Prometheus (2012)
Jun. 3rd, 2012 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerNon-spoiler summary: Having watched the trailers several dozen times, I fear I had assembled in my head a rather better movie from which they drew than the one I actually saw. Prometheus is visually stunning, intense, at times shocking (it must have scraped its '15' rating) and with excellent performances from Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender, but it also suffers from thin supporting characters, dubious plotting and, above all, a seeming confusion as to what sort of movie it wants to be. Worth seeing, but hardly the all-consuming behemoth of awesome that the buildup has led us to expect.
From here on, things get VERY SPOILERY INDEED
A group of archaeologists, biologists and geologists travel to a far-off, hostile environment. Amidst towering mountains, they uncover evidence of alien life that may have seeded all life on earth. But something comes back to life, death and horror ensue, and the few traumatised survivors realise that our makers' own creations turned on them and pose a dreadful threat to us too.
Yes, you can see why Guillermo Del Toro abandoned plans to film At The Mountains Of Madness when he heard about the plot of Prometheus. The Alien franchise has been Lovecraftian in tone ever since the first film, but Prometheus really takes us back to the source material; for that matter, the giant-size squid-cum-facehugger we see near the end probably wins the prize for Cthuloid Monstrosity of the Year. Indeed, if the tone Ridley Scott was aiming for is 'cosmic horror' then for much of the second half of the film he does quite well, although the ending explicitly rejects it - true cosmic horror is something you flee screaming from, not go out to explore the heart of. Of course, Dr Shaw's final odyssey arises in part because of decision to make this an explicit precursor to Alien; she cannot return to Earth, or the events of Alien would be different.
(A plot hole that any sequel will have to fill is why Weyland Industries doesn't send a follow-up expedition to LV-223, although Prometheus suggests that the mission's nature was a secret even to most of those aboard, and Peter Weyland's assumed heir died with him. Indeed, perhaps this leadership vacuum is why Weyland becomes Weyland-Yutani by the time of the events of Alien a few decades later.)
In terms of continuity, Prometheus is... confused. There are explicit call-outs (the Engineers' ships, the 'Space Jockey', Weyland Industries) and some more subtle ones; I love the way that Peter Weyland's holographic briefing is accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith's haunting theme from Alien. At the same time there is almost gleeful trashing of three decades of spin-off canon: Peter Weyland, not Charles Bishop Weyland, is the founder of Weyland Industries; the Space Jockeys are not elephantine aliens, but rather giant humanoids in organic spacesuits. (In artistic terms, I like the comment I saw that the Engineers resemble nothing so much as William Blake's titans.) And while the final scene - which felt very tacked-on - showed something very reminiscent of a xenomorph, its life cycle seems very different from that seen in the other films.
What every film to date - even those of, er, dubious canonicity (hello anything with the words 'Alien' and 'Predator' in the title) - has shown is parasitism; an embryo is implanted in a host. But the plot device in Prometheus is the black oil found in the Engineers' casks, which appears to work by infection. A minuscule amount is enough to infect Holloway (and rather more has a much more dramatic effect on Fifield); Holloway then infects Shaw, resulting in an accelerated pseudo-pregnancy of a squid-like creature that itself seems to parasitise others. The implication seems to be that the oil is some sort of potent targeted mutagen and indeed, going back to Lovecraft, it is awfully reminiscent of the Milk of Shub-Niggurath, particularly its depiction in more modern interpretations such as Delta Green.
I also wonder how many other Alien fans thought, like me, "I know how this is going to end". I expected the final scene to be the Engineer crawling back to the crashed spacecraft, getting back into his seat, and then dying as a chestburster exploded from him - whilst, nearby, the casks mutated into the eggs found by Kane. This would even explain why Shaw removed David's robotic body (the bodies of Weyland and his minions would presumably have been consumed by the xenomorph), thus setting things up for the arrival of the Nostromo a few decades later. But that would, I suppose, have been a bit too near, as well as requiring the Nostromo's crew not to notice there being a huge alien construct or thousands of bits of the Prometheus lying around. But there are so many points of similarity - the ringed planet LV-223 orbits looks just like the one seen in Alien - that I wonder if this had been the original planned ending until Scott perhaps decided that there would have been too many loose ends to clean up.
