[Spoilers abound! If you haven't seen it yet, do so while it's in the cinema; the visuals are spectacular, but the plot and characters are dreadful, so dreadful that I was moved from my normal torpor to write the following. I've only seen it once, so some of the following may be based on me misreading or misunderstanding the story (especially as, towards the end, I was growing very bored, and being reminded of Alien made me realise how much I'd rather have been watching that instead...)]
Ah,
Prometheus! How foolish can one film be? Very foolish indeed, and here’s why.
First, a synopsis of the plot: Millennia ago, eight-foot-tall, bald, muscular
aliens (called Engineers in the film) came to Earth. One of them drinks a weird
looking substance and then dissolves into a nearby river, and his DNA becomes
human beings (I’m not sure how, and the film doesn’t show). Later, the
Engineers come back, and teach cavemen across the globe to paint crude murals
showing a group of small figures (humans) surrounding a large figure (an Engineer), who’s pointing to a group of five dots. Millennia later, in the late 21st century, archaeologists find the crude cave paintings in disparate locations,
and immediately conclude that these drawings represent aliens pointing to their homeworld,
as they assume that the five dots are of a star system not visible to
the naked eye, and cavemen who had no idea of each others’ existence couldn’t
have done the same drawing by coincidence, therefore they must have been shown by Visitors from Elsewhere. They explain this to a local
trillionaire, who immediately builds, and mans with scientists, an
interstellar spaceship, because he wants to meet our makers and find out if
they can stop him from dying. However, after arriving on the planet, the team
soon discovers that it’s not the Engineers’ homeworld; in fact, it’s a
biological weapons storage facility, and the Engineers had planned to come to
Earth to wipe out humanity when their own weapons turned on them, or so we
think...
Hmmm,
where to begin ... At the beginning, I suppose:
1)
Why do the Engineers teach cavemen to draw the location of their bio-weapons
storage facility? How did they know that all (or any) of the drawings would be
found? And interpreted correctly? And why didn’t they just draw proper maps
themselves, complete with coordinates?
2)
A handful of caveman drawings seems a bit of a flimsy premise to spend hundreds
of billions on an interstellar spaceship and a team of scientists, even if
you’re a crazy old kook. I’m sure his heirs, and company stockholders, must
have been delighted to see dear old Dad blowing their inheritance on an
interstellar wild goose chase!
3)
While the crew of the spaceship spend the long voyage to the Engineers’ planet
in cryogenic suspension, an android called David potters around the ship
watching Lawrence of Arabia and keeping things humming along. Here’s a thought:
why not man the ship entirely with androids? They don’t need things like food,
oxygen, cryogenic-suspension chambers, and never sleep or make mistakes. If
they find something interesting, then you send a second mission with your team
of scientists. If Weyland’s worried about dying before they come back, just
freeze him!
4)
How precisely do you operate a machine that can plug directly into people’s
dreams? Wouldn’t watching them be a gross violation of privacy, and wouldn’t an
employee of a major corporation prying into another employee’s dreams be ground
for litigation?
5)
The ship is brought in to land on the Engineers’ planet. Remarkably (or, to be
more blunt, preposterously) they accidentally land a mile from the Engineers’
base. To test the likelihood of this, try the following: go with a partner to a
one-acre field. Cover your eyes, and have her place a bottlecap somewhere in
the grass. With your eyes still covered, use a catapult to fire a peanut into
the field. What are the odds that your peanut will land within six inches of
the bottlecap? Exactly...
6)
From IMDB: "During the landing on the planet, the crew analyzes the atmosphere
and reported that the oxygen level is about 20% (on Earth = 23%) and 2% carbon
dioxide (on Earth = 0.5%) and a human without spacesuit will die in a few
minutes. In fact, humans can live for many days in atmosphere with 2% of carbon
dioxide and 20% of oxygen on Earth at sea level."
