Terminal Lance “Prometheus Woes”

I saw Prometheus on Friday night, and I still haven’t figured out if I liked it or not. It may be the lack of Space Marines that bothers me, the lack of aliens, or the lack of Charlize Theron stripping down for a milk bath…

Got Milk?

Whatever the case, it left me with a confused feeling inside. On one hand, I really wanted to love the movie. The trailer was incredible, and I love Ridley Scott and “Alien“. This movie started off great, it was an interesting premise and the cinematography was spotless. However, once the movie gets rolling it starts to slowly come apart at the seams with weird plot holes and unclear motivations.

Obligatory Spoiler Alert

So we have an eccentric billionaire who hires a team of “scientists” to travel 36 lightyears away from earth on a hunch that there might be evidence of alien life. Nevermind the fact that, if anything, we’d probably send a plethora of probes and satellites to orbit the planet years before any humans ever stepped foot on it–this didn’t bother me, I’m okay with this. I’m also choosing to ignore the fact that 2 years of traveling is nowhere near the amount of time it would take to travel 36 lightyears (here’s a hint: it would take 36 years traveling at the speed of light).

This mission–no matter how you look at it–is the most important mission ever undertaken by man. When they get off the ship, the douchebag anthropologist boyfriend guy even says, “One small step for man huh?” or something like that, so obviously he knows that this is important. They go into some alien ruins and find some dead alien bodies. Pretty amazing right? I mean, they just proved the existence of alien life–this is world-changing stuff.

Yet, no one on this ship seems to care. At all. Well, maybe at first, but overall not really. You’ve got the douchehammer anthropologist who, upon discovering dead aliens (not live ones) drinks himself into a stupor because he wanted to see live aliens. Really? You just discovered aliens and you’re gonna get all emo and fucking stupid about it? You’ve got the biologist and a geologist who give so few shits, they actually choose to abandon the group and head back to the ship. They get lost.

You’d think, “oh shit, two members of this elite group are lost! You guys should monitor their vitals and movements to make sure they’re okay on this potentially hostile alien world where we found dead bodies and scary canisters of alien goo.” Nope, no one gives a shit that they’re lost, no one monitors them, they’re simple told to “stay warm”. They die. Strangely, no one notices (via their head cams or transmitted vitals and GPS signal or otherwise) until they arrive on the scene the next day and find their bodies.

There’s this android that walks around, opening doors and pushing buttons and shit and being all shady–no one seems to care, as if he wasn’t creepy enough.

Then you have just the lore of the movie itself to deal with. Was the stuff the alien drank in the beginning of the film the same thing the android gives to douchehammer? If so, why does it turn him into an evil space zombie instead of killing him outright like it did to the other guy? Did he know it would lead to Shaw (the main chick) getting pregnant with an alien squid/facehugger thing? I have no idea, the movie doesn’t tell you.

The movie’s central theme is the idea of coming to terms with one’s creator. The movie preaches this over and over again, but then that theme becomes murky when you realize that the “map” the people were given leads them to a weapons testing site and not where the aliens are from. Why would they even give humans that information? What purpose would they possibly have to want people to come to this planet, where the only thing that exists is some kind of doomsday bio-weapon? Silly, I say.

Overall, I left the theater really liking the movie. The more I thought about it though, the less sense any of it really made. The movie is a spectacle to look at, the ending is great and it’s pretty entertaining for the most part. However, it’s just not the intelligent and (arguably) perfect movie that Ridley Scott’s original “Alien” was. Go into the movie with zero expectations and you’ll be fine, at the very least it’s beautifully done.

Lastly, sorry for the late update, I’ve been having hardware issues all day.