I‘ve a certain set of skills that allows me to rationalize anything in movies that I love. I could even write a thesis about how Signs is actually the most realistic depiction of an alien invasion ever put on celluloid. My skills are not enough to rationalize Prometheus. It is one of the stupidest films ever made. But it’s made by people who think they are really smart and deep, and they had a huge budget, and the film is entertaining and also a prequel to one of my top 5 favourite films, so… I do love it.
It is stupid from second one, though.
It starts with amazing images of my home country, Iceland. We see an alien, an engineer, watching as his spaceship leaves him stranded. He sips some black goo and dissolves into DNA that replicates itself into multi-cellular organism—the seeding of life on earth. Many have thought what that scene meant but that is also stupid because Ridley Scott isn’t a subtle person. We all know what it means. The engineers created life on earth.
The problem is that Iceland isn’t just a collection of black and rocky otherworldly vistas devoid. It’s surprisingly green. I know that because I live here, you know that because Ridley shows us that in first frames of the film. The beautiful mountains brimming with green moss. By the time that amount of moss had gathered on places far away from the oceans, sharks and our ancestors already existed in said oceans. Hell, the alien probably stepped on a scorpion or a millipede on his way to the waterfall.
I know I’m being nitpicky here, but the alien was hundred of millions of years too late for multicellular life, and about 3.5 billion years too late to create life on earth.
I’m also being generous. It’s not just moss, but grass. Grass evolved about 110 million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
Anyways, because of some circles ancient people drew on walls, the eccentrics Weyland sends a spaceship to a moon that supposedly is one of those circles. Spending trillions of dollars to do so. Because they think that aliens created us who wanted us to find them but left only clues in ancient caves. Did the engineers paint those paintings? How did the ancient people grasp the concept of another star system? How did they know how the star system looked like? We are talking about 35-thousand-year-old paintings. That’s 25 thousand years older than the advent of agriculture.
The film’s protagonist is the doctor who discovered the paintings. She has gotten a crew of people to an alien moon that ancient aliens directed them to and she is surprised that there are weapons involved for security.
They find a structure. It has less CO2 than the atmosphere outside so, of course, the other doctor, Naomi’s husband, takes his helmet off. She tells him it’s stupid but when he can breathe, she takes her helmet off, too. They are in a structure they believe was created by aliens that share our DNA and they take their helmets off. It has breathable air (a byproduct of living organisms) and they take their fucking helmets off.
I could go on. Literally.
There are other issues, too. Ridley Scott wanted to have it both ways when it came to how this connects to the Alien series. He wanted to have freedom to do what he wanted, but wanted to explore the engineers more. He, or at least the studio, wanted the connection to the alien franchise to be more obvious than just the engineers or Weyland. The result makes no sense. Firstly, sure we all thought what the elephant dude from Alien’s story was. The obvious answer was that he was an alien race that had tried to contain the xenomorphs—like humans want and try to do in the original sequels. Like the humans, that alien elephant race failed.
What we do know is that he was killed by a xenomorph.
Ridley decided that the elephant thing was a suit, the alien was a Greek statue that not only created us but IS us. Yeah, that scene at the start of the film makes even less sense when it turns out that the DNA from an engineer’s head they found is a match with human DNA. We know roughly our evolutionary history. The only way for it to make sense that we share the same DNA is if engineers are literal humans that somehow conquered space travel while most humans were trying to figure out language. But then what the hell was that beginning? And what the hell burst out of the engineers that are dead in this film?
Also how did the engineer have a spaceship filled with eggs when David created the xenomorphs? Ridley really wanted the film to be about creation and the connection between the creator and creation and how the creation can became a creator. Weyland created David, David created the xenomorphs, the engineers created humans, etc. But it makes no sense.
The new Alien: Earth series also hammers home how you can make a prequel to a film made in the 1970s that featured 1970s technology. Notice in that series how they use a pretty basic DOS-like operating system and all the tech is pretty thick and CRT-y. That’s what they use in the Nostromo so obviously that is how future tech is. In Prometheus, they just use future tech as we envisioned it in 2012. It makes no sense that they went from high glossy tech with 3-D projections to MS DOS.
The new Naked Gun film had a P.L.O.T. device. That is more subtle than the magic goo featured in this film. What is it? Who knows. What does it do? Whatever the plot needs it to do at that moment. It seems to cause rapid growth (that doesn’t have to follow the laws of thermodynamics) and DNA mutation. Sometimes that leads to a functioning new species, like the worm that gets turned into a snakefacehugger (which a scientist tries to pet), or just a horrible disfigured mutant creature. It could be argued that the goo is the xenomorphs, since It seems to strive to create facehuggers.
Yeah, I love the film. It’s a big budget version of a stupid 80s alien-rip-off. That’s how I view it. It’s not canon, obviously. It’s a rip-off film like Galaxy of Terror but made by an immensely talented filmmaker (not storyteller). It’s beautiful and filled with insanely talented actors. It’s both entertaining and educational. You can watch it and learn what actions are stupid by following a simple rule: if a character in this film does it, it’s stupid.