7)
Our team (scientists all) and the android head off into the alien base without
bothering to map it or scan it for lifeforms first, despite having the
technology to do so. Once within, their instruments show that the air is
breathable. So the male archaeologist, Holloway, immediately takes his helmet
off, ignoring the fact that an alien planet may contain microorganisms that
could be lethal to an outside lifeform. Not only that, but the whole team (of scientists!) does
the same! The sheer irresponsibility, not to say suicidal recklessness, of this
is jawdropping.
8)
David, for reasons left unknown (to me anyway), activates a holographic
programme that shows projections of Engineers running through the caves, which
is now clearly an alien complex, without telling anyone what he’s doing. Why
2000-year-old alien technology would still work, and where it gets power from,
is left unexplained.
9)
This holographic images and the body of a dead alien freak out the team’s geologist, Fifield, and the
biologist, Millburn, who decide to head back to the ship. Millburn doesn’t seem
interested by the fact they’ve found a dead alien, and Fifield hasn’t taken any
rock samples, despite being on an alien planet. On the other hand, they could
be acting quite sensibly: when you are exploring an alien complex and weird
stuff starts to happen (including finding a giant decapitated body), the best
course of action is to retreat back to your ship and wait until the automated
probes have finished scanning for lifeforms. Bringing along a few androids as
well as the remote controlled probes, and getting them to do the initial
exploring, would be more sensible again.
10)
One of the team carbon-dates the dead alien, and proclaims him to be 2,000
years old. Unfortunately: “Carbon dating is a radiometric dating method that
can be used to estimate the age of organic remains. Scientists know that plants
take up a small amount of the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 from
the Earth’s atmosphere, to synthesise organic compounds via photosynthesis. The
quantity of carbon-14 in a plant roughly matches the levels of this isotope in
the atmosphere. When the plant is eaten by other organisms, the carbon-14 is
passed on and starts to decay at a fixed exponential rate. By knowing the rate
of decay, and comparing the remaining carbon-14 in an organic sample to that
expected from the atmosphere, scientists can estimate the age of the organic
remains. If you don’t know the atmospheric levels of carbon-14 on the alien’s
planet, then you can’t carbon-date him. Heck, you don’t even know if they have
plants on his world, or at this point in the movie if he even contains any
carbon.” (see here)
11)
Our team find a severed alien head in a huge chamber containing mysterious pots
with black goo and a huge sculpture. Curiously, nobody has brought a camera to
take still photos (although they have cameras build in to their suits, it would
be nice to have quality pictures not spoiled by motion blur). David takes a
sample (in fact, he takes an entire canister!) of the goo without knowing what
it is or does. An earthworm is seen oozing around on the floor; what it
survives on, in a vast tomb dry enough to preserve mummified aliens for two
millennia, is left unclear. And, seeing as the team have flying probes that
detect lifesigns, would they also bring handheld ones? Aside from the dead
aliens, even a living alien earthworm (which suggests a functioning ecosystem)
would be a hugely important find!
12)
A storm comes, and the team have to retreat back to their ship. However, the
panicked Fifield and Millburn have gotten lost, and are trapped in the complex,
despite being experienced scientists, and Fifield (who should be used to
caves!) being the one who sent out probes mapping the alien complex they’re in.
13)
The female archaeologist, Elizabeth Shaw, and another woman whose name I can’t
remember (this film has too many characters, for one thing) decide to examine
the severed head. Why an archaeologist would be useful at an alien autopsy is not
made clear. They don’t isolate it, or wear protective body suits to prevent any
alien pathogens from landing on their skin and going up their noses. Why not
simply freeze the head, and bring it back to a proper laboratory on Earth? They
do discover that its DNA is identical to ours, which I’m not qualified enough
about to make a comment, but it does set my Scientific Nonsense Detector
twanging madly! Then they jam something into the neck that ‘stimulates’ it back
to life (I may have misunderstood what they were doing here), which causes it
to explode. At this point, they are not quarantined in case whatever caused the
Engineer’s head to explode is contagious and could wipe out the entire crew.
