Prometheus

It’s a Ridley Scott film, so right off the bat we know it’s going to be a meticulously composed, lit, shot and edited beauty. But Prometheus is a maddening movie which poses questions that it doesn’t even bother to answer, or even bring back up after throwing them out there, and can’t make up its mind over whether or not it’s a companion piece of the Alien franchise or the long-gestating prequel. It’s a schizophrenic film in which various plot points, devices and characters change on a whim with little-to-no regard for what has come before.

The film begins its story with a gigantic white Engineer swallowing a black liquid and promptly dying/decomposing before our eyes. Where he is exactly is never explained, nor is what he’s committing ritualistic suicide for. It’s all a load of vague but beautiful images. Even if the makeup job on the Engineers is distracting on how rubbery and synthetic it looks, never fully convincing us that this is a creature to be amazed and silenced in the face of.

No matter. We rush forward to 2089 and meet our two opposing scientific minds – atheist Darwinian evolutionist vs. Christian creationist believer – and, of course, they’re lovers too. Anyway, they keep finding these same cave paintings/stone engravings from ancient times with a figure pointing towards a group of three stars. They gain backing through a privately funded trip by a believed dead eccentric billionaire’s company, and we’re off to explore the universe in the Alien mythos.

And for a period of time, it all plays out in a completely fascinating way. So, Prometheus ISN’T the long-awaited prequel to the whole thing, but a separate entity that expands upon the same universe? Interesting, I enjoyed it.

But then the references to Alien come in, and lead to a conclusion that I can only describe as the filmmakers suddenly going “Oh shit! We need to make this a prequel and tie it in after all!” midway through production. Because it’s right around the midsection of the film that things begin to go flying off the rails at an ever quickening speed.

It took enough of a leap for me to buy into a highly expensive space mission being funded on the slimmest of hunches with little-to-no empirical evidence, but once we get into the mysterious black ooze, David’s twisty-turny machinations and the Engineers having a gloriously bloody freak-out, I was ready to get off this space ride.

You see, while digging around in the bottom levels of the space caverns, they discover a throne room with a moving painting featuring an Alien Queen in the crucifix position, a giant statue of a head and hundreds of containers of black ooze. It’s all appropriately atmospheric and unnerving, but once the black ooze is unleashed to wreak havoc upon the world things just get confusing as the film cannot decide to stick to what it is exactly that this stuff does. It changes willy-nilly depending on what they need it to do.

One moment it transforms a tiny worm into an albino space-cobra with a vaginal opening for a mouth, the next it’s able to turn a dead member of the crew into a contortionist zombie who attacks them, and yet still it transforms another member into a diseased humanoid who looks like he’s suffering from a kind of super-AIDS. And so it goes. This black ooze does whatever the plot requires it to do and never sticks to the logistics that had been established when it was first introduced. So this black ooze can kill the Engineers, but it can also transform someone into a chalky, sore-ridden mess AND impregnate someone who was sterile with an octopus-like creature? Sure, why not, I guess.

And then there’s David, beautifully portrayed by a glacial Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers, two characters who change personality stripes at the drop of a hat. David, like most androids in the Alien universe (Bishop and Call being the exceptions), cannot be trusted on the basis that he’s an android alone. And that he has an secret submission isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is how quickly he betrays that submission and manages to stay active for an incredibly long time without a power source. And he somehow has all the knowledge of the Engineers after stumbling across their layer on his own and spending a few hours there. I’ll grant that an android can assimilate data at a far quicker rate than a human ever possibly could, but the sheer amount of information he would have had to assimilate wouldn’t have taken so quick a time.

And Theron’s character is introduced as a remote Hitchcockian blonde, complete with own secrets and agendas, with a splash of the tough-girl/riot grrrl-power ethos of the original franchise. A subplot about her possibly being an android is brought up, never answered, and forgotten as quickly as it was presented. Her descent into screaming, useless, helpless female is embarrassing. Not for Theron, who plays it all incredibly well, but for the inconsistent writing.

This leads us back to the Engineers, and the faux-profundity of the whole Science vs. Religion debate at the heart of the film. It’s a fancy window dressing that means nothing more than that. The debate is never fully engaged, nor does it really go anywhere besides one character eternally believing and getting her belief reaffirmed through her horrific travails, and the other dying off at the expense of magical black ooze. If the Engineers are gods, or the creators of mankind, and the one we saw at the beginning was giving of itself to create life on earth, why are they so intent on bringing us back to kill us off? And, if this isn’t their home planet, why are they stuck here?

Of course these questions are never answered. They’re only brought up for the inevitable franchise they were hoping to spiral off of this film. The film begins by exploring another pocket of the Alien universe before devolving into a proto-facehugger and Engineer battle that gives birth to an early form of the xenomorph we all know and love. So now we’ve got Prometheus telling us that the Alien franchise was actually symbolic of the Big Issues in life. What? The xenomorph is actually a symbolic form of a hellish demon unleashed upon unsuspecting masses to horde more souls for its dark master? Ha!

As someone who grew up on the Alien franchise I can say this, yes, there was symbolic characters and story lines to real world issues: Ripley being shunned out for being a crazed woman in Aliens by the patriarchy at work in both the military and big government should feel real enough to anyone who has had to face the glass ceiling, or the racism/prejudice involved with androids throughout the franchise, learning to accept and trust the “other.” But the films were mostly well-made and well written exercises in haunted house terror and intense military carnage wrapped up in a sci-fi bow.

For all its posturing to Big Issues and Ideas, Prometheus can’t seem to make up its mind about what the Engineers are, or why. By the time an Engineer straps itself into a gun turret and launches the spaceship which we once thought was a cave or dwelling into the air, we know that all of those big questions were just silly mysticism trying to make the film seem deeper than it was. During, roughly, the first hour when Prometheus focuses in on creating an intense, exciting horror/thriller/action film that it’s at its best. Right after the abortion scene (which is probably the best sequence of the whole film until she keeps running and banging her stitched together stomach on sharp or jagged objects, performing feats which should have ripped the staples out and caused her to bleed to death, but I digress…) is when the hysterical mumbo-jumbo kicks into overdrive and the plot threads unravel at a rapid pace, and it’s all over. In the theater, much like in space, no one could hear me scream.