I really enjoyed Prometheus. It was wonderfully pretty and it scared the crap out of me a few times.
I didn’t notice any massive plot holes at the time. Thinking back, it probably didn’t help that the day before I had found a bottle of little pink pills from 1974 down the back of my couch and had snaffled the lot with a vodka chaser. I was also distracted because I went with Marge Albrechtson, and every time Charlize Theron appeared on screen Marge would peg a squirrel at her.
However, this review by Henry Rothwell entitled “Prometheus: an archaeological perspective (sort of).” (via the lovely Mr Doctorow at Boing Boing) very ably and charmingly points out several problems that I missed.
Due warning, however – it is pretty much spoilers all the way.
Fassbender cycles around the spaceship, throwing basketballs into hoops and watching documentaries. You get a feel for the size of the spaceship, and his lonely existence within it. For a crew of less than ten people, the financiers and engineers behind the expedition have sensibly decided that creating a space-ship the size of a cathedral would be a good idea. Presumably neglecting to install an off switch for a robot was just one of those costs they had to cut to make the whole thing possible. To pass the time he likes watching old films and learning languages. We like him. That’s even before all the humans wake up and prove to be barking mad or arseholes. Or barking mad arseholes.
But wait – the balls on the pool table (yes, the pool table – what about it?) are all sliding over to one side by themselves – the destination threshold has been reached and the spaceship has, believe it not, put the brakes on at the last minute. Fassbender goes to the bridge, and fires up the computers to see what’s going on. Colourful displays shimmer into being – motion sensitive read-outs unfold and hover in front of him, their only goal in life is to provide him with information, and look great. Fassbender smiles, perhaps marveling at the possibility that one day in the not so distant future, all this marvellous technology could be replaced by clattery keyboards, blinking LEDs and monochrome cathode ray tubes – almost like something out of a 70s horror movie. . .
Hunter Gathers
Fassbender-bot must operate under the assumption that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey… stuff.
Allen
Weyland just spent a lot less money on a “mining ship”. Sheesh, all the supposed plot holes that I keep hearing about are easily explained, even if we don’t want to leave this particular one up to being due to the fact that today’s moviemaker has much better tools.
freelancer
Saw it this morning in IMAX 3D. Gorgeous flick, interesting story, even if you could drive a truck through the plot holes and Scott pulled the premise from some pseudo-historian quack.
That said, it’s some pretty decent space-horror and Michael Fassbender is fucking perfect as David.
lamh35
I only have one question (well 2 I guess) How much screen time did my husband Idris Elba have and did any of his scene involve him shirless or saying something in his sexy accent?
That will make or break the movie for me.
Allen
But if you want to check out a truly great science fiction movie, check out “Another Earth” (available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and presumably streaming now). Whereas “Prometheus” is science fiction as spectacular entertainment, “Another Earth” is science fiction as art.
Corner Stone
Is this Event Horizon redux?
Chris
The [SPOILER ALERT] scene where Shaw gets the facehugger cut out of her abdomen is seriously one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen on film (granted I almost never watch horror movies). Worthy successor to the original Alien movies, and Shaw’s definitely a worthy successor to Ripley.
Otherwise, the movie was definitely begging for sequels, which I hope they make.
Liquid
So, without having seen the movie yet, I assume everyone dies.
If the company knows it’s there then who needs survivors?
John 2.0
Daniel watching Laurence of Arabia? Character moment. Daniel learning ancient languages? Awfully cliche, but legitimate plot point.
I assumed the basketball scene was a clever nod to the no-look shot in Alien Resurrection.
Scott knows how to frame a shot. I don’t think there’s a single shot in the whole movie that’s anything less than beautiful. The movie doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least as a prequel to aliens (and a lot of the references are too cute by half). But, damn, is it a nice looking film.
(spoiler: I hated that the space jockeys are just 8 foot tall bald albinos who turn into 80’s slasher villains. Way to rob them of all majesty, Ridley.)
SteveM
Vulture has “10 Questions Left Unanswered at the End of Prometheus.”
gnomedad
@Chris:
Dude, you skip a few lines after “Spoiler Alert”! Although I’d kinda figured out something like this happens.
Mike in NC
Will catch it tomorrow night when I flee the house because the wife invites 10 other women over for their insufferable weekly Mah Jong game.
Todd
OT, but dammit to hell, I bought some treats for my poor old pup this weekend, and failed to read the fine print. I saw South Carolina and a lot of plant material. I missed the “china” and chicken part. He’s been awfully sick all day – diarrhea, weakness. Now he doesnt want to raise his head. He’s in a favorite spot in the yard.
I’m sitting outside with him and watching him quietly breathe. Can’t really get him into a car without hurting him – he’s about 110 lbs.
Dammit.