14)
The android infects Holloway with a drink containing the alien goo, despite not
knowing what its possible effects might be. Why he does this is not made clear
(to me, anyway). Using a guinea pig in a hermetically sealed container would
probably be more sensible, but what do I know? He is essentially jeopardising
the life of everyone on board, including his employers and Peter Weyland, who
funding the expedition and is giving him orders. Holloway’s having a bit of a
hissy fit because, in the handful of hours they’ve been on the alien planet,
they haven’t found any live aliens. The aliens, of course, could be over the
next hill waiting for them: if I landed a plane in the middle of the Egyptian
desert I wouldn’t instantly assume that the entire planet is uninhabited; I’d
fly out the next day and search for cities! Obviously, slow, steady research
involving patience and levelheadedness is not his thing, which is odd
considering he’s an archaeologist.
15)
On that subject, Holloway says to David that perhaps the Engineers created humans for the same
reason that humans created David: because they could. I call shenanigans on
that nonsense! Nobody (especially if they’re being funded) runs expensive
and/or time-consuming experiments simply because they can. They do so either to
make fresh discoveries about the nature of the physical world, to acquire
knowledge, or because their invention/experiment will have a practical
application. Making money from their invention is also a plus, which is why inventors
patent things. An android like David is clearly, first and foremost, a
practical and useful tool (disregarding the whole Blade-Runner-do-androids-have souls issue); he never eats or sleeps, is very strong, and
does what he’s told without emotion or question. Why would an interstellar race
would travel halfway across the Galaxy and create life on Earth just for the
fun of it?
16)
Fifield and Millburn are trapped in the alien complex overnight, and are in
continuous radio contact with the ship and its captain, Janek. Until Meredith
Vickers, the icy corporate dominatrix running the mission on behalf of the
Weyland Corporation, pops in for a chat, at which point Janek goes off and has
sex with her, leaving the two lads unmonitored in a huge, mysterious complex
full of dead aliens and with a probe that’s intermittently picking up lifeforms
other than their own.
17)
Vickers says at this point that she didn’t travel half a billion miles to get
laid. You would think that an icy corporate type like her would know that half
a billion miles wouldn’t get you out of the Solar System. She might be tired,
and mixing up miles with light years, of course, but it seems out of character.
And the Milky Way is only around 100,000 light years across. Half a billion would
take us one twenty-eighth of the way across the entire visible universe, a mind-bogglingly large distance (see here). If the planet was that far away it
would have been impossible to detect, and the Weyland Corporation would need an
as-yet-uninvented mode of space transport to get there, travelling at 250,000
times the speed of light. According to IMDB: “The
distance to the exo-planet they are visiting is stated to be on the order of
10^14km. Since it took them a little more than 2 years to get there, they must
have been travelling at more than 10 times the speed of light.” This suggests
the planet is in fact 20 light years away. (Apologies if my math is wrong; it’s
not my speciality.)
18)
The two lads in the complex go into the chamber with the pots and the huge stone
head, and out of a stream of goo rises a weird looking snake/worm (presumably
our earthworm friend after being mutated). Despite being a totally unknown
lifeform, Millburn tries repeatedly to touch it, and it eventually attacks him.
Even on Earth there are numerous creatures that carry poisons capable of
killing in seconds; on an alien planet it’s unlikely to be any different.
Wouldn’t an explorer on an alien planet (with more than two working brain
cells) work on the assumption that everything is lethal until proved otherwise?
19)
The next morning, the team head back into the complex and find Millburn dead
and Fifield missing. Holloway becomes severely ill, and on bringing him back to the ship Vickers
blocks his entrance. It’s the first sensible thing anyone’s done, although
nobody points out that he could have gotten infected the previous day and
transmitted the disease to everyone on board, as a result of their collective
disregard for quarantine procedures (also: why would a spaceship need a
flamethrower?).
20)
While all this is happening, David has wandered around in the alien complex and
found the central command post. He then brings up a huge holographic display
which allows him to learn that the Engineers had planned to travel to Earth. He
was able to do this because holograms of the aliens were seen walking around
the consoles and operating the buttons. At a military facility, isn’t it a bad
idea to leave recordings of how to use your equipment, and access your records,
available for anyone who might wander in?
21)
David also finds a still-living Engineer in a cryogenic suspension tube.