Overall I enjoyed Prometheus but emerged vaguely unsatisfied and a little disappointed. As I said, the buildup to this film has been such as to make it unlikely that it would meet expectations, but I had thought we'd get something a little less unsure of what it was trying to be. Also, as a prequel of sorts to Alien, the film dooms the Prometheus' crew by having them do the sort of thing that nobody who had ever seen Alien would be daft enough to even consider, because of course they never have.
From here on, things get VERY SPOILERY INDEED
A group of archaeologists, biologists and geologists travel to a far-off, hostile environment. Amidst towering mountains, they uncover evidence of alien life that may have seeded all life on earth. But something comes back to life, death and horror ensue, and the few traumatised survivors realise that our makers' own creations turned on them and pose a dreadful threat to us too.
Yes, you can see why Guillermo Del Toro abandoned plans to film At The Mountains Of Madness when he heard about the plot of Prometheus. The Alien franchise has been Lovecraftian in tone ever since the first film, but Prometheus really takes us back to the source material; for that matter, the giant-size squid-cum-facehugger we see near the end probably wins the prize for Cthuloid Monstrosity of the Year. Indeed, if the tone Ridley Scott was aiming for is 'cosmic horror' then for much of the second half of the film he does quite well, although the ending explicitly rejects it - true cosmic horror is something you flee screaming from, not go out to explore the heart of. Of course, Dr Shaw's final odyssey arises in part because of decision to make this an explicit precursor to Alien; she cannot return to Earth, or the events of Alien would be different.
(A plot hole that any sequel will have to fill is why Weyland Industries doesn't send a follow-up expedition to LV-223, although Prometheus suggests that the mission's nature was a secret even to most of those aboard, and Peter Weyland's assumed heir died with him. Indeed, perhaps this leadership vacuum is why Weyland becomes Weyland-Yutani by the time of the events of Alien a few decades later.)
In terms of continuity, Prometheus is... confused. There are explicit call-outs (the Engineers' ships, the 'Space Jockey', Weyland Industries) and some more subtle ones; I love the way that Peter Weyland's holographic briefing is accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith's haunting theme from Alien. At the same time there is almost gleeful trashing of three decades of spin-off canon: Peter Weyland, not Charles Bishop Weyland, is the founder of Weyland Industries; the Space Jockeys are not elephantine aliens, but rather giant humanoids in organic spacesuits. (In artistic terms, I like the comment I saw that the Engineers resemble nothing so much as William Blake's titans.) And while the final scene - which felt very tacked-on - showed something very reminiscent of a xenomorph, its life cycle seems very different from that seen in the other films.
What every film to date - even those of, er, dubious canonicity (hello anything with the words 'Alien' and 'Predator' in the title) - has shown is parasitism; an embryo is implanted in a host. But the plot device in Prometheus is the black oil found in the Engineers' casks, which appears to work by infection. A minuscule amount is enough to infect Holloway (and rather more has a much more dramatic effect on Fifield); Holloway then infects Shaw, resulting in an accelerated pseudo-pregnancy of a squid-like creature that itself seems to parasitise others. The implication seems to be that the oil is some sort of potent targeted mutagen and indeed, going back to Lovecraft, it is awfully reminiscent of the Milk of Shub-Niggurath, particularly its depiction in more modern interpretations such as Delta Green.
I also wonder how many other Alien fans thought, like me, "I know how this is going to end". I expected the final scene to be the Engineer crawling back to the crashed spacecraft, getting back into his seat, and then dying as a chestburster exploded from him - whilst, nearby, the casks mutated into the eggs found by Kane. This would even explain why Shaw removed David's robotic body (the bodies of Weyland and his minions would presumably have been consumed by the xenomorph), thus setting things up for the arrival of the Nostromo a few decades later. But that would, I suppose, have been a bit too near, as well as requiring the Nostromo's crew not to notice there being a huge alien construct or thousands of bits of the Prometheus lying around. But there are so many points of similarity - the ringed planet LV-223 orbits looks just like the one seen in Alien - that I wonder if this had been the original planned ending until Scott perhaps decided that there would have been too many loose ends to clean up.
Overall I enjoyed Prometheus but emerged vaguely unsatisfied and a little disappointed. As I said, the buildup to this film has been such as to make it unlikely that it would meet expectations, but I had thought we'd get something a little less unsure of what it was trying to be. Also, as a prequel of sorts to Alien, the film dooms the Prometheus' crew by having them do the sort of thing that nobody who had ever seen Alien would be daft enough to even consider, because of course they never have.
