No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons

Well said, Pete! You make many of the same points I was ranting about on my blog yesterday, only you have the scientific expertise to point out the flaws in greater details, while I just frothed furiously about them. What a train wreck of a film.

I just wanted to present a different read of it? Not given any specific time information, I assumed the giant pale alien in the beginning dated from the time of the cave paintings- as direct explanation for the cave paintings and mythology. His tampering was hands-on, implying the Prometheus myth: Prometheus, given charge of creating mankind, feels sorry for the pitiful creations he shaped out of clay, and so gave them fire, gifts reserved for the gods. The rest of his kind are outraged and thus their impulse to destroy is a result of their outrage over what Prometheus has done. The black goo I read as a sort of attempt to improve the body, mass-produced so the entire race can transcend, turns out to create horrible killing machines, so they stockpile it in the default reaction of everyone to the Aliens (wouldn’t a horrible killing machine be useful later?). And go tell that Prometheus guy that the transcending brew worked and is awesome, but actually give him some disintegrating poison.

Maybe not much scientific sense, but works out more in line with the myths.

OMG… your review is… cleansing. I can go to sleep and be at peace now. G’night 🙂

@Gardner:
It’s about expectations: “Prometheus” was marketed as a SF movie. What we got was a religious movie. That accounts for a large amount of my irritation.

It was quite like my response to “Book of Eli” which was also marketed as SF.

Thank you Peter, I feel as though you have saved me the ticket price for seeing the movie, and probably been more entertaining in the process as well. I expect I’ll see this piece linked to quite a bit…

Will, I like your interpretation and am looking forward to the inevitable fan cut. :–)

Lindelof wrote it? That’s all you had to say.

I’ve described Prometheus to people as a combination of slick visuals and good effects mixed up with a terrible script made of stupid characters and plot holes big enough to fly a spaceship through them. Seems to get the message across to avoid it until it’s available for rental.

Ultimately, my disappointment with the film stems from being able to see what they intended (explore the “Big Ideas” in a scary sci-fi thriller with ties to the Alien franchise) and then how they bungled up the execution of those intentions. If you can’t stick the landing all the fancy pirouettes in the world won’t save you.

By the way, the term ‘Darwinism’ seems to have been coined by either Alfred Russel Wallace or T. H. Huxley. It is only in the USA that it has been co-opted by creatonists, as far as I can tell; using it with British English speakers won’t raise an eyebrow.

The movie was pretty–that’s about the only nice thing it had. It was a train wreck of a movie. The “scientists” were a complete mess. Not removing your helmet in a potentially infective place or petting the weird snake seem like pretty basic rules. Having some sort of methodical plan would have been useful rather than “let’s all run into the big building before we map it.”
The science was a mess. The writers don’t seem to have any idea how genetics actually work or how the scientific method works at all or any sort of idea of, well of anything.
It seemed like they almost wanted to explore the notion of free will with David, but just couldn’t quite engage. As Peter said, throwing out some questions like spaghetti isn’t at all the same as trying to grapple with them.
The Theron character seemed almost rational–Don’t engage the unknown aliens and don’t let the potential plague carrier on the ship. So, she, of course, had to be crushed.
And, yeah, there was no need to reveal the alien as just a spacesuit. Ridley doesn’t seem to understand that horror is best kept in the shadows.

Yes!! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. One of the first things I thought of after seeing the movie was, I can’t wait until Peter Watts reviews it.

>> David the android does a pretty good pre-enactment of Ash’s later subterfuge in Alien by using his flesh-and-blood crewmates as incubators for this week’s infestation — for no reason I could see

I got the impression that David was pissed off with humanity and wanted to sneak some goo back to Earth with the aim of killing us off. When he talks to Shaw (I think?) he says something about how she would hate her creators if, when she asked them why they created humanity, they replied “because we could”. It’s implied that he thinks that about us.

