A few days ago, I saw this:
people thought Prometheus was a bad movie because it asked and then didn’t provide an answer to the question “what is the meaning of life” and that’s why you shouldn’t even bother trying to make your movie even slightly intelligent
(It was on the Facebook profile of someone I don’t know. I’m sure they won’t mind if I lift it without attributing it, especially as I’m not going to attack it.)
Here’s the problem. There’s a reason I tend to go along with critical consensus in choosing the films I watch, because a) apart from The Master of Disguise, watching badly-received films just depresses me and provides exactly the reaction I expect to get (critical consensus is generally reliable), and b) life is too short for bad art.
Prometheus has had a lot of middling reviews. They’ve all eventually agreed that it’s, okay, kind of good, but it’s by no means a masterpiece. They’ve also had a tendency to do what the above quote accuses them of - say that it builds up intellectual expectation, but doesn’t deliver on what it apparently promises (and I’m not sure that the so-called promise exists in the first place). It’s not a good criticism. It isn’t fair. So there’s the first part of the problem - this time around, having seen both the films and a cluster of reviews, I can’t go with the critical consensus.
Now, here’s the second part - in terms of this film’s overall quality, rather than delving into the specifics of why it’s flawed, I am in exactly the same camp. There are a lot of problems with this film; I kind of liked it despite those flaws; but in a world where I respected star systems it’d still be hovering somewhere around three out of five.
That makes criticising this film difficult, because first I have to defend it. I’m sure my criticisms are by no means unique (in fact, I’m going to echo some of the problems raised in Ian Nathan’s Empire review), but they haven’t, generally speaking, been the so-called “main problem”. I am okay with films that force me to speculate. Not every unanswered question is a plot hole. And for a film that has a few honest-to-god plot holes, we’d do well to tell them apart.
Things get very spoilerific after the cut. You have been warned.
OK - let’s start with that Strong Female Protagonist, Elisabeth Shaw, who everyone’s screaming is “the new Ellen Ripley”. Maybe I’m over-protective of a film franchise I love, maybe I’m a little jaded, but they’re nothing alike - and Ripley comes out on top. In terms of the basic formula - that is, the plot without the metaphorical depth - Prometheus is very similar, but with added glitz - a team of people in space, out of their depth, stumble across a bunch of alien things which proceed to kill all but one of them off in a variety of gory and scary ways. At the end of Alien, Ripley (rationally) manages to escape, and fucks off back to Earth with no intent on ever coming back. (And then James Cameron really fucked her over in the sequel.)
Elisabeth Shaw sees her squadmates dismembered, her lover contract an alien sickness that is destined to kill him, and one of her so-called creators rage out and murder everyone in a room but her, and thinks it’s a great idea to go and find more of them with the severed head of Michael Fassbender. That’s stupid.
I’ve seen one or two critics say that Elisabeth Shaw is the new Ripley because her philosophy is a “bold new one”. Bullshit. By the end of Prometheus, I was wondering if the death of everyone close to Shaw had turned her into a sociopath, totally incapable of providing an emotional point of entry for the audience. Sure, she sobs, wails, cries, has self-doubt and so on - but I’m not buying the argument that she “has to know” why the Engineers created the tentacle-monster-generating-ooze to wipe out humanity in the first place.
It’s made pretty clear that it was a plan that failed, was accidentally restarted by a bunch of silly humans, and then sabotaged to a point of total destruction again, and the idea that stupid little Shaw might go flying off to give them another chance to destroy humanity is so lacking in critical thought or foresight that I’m amazed anyone likes the whole wide-eyed-innocence crap. Anyone would be a little jaded by seeing the love of their life burned to death and their crewmates torn apart, and the ones who aren’t are either insane, stupid, or both.
I mention this first not because it’s the biggest flaw, but because it leads into more or less everything else. Truth be told, I think Elisabeth Shaw is less of a character than a guiding principle - and that’s why it doesn’t shake at the end. Because it should, but I think it’s one of the many cases where the screenwriters (newcomer Jon Spaihts, who also wrote the awfully-received The Darkest Hour, and Damon Lindelof, who wrote, uh, Lost) let the grand metaphorical vision overrule the integrity of the plot.
Prometheus operates on two levels. There’s the basic, Alien-esque plot. And then there’s the big, lofty ideas. The latter keeps overstepping the former, and not in any way that could be considered stylistically impressive. Shaw’s Big Final Decision is the worst culprit, but there are plenty of others.