ETA – just coaxed him to raise his head. I might just stay out here with him tonight. He’s an old guy, 13, and likes company.
xyzxyzxyz
I love Ridley Scott movies, but not this one. Visually great. Character development is sub par, and as a scientist I was entirely put off by the stupidity of the scientists in the film. Then again, none of them were Chemists ;).
Soonergrunt
Just got back from Prometheus IMAX 3D. Normally 3D movies give me a headache and I wasn’t going to this one but for the free ticket.
Thoroughly enjoyed the show. Plot holes, you say?
Damon Lindelhof wrote a screenplay with unresolved plot holes. And the sun rose in the east and set in the west, water is wet, etc.
Percysowner
@Todd: I’m so sorry about your dog. The Diamond dog supply plant from South Carolina just recalled all sorts of products due to salmonella contamination. I hope your guy hangs in there and gets through this.
mainmati
Family wanted to see the IMAX Version so we did. First time I have ever worn those glasses. Very irritating but I would have gladly suffered had I seen a Blade Runner version of Ridley Scott. This was, instead, sadly a lot of eye candy and some obvious copies of the original “Alien”. Too many characters come and go speaking of Michelangelo. Including the whole pointless Dad-Daughter “conflict” on which the excellent Therize Cheron was wasted. She could have been the Sigourney Weaver of this film but was reduced to the Mirror, Mirror on the Wall bad witch. What a waste. Noomi Rapace as the scientist has a really hair-raising if totally incredible role (has a Caesarian section and then goes into extreme action mode – all without shock thanks to extremely unlikely drugs (and incredible staples). Obviously, I would have liked to have seen more character development and more history as to the mysterious proto-humans (yeah, I know, boring – except to us Sci-Fi fans).
Gromit
The more I think about this movie the less I like it, and I started out very dissatisfied once the credits rolled. The only characters that interested me were David and Vickers, and they both meet really ignominious fates (seriously, Charlize, just run SIDEWAYS). Turning the space jockey into just a big bald guy in a suit is a crime. Remember how the entire ship appeared to be grown, rather than made, and the pilot was fused with the chair? Oh, never mind, it’s all really just metal and he’s just wearing a suit.
Also, there were no cryo-chambers in the derelict on LV-426. Why on this one. Also, why is the pilot in cryo-sleep all?
And the stupid and inexplicable choices made by the characters in this movie have been catalogued extensively elsewhere, but:
Why did they take off their helmets? Even if you aren’t concerned about hazards to your own health, you would be introducing foreign organisms into the environment. These are scientists, right?
How did the guy who was in charge of mapping the place get lost? Couldn’t Idris Elba help them find their way out? If not, why not?
Why hide the fact that Weyland was alive and on the ship? What would have been different?
Why would David infect whatshisname with the black goop? What was the point? And wouldn’t introducing an infectious agent into the ship’s crew endanger Weyland? It’s dumb luck that the guy wasn’t on board when he started to succumb.
For that matter, why weren’t there cryo tubes in the freaking lifeboat? There was a whole automated infirmary, for god’s sake.
The movie is filled with head-scratchers like this. Characters make decisions solely to advance the plot, not according too their own motivations or interests.
Comrade Luke
I had high hopes for this movie, based on Ridley Scott’s career, but once the opening credits started rolling and I saw “Written by Damon Lindelof” I got a bad feeling.
I have low standards for blockbusters in general, and this was still hugely disappointing.
Gromit
The creature was icky, but I was expecting this scene to be a lot more squirm-inducing based on reviews. It was extraordinarily bloodless compared to a real caesarian section. Also, every layer of tissue that gets incised has to be sutured. You don’t just staple the epidermis closed.
Also, the bit about the machine not knowing how to operate on females was just crappy writing. One excellent explanation I read elsewhere was that the auto-doc only had room for either the caesarian section app or Guy Pearce’s MP3’s, and he chose the MP3’s.
Tyro
I liked this movie, but that was the problem– I only just liked it. I didn’t fall in love with it, and I wasn’t blown away. I mean, I’m looking forward to the sequels, and everything, but it’s not like this was anything I hadn’t seen before.
It’s nice that budgets and special effects are big enough to make HR Giger’s art really come alive, though.
ruemara
@lamh35: Not enough, and nothing shirtless. Very disappointing and not even in comparison to Alien. Slow start, slow middle, some of the dumbest scientists in human history, tremendous plot holes, but Fassbender is amazing as David. Frankly, his performance was worth watching.
A Humble Lurker
Spoilers!!
The caesarian section scene almost made me throw up (which is weird for me) but what pissed me off was that she was able to walk afterward. You might chalk that up to awesome scientific breakthroughs or something, but without that it just annoys me. And I don’t even know that much about this stuff, but I knew that after one of those, you cannot walk.