But then, he spends the rest of the film being nice and helpful, so make of that what you will…

“Which makes it not a work of science or of philosophy, but of religion. ”

Well, yes. It repeatedly and explicitly is. We get numerous references to the idea of the dying god – the god who dies to give life, typically though having its stomach torn open. It is in the title of the film, the opening sacrifice, a prominent part of the mythology of all the cultures that had “invitations”, part of the fresco on the wall of the storage chamber, the side reference to Jesus, Shaw having the larva removed, the final eruption, etc. The only peaceful endings come to those who sacrifice for the larger whole (contrast Halloway remaining dead vs the geologist), and the idea of failing to sacrifice is abhorrent to the Engineers (the revitalized head screams in horror, the pilot, confronted with Weyland trying to live longer while standing next to created life decides to attack the heretics). The final abomination is a lifeform that lives only to take life and consume, rather than sacrifice, the ultimate antithesis of the philosophy of the Engineers and symbolism of the film.

The problem is this movie is that it replaces “plot” with “symbolism” and expects it to work. When you need to catch multiple background interviews, peruse the production notes, and reread The Golden Bough to get what is happening rather than just seeing it in the screen, there is a problem with your storytelling. As a result, it is a good film student movie, and a terrible everyone else movie.

However, I am willing to give it a few years to age, a lot of the criticism applied to it so far could have been lifted word for word from the criticism for the original Alien. I don’t expect I will look back on it fondly, but I’m willing to give it a chance.

A more pertinent criticism to me is the failure to have visual continuity in the art direction for the human ships. Here they have tablets, holograms, and bright glowing lights everywhere, yet decades in the future they have beige block computers, keyboards, and green crt screens. That is particularly important in a science fiction film, since about all of your worldbuilding is the art direction there. Say what you will of the Star Wars prequels, I could look at them and see the similarities between those ships and the star destroyers. Here it is basically a whole different universe.

But beyond that people aren’t being quite fair to the acting. Fassbender (David) did a fantastic job and deserves a few awards for it.

Simon:
It’s not a mealworm, it’s a superworm. There is a difference.

It’s like saying “It’s Watts” when in fact it’s Lem. There is a difference, however subtle.

“A more pertinent criticism to me is the failure to have visual continuity in the art direction for the human ships. Here they have tablets, holograms, and bright glowing lights everywhere, yet decades in the future they have beige block computers, keyboards, and green crt screens.” — Daniel

Films are always made with whatever technology and effects are contemporary. It’s just one of those things that needs to be overlooked. There are 30 years between the films. If they had gone for continuity there would have been other problems and it would just have looked fetishistic. Nothing in the Star Trek universe looks like the tech in the original show, but people kind of understand why. if i were listing criticisms, visual continuity, if it were on the list, would be pretty low.

it’s one of the nice things about books, they have unlimited budgets for special effects and set design and more fluidly move forward and backward in time.

Peter said, regarding scientists who know ALL science:
“[1] Granted, this is an all-too-common failing even of SF shows that I like.”

Personally, I blame this trope on Gilligan’s island. That damn ‘Professor’ defined what a scientist was for a generation of TV and film writers.

http://m15m.livejournal.com/23209.html pretty much sums it up and makes you choke laughing at the same time

You’ve missed the point of the film. To the “engineers” humans are as rats are to humans. Something we experiment on, don’t necessarily like, but are willing to abide with as long as they provide us a route to advance ourselves biologically. That is, until they start harboring Black Plague, which also affects humans and kills them. THEN WE WANT TO KILL ALL THE RATS SO WE DON’T GET IT!! The “Engineers” are no different. If a science experiment goes foul, cut your losses and run…except, that is not always the final outcome. It wasn’t a bad flick. My biggest problem with it was, in the year 2090, the best weapons they have are crappy flame-throwers???

Yes, those are very nice adds.

Too bad the basic scenario is still screwed.