Like this one: that part where we suddenly learned that wrinkly old Peter Weyland was onboard? (Oh! Fun fact: Guy Pearce only played that role because his younger self was initially supposed to appear in the film as flashback footage, before it was relegated to this TED viral piece, making him probably the first young actor to go through extensive aging prosthetics for the purposes of a marketing campaign.) And how there was the subplot where Charlize Theron turned out to be his daughter? And how she had that weirdly poetic speech in private about how he should just hurry up and die and accept that things keep pressing on, rather than getting too entrenched in origins, you know, of companies, and families, and, and, THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE? LIKE HOW FOCUSING TOO HARD ON THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITY MIGHT BE A BAD IDEA? DO YOU GET IT, DADDY? DO YOU?
A little overblown, is what I’m saying. A little too much of the plot being trampled on by the metaphor, rather than standing on its own coherently. You watch that scene with Theron, and sure, it’s all cool, and mystical, and stuff, and things, and yeah, but there’s some voice in the back of your head screaming real people don’t do this. It’s jarring to watch.
Maybe the problem is just that the plot - the meat of the film that rests on the bones of those cool nifty ideas Lindelof’s such a fan of - is simple, and by simple I don’t mean minimalist. I mean that as a big, silly, action-packed blockbuster with no depth, this would have gone down fine. (By minimalist, I mean 2001: A Space Odyssey, which understood the problems of marrying huge plots with huge themes and resolved to pare away the former as much as it possibly could to great effect.) There’s this scene where Fifield - oh, this is Fifield:
There’s a scene where he inexplicably turns up outside the ship after having his face melted off and for no reason decides to kill as many of the remaining crew as he can. There’s no reason for it. As a silly grindhouse cliché, it works fine. In a film where everything has to have a purpose, even the most superficial details, it’s stupid.
And I could leave it there, and call this film a failure, and add to the maelstrom of negativity surrounding it, and it’d be nothing new. But the thing is… there are things to like about this film. In particular, one thing, and I won’t be saying anything new in saying what it is - though I hope to explain why it works a little better. First, though, the other stuff.
The set-pieces are brilliant. There are some nifty storytelling devices that both make the viewer think and don’t require huge amounts of dialogue (especially the first scene with the starmap, as depicted at the start of this post). The opening scene is brilliant. The Prometheus - as in, the ship - is brilliantly designed, right down to the holographic introduction by Weyland. There’s enough that bleeds into the Alien mythos (including adequate reason why the Nostromo was a heap of junk by comparison - it’s made clear that the Prometheus is top of the line) to stop fans from raising eyebrows. It’s consistent - both visually, and in the broader strokes, assuming you don’t probe too deep.
There’s also that haunting score - it takes a different tack from the jarring sounds in Alien, but succeeds because of it. This film has a much bigger, epic scale, and it has the soundtrack to match.
And you know what? Ignore the execution, and the ideas in this film are awesome. There’s a big part of me that speaks to the theme of mankind’s origins, and conspiracies, and alien life. I’m 21, and already preoccupied with my own mortality - Prometheus engages with that, too. There’s the danger of unchecked curiosity, and an examination of a bunch of altogether human traits that fuck us up - if nothing else, Prometheus acts as a case study in why it might not be the worst idea to cover our planet in tentacle-generating-slime and start over, because we have a tendency to fuck things up.
Best, though - and it was obvious I was going to say this - is David, the ship’s android. Michael Fassbender follows in a relatively short line of awesomely creepy robots - Ian Holm in Alien, Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Lance Henrikson in Aliens, and so on. He perfectly occupies that uncanny valley between human and nothing like humans, and for a minute he almost feels like the real star of the show. It’s David that opens the film while everyone else is in stasis, watching them dream, learning languages, watching Lawrence of Arabia on repeat - and he helps focus the film whenever it begins to teeter (it’s no surprise that the two weakest parts occur in his absence). He isn’t a simple servant, but neither does he have a fully-developed human personality - there’s the sense that there’s something in there, held back by his subservience to Weyland.
But really, it’s David that charges this film because we don’t see a problem with an android doing things that might be put down to character flaws in people. It’s David’s curiosity, orders, or maybe a combination of the two that set off a few of the horrible chains of events within the film, and they’re genuinely creepy, where the same actions by a human character would provoke the usual “oh my god you MORON” reactions that horror fans are used to.
In narrative, humans are limited by their humanity - the ones who step outside it are either villains, or unrealistic portrayals as a result of bad writing. By comparison, David’s personality is an open book - what might be considered bad writing otherwise feels more like a glimpse at something altogether different. It’s not just that, as an android, he’s convenient to write for - it’s that that convenience is taken advantage of to make us feel uncomfortable.
Throw all of that together, and you get a film that is complicated. You want to surrender yourself to the bigger thoughts, as experienced through a big silly plot, but there are too many clashes to do so. You want to focus on a totally fascinating character, but the camera keeps panning away. You want to marvel at the prettiness of it all, and then some idiot fucks it up by saying something that sounds like it’s out of a B-movie. It’s a victim of bad design, but it hints at something better. You might hate it, but at the end of it you still want to see a sequel.