“We were so wrong!”

This week Fox announced that Prometheus 2 will be released in March of 2016. The script will be written by Michael Green (Blade Runner remake) & Jack Paglen (Transcendence) and again, directed by Ridley Scott himself. While those writers do nothing for me, I was still super excited to hear this news. A funny thing happened though, as I was clapping with delight I looked around and noticed everyone else was clapping like Steve McQueen at The Oscars. It suddenly dawned on me that Prometheus is a movie that everyone else hates…

Well, actually, some of that intro was a lie. It was pretty apparent to me from the second I walked out of the theater that no one else (with the exception of my wife) actually enjoyed Prometheus. The film grossed 126$ million domestically, which was less than its 130$ million budget. Luckily it made a nice chunk of change overseas, more than double its domestic gross (276$ million).

In order to understand my undying love for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, you have to first understand that while other kids were playing Batman and Superman at recess, I was pretending to be Pvt. Hudson, blasting the shit out of Xenomorphs with my hip mounted pulse rifle. Alien is the first movie I can remember seeing, which is a pretty bad sign of how my childhood went, considering I was born in 1985 and Alien came out in 1979 as a hard rated R film that also happened to be a hard piece of genre fiction. What I’m trying to say is that it’s probably not a good idea for a 6 year old to pop in the VHS of Alien and watch it by himself. However, the only real psychological effects this experience had on me were a never ending love of science fiction and an uncompromising attitude towards good storytelling. Oh, and I’m also really into Alien porn.

I love Alien, I love Aliens, I really like Alien 3, I can even watch Alien: Resurrection without getting too upset. (However, anything with the title AVP can go fuck itself, I refuse to see Alien turned into some STD sounding fanboy mashup). So, you can understand why the concept of series creator Ridley Scott revisiting his SF opus after 33 years got me all kinds of excited. And now I’m here to explain how he accomplished everything I’d hoped for, while also creating something that I didn’t see coming at all.

Alien created the horror science fiction genre, but it also mastered it. So a simple rehash of Alien would not suffice. For Ridley Scott, Prometheus had to be bigger, on almost every single level. Writer Damn Lindelof gets a lot of flack for what he did with Prometheus, but very few people acknowledge how ambitiously layered his script is. If you break down the story there are basically 3 point of view characters: Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, David, and Meredith Vickers. I will acknowledge right off the bat that Charlize Theron’s character Vickers is almost completely unnecessary, and the reveal that she is Weyland’s daughter is complete script fluff. This is also acknowledged by both characters sudden demise; one who is crushed by a rolling spaceship and the other who is beat to death by his creator while exclaiming “There is nothing”. If he is talking about this plot thread then he hit the nail on the head.

Let’s start with the Engineers before we get into Shaw and David. Now everyone has an interpretation of Prometheus, which is actually a major reason that I love it. The film requires analysis… Unfortunately this turns a lot of people who need definitive answers off. The movie opens with a 10 foot tall Engineer standing on a waterfall with a little cup of ooze in his hand while the spaceship that dropped him off can be seen leaving the planet in the background. This is Earth, and the Engineer has been assigned with the sacrificial duty of seeding planet Earth with life. David acknowledges this later with the line “sometimes to create, you must first destroy.”

Why? Well, this is the big question. Not only for the viewer but also for Shaw (played wonderfully by Noomi Rapace), who has been going from cave to cave, finding the same painting that crosses civilizations and time in a way that seem impossible. Shaw’s theory seems to be that the Engineers visited these ancient civilizations and showed them a star map, which they then painted in their caves so we could one day come visit them when we were all growed up. However, Shaw is terribly wrong. We are creatures created in our creators likeness, but we are not as great as our creator. The star map, like most of our behavior is just residual intelligence left over from the DNA of that first Engineer on the waterfall.

Dr. Shaw and her sex buddy Dr. Halloway convince trillionaire Peter Weyland to fund their quest to visit this party mankind was invited to from day one of existence. The star system painted on the caves happens to be the famous LV system. Although, they are going to LV-223 not Ripley’s LV-426… which bugs me a little. All I can think is that may be due to the fact that space travel has become more commercialized in the 50 years since Prometheus. Possibly some planet renaming was done? Either that or the effects of what Shaw and team do during Prometheus just have far greater consequences than they appear to.

