{"id":3211,"date":"2012-06-18T18:23:54","date_gmt":"2012-06-19T02:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=3211"},"modified":"2012-06-20T14:29:41","modified_gmt":"2012-06-20T22:29:41","slug":"prometheus-the-men-behind-the-mask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=3211","title":{"rendered":"Prometheus: The Men Behind the Mask."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Some things Man was not meant to know.<\/p><\/div>\n

We start with spoilers, right off the top: Back in 1979’s Alien<\/em>, Lambert, Kane, and Dallas passed through a big spooky chamber\u2014 the Devil’s own rib cage \u2014\u00a0 en route<\/em> to cinematic immortality.\u00a0 The fossilized remains of an alien creature rested at its center like a great stone heart, embedded in organic machinery: mysterious, vaguely pachydermal, lonely<\/em> somehow. We never learned what that creature was, where it came from, how it ended up fused to the bottom end of an alien telescope with its ribs shattered. We didn’t have to. The mystery was what gripped us: this evidence of things beyond the firelight we couldn’t see and, oh please God, might never see: because the infinitesimal sliver of the Unknown that did<\/em> leak into view was enough to make us crap our pants before it ripped us limb from limb.<\/p>\n

Thirty-three years later, Ridley Scott shone a light into the darkness. He peeled away that skeletal shroud and showed us what lurked underneath: just a regular dude with big muscles and albinism, as it turned out. Mr. Clean without the earring.\u00a0 And with that one reveal, Scott took all that was mysterious and compelling and fearful about the monster under the bed, and reduced it to utter banality.<\/p>\n

The scene itself is almost meta\u2014 because when you scale it up, that’s pretty much what Prometheus<\/em> does to the entire Alien<\/em> franchise.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t checked out Caitlin’s review<\/a> yet, you should: it’s concise and thoughtful and right on the money in terms of the broad missteps that make Prometheus<\/em> sputter on its narrative cylinders.\u00a0 But perhaps the one grand achievement that\u00a0this movie might lay claim to is, its failings are too vast and too numerous to be contained within the limits of any one review. It will take squads, entire platoons of reviewers to properly pick apart these bones.\u00a0 I only hope that I, along with the half of the Internet that also happens to be weighing in, am up to the task.<\/p>\n

Where to begin?<\/p>\n

How about at the very first shot, where a naked alabaster oxygen-breathing humanoid strolls about on a planet that doesn’t have any oxygen in its atmosphere (i.e.<\/em> prebiotic Earth). He drinks of a literal Cup of Life; dissolves; topples into Earth’s water cycle, where the soup of his dissolution forms the basis of all life on the planet.\u00a0 We know this, jumping ahead a few billion years, because we humans turn out to be an exact genetic match with said alabaster dude. Meaning that<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Every earthly life form from the Archaea on down has exactly the same genotype \u2014 has had the same genotype for 4.5 billion years, in fact \u2014 and everything anybody ever discovered about genes from Mendel on down was wrong; or<\/li>\n
  2. Different earthly clades do have divergent genotypes, but our particular twig on the tree (and none other) just happened to end up converging back to an exact match on the primordial soup after four and a half billion years of independent mutation, divergence and reticulation on its own (oh, and everything anybody ever discovered about genes from Mendel on down was wrong); or<\/li>\n
  3. Everybody who ever had a hand in developing the screenplay for Prometheus <\/em>dropped out of school after Grade Three, never watched a single episode of Animal Planet or CSI, and stuck their fingers in their ears and hummed real loud whenever anyone at a cocktail party talked about science. And everything Damon Lindelhof thinks he might have overheard somewhere about genes is wrong.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These are pretty big lapses to encounter in the first ten minutes of any so-called “science fiction” film \u2014 much less from the hands of someone as genre-defining as Ridley Scott \u2014 and yet I feel a little silly even bringing them up, because so many of the broader storytelling elements are such a mess.\u00a0 When the Challenger blows up, you don’t waste your time complaining about its paint job.\u00a0 But beyond Sweet et al.<\/em>‘s observations about the lack of dramatic tension, the lack of mystery, the lack of story<\/em>, science does play a disproportionate role here. Alien<\/em> was about a bunch of truckers on a lonely monster-haunted highway; Aliens<\/em>, about a bunch of jarheads rediscovering, to their shock and awe, the nastier lessons of Viet Nam. \u00a0Prometheus<\/em> is about a scientific expedition<\/em>, for fuckssake\u2014 and while Cameron cared enough about verisimilitude to put his actors through a couple weeks’ basic military training, it’s blindingly obvious that Scott couldn’t be bothered to ensure that his “scientists” knew the difference between a gene and a bad joke. \u00a0Much less anything about science as a profession.<\/p>\n

    So nobody thinks it remarkable when an archaeologist performs micro-necro-neurosurgery or runs a genetic analysis \u2014 anybody with an ologist<\/em> on their resum\u00e9 has gotta be a whizz at everything from microbiology to global general relativity, right?[1]<\/a> We’re shown a biologist who uses the word “Darwinism” as though it were a legitimate scientific term and not a dig invented by creationists: the same biologist who, in the penultimate act\u00a0 of a profoundly undistinguished career, runs with his tail between his legs at the sight of the first actual alien the Human race has ever encountered, even though it’s been dead for thousands of years.\u00a0 Then, a few hours later, watches a live <\/em>serpentine alien perform what’s pretty obviously a threat display \u2014 and<\/em> tries to pet it.<\/em><\/p>\n