Her devotion to finding where we came from and why our creators wanted to kill us bothered me too. It’s like we were supposed to root for a girl seeking her abused father’s acceptance instead of rooting for her MOVING THE FUCK ON. It didn’t help that she ended up working with the entity that basically killed her boyfriend and through him impregnated her with an alien baby she had to cut out of herself.
Walker
I wanted to like that movie, but could not. The problem is that the characters act dumber than teens in a slasher pic (which is saying something), and the plot requires this stupidity of them to make any progress.
ruemara
@A Humble Lurker: I hid through the c-section scene, because, been there, have the ab smile. By the time the c-clamps went on, I was behind my hands. And her being able to walk, just killed me. Because it takes forever.
JGabriel
__
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Sarah, Proud and Tall @ Top:
… When I was nine.
Sarah makes me feel young again.
.
Walker
The.worst thing about Prometheus is that now Del Toro will never make At the Mountains of Madness. There are too many similarities between Prometheus and the Lovecraft story that the. Studio canceled the project (indeed, this is exactly the reason Del Toro gave for its cancelation in a recent interview).
Brachiator
@Allen:
Never heard of it, but may check it out. However, science fiction as art has Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at one end an Blade Runner at the other. “Another Earth” better be some impressive shit.
That Damon Lindelof is involved is a bad sign. I’ve seen some rants that “Prometheus” is anti science, but haven’t looked into this stuff more closely to avoid spoilers.
I listened to an interview of Ridley Scott on Mark Kermode’s BBC podcast available film review program. Scott said that there could be two more films he could do that would lead to the time of the Alien film. I could see this as being interesting if Scott himself did not direct the next movies, but instead handed it over to new talent. Even though Scott is obviously very gifted, it took James Cameron’s new eyes to take the franchise in a new direction. And I note the unsatisfactory results of Fincher’s Alien 3 as a caution (as well as some of the other crap that followed).
As an aside, Madagascar 3 beat Prometheus at the box office, and we still have Brave and Ice Age 3 on deck in terms of summer animation. What a wild movie season. Definitely something for everyone.
Kiril
@Brachiator: “That Damon Lindelof is involved is a bad sign. I’ve seen some rants that “Prometheus” is anti science, but haven’t looked into this stuff more closely to avoid spoilers.”
Anti-science is one thing. Stupid dialogue, poor characterization, just crap all the way through. It’s a parade of cliches. There are no true surprises, if you are familiar with science fiction. The direction wasn’t the problem, it was the script. I was almost angry at how bad it was. 3D is expensive.
JGabriel
@Walker:
I’ve heard of At the Mountains of Madness but never read it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and discovered this wonderful sentence:
Somehow, when you’re reading horror, penguins just break the mood. Avoid penguins when writing horror. The idea of being waddled to death is just too silly to sustain dread.
.
Gromit
I think calling it anti-science gives the script way too much credit for thematic coherence. There are some anti-science elements (the character who brings up “Darwinism” gets particularly rough treatment at the hands of the local fauna, due to his own mind-numbingly idiotic choices) but its treatment of spirituality is completely superficial. It’s mostly just pro-bullshit.
Tehanu
I hate horror movies so I won’t be seeing this one. However for the record, I was up and walking 24 hours after my C-section — not fast and not far, but on my own without a cane or walker or anything. And I was in really lousy shape. So it’s not totally impossible.
Brachiator
@Kiril:
Ouch. There is no excuse for cliches, either in science fiction or any other genre. And since both the original first Alien films and “Blade Runner” set the bar so high for future films, I find it surprising that Ridley Scott and the other people behind this film didn’t realize that they had to raise their game to a higher level.
Also, I think that this season, “The Hunger Games” and “The Avengers” have also raised the bar on what movie goers expect in terms of summer films. In past seasons, films like The Matrix and the original Men in Black raised the bar to a similar degree. We have already seen a studio back down and pull the GI Joe movie from the summer schedule. There was a lot of expectation and good will for Prometheus. Much of the marketing, the trailers and special little bits were very well done. Too bad that the movie itself did not quite follow through on the excellent preparation.
Schlemizel
Sarah, wish you had shared those little red pills they might have helped.
I thought it was a lot like an elaborate theme park roller coaster. Lots of flash and pretty images but at the end all I could think was, “is that all?”
MBL
I want to see it again, carrying a notebook, so that I can exhaustively catalogue its sins as they occur on screen. One of the most awesomely stupid movies I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Battlefield Earth.
