Prometheus (2012)
Jun. 11th, 2012 12:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyPrometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott, 2012.
Well, so that happened.
I thinkkuwdora, with whom I laughed my way through this trope-fest under the glares of fanboys, said it best when she said, "So Ridley Scott totally just made a Lord King Bad Movie!" Yes, yes he did.
I read a really great, snarky, fairly non-spoilery review before I saw the movie, and one of the things it said was that Michael Fassbender, playing the android David 8 in the single best element of the film, frequently seems to be in a completely different movie, and that it would be nice if the other characters could join him there. Thoughkuwdora and I actually couldn't figure out where we would start if we were going to try to fix this film, I will say that one of the biggest problems with the movie is that there's actually at least three different movies going on simultaneously, and they only really intersect a few times, mostly when characters die and gasp obscure phrases that are meant to convey Deep Meanings about Faith and Whatnot with Mythical Significance. Insert tab A into slot B! Cross narrative lines in a way that is Deeply Meaningful. NO.
So, there is the movie that Idris Elba's character, Captain Janek, and most of the rest of the crew are in, which is a pretty standard sci-fi horror schlockfest made bearable by the true beauty of the movie's visuals and the fact that Idris Elba's character is one of only two in the movie with a scrap of genre savvy [Warning: Link goes to TV Tropes, which Weyland Corp. clearly acquired and shut down at some point]. There is also the movie that Noomi Rapace's Dr. Elizabeth Shaw is in, which is some kind of latter-day parable about Faith and The Nature of Humanity and What The Fuck Ever, Ridley Scott, FFS. And there is also one and a half movies with Fassbender as David 8 and Charlize Theron as the stone-cold BAMF Meredith Vickers, one of the other two characters with genre savvy, acting out some kind of Freudian psychodrama in which they compete futilely with one another for the affection and approval of their dying father figure. Spoilers: He's never gonna love you, kids. Half of that 1.5 movies is David 8 following Directive 937 and boldly going where no one has gone before with a kind of blithe unconcern that is, I think, actually truly new in sci-fi. It's that movie that gets the standout scene of the film, in which David 8 activates the holocordings on the aliens' bridge, and which non-coincidentally is the only sequence touched with any sense of wonder.
Basically I could watch a whole movie with David 8, and like the snarky reviewer I would gladly have traded some of the gratuitous and formulaic action sequences for more shots of him chilling on the Prometheus while the crew is in cryo-sleep pre-planetfall (moonfall, technically). The truly SFnal part of this story is with him and his fascinating inhumanity (like snarky reviewer or someone said, his empathy is hardwired but his ethics are adaptable), but there are people to scratch off the crew roster and tropes to glorify in like a pig in mud, no time!
All that being said, however, when the Prometheus touched down on the planet (which, I'm sorry, I know my own planet, and it was pretty clearly Iceland through and through) I thought, "See, this movie is an ad for why the government should not get out of space exploration in favor of corporations!" i.e. no sense of wonder, and then for most of the movie I sat there thinking - because Star Trek V is objectively a terrible movie, but it had some good things in it, and one of them was the startlingly useful question, "What does God want with a starship?" For these reasons, I was totally unsympathetic to Noomi Rapace's character and her status as the (this is an actual quote from the screenplay) True Believer until about halfway through, and I could not wait for her asshole scientist boyfriend, who is the worst kind of cheap believer, to fulfill his obvious plot-role as alien bait. (And then Meredith Vickers STRAIGHT-UP SET HIM ON FIRE, flambeed scientist, served up fresh! and then I knew I loved her.) The narrative alternately sympathizes with and condemns Rapace's character for her faith, which was perpetually jarring. And also, dear Noomi Rapace's character and Weyland, it's never actually proven that the so-called "Engineers' engineered shit, IJS. For that reason among many others, the cliché-fest of Weyland's plot line doesn't even bear discussion, and I am totally in line with Meredith Vickers' dismissal of it and of him.
The reason I developed a sudden onset of sympathy for Noomi Rapace's character was her giving herself an abortion (NOT a Cesarean, dear screenwriters) of her alien baby after attacking the medical personnel and reprogramming the med-pod that was ONLY DESIGNED FOR MALE PATIENTS, ah hahaha OF COURSE, and then jacking herself up with drugs and following along to the alien bridge, because clearly she too is a BAMF. As David 8 nastily observed, "I didn't think you had it in you." But oh my god, it was just SO BEYOND CLICHÉ, I cannot even tell you, I would have been laughing except I don't actually enjoy seeing any of those tropes on screen. David 8 is clearly non-compliant with informed consent protocols, as his interactions with the scientists prove. And in the end I did like Shaw and and her BAMFness and her willingness to keep searching, though I could have done without her blatant anti-robot sentiments in her final lines. David 8 has perfectly good reason not to want to know about his creator's origins, okay, because he knew his creator and his creator was a monumental asshole!
