live on this moon. They fly to this moon. Within around an hour of penetrating the sky, the immediately find alien ruins. “Yay!” they say. “We were immediately and obviously right!” They run inside the ruins, also immediately, and begin making huge revelations about the engineer race.

This saps the movie of its energy, especially later on. There is no build up: they think they are right, and are immediately proven right, and immediately begin causing problems, touching everything alien in sight. Nothing is gradual: there is no slow reveal, and thus no tension. Pandora’s Box is opened before they even read the label.

Solution: This story has actually been done before, and better: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness set the mold for these “exploring alien ancients” tales. 2001: A Space Odyssey followed the same format: you don’t open Pandora’s Box before the first half of the movie. Your characters don’t even know they’re handling Pandora’s Box until halfway through the movie, at least.

Delay. Always delay until you don’t have to. Small revelations should lead to big ones. The second half of this movie is devoted chiefly to random horror-movie happenings, rather than shedding light on the questions the movie initially poses: there are no further revelations, because it is suggested there is nothing worth understanding.

THE BIG REVELATION

Problem: The one big revelation – that this is a military installation filled with ships and weapons, not a beacon for other life – is really underplayed. It’s a tossed-off line by Idris Elba. And the revelation that there’s a ship underground is not terribly surprising, considering we’ve seen almost the sum total of the underground installation already.

What’s worse is that this is the big revelation, and not the “we can actually meet one of our creators” moment. This moment is reduced to a pure stupid horror movie moment: the alien engineer wakes up, looks at them, then HULK SMASH, like an asshole.

It sheds light on nothing. The engineer’s actions are bewildering, inexplicable. The engineer totally refuses to examine its environment: it does not even notice that its four shipmates are, apparently, dead. We do not know what he thinks of us, or why he does what he does.

Solution: Cavalorn has written some really smart stuff upon the Christian themes sort of forced into this movie. This was totally surprising for me to read about after seeing it. Because, having seen Alien and Aliens, the view of the universe and space presented in those movies is that the universe is cold, uncaring, and what life there is is interested solely in self-preservation and reproduction. And what’s worse, I came into this movie aware of that, and thus aware that the engineers are the people who created the Xenomorphs, the incredibly devastating bio-weapons that, as suggested in Alien, eventually wound up overcoming their creators.

This is undeniable. This is exactly how things were presented in Alien. Scott can’t argue his way out of that.

 So the idea that we, the creation of the engineers, had done something wrong, which caused things to fall apart for the engineers, seems fairly preposterous. They were the ones who had fucked up: they are the ones who chose to make monsters for their own ends. They aren’t angels, or gods: they made mistakes, and got hurt by those mistakes. So I don’t feel humanity should cast itself at their feet and beg for judgment. David, I bet, would get my feeling.

And to hear Ripley Scott suggest Jesus was an engineer, well… I didn’t see it. I’m glad I didn’t see that. It’s quite dumb. It’s vain, assuming that a hugely advanced species could possibly care about us in this way, and wish to punish us for our actions. We behaved like animals because we were and are animals, geez.

Solution: Now. What I expected to see in the movie was to discover that the engineers were clones.

Yes, clones. This might be because it’s a common trope in sci-fi movies about deep space travel: I mean, really, if you’re sending ships on voyages so far that you might not ever see them again, it’d be best if the crewmembers were strictly functional, thus, androids or clones. That, and the engineers all looked alike, and seemed fairly expendable (though I think the whole “required self-sacrifice for creating life” thing to be quite dumb), and their muscles and size suggests a functional, durable aspect to their lives.

So I was anticipating finding out that humanity was the creation of a creation, just like David is the creation of a creation. I was anticipating a satisfying frustration, in other words: the progenitor, the Creator, remains inaccessible. We do not get to sit at the right hand of God and hear His words. God remains worlds away. We get nothing.  And the ending, in which one human flies off to the Homeworld to ask the question directly, would be a continuation of our neverending struggle for truth, and it would be a lot more satisfying than it was in the movie, where I kept wondering, “Why does she want to keep bothering with these assholes?”

This ending would be a lot better than finding out after the fact that these guys, who had created so many monsters (and remember that the Xenomorphs in Alien appear to have been created independent of humanity, so yeah, the engineers made them, rather than us making them), were also supposed to be Space Jesus.

That does not work. I am glad I did not see it in this movie. I am mighty tired of the self-flagellation some Abrahamic interpretations require of us.

GENDER ROLES

Alien and Aliens had a very definite gender agenda: the xenomorphs were a blend of vaginal, ovoid, and phallic imagery, already blurring our usual conception of procreation. The process itself is labyrinthine and savage: queen lays eggs, the eggs hatch into a creature both phallic and vaginal, the creature lays eggs inside of whatever flesh is available, which then hatches into the xenomorph, with its phallic head, vaginal mouth, and skeletal body.

More importantly, anyone or anything in the Alien universe can become “pregnant.” You don’t have to be a man or a woman: the aliens don’t give a shit about how your gender and sex is “supposed” to work. You’re functional. You’re just meat they need to lay eggs inside.

This is a profoundly dehumanizing and dispiriting suggestion. It totally upends our normal concept of reproduction, our concept of life as male/female, of willing partners and “contributors” to new life. Life, it suggests, acts as a disease, self-interested and willing to proliferate through any means possible. Our gender assignments are cursory, matter-of-fact, or even accidental. This is what the Alien universe suggests. It’s more about species than about gender itself.

Prometheus has some unclear stuff going on with gender. I will say I did not get the impression that the creators of this movie thought about gender at all. Its attitudes toward them were incoherent, like a lot of things in this movie. As such, I am not quite sure if it’s even worth talking about, though I would direct you here for another take on it.

It is totally bizarre to me that the man who made Alien could possibly create a science fiction movie so aligned with what appears to be Abrahamic gender roles: the paternal creator, the father handing down life. And though both men and women get “impregnated” in this movie, it’s only the woman’s that has any consequence on the rest of the movie – and even then it comes across as a cheap scare moment, no matter what symbolic meaning Scott is attempting to tack onto it.

Say what you like about the horrible universe presented in Alien, but at least it was equal. I wish he’d kept this angle rather than ditching it for the usual god-stuff.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS:

Just because the air is breathable, it doesn’t mean it isn’t swimming with alien bacteria against which you have no immune system. Haven’t you read The War of the Worlds?
If you have the head of an alien species, there has to be better ways of inspecting it than stabbing it with a machine and pumping it with electricity.
The amount of touching, stabbing, crushing, and general interference in the ancient ruins is staggering. This cost a trillion dollars? Hire better people.
Any scientist worth his salt would probably report his own infection. This is why we don’t hire scientists based on the quality of their abs.
If you’re on a planet with an atmosphere that can kill you in two minutes, that seems an easier way to go than being doused with a flamethrower.
If a lady comes running in in a bra and panties covered in blood with staples across her gut, you might want to ask, “Hey, what’s up?” rather than just ignore her.