Richard Fox
I loved the visuals, the actors did what they could with the script, but my major bone of contention (and I might be reading too much into this) is the basic premise. In the first scene we have a nicely muscled god like fellow push buttons on a gizmo, imbibe something so awful he becomes broken down to DNA molecules and falls into a raging cataract. Okay got it. So.. It was just a matter of time that we little earthlings spring from this guy? Why would evolution happen, trilobites, dinosaurs, mammoths, etc, if the point of the whole thing was us? Why not just cut to the chase and leave out all the middle men? Er, middle pre- humans, as it were. Point is it had no causality for me to buy the premise. (I like to think we humans are a series of happy accidents that just, well, happened, but perhaps that’s another topic.) Though the space ship was awesome and David the robot looked like a fun amoral sort to pal around with…
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@freelancer:
This. My wife and I spent all of yesterday bring up all the little plot threads introduced, then abandoned not to mention the gaping flesh wounds of plot holes.
Like everybody else, loved the visuals, loved the individual performances but we rank this one about on the level of the 4th Alien film.
k488
“This is a scientific expedition – no weapons!” said rather early in the film had me LMAO. Beautiful to look at, but irksomely silly. And how does the face-sucker grow to such a size in so short a time with NO FOOD IN THE CLOSED ROOM???
Patricia Kayden
@lamh35: Elba was in Prometheus enough to make you drool — but his shirt was always on. He and Charlise’s character apparently had a fling, but that is off camera.
While Prometheus was not as great as Alien, it was alright and I’m looking forward to the sequels (or additional prequels).
JustMe
@Allen: Whereas “Prometheus” is science fiction as spectacular entertainment, “Another Earth” is science fiction as art.
But is it “spectacular” art? Because there’s plenty of mediocre art out there, and just because it’s “art” doesn’t make it worth our time.
I can only guess that what went wrong with Prometheus was that Ridley Scott didn’t realize what a poorly-written mess that Lost was and just got caught up in the hype.
jh
Ok,
I have two major beefs with Prometheus.
Lasers.
If I’m going on an expedition to a new, unknown world,I want my own laser gun.
I want everybody I’m with (excepting the creepy, ethically sanitized Androids they seem intent on launching us into space with every goddamned time) to be sane, trained to use and issued their very own laser.
Then, I want the ship I’m riding on to have lasers.
Otherise Mr. Weyland, I’m not getting anywhere near your space traveling death ark.
And as someone mentioned upthread, never, EVER, take your helmet off.
Dumbest. Smart. People. EVAR.
nastybrutishntall
some of the cleanest, prettiest CGI in awhile, excellent 3D direction and cinematography. amazing sets. Fassbender. I mean, this is not Tarkovsky. But it’s not Michael Bay either. The Matrix had plenty of plot holes but who gave a shit? It was amazing to watch and you had to be a real curmudgeon to skip it. Same here. This is not essential, but extremely satisfying as a scifi blockbuster. Got my money’s worth, which 95% of Hollywood’s shit don’t do for me.
lapinga
“peg a squirrel?”
Jeffro
Additional problems:
1) Bringing an interstellar spacecraft a) into the atmosphere b) for an Osprey-style, flip-the-engines-to-vertical landing.
2) The crew finding the alien “landing strip” in mere moments (as opposed to the ship scanning the planet for weeks upon arrival while they crew ‘slept’)
3) The alien ship’s crash-landing back into the planet, causing so little impact that the characters almost directly beneath it weren’t blown (dozens of?) miles away
4) Also, why would a robot learn from watching movies in real time when the entire film library of humankind could be downloaded into his head in minutes?
And now that I think about it, I really am irritated at the instantly walkaway C-section, and at the squid-baby’s phenomenal growth (without food, as noted above).
Ben
This blogger’s analysis helped me make sense of the movie: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1
Amir Khalid
Without starship crews full of scientists doing bone-headed things, SF would be a much much smaller genre. So it’s not the bone-headedness per se that puts me off really liking this movie, but the fact that the bone-headedness here was so glaringly obvious. The movie was well-executed, I’ll give it that. But you can’t quite get into it when every few minutes, you’re distracted by something that makes you want to say, “WTF, man?” to the on-screen character.
cmorenc
@Ben:
I checked out said blogger’s “analysis”, and it’s nothing more than a strained attempt to overlay a boatload of pretentious literary/mythical reference crap onto an atrociously bad script and plot shot full of ridiculously stupid holes, whose only coherent theme is setting up the basis for yet further potential Alien sequels. If Scott really intended all the subtleties and allusions this blogger strains to find in the film, Scott utterly failed to communicate most of them, and the ones he does sort of obviously intend (the humanoid drinking goo and disintegrating into DNA to seed life) is simply so much outrageous silliness.
McJulie
It had some good scenes and was pretty to look at, but it’s telling when the robot is the only character with a meaningful story arc.
@Gromit at #18 lists a lot of the things we were complaining about at dinner afterward. It suffers from a bad case of unfired guns. And my chemist friend was appalled at the extremely cavalier way they handled things like contamination and quarantine. They’re supposed to be scientists, but they’re written like the dumb teenagers in a slasher flick.