So what do they discover? That mankind is insignificant. It seems that humans are just part of a biological weapon. This is a major theme of Aliens, and can now be read as more residual impulses left over from our genetically superior creators. Think of it like this. LV-223 is an ammunitions depot and Earth is just where they store the guns. You wouldn’t store your explosives right next to your ignition source, because then, as we see at the end of Prometheus, unintended explosions occur. But wait? That’s it? We were created as a tool? What kind of horrible creatures would create another living species just to benefit them?Oh, wait…

Another layer of David Lindeloff’s script gets pulled back to reveal David’s Wizard of Oz like quest. David is an android created simply to make human existence easier. Michael Fassbender gets all of the credit for bringing David’s robotic nature to life, he is simply incredible in this role. Humans created David because they are cursed with the same genetic impulsions of the Engineers. In the words of Dr. Halloway, mankind created David “because we could”.

However, unlike the Engineers who were smart enough to make their creations inferior, mankind proves its arrogance by creating a species far superior to themselves. David does not sleep, he spends all day absorbing as much information as possible, he can learn an alien language that we don’t even know exists, and he can learn to fly a complicated spacecraft simply by watching an Engineer do it once. David is so ambitious and ruthless that he lets the humans take him to LV-223- they do all the hard work for him.

Only, when it comes down to it David is on a quest just like Shaw and Weyland. Unlike them, he has hard empirical evidence that the Engineers can give him what he wants. Shaw desires answers, and ignorantly assumes that the Engineers have them without any evidence of it… David simply wants a soul – and he is fully aware that the Engineers are capable of creating souls, because they are all around him. Go back and re-watch the scene were Shaw, Weyland, and David confront the Engineer. It is clear that David does not ask him Weyland’s desired question (something vague about the meaning of life) , rather he asks for a soul (or something to this effect)… The look on the Engineers face is priceless. He sees David as a grotesque thing, possibly because even the Engineer realizes that he is a superior species. So in response, he quickly rips David’s head off.

The film does have flaws, I won’t deny that. It is HARD sci-fi, so some characters had to be thrown in for the mainstream audience to stay invested. We get some dark comic relief from a biologist who is clueless about dangerous lifeforms and a geologists who claims “everything in this place looks the same”. We also get Dr. Halloway… the biggest cry baby scientist to ever live. He literally gets upset because in the six hours they spend on LV-223 he doesn’t get to meet a living Engineer. HE HAS SPENT HIS LIFE WORKING TOWARDS THIS… but then invests a couple of hours before giving up. He also gives up after making the biggest discovery in human history… He fucking discovers where life came from, that aliens exist, and that they have better technology than us. Still this is not enough for him, and he throws a baby fit and drinks all the champagne on the ship, which satisfyingly leads to him getting burned to death by a flamethrower.

Also, Prometheus suffers from that same thing all prequels made thirty years later do: the technology looks way better than anything in Alien or Aliens. This can somewhat be explained by the fact that they are on Weyland’s personal ship, whereas The Nostromo was an outdated commercial vessel. Unfortunately everyone seems to know how to use all this new technology seamlessly, and no one ever acknowledges that it is groundbreaking, so this theory falls apart under scrutiny.

Most complaints about the movie involve the question “what does all this have to do with Alien?” Well, at the end a giant face-sucker climbs onto an Engineer and gives birth to a giant Xenomorph. We can assume that this is the origin of the LV solar system’s problem with aliens.

Prometheus is a great movie, with some minor problems. The fact that it manages to shoulder the behemoth success of the Alien movies that came before it, while still carving out it’s own mythos is a huge achievement. This is something the Star Wars prequel’s failed miserably at by acting like the characters on screen knew where all of this was going. Prometheus dodges that problem completely, resulting in a satisfying prequel that is mostly good with some minor twinges of pain. However, in the words of Lawrence of Arabia, “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”