The pretensions of this movie are just as monumental, and just as empty in the end. I do think there may have been a good movie in there somewhere, but it was dragged down by too many things to name (not least of which is the script's strange reluctance to have characters actually interact or communicate with each other, WTF), among which was the decision to have the guy who ruined the end of Lost write the screenplay, and also, weirdly, Ridley Scott's inability not to let this movie truly stand alone from the rest of the Alien universe, despite his avowed desire for it to do just that. (Relatedly: did Noomi Rapace just become the unwilling genetic incubator for the alien species? Did we see its creation via xenogenesis with humans, the Engineers, and the vagina dentata slime aliens?) Also, I still can't figure out that random Engineer's suicide at the beginning, WTF, but I am sure it was deeply Mythically Significant.
Tl,dr; Ridley Scott clearly does not know mythology as well as he thinks he does (nor does Weyland, for that matter), because it should have been called Epimetheus.
As a bonus, have mine and kuwdora's fairly non-spoilery Twitter reactions (@s without links are my replies to her):
Weyland-Yutani Corp. Directive 937 was established in 2091.
If you see Prometheus stay until the very end.#bestpart
Patrick J. Adams @halfadams Scientists in the future are really stupid. #thingilearnedfromPrometheus
In conclusion: Prometheus: worth it for Fassbender, for Rapace & Theron, for the lolz.
Not a spoiler: They should totally have named that movie Epimetheus. Ridley Scott: not a myth expert.
@kuwdora How is it that Stargate utilized Erik von Daniken's work better than Prometheus?
@kuwdora I am still laughing too much to go to sleep!
@kuwdora: I just--what--so pretty, yet so empty.
@kuwdora am I being an evil feminist if I say the whole thing is a monument to the male ego
@kuwdora: evil, maybe, but not wrong. Just don't forget that you-know-what-scene towards the end that's a metaphor for, idk, something.
@kuwdora that scene was Mythically Significant, what are you talking about. Or something
Reminder: Weyland Corp. TOS clearly state that David 8 is non-compliant with informed consent protocols.
@kuwdora: obscenely giggling in bed right now, tyvm.
Well, so that happened.
I think
kuwdora, with whom I laughed my way through this trope-fest under the glares of fanboys, said it best when she said, "So Ridley Scott totally just made a Lord King Bad Movie!" Yes, yes he did. I read a really great, snarky, fairly non-spoilery review before I saw the movie, and one of the things it said was that Michael Fassbender, playing the android David 8 in the single best element of the film, frequently seems to be in a completely different movie, and that it would be nice if the other characters could join him there. Though
kuwdora and I actually couldn't figure out where we would start if we were going to try to fix this film, I will say that one of the biggest problems with the movie is that there's actually at least three different movies going on simultaneously, and they only really intersect a few times, mostly when characters die and gasp obscure phrases that are meant to convey Deep Meanings about Faith and Whatnot with Mythical Significance. Insert tab A into slot B! Cross narrative lines in a way that is Deeply Meaningful. NO. So, there is the movie that Idris Elba's character, Captain Janek, and most of the rest of the crew are in, which is a pretty standard sci-fi horror schlockfest made bearable by the true beauty of the movie's visuals and the fact that Idris Elba's character is one of only two in the movie with a scrap of genre savvy [Warning: Link goes to TV Tropes, which Weyland Corp. clearly acquired and shut down at some point]. There is also the movie that Noomi Rapace's Dr. Elizabeth Shaw is in, which is some kind of latter-day parable about Faith and The Nature of Humanity and What The Fuck Ever, Ridley Scott, FFS. And there is also one and a half movies with Fassbender as David 8 and Charlize Theron as the stone-cold BAMF Meredith Vickers, one of the other two characters with genre savvy, acting out some kind of Freudian psychodrama in which they compete futilely with one another for the affection and approval of their dying father figure. Spoilers: He's never gonna love you, kids. Half of that 1.5 movies is David 8 following Directive 937 and boldly going where no one has gone before with a kind of blithe unconcern that is, I think, actually truly new in sci-fi. It's that movie that gets the standout scene of the film, in which David 8 activates the holocordings on the aliens' bridge, and which non-coincidentally is the only sequence touched with any sense of wonder.