Even from a suspense standpoint it was weak — individual scenes could be scary, but the overall arc goes way too abruptly from “Yay, we found EXACTLY what we were looking for!” to “Boo! Horrible things trying to kill us!”
CraigoMc
There wasn’t a single death that would have been averted if someone had left their helmet on. Milburn is killed by an alien that wormed its way inside his suit after breaking his arm and tearing the fabric; Fifield was killed by a burst of acid that ate through his helmet; Holloway was deliberately infected; and the rest were killed by a mutant human or an Engineer, both of which were powerful to simply smash the helmets.
CraigoMc
@cmorenc: Did Scott fail to communicate his ideas, or did you fail to perceive them? Personally, I appreciate it when a director feels the need neither to spoon feed me, or cram it down my throat.
Robert
The movie clearly said there were 17 crew members. It’s still a ridiculously big ship for 17 crew members, but it’s that kind of inaccuracy that would lead the koolaid drinking fanboys to dismiss any relevant arguments in that review.
celticdragonchick
@xyzxyzxyz:
I was annoyed with the geologist (I have a geology degree), and even more so with the biologist who seemed to want to be killed by an unknown creature giving a cobra-like threat display…
celticdragonchick
@jh:
Man portable directed energy weapons (DEW’s, or lasers) are not available in the Aliens universe. You are stuck with various assault rifles and flame throwers.
Laertes
Setting aside all the cringeworthy scenes (“…father!”, “…I didn’t mean you!”) and spotting them all the science, such as it was, my big problem is that once we see the big picture, the big picture doesn’t make any sense.
I’ll back the whole story up 35,000 years and roll it from the Engineer point of view:
35,000yo: Okay, guys, those humans that we made over on Sol-3? Let’s make sure we teach them the address of this insignificant little planet that we’re using as a weapons lab. Because we want them to come find us once they’re capable of spaceflight.
2,000yo(1): You know what? Those Sol-3 humans were a bad idea. Let’s get rid of them.
2,000yo(2): Oops! The ship that I was tasked with taking to Earth to bomb them with our alien goop suffered some kind of mishap, killing most of the crew. The ship is still spaceworthy, there are more ships to hand, and I’m still perfectly capable of carrying out my mission, but instead I’m going to go to sleep in my hibernator and wait until someone comes to wake me up. I won’t attempt to send any kind of signal to the rest of my species to advise them of my predicament.
2,000yo(3): Hey, remember that depot we set up to run the weapons lab? Let’s be sure we don’t follow up on that in any way, nor ever send any more ships there.
Present day: Some people have awakened me. They look like they’re from that planet that I was supposed to wipe out, so I’ll kill them all and then go do the job I was supposed to do 2,000 years ago.
That last bit, the “present day” part, that actually makes sense. I imagine that’s the bit of the story that got written first, and then they couldn’t be troubled to write a backstory that logically produced the endgame they wanted.
brent
@CraigoMc:
For me, the definition of good storytelling is that it successfully communicates its ideas while doing neither (spoon feeding or cramming). Even if I believed that the ideas in the linked essay were really the underlying thesis of the film, my opinion would still be that it failed quite significantly to communicate those high minded ideas.
But, in any case, I don’t believe most of those ideas were lurking in the script in some way that only the most subtle of minds could perceive. I believe it was just a pretty clear and run of the mill example of a badly written script. Nothing extraordinary about it.
I think this is missing the point. These are supposed to be scientists and as such, one expects them to move through an alien environment with some minimal sense of caution and thoughtfulness. The removal of their helmets at the first sign of an environment is just the most obvious example of this lack of caution. In the end, their behavior is persistently marked not by any sense of rational engagement with this new environment but by horror movie tropes and cliches.
CraigoMc
@Laertes:
So if you deliberately interpret something so as to not make sense…it doesn’t make any sense? Bravo.
In statutory construction, we have something called the doctrine of absurdity: If there are multiple interpretations available, eliminate those that result in ridiculous conclusions. Don’t read errors into the text unless there is no other option available to you.
It’s a good rule, if you think about the alternative – which is like building a wall and having some idiot come along and beat his head bloody against it, only for him to mock you for building something so stupid and useless.
CraigoMc
@brent:
“But, in any case, I don’t believe most of those ideas were lurking in the script in some way that only the most subtle of minds could perceive.”
So the movie tells the audience explicitly that the Engineers died 2,000 years ago, and the characters wonder what could have happened to make them change their minds about us – was the reference really that elusive?
For that matter…the film itself was called Prometheus. Even passing knowledge of the myth makes the movie much easier to understand…unless you’re being deliberately obtuse.