The trailers and teasers and viral videos promised something more like the anti-2001. Ancient unknowable and nigh omnipotent entities seed the human race and leave an “invitation.” When the humans arrive, they walk into a trap, an extremely complex rat maze that’s part of a billion year old experiment with a purpose that we could never ever fathom any more than rats could ever understand the point of all the lab tests we perform.

Like this blog review points out, in the end, Prometheus takes the mystery out of ALIEN and implies that behind the horror, there is some sort of point – a purpose – and in the end, the only way it has a purpose is to reduce it to a “spiritual/religious” journey.

But at the same time, it really is just another one of those “A CABIN IN THE WOODS” movies with a cast filled with expendably idiots and monsters you’d list alongside the rest on the dry erase “monster pool” board down in the bunker.

Peter Watts wrote, in-part, and I thank him for saving me the $10.00 for a ticket with this review:

[…] its failings are too vast and too numerous to be contained within the limits of any one review.

So it’s the “Fermat’s Last Theorem” of Bad SF Film?

Of course, it will probably rake in so much box-office that someone will immediately launch a big-budget remake of that Star Trek (the original series) episode with the giant energy-sucking space amoeba. With a subtext of US trade imbalance and somehow including Nanotechno-Lamarckism from none other than the Nephilim as somehow responsible and with global meditational attuning to Gaianism as the only possible countermeasure.

Get writing, folks. The big bucks (and infamy, rightly deserved) are out there!

John Henning:
Sundry Godzilla Awesomeness

This. This needs to be made. I don’t care what media format, you need to make this, ASAP.

What can I say, I loves me some kaiju.

Absolutely right on. I hated this film for failing to live up to even an iota of its potential, and instead wallowing in idiocy for the painfully apparent purpose of “creating a franchise.”

Money wasted. Time wasted. It destroyed what was good about Alien just as the two Matrix sequels ruined what was good about the Matrix. I wish Prometheus had never been made. It has robbed me of exactly the sense of wonder and delicious Lovecraftian horror – i.e., humans thrusting themselves into the void without any inkling of the ancient, eldritch terrors that are out there – that Alien inspired.

Michael:
One question – Are we certain that the alabaster mega human in the start is actually seeding the earth several billion years ago? Couldn’t he just be seeding the earth X million years ago and the outcome of that becomes humans?

This is actually an excellent point! I was explaining this opening scene to a friend last night and this same alternative explanation came to mind (as opposed to human seeds life, life diversifies and then miraculously un-diversifies back into people that have a slightly more healthy looking skin luster.) Kind of like a monolith from 2001.

Yeah – the DNA would still have to have gone through something like a very hairy ape stage despite the fact all the Engineers are uniformly hairless, white and over 10 feet tall.

if they wanted to seed the planet with their DNA at that point, why not simply plant a colony there? It would’ve taken just as long and no need for the magic goo.

Obviously, though, the albino giants must have a bit different genome than we do because they are 11 feet tall and have no skin pigmentation or hair at all.

@John Henning, who wrote in-part: Only now that our cargo cult imitation of the “Space Gods” of the distant past has achieved levels similar to the first invaders, the Earth has woken up to the deception and sees the human race as an invader species — thus awakes Godzilla!

Um. Leave out most of it, and just give us more Godzilla. 😉 Though actually that whole “Cargo Cult of the Space Gods” thing, what with humanity thus achieving a technological level close to that of the “divine”, sounds rather a bit like Genesis 11:1-9, that being the story of the Tower of Bab El. From the Douay version, which I quote because of their attention to the pronouns:

[6] And he said: Behold, it is one people, and all have one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them indeed. [The King James has it thus: “and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” -th]

[7] Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

As I am the sort who doesn’t mind stealing from great stories and re-writing them a bit and passing it off as mine own, I just had write a novel mostly dealing with a human-created plague of Semantic Aphasia as an emerging backdrop to the completion of a vast hemispheric highway system (linear induction motor superhighway built of of nearly indestructible “organonanotech”). (“In the Fall”, 1996 by yours truly. Never saw print.)

