It has come to my attention that Prometheus is not a
well-written movie. Like, at all. And not because it didn’t answer the
questions about the Alien universe that everyone was expecting, but…the film
just didn’t make that much sense; the characters either completely lost any of
their common sense, or they didn’t have any in the first place. I actually
didn’t mind that we don’t find out what the “Engineers” wanted or why they made
humanity or why they decided to kill it off; I can deal with the idea that we
weren’t meant to know (or that it doesn’t matter). I didn’t even mind most of
the scientist stupidity (“Let’s take off our helmets in this unknown
environment!”) And to be honest, I kind of like that the reason for the cave
paintings was left unanswered. Film Crit Hulk’s article on Damon Lindelof calls this
the “ ‘I want the answers!’ ‘You can’t have the answers!’” dynamic (and by the
way, you all should be reading his work because it’s amazing), but personally,
I felt that wasn’t important. The reasons aren’t important,
but everyone’s reaction is. The main theme isn’t about the actual
creation of humans, but the search for it.
The problem is that the results of the search and character
reactions don’t mean anything because the characters are so inconsistent and
flat. Holloway falls into a drunken depression within hours of learning that
he’s right, but he can’t personally talk to an alien. He’s had this theory
about intelligent life for what we assume to be years, and he’s sad because he
can’t personally have a conversation with them? Sad enough to down a bottle of
vodka? Really? Milburn is scared shitless by a bunch of dead alien bodies, but
when he sees a live vagina monster, he’s not scared in the slightest? Janek
doesn’t give a fuck about the mission, and yet he somehow figures out that the
xenomorph primordial soup was a biological weapon meant to kill us? Jackson the
security guy sees a twisted body that was originally in the Temple of Doom and
his first reaction is “Hey, look at this” ? (Protip: if you’re ever in a scary
situation and see something unusual, don’t get closer to examine it! “Hey
look at this” is almost guaranteed to get you killed!) Shaw has the ability to
go home, away from the alien crazy, and instead decides to go after the aliens
who could kill her in a second along with the robot that’s been creeping on her
for the entire movie? What?
Speaking of David, I loved him (as I do most robot
characters), and he’s possibly the only nuanced character; I only wish we got
more time with him. The Weyland family dynamic is really something that was
shoehorned in (“Kings die someday, DAD”), and David’s devotion to his father
combined with his fixation on Shaw hands down makes him the most interesting
character on the ship. He’s supposed to be support for the crew, but it’s made
clear very early on that he has his own agenda, and while his agenda is vague,
it’s not baffling. David is driven by his desire to gain acceptance as a true
son by his father, his fascination with Elizabeth, and his curiosity about
alien life. The last point may be related to the first; Weyland has spent over
a trillion dollars and possibly sacrificed an entire crew just to have a chance
to meet the creators of the human race, and so David’s fascination may be an
extension of his desire to please his father. However, it also may relate to
Ash’s admiration of the alien in the original Alien; David has spent his entire
life trying to be accepted as a human son, so perhaps he is curious about the
first non-human creature he’s ever encountered. Poisoning Holloway may have
been an experiment to see what this life form was capable of, but it is unclear
whether this was part of Weyland’s plan or David’s interpretation of it.
Whichever it was, the fact that Holloway is Shaw’s boyfriend was definitely a
factor, and David definitely has a vastly different version of morality than
anybody else on the ship.
But talking about David, Weyland, and Vickers reveals the
biggest problem with Prometheus; most of the meaning derived from it is
completely subjective. A lot of the things I just said were how I interpreted
it, and there are a ton of different interpretations, some of which are based
on prior drafts or deleted scenes from the film. Supposedly there’s going to be
a director’s cut, which seems like a bit of a cop out to me. The film should
make concrete sense on its own; any theory that is based on deleted scenes is
automatically invalid because those scenes weren’t in the finished product.
Personally, I think that David’s actions can be explained, but it’s never truly
clear, and while it’s a much more interesting mystery than why the Engineers
try to kill off humanity, it’s still an important element of the film that’s
kind of left dangling. I can say that David’s lack of morals is an example of
the non-humanity that he struggles with for the entire film, but I don’t really know if
I’m not intended to be sure of that or if Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof don’t
know either, or just don’t care. I think comparing Prometheus to Alien is
pretty unfair (they’re only tangentially related at best, and Alien is tightly
focused whereas Prometheus is intentionally sprawling), but Ash is given a
clear and direct purpose: bring the alien back to earth at all costs, and in
retrospect, everything he does comes back to that directive. David has much
more of a developed personality than Ash underneath his congenial demeanor,
with his own wants, but that makes his motives much more unclear.
And that’s really the thing about Prometheus; I liked it at
first, but what I was interested in (besides the amazing cinematography) was
more the seeds of ideas instead of something truly concrete. I still wouldn’t
say it’s a bad movie by any means, but it’s definitely more vague than it
should be.
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