Laertes
@CraigoMc:
All perfectly reasonable. So can you spell out for me the reasonable version of what’s going on? The only one I can see is nuts. What’s this more obvious and sensible reading of the setup that you think I’m deliberately ignoring?
jh
@celticdragonchick:
You are absolutely correct. I’ll take that as my cue to re-read Aliens Omnisbus Vol 1.
I guess my point was, scientific expedition or not, I’d be a little jumpy and redy ventilate…*ahem* “neutralize”, any life form; e.g pale, eyeless worms in a threat posture or black eyed, alibino giants, that looked at me sideways.\
Lasers are nice but projectile weapons will do in a pinch.
brent
@CraigoMc:
Is it really necessary to explain all the ways in which that reference is entirely absurd? That would be a tiring and ridiculous exercise but I am glad to take the time if you really believe this Space Jesus notion is in any way sustainable in the context of the film’s timeline and narrative.
But this would still miss the point. The idea that Jesus came from outerspace is not a particularly grand idea and in the end, who cares? Its just an alternate mythology. But if Scott meant to actually communicate some notion of this as somehow telling us something interesting or important about humanity, there is really no sense in which that was achieved. Obviously you feel differently.
The reference to Prometheus is not in any way difficult to understand. Indeed, it would be a perfect example of exactly the sort of “spoon feeding” which you say you dislike. What it doesn’t do is explain irrational leaps of logic and bizarrely stupid behavior of just about every character in the film. It doesn’t explain away the narrative mess that comprises this movie. It was a valiant try by cavalorn to inject some narrative richness through the mythos of the story but the narrative holes are just as obvious to me after having read the essay.
CraigoMc
@Laertes: The thing that most people remember about Prometheus is stealing fire from Mt. Olympus to give to humanity.
Now, that’s in the film – it’s implied from the cave paintings that the Engineers were guiding and civilizing early humans – but it’s not central to the plot.
The parts of the myth that are forgotten are that Prometheus actually created man, and later sacrificed himself to save humanity when Zeus wanted to see it destroyed.
It’s clear that roughly 2,000 years ago some of the Engineers decided that humans weren’t worth keeping. Some viewers interpret the state of the ship as the result of a horrible accident, but I think the source material wants us to think that there was disagreement among the Engineers, and that at least one (one would be thematically appropriate) unleashed the biological horrors on the ship to prevent it from taking off.
(At least one of the anti-human faction was able to put himself in stasis before he could be killed or infected, which is the one that we see at the end of the film. alternatively, he was sealed in there deliberately by another of his species. I’m not going to assume that he really wanted to eradicate Earth and decided to hibernate instead, because that’s an absurd conclusion.)
The 2,000 year reference I initially dismissed in the theater as too weird, but the interview of Scott I read today seems to indicate that…yes, Jesus was an Engineer sent to watch over us. And we killed him, one of our makers, thus convincing the Engineers that we were unworthy of existence.
As too clever by half as that sounds, it is also thematically appropriate due to the parallels with Prometheus, who, like the divine Christ, both created mankind and sacrificed himself for it. This is a much darker twist on it, however – Christ’s death as our damnation, instead of our salvation. It also sheds some light on why Elizabeth’s devout Christianity is played up in the film.
***
I do have my complaints about the film – Theron’s character is underdeveloped, the cowardly biologist is inexplicably sanguine about the creepy snake that rises out of the goop, and I was confused about how he and Fifield got left behind in the first place. And the sequence leading to their deaths is completely contrived – not only does the three person bridge crew leave it completely unmanned, but this scientific expedition is apparently not recording every single piece of data it collects.
The tentacle creature in the medical room is similar how the original chestburster grew into an 8-feet tall behemoth in the space of a few hours in the first film; there may be an explanation for it (such as digesting the metal or plastic in the room with it), but even if it is a genuine plot hole, I’m willing to overlook it due to the homage.
Prometheus is basically the same general story of Clarke’s 2001/3001 – alien race creates man, decides we are unworthy, attempts to destroy us. The difference is that 3001 kinda sucked and went in the opposite direction of Prometheus (and 2001), and overexplained the premise.
As someone else noted, either the quoted reviewer didn’t read the giant card at the beginning of the film which states “Crew: 17,” or he is under the impression that the number 17 is “less than ten.”
As for the ship’s size, that makes sense for several reasons:
1. Capability. It’s equipped with an enormous cargo bay, at least a dozen relatively spacious cabin and one huge stateroom/lifeboat, several medical areas and labs, a gym, and presumably a power plant, though that’s never onscreen. Plus corridors connecting all of these.Believe it or not
2. Mental health. Even if you’re going to be awake for only a few months, you want as much as space as possible. Ask a submarine crewman what a long voyage feels like. Stir craziness is best averted by giving the crew plenty of space and things to do in it.