This is sort of another way of me pointing out that “if you read much of the very oldest parts of Scripture, as if it were both science-fiction and actual history, barely remembered and highly misinterpreted, you have to really wonder and worry if the interstellar commercial empire known as the YHWH are thinking that it’s about time to do it once again”.

Such a script could probably be written and perhaps even be filmed and distributed, but I figure Armageddon is already right around the corner, no real need to give it a kick start.

@All: Are we agreed yet that “Prometheus” isn’t just the name of the ship, but also of the alabaster giant? (Still haven’t seen the movie; I’ll wait for it to be on the instant queue on Netflix.)

And I might add, given the stuff that has continued to sell in Larry Niven’s “Man-Kzin Wars” franchise, I can’t fault these folks for trying the whole thing of dissolving themselves into primordial soup just so as to re-evolve as a sub-set of the genetics of the descendants of some promising plains-apes. The back-story on Niven’s “Protectors”, as awesome as the Protectors are, has been flapping in the wind like a sheet of loose literary canvas for the last 30 years or so. One Matthew Joseph Harrington finally nailed down the loose corners in some novellas/novelettes in the Man-Kzin Wars XII offering from BAEN, especially in “Peace and Freedom”. Things I had thought ridiculous on the face of it are now rendered into something in which one can easily choose to suspend disbelief.

So maybe someone can manage to nail down the loose ends of Prometheus, so that that canvas will stop flapping, and if they manage to do it without severe retcon, I’ll bow down and worship.

@01: You wrote, in part: P.S.:
making Xenomorphs smarter would be a nice development, too, since it would go a long way to make them scary again (though Aliens already had implication of Xenomorph intelligence if you spend a lot of time overthinking the fact that the queen was about less than 5 years old, and nonetheless had the smarts to operate the elevator in the exact manner needed to follow Ripley and hide onboard the dropship. That’s quite superhuman an intelligence, if you ask me).

Well, the Xenomorph Queen has a pretty big head, dontcha know. Besides, if she wasn’t that smart, the plot couldn’t have gone forward as it did. Less scary pop-out action would have been possible. Thus, the instincts of the monsters are clearly supplied less by evolution and more by deus-ex-machina or something much like it.

Of course, this reminds me of my suspected story line for Jurassic Park IV (or V or VI or whatever would be next). Having learned the folly of actually letting humans be in contact with the genetically resurrected dinos, more recent scientific expeditions simply have a high-tech equivalent of game-cameras all over the island. Reasonable enough, but of course the scheming ambitious underlings at Giant Mega Techno Corp (“GMTC”, Inc”) go it one better: They’ve noticed that not only are the velociraptors pretty darn smart and capable of organizing pack actions through their vocalizations, they’ll talk to anything that talks to them with a good imitation of their vocal apparatus. Clever techs in the GMTC Weapons Research Division manage to drop ship some modified game-camera units into the heart of Raptor Country, and compound their hubris by developing and teaching an artificial language to the Raptors. But little do they know! Being very curious carnivores with an astonishingly efficient circulatory system to supercharge their not-so-tiny brains (they were inadvertently synthesized from not just deinonychus but also the large-brained stenonychus), they managed to accidentally drop into another screen that teaches them the basics of english and gives them all of the mozilla on earth via dedicated satellite.

