Sunday, 10 June 2012
We try to work out what the fuck Prometheus is about.
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Needless to say, spoilers abound.
Themes: TV & Movies, Peacast Shownotes, Podcasts
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I also thought it was very weird that they just kind of ignored the fact that there was a tentacle monster in the sickbay. Did anyone else think they also seemed to have ignored the fact that they had just been attacked by a zombie? I almost wonder if that scene was inserted at a late stage to add more action, because it never gets mentioned again.
My one other thought was that it was stage-y. The two locations were just point A and point B connected by empty (albeit very pretty and vista-y) space. It felt rather constricted and linear, without being atmospherically claustrophobic in the way that Alien was.
The vagueness of the layout of, well, just about everything was something I found really distracting, which is something I've never encountered in a film before. Usually I am quite happy to accept that I don't really need to know which way Darth Vader has to go on the Death Star to get into his TIE-Fighter, or what the exact layout of the Starship Enterprise is, or precisely where the air ducts on the Nostromo go, but in this case I found it irksome, particularly since spatial relationships are a big part of the visuals.
I know I keep coming back to the scene where Shaw is running around in her pants covered in blood with great big staples in her tummy, but it was far and away the most jarring scene for me and completely broke the illusion. Partially because I was forced to think "Wooooow, she's really being humiliated in a way Ripley never was in Alien", but also because it forced me to think "Waaaaait a second, why is nobody reacting to this at all?", and so I was prompted to start trying to work out whether she was on the main ship or the fairly expansive space shuttle and whether it really made sense for nobody to hear or see her running around like that and so on.
Another thing I found jarring was that if you look at the 3D map the little spheres make of the Space Jockey complex, it's clear that there's a lot of stuff in there - for instance, there's passages winding all the way to the top of the dome - but the film only ever uses a tiny fraction of these locations: the entry, the death room, and the cuddle pile. (The ship seems to be docked in a port area rather than being an intrinsic part of the complex.) We never get to see what the deal is with that passageway going up to the top, despite the fact that whenever we see the map the spheres are exploring more and more of it. For an outfit which is meant to be on an exploratory mission they really don't show much enthusiasm for exploration - and, again, if the geologist and biologist wanted to find a safe place, why go to the creepy room with the dead body and the thermos stash when they could see where that long passage goes?
If true, this is Deckard-was-a-replicant levels of stupid from Ridley Scott.
Because of course a woman giving birth to a squid is the height of subtlety, and isn't even remotely stupid.
- They take as a premise that the Space Jockeys are all about sacrificing themselves to bring forth life rather than allowing for self-preservation. This isn't established in the movie even remotely. The sequence with the Space Jockey killing itself on maybe-Earth gives us too little information to assume that that leads to life being seeded - in fact, quite the opposite, it looks like that DNA there is being destroyed right down to the atomic level rather than being disseminated across the world, so it looks more like an execution or a suicide than a sacrifice to bring forth life. At no other point do we see a Space Jockey sacrificing themselves; indeed, they seem quite intent on eliminating others for their own inscrutable purposes.
- They also assume that the black goo only becomes evil on contact with humans, which means we go back to having no idea what caused the mass death in the Space Jockey base 2000 years ago. It can't be as a result of human contamination of the goo because there's no sign of any humans being brought back to the base, and according to the WorstPreview theory the black goo in contact with Space Jockeys causes love and cuddles. I don't buy it; more or less the only assessment of the black goo which makes sense is Idris' character's assumption that it's a bioweapon, and the planet they've landed on is a military base, because we never see the black goo doing anything other than kill stuff.
I'll admit, the first time I saw it, I didn't entirely understand everything that was going on. However, it hit that certain unquantifiable threshold where all the discordant elements of a work stop being "mistakes" and become deliberate stylistic choices. The people who made this movie are not stupid men. If they wanted to make a straightforward Alien prequel, they could have done so. The question then is: why? (I think like this a lot. I usually read art on a thematic level, and I prefer to ignore the "logical consistency" of plot or character until I can see the work as a whole. As a viewer, I can't see the trees for the forest.)
Anyway, one thing led to another, and I eventually ended up on a thread on SomethingAwful, which honestly helped me out immensely. A number of the posters (a disproportionate number of whom have names that are some variant of "mecha godzilla") saw the film in a similar light, and a lot of what they've written has managed to clarify my thinking with Prometheus. I think the thread's starting to slip towards the archive pay wall, so I'd recommend looking through some of it now. (I started reading around page 250, so that's a start if you need one.)
To summarize all I've absorbed and figured out briefly, I think Prometheus works best if you do not see it as a documentary on planetary exploration, but as a fable of mankind's search for ultimate truth (or ultimate knowledge, or the Lacanian Real, take your pick) and his relationship with said truth, told through the language of Golden Age scifi tropes. Once you start looking at the movie that way, a lot of it starts to fall into place.
The tragedy of Prometheus is that most of the characters attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the Engineers under the impression that they are the masters of the world, or that they are owed something. Weyland, obviously, wants divinity in the form of eternal life. Capt. Janek wants his paycheck, as does the geologist Fifield (Fifield is a debatable case; you could argue that by his mohawk, tattoos, and his mapping "pups" that he has a sublimated desire to modify his body beyond its mundane limits, a wish that is unwillingly granted after his visor melts into his face and he is transformed by the black goo into an ubermensch). The biologist Milburn wants to make friends. Vickers doesn't care what they find, so long as it gets her her father's company. Both Holloway and Shaw want knowledge, but they are subtly different. Holloway wants the Engineers to tell him their secrets first-hand, and is disappointed when it isn't handed to him on a silver platter. When they first land on the moon, he overrides Janek's suggestion that they wait until dawn to perform the first survey by saying "it's Christmas. I wanna open my presents," which tells you all you need to know about his character. Shaw wants to know, but there is no real entitlement to her desire. She's perfectly happy just to study the inscriptions in the catacombs in the beginning of the movie. After her experiences, her desire to know becomes an active quest, but it's not borne of a need for vengeance (you did this to me, you cannot do this, I will make you pay) but out of a desire to understand the new world she has found herself in (your actions have changed how I interpret myself and my place in the world, and now I must rebuild my understanding of the world). It also seems quite likely she's going to spend her time planet-hopping rather than making a beeline for the Engineer's homeworld. The quest for knowledge is not punished in Prometheus, but assuming you can treat the ultimate truth of the universe like a bank machine will get you killed.
Sadly, since I am beginning to fall asleep, I will have to cut this defense far too short, but I will say that there is far more going on Prometheus than a surface reading can show (a major theme of the movie, incidentally, one that occurs again and again in the course of the excavation, the events and structure of the plot, and also in Scott's use of the tropes and images of Alien and Aliens).
It'd be perfectly possible for a director of Scott's calibre - during his prime at least - to create a film with all of this nuance and which is also tells a good and coherent story on the surface. But Scott hired one of the writers of Lost to do the script so I think that tells you all you need to know about how much of his judgement and taste he's retained.
In particular, I see no way in which this:
is even remotely supported by the film. Shaw shows no interest in visiting any other planet whatsoever.
I also think the analysis ascribes somewhat loftier and cleverer aspects to the spiritual side of the film than you can really seriously expect when Scott in interviews seems to be implying that he semi-believes in the whole ancient astronauts thing. Sorry, but garbage in/garbage out applies here: Chariots of the Gods is daft and only daftness can arise from it.