    And yet, idiotic though that biologist may be, the scientist in me can’t really take personal offense because nobody<\/em> in this shiny train wreck has a clue, from the pilot to the aliens to an on-board medical pod that, honest-to-God,\u00a0 is Not Configured for Females (<\/em>unless that was supposed to be some kind of ham-fisted comment on gender politics?).\u00a0 Nobody bothers with any kind of orbital survey prior to landing (blind luck is always the best way to locate\u00a0 artefacts that could be anywhere on the surface of a whole bloody planet \u2014 although that’s downright plausible next to being able to find a multi-mooned gas giant from 34 lightyears away, based on a prehistoric game of tic-tac-toe someone scratched into a cave wall during the last ice age).\u00a0 A survey team goes charging into an unexplored alien structure and takes off their helmets the moment someone says “oxygen”.\u00a0 <\/em>Their captain leaves the bridge unattended for a quick fuck, right after informing two crew members stranded in the bowels of said structure that some kind of unknown life-form reading is popping in and out of sensor range just down the hall from them. The lead’s love interest notices an alien worm doing a quick tap-dance on his own cornea, then suits up for EVA without telling anyone.\u00a0 David the android does a pretty good pre-enactment of Ash’s later subterfuge in Alien<\/em> by using his flesh-and-blood crewmates as incubators for this week’s infestation \u2014 for no reason I could see, since the standing orders that motivate Ash can’t possibly have been coded yet (nobody even knows <\/em>about these aliens, or any others, prior to planetfall). And the “Engineers” \u2014 ancient godlike beings who act across billion-year timescales and give life to worlds \u2014\u00a0 have yet to figure out how to make biohazard Tupperware that doesn’t breach whenever someone comes through the front door.<\/p>\n

    Not, granted, that all that black goo really can <\/em>be contained, not by any plausible bioware facility (although you do have to wonder why, if the stuff really was such a handful, the Engineers didn’t just take off and nuke the site from orbit). The stuff seems to spin a roulette wheel to decide what it’s going to be at any given time: kraken, mealworm, biologist-eating cobra[2]<\/a>.\u00a0 At one point it acts as some kind of zombifying-and-reprogramming agent, reanimating the corpse of a dead geologist and sending him back to the mothership to flail around like Jason Voorhees on So You Think You Can Dance<\/em>.\u00a0 Biological containment measures are doomed to fail because this McGuffin is not limited by any plausible biological constraints.<\/p>\n

    I see that over on io9<\/a>, my buddy Dave Williams describes the Engineer’s goo as a “DNA accelerant”. I don’t know what that is; maybe it’s a product of “Darwinism”.\u00a0 I’d be more inclined to suggest that it simply exhibits whatever arbitrary characteristics the plot requires at any given moment, except for the fact that Prometheus<\/em> doesn’t seem to have a plot. None of those iterations seem to tie into a coherent biological model; none of those incidents seem to connect narratively to any other.\u00a0 It’s as if some lazy Dungeon Master showed up for a night of Dungeons & Dragons without having actually planned a campaign, and just threw a bunch of random encounters at the players hoping they wouldn’t notice.<\/p>\n

    Of course, those who champion the film don’t do so on the basis of its science.\u00a0 It’s not about<\/em> the science, they would say, it’s about the Big Questions.\u00a0 (I wonder how such folks would react if the producers of Master & Commander<\/em> had followed the same logic, decided that since the heart of the story was the human relationships, why not just let Russell Crowe and \u00a0Paul Bettany bob around the tropics in Water Wings and not worry about all that nineteenth-century nautical trivia?)\u00a0 I admit to half the point; I admit that Prometheus<\/em> is not a movie especially interested in science.\u00a0 I do not concede, however, that it is a movie about Big Questions: that would put it into the realm of philosophy, and the script lacks anywhere near sufficient rigor to qualify on that score.\u00a0 Philosophy does more than throw a bunch of what-ifs at the wall and leave them sticking there like overcooked pasta. It doesn’t just raise<\/em> questions, it engages<\/em> them.\u00a0 It grapples<\/em>. Prometheus<\/em> just takes its what-ifs and stuffs them into a hundred-million-dollar fortune cookie.<\/p>\n

    Which makes it not a work of science or of philosophy, but of religion. It may mouth the Big Questions, but the answers it provides are downright inane.\u00a0 And you have to take everything else on faith.<\/p>\n


    <\/p>\n
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    [1]<\/a> Granted, this is an all-too-common failing even of SF shows that I like<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    \n

    [2]<\/a> I won’t complain \u2014 just this once \u2014 about the biophysics model that allows a larvae the size of a banana to grow into an adult Kraken in the space of a few hours, without eating anything.\u00a0 That’s been a perennial problem even for the good<\/em> installments of the franchise. (It’d make a great basis for a Gator-Ade commercial, though.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    We start with spoilers, right off the top: Back in 1979’s Alien, Lambert, Kane, and Dallas passed through a big spooky chamber\u2014 the Devil’s own rib cage \u2014\u00a0 en route to cinematic immortality.\u00a0 The fossilized remains of an alien creature rested at its center like a great stone heart, embedded in organic machinery: mysterious, vaguely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3211"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3229,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3211\/revisions\/3229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}