Basically I could watch a whole movie with David 8, and like the snarky reviewer I would gladly have traded some of the gratuitous and formulaic action sequences for more shots of him chilling on the Prometheus while the crew is in cryo-sleep pre-planetfall (moonfall, technically). The truly SFnal part of this story is with him and his fascinating inhumanity (like snarky reviewer or someone said, his empathy is hardwired but his ethics are adaptable), but there are people to scratch off the crew roster and tropes to glorify in like a pig in mud, no time!
All that being said, however, when the Prometheus touched down on the planet (which, I'm sorry, I know my own planet, and it was pretty clearly Iceland through and through) I thought, "See, this movie is an ad for why the government should not get out of space exploration in favor of corporations!" i.e. no sense of wonder, and then for most of the movie I sat there thinking - because Star Trek V is objectively a terrible movie, but it had some good things in it, and one of them was the startlingly useful question, "What does God want with a starship?" For these reasons, I was totally unsympathetic to Noomi Rapace's character and her status as the (this is an actual quote from the screenplay) True Believer until about halfway through, and I could not wait for her asshole scientist boyfriend, who is the worst kind of cheap believer, to fulfill his obvious plot-role as alien bait. (And then Meredith Vickers STRAIGHT-UP SET HIM ON FIRE, flambeed scientist, served up fresh! and then I knew I loved her.) The narrative alternately sympathizes with and condemns Rapace's character for her faith, which was perpetually jarring. And also, dear Noomi Rapace's character and Weyland, it's never actually proven that the so-called "Engineers' engineered shit, IJS. For that reason among many others, the cliché-fest of Weyland's plot line doesn't even bear discussion, and I am totally in line with Meredith Vickers' dismissal of it and of him.
The reason I developed a sudden onset of sympathy for Noomi Rapace's character was her giving herself an abortion (NOT a Cesarean, dear screenwriters) of her alien baby after attacking the medical personnel and reprogramming the med-pod that was ONLY DESIGNED FOR MALE PATIENTS, ah hahaha OF COURSE, and then jacking herself up with drugs and following along to the alien bridge, because clearly she too is a BAMF. As David 8 nastily observed, "I didn't think you had it in you." But oh my god, it was just SO BEYOND CLICHÉ, I cannot even tell you, I would have been laughing except I don't actually enjoy seeing any of those tropes on screen. David 8 is clearly non-compliant with informed consent protocols, as his interactions with the scientists prove. And in the end I did like Shaw and and her BAMFness and her willingness to keep searching, though I could have done without her blatant anti-robot sentiments in her final lines. David 8 has perfectly good reason not to want to know about his creator's origins, okay, because he knew his creator and his creator was a monumental asshole!
The pretensions of this movie are just as monumental, and just as empty in the end. I do think there may have been a good movie in there somewhere, but it was dragged down by too many things to name (not least of which is the script's strange reluctance to have characters actually interact or communicate with each other, WTF), among which was the decision to have the guy who ruined the end of Lost write the screenplay, and also, weirdly, Ridley Scott's inability not to let this movie truly stand alone from the rest of the Alien universe, despite his avowed desire for it to do just that. (Relatedly: did Noomi Rapace just become the unwilling genetic incubator for the alien species? Did we see its creation via xenogenesis with humans, the Engineers, and the vagina dentata slime aliens?) Also, I still can't figure out that random Engineer's suicide at the beginning, WTF, but I am sure it was deeply Mythically Significant.
Tl,dr; Ridley Scott clearly does not know mythology as well as he thinks he does (nor does Weyland, for that matter), because it should have been called Epimetheus.
As a bonus, have mine and kuwdora's fairly non-spoilery Twitter reactions (@s without links are my replies to her):
Weyland-Yutani Corp. Directive 937 was established in 2091.
If you see Prometheus stay until the very end.
Patrick J. Adams
In conclusion: Prometheus: worth it for Fassbender, for Rapace & Theron, for the lolz.
Not a spoiler: They should totally have named that movie Epimetheus. Ridley Scott: not a myth expert.
@kuwdora I am still laughing too much to go to sleep!
@kuwdora am I being an evil feminist if I say the whole thing is a monument to the male ego
@kuwdora that scene was Mythically Significant, what are you talking about. Or something
Reminder: Weyland Corp. TOS clearly state that David 8 is non-compliant with informed consent protocols.