One of the most frequent complaints I hear about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is the film’s reliance upon a storytelling device known as an ‘idiot plot.’ An idiot plot takes place when characters make consistently stupid decisions, allowing the plot to move forward in places where an intelligent decision would end the conflict of the film prematurely. It is often applied where characters are presumed to be reasonably intelligent — in Prometheus, for example, many of the characters are scientists — and this can be problematic because it becomes all too obvious to the audience that a writer has contrived the plot.

In other words, when a film relies too heavily on an idiot plot, we can no longer suspend our disbelief in the story and our experience of the entertainment is tarnished. It is this which separates believable mistakes from an idiot plot; dramatic irony resulting from a character’s shortcomings creates tension in a story, but tip the balance over the edge and the audience will find themselves unable to invest in the story or its characters at all.

Ian Holm as Ash in the original ‘Alien’

The unusual thing about Prometheus is that it doesn’t really have an idiot plot, despite how consistently it comes up as a criticism of the film. Such complaints, I believe, stem from unfulfilled expectations, rather than the film itself being of poor quality. The connection to Alien, for example, while largely irrelevant to the story itself, ought to bring viewers back to the scene in which Ash made the disastrous decision to break quarantine for the infected Kane and allow him onto the ship — only to be later revealed as an android under orders to return a xenomorph specimen to Earth, in spite of the danger it poses to the crew.

Similarly, in Prometheus, those instances where characters do make stupid decisions are not simply contrived to push the plot forward; the prevalence of human arrogance, naivety and aggression and its detriment to us as a species is one of the film’s key themes. Those aspects of human behaviour should be uncomfortable to witness because the film can be viewed as a critique of these behaviours. In that aspect, disregarding Prometheus on account of the idiotic behaviour of the characters makes about as much sense as complaining that the titular character of Dr Faustus should have known better than to trust a demon, or criticising The Godfather because Michael Corleone isn’t very nice. Some of the most frequent criticisms incorrectly associated with an idiot plot are as follows.

1. The crew remove their helmets when they discover the air in the Engineers’ complex is breathable

It should be noted first and foremost that there are no consequences for this decision, negative or otherwise, which automatically disqualifies it from being classed as part of an ‘idiot plot.’ It isn’t even part of the plot at all: nobody gets infected by any alien parasites (as in the later Alien: Covenant) and all of the horrific things that happen subsequently in the film are totally unrelated to whether anyone’s helmet remained on or off.