3. Consumables. Seventeen people require a lot of food and water over a course of even weeks, and water especially is volume-intensive. You want more than you ever expect to need as well, lest you run into a Cold Equations type scenario.
4. Waste heat. This is probably the one that will occur to the least people, and the most important. One of the biggest problems in space is that there’s no atmosphere to leach heat from the ship – the only way to cool down is by radiating it. Now Prometheus had no visible radiators, but it appeared to have an absolutely huge surface area nonetheless. The more surface area, the greater the heat loss, and the less likely the crew is to roast alive.
CraigoMc
And for what it’s worth, my #1 dangling plot thread hasn’t been mentioned by any article I’ve read: What the hell did David and the Engineer say to each other?
Gromit
To my knowledge there is nothing in scripture about Jesus being 8 feet tall, chalk-white, and hairless. You’d think this would be worth a mention.
CraigoMc
@Gromit: Who says he was?
This insistence upon assuming errors where none are evident is asinine. You don’t look smart, or funny. You look like a guy who would shit his pants if no one had ever told him to drop them first.
Gromit
The cave paintings all depicted the engineers as giants. Is the idea that this one time, they sent a swarthy, hairy, dwarf engineer? It’s one thing to appropriate ancient gods for this ridiculous mythos, but a key component of the scriptural portrait of Jesus is that he was physically indistinguishable from other humans of the time and place. Are you saying this doesn’t pose a problem for the Jesus-as-engineer thesis?
brent
Based upon what? Where is the narrative support for this conclusion? It is always possible, no matter how badly a story is told to come up with some entirely separate narrative which somehow ties up the loose ends. That’s easy. But it doesn’t make a bad story suddenly good.
This is, as I suggested, just another attempt to make the story make sense by adding some entirely separate narrative which is not supported by anything we actually see. Again, this can be done with any story, no matter how badly told. But just for the record, the conclusion which you cast aside as absurd is only slightly more fanciful than the story you came up with. It makes a number of unsupported assumptions starting with the idea that stasis, basically going to sleep in the middle of whatever the “infection” is, is for some reason safer for the Engineer than anything else he could have done. But again, we are given no reason to accept that as reasonable. Its just another bit of handwaving designed to make sense out of something which just didn’t try hard enough to make sense on its own.
k488
Despite my problems with the film, I loved all the references to earlier space-flight movies – Dave sounded like Hal (was named Dave, for Pete’s sake, and COULD exist outside without a space helmet); the cobra-creature looked like the eyeball on a stick in the death-star’s trash bin; the list goes on.
nastybrutishntall
1) Let’s count the number of science-fiction movies without giant plot-holes or improbable/impossible physics on our fingers, shall we?
2) With the remaining 6 or so fingers, plug your ears and wiggle the remainder while shouting “lalalalala it’s not realistic!”
3) Repeat 30 times and bingo! you have this thread.
cmorenc
@CraigoMc:
Whatever purported literary/allegorical/mythical allusions (other than the obvious “Prometheus” mythical reference) and whatever subtle reasons, explanations, meanings, or motives Scott may have purportedly embedded in the movie, are unfortunately totally buried so deep underneath the jumbled rubble of a weak script shot full of preposterously glaring holes and fatally warped by the commercial imperative to tie into the existing “Alien” franchise and make a summer CGI “action” blockbuster appealing to general audiences rather than to a more thoughtful cult audience, that they’re hopelessly obscured if they were ever indeed there (and I call bullshit on claims that they are). As a visual spectacle, it’s a wonderful roller-coaster ride full of interesting visual artifacts and action, SO LONG AS you don’t try to think too deeply about what you’re seeing. However, as many people in this thread and elsewhere have abundantly pointed out, the more thought one gives to this movie the more ridiculous, shoddy, and vacuous the story gets, most especially as any sort of serious contemplation of the origins of human life.
In short, I didn’t miss a damn thing except just how poorly crafted the plot and many elements in this movie really are, beneath the shiny surface of the dazzling 3D visuals. Scott could have made the kind of movie you allege maybe I missed, but most of the rest of us don’t think so. He could have made one of the greatest, most thoughtful all-time sci-fi films ever out of this, but instead settled for a summer popcorn cruncher, albeit with interesting visuals.
Laertes
@nastybrutishntall:
I’ll spot you any amount of improbable/impossible physics. You can have all the FTL drives, ray guns, food pills, stasis pods, time travel, automatic translators, and implausibly breathable air that you need to get your SF story off the ground.
The people who think that the ship’s size wasn’t appropriate to it’s crew complement aren’t critiquing the film in good faith. The people who pretend that this sort of critique represents the most significant problem with the movie aren’t replying in good faith.