Unfortunately, this is entirely unsuspected by the folks sent from GMTC (WRD) to transport a few dozen back to a training lab to weaponize them as a dirigible reptile ninja force. Even less suspected is that they have already learned everything they need to know about all of that, and have furthermore adopted a variant on certain human political ideologies…

Can you predict the trajectory of the movie from this point of “reveal”? 🙂

Thomas Hardman wrote:

Unfortunately, this is entirely unsuspected by the folks sent from GMTC (WRD) to transport a few dozen back to a training lab to weaponize them as a dirigible reptile ninja force. Even less suspected is that they have already learned everything they need to know about all of that, and have furthermore adopted a variant on certain human political ideologies…

Surely the raptors will be taught proper corporate values and thus turn into libertarians? Office politics is about to get a whole lot deadlier…

@Hugh, who wrote: Surely the raptors will be taught proper corporate values and thus turn into libertarians? Office politics is about to get a whole lot deadlier…

On that day when I find myself confronted with an intelligent velociraptor trying to convince me to read some Ayn Rand and become an Objectivist, I’ll figure that my lifetime limit of WTF exposure will have been exceeded by a couple of orders of magnitude. Then again, scenes from “Finding Nemo” may have helped to prepare us to better accept such eventualities. 😉

@Cate: Thanks for that. I hadn’t ever read Bateman and I’m glad for the information. That study was doomed to failure! Gowaty suggests that perhaps promiscuity in the female (fruit fly, at least) provides greater diversity in immune response potentials from the male side, meaning that the offspring of promiscuity might have a better change to pass along the mother’s genetic contribution to the mix. Of course, the same is true for the males. Yet with the methods in Bateman, it’s a wonder any of the offspring survived much of anything. Including hatching.

If this is really the first time since the initial experiment that someone else as tried to replicate the results through the same methodology (as seems to be implied by the article), then I think a reminder is in order:

Scientists, if you want to confirm that the results of an experiment are not mistaken and accurately reflect reality, you independently repeat the GODDAMN EXPERIMENT! YOU IDIOTS!

There, you may now return to your regularly scheduled science. You idiots.

Some of my notes on Prometheus: (pardon any obvious errors, second language and all…)

The movie Prometheus -while certainly in the genre of science fiction- is not a movie primarily about science except in a mythical, symbolic sense. Biology, physics and every other branch of science is portrayed mostly in the context of the underlying themes of hubris and human folly. Characters in the film make assumptions and jump to conclusions based on their own backgrounds and act accordingly, only to have reality come crashing in
when their ideas are proven wrong. This may mirror some viewers experience if they thought the film would be another familiar part of the Alien-franchise, a notion the filmmakers have discouraged.

All mentions of DNA and origins of life in the movie are just a twisting of scientific terms to fit the symbolic themes of the story. Like with the pseudo-science use of ancient alien visitors in the script, all scientific realism is thrown aside for storytelling purposes. If you shrug off the Hollywood treatment of science and consider the underlying mythical elements, the movie is more enjoyable. Many real-life PhD.s will no doubt struggle to contain their screams for a range of reasons.

The black goo used by the engineers represents a life-giving, mutating chaotic force, an alien technology so god-like and beyond understanding that humans tampering with it are like baboons tossing around a nuclear warhead.
The use of the goo by the android David in an experiment is driven both by his own innate curiosity and more pressingly by the orders from his own maker, eager to find something, anything to advance the true agenda of the
mission: longer life and immortality.
The whole mission is assumed to be a scientific expedition by the crew and audience, but ultimately it is not; the entire operation is really just one mans trillion-dollar vanity project and the answers sought by the “scientist” characters are of religious and philosophical type. Any discoveries are
entirely secondary unless they contribute to Weyland & son’s goal of finding the fountain of youth. Hence the indifference to any dead ends or casualties along the way. The audiences presumption of malice by the company is coloured by the earlier movies. Who are villains and from what perspective?

As to the incompetence of the science team, these are not the best scientists in the world, obviously. If Earth sent an actual scientific expedition to an alien world, you might expect the best people for that job. Since, however, the mission was put together by the control-freak and egotist who paid for the flesh- and metal instruments to do his bidding, the crew consists largely of obedient lackeys, some unmotivated mercenary types
just along for the money and a few archeologists, who on Earth might have spread their ideas around to the wider world, but once brought along onboard the secretive mission, serve as tools to be used and discarded as the situation requires. Some of the crew were also hired by Vickers, whose assumptions and opinions about the whole operation may be reflected in her hiring decisions. She never cares much for the success of Weyland’s plan and acts out her own agenda instead. When it´s time for the king to die, the torch is passed to the heir. Passively dropping wrenches in the machinery of the mission would suit her fine as long as she gets safely back to the company headquarters on Earth.

The real research and learning is hurried, neglected and figuratively as well as practically handed over to the creations; Fifield (a geologist, not a geographer) is not motivated to pay much attention to the task of navigating and mapping the area (with consequences later on), he instead sends his little sensor-drones to do the job. For Weyland every person is just a tool and extension of his own ambition, learning ancient languages or doing experiments is handed over to his creation, David. The man himself
wants to make demands of god but won´t even learn the language first.

The naive, childlike biologist assumes he can handle a strange animal as though it was domesticated and manageable and overreaches. The obvious involvement of a serpent figure and pursuit of knowledge is joined by the ancient belief of snakes having regenerative powers and immortality due to the shedding of skin. This is the source of the images of intertwined snakes as an ancient symbol of healing. His actions and fate are a direct
allegory of the quest of the characters.

David, eager to please and wanting recognition for his brilliance, is also brought down by his hubris. Convinced of his own superiority and feeling slighted by his own creators, he wakes the elder god he sees himself on equal terms with, but is unprepared to be judged and found wanting just like his creators.

When intruded on Mount Olympos by his species’ own creations, whose first words through a synthetic facsimile are a demand for more life, god is pissed. His kind have been creating life through a process of self-sacrifice for eons and now these upstarts want to rival them as well as have their cake and eat it too? NO.

The assumptions made by David and the captain are also open to interpretation. David sees a holographic map and recognises Earth. The map clearly reacts to his interaction and when the recording ends, he notices Earth being locked in as the next destination. Was that part of the recording or did he inadvertedly select it himself? This has major
consequences later in the film.

The captain, coming from a military background, interprets what he sees as a military installation housing biological weapons. The audience may end up viewing his words as exposition of the actual nature of the planet and subsequently the intent and character of the engineers, but as far as can be seen it is only one characters assumption. We have already seen how that has worked out so far in this film. The combined assumptions of intent, payload and destination end up dooming the ship and crew. Were they correct or not? Were their actions heroic or misguided?
The bloodied and emotionally shaken believer Shaw assumes the threat is urgent and persuades others to fight and sacrifice themselves so that Earth may live, the clinically pure and sceptical Vickers just wants to leave the
whole mess and is first overruled and then overrun by the ouroboros-juggernaut.

The surviving engineer, having crushed the arrogant intruders like bugs, shows no interest in the fleeing Shaw, who had been roughed up by the old mans’ henchmen. Instead he gets back to doing whatever he was up to before his stasis. Only when again bothered by these infuriating meddlers does he go after the living intruder. The blind rage that sends him
running into trouble should be understandable to any erring human ever kept awake by a mosquito. Gods were made in the image of our own subconscious after all.

As for the mythology, the film follows the Prometheus-myth quite closely at times and shows little details that hint at the original story. The elder gods punish the trickster Titan Prometheus for stealing fire, the first technology, and gifting it to humans, whom he had created from clay. The immortal benefactor of mankind is chained to stone and an eagle eats his liver each day, only for it to grow back during the night. His eternal agony is finally ended by Hercules, a son of a god and a mortal who sets him free.
The injuries on the bodies of dead engineers can also be seen to allude to the background story. The Prometheus-myth is also the origin of the Pandoras Box, a jar containing hope, disease and all things evil. Opening of the jar out of curiosity was not a malicious act, but like the figure of Prometheus, represented the well-meaning striving for knowledge and
the unintended risks inherent with it. The gift of giving life to others involves a
sacrifice of the self