Clearly, during 2,000 years in an abandoned complex there have been no power
failures long enough to cause his death. After all, the first question Vickers
asks David after he’s awoken the crew after their cryogenic sleep is if anyone
died en route, and this was on a brand-new, continually monitored (by David) spaceship where the crew
were asleep for a tiny fraction of two millenia! Again, what’s been powering this
abandoned facility?
22)
In the most lunatic sequence in the film, Shaw discovers that she’s three
months pregnant after having had sex with the infected Holloway ten hours earlier. She
rushes off to a kind of automated surgery booth in Vickers’ quarters and
discovers it's designed for men only, but overrides it. The machine cuts a
ten-inch opening across her stomach, and a forceps lowers from the ceiling of
the machine (looking remarkably like a lucky dip machine!) and pulls out a
writhing blob the size of a grapefruit, which then bursts open to reveal an
octopus monster. The machine stitches her stomach back together with metal
staples, and she runs away. Even by the standards of this film, the scene is
ludicrously stupid. Women who’ve had a caesarean section need to be
hospitalised for days afterward. Wouldn’t a creature growing that big that
quickly cause major internal ruptures? How could a machine designed to operate
on men know about, say, the womb (where the creature is presumably gestating)?
And, even if she was anaesthetised up to the eyeballs so that she doesn’t feel
pain when she’s running around afterwards, wouldn’t she burst open the sutures
and bleed profusely, not to mention inflicting major internal damage on
herself?
23)
Earlier in the film, just after our cannon fodder crew were all awoken, they
received a recorded holographic talk from Weyland Corporation CEO and the man
paying for the expedition, Peter Weyland. Now, at this point, Shaw discovers
that Weyland has been on the ship all along. Why he pretended not to be, and
wastes his time making a special recording for the expedition team to fool
them, is never made clear. It’s meant to be some kind of Big Shock when we
discover this, but I’m not sure why, as it makes no difference to the story.
Later we discover that Vickers is his daughter; again, the effectiveness of
this Big Shock is undercut substantially by the fact that we don’t really care
about either him or her, and it has no bearing on the plot. Also, wouldn’t a Google
search let anyone on board know this, and if so, why does nobody reference it?
24)
On we go! Weyland gets David to revive the sleeping Engineer, who promptly goes
ballistic and kills everyone bar Shaw. But before he does, David speaks to the
Engineer in a language that he believes the latter will understand, cobbled
together from various primitive Earth languages. A linguist comments: “Towards
the end, one character communicates with an alien in a language that I'm fairly
certain is proto-Indo-European; my reason for thinking so is that earlier in
the film the same character is having a lesson in that language, as part of
which he recites Schleicher's fable, and uses very similar intonation and
accent in both instances.” (Source here) But: “As PIE was spoken by a prehistoric society, no genuine sample texts are
available, but since the 19th century modern scholars have made various
attempts to compose example texts for purposes of illustration. These texts are
educated guesses at best; Calvert Watkins in 1969 observe[d] that in spite of
its 150 years' history, comparative linguistics is not in the position to
reconstruct a single well-formed sentence in PIE.” (Wikipedia) That an Engineer
might understand this is particularly absurd, as it is based on believing: a)
the language David speaks has any resemblance to what the Engineers use, as it
assumes that the Engineers, in addition to giving us life, also came back and taught
us their own language; b) the language taught by the Engineers to primitive
peoples was not grossly simplified; c) the Engineers’ language has not changed
in the millennia since they were on Earth; d) the pronunciations and
inflections that David uses match those an Engineer would; e) all Engineers
speak the same language (imagine, if you will, an alien landing at a US
military laboratory and talking to the first soldier he sees in a jumbled,
partial version of Old Chinese, a language from the first millennia
BC). Of course, there’s the distinct possibility that the Engineer doesn’t
understand a single word of what David says; after all, he doesn’t respond except to go berserk...
25)
Seeing as 25 points is more than enough, I’ll finish with the following: how
did the tiny octopus thing grow to such enormous size so quickly without any food? The
only thing it could have consumed is air, which would make it as dangerous and
challenging as a giant balloon...