Aliens that grow to tremendous size without any apparent food source? Humans that quickly recover from surgery that outta leave them bedridden for days? It’s maybe a little jarring at the time, but it’s still fairly ordinary movie badassery. I can let it go.
But “gaping plot holes?” You know what? No, you don’t get to dismiss those so airily. Take Aliens and Avatar as two obvious examples of this genre. If you object to those choices on the grounds that this is more cerebral SF while those are more straightforward action pictures, take Moon or 2001 instead.
In all of those pictures the plot more or less holds up. The players have comprehensible motivations and their actions are plausible given those aims. None of those pictures requires all the post-hoc hand-waving that
Terminator: SalvationPrometheus demands.At the end of a picture like this you’re supposed to be able to look back on it and see that it all more or less makes sense. With Prometheus, you have to immediately start Kesselrunning to fix the stuff you saw on screen, and then pretend that you saw some other, better movie instead. (CraigoMc is really good at this, and it would have been a much better picture if they’d let him edit an early version of the script.)
Mayur
That Listen Eggroll post really sums up my issue with the film. The big unanswered plot point is why the Engineers implant an ancestral memory (or actually show up to make an in-person explanation) pointing the way to a planet from which they later decide to launch a biological weapon (or a device for additional genetic evolution; who knows really). It’s really illogical.
A Humble Lurker
@Tehanu:
This is not snark, this is an honest question: were you able to run as well? Just because that’s what she was able to do in….I wanna say less than a day after.
cmorenc
@CraigoMc:
David told the Engineer that he was one stupid ugly looking motherfucker, and the humans were here to kick his ass. David meant to tell the Engineer that the humans were here in peace and wanted to know what happened to the Engineers, but we all know how easy it is to mispronounce a few syllables in a foreign language and wind up saying something with a completely different meaning than we thought we were speaking.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@CraigoMc:
Considering most people’s knowledge of ancient Greece is from Xena:Warrior Princess and 300 assume a passing knowledge of Greek mythology (aka “that flat broke socialist place with the old statues”) is asking an awful lot from an audience. The use of the word “Prometheus” is more of an in joke.
Face it, this is Hollywood; they threw shit at the wall and what stuck and looked cool made it into the movie. Nothing more, nothing less.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Mayur: Says whom? I read the film to say that the engineer on earth was exiled, his ‘imprint’ on the DNA strove to get back home, which led humanity to long to go to a certain planet, which just happened to be where the engineers were from. Apparently, the engineer world wiped itself out accidentally (or otherwise).
So much of the “story” the humans are telling is speculation, I didn’t take any of it as truth. The engineers might not have created humanity on purpose. The engineers weren’t necessarily coming to kill us on earth (the star map might have just been a list of inabitable planets, in a rush to escape the crisis on their planet).
There are things that bugged me about the movie, (calling aliens “martians”, weird mapping consistancy (“where are you guys”/(5 min later) “hey, i can see your blip on this map”), and the collapsed man suddenly flipping around the cargo bay, but these are minor issues, not the major story holes everyone else seems to see.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@CraigoMc:
Death Star ship design; 10,000 men to stand around and look busy, one to press the button to fire the weapon.
Glyph_2112
I like this thread but it’s been mostly negative. Were there plot holes? Of course. But geez, in any movie I could find a place where you wouldn’t have done the same thing as the character. As far as scientists and engineers doing dumb things, look around today. You think BP’s oil spill couldn’t have been prevented with some foresight?
If they really wanted to know why the space engineers wanted to wipe us out, all they would have to do is listen to an hour of Rush Limbaugh and they would have probably helped pilot the horseshoe ship back to earth.
Anyway, the bottom line for me is that I was entertained for a couple of hours and felt my money was well spent. All my kids have enjoyed it as well. I would gladly pay to see a sequel.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn
Late to the party, but did anyone else catch that among the Alien movie’s DNA strands were some strands from WALL-E? David is essentially a darker version of that movie’s main character. In the beginning, David is custodian of the ship in the absence of the human crew, just like WALL-E was a custodian of Earth without the humans on it. David even has a favorite movie he watches, although it’s Lawrence of Arabia as opposed to Hello, Dolly! (The LofA significance would seem to be that Peter O’Toole plays a Westerner who lives among Arabs, essentially as an Arab, and in the end finds difficulty lying claim to either identity.)
Shaw, it turns out, is EVE, charged with finding life in an otherwise barren environment, and uniting it with the humans. Like Pixar’s two ‘bots, David and Shaw wind up united in their efforts.
There’s also the scene in Prometheus of the approaching sandstorm and the race to get up the ramp and into the cargo hold before being swept away; this very scenario played out in WALL-E.
I was quite fascinated by the fairly liberal use of parallels. I wonder if there are more to catch (one thing this movie is not made for is to be viewed only once [provided you can forgive it its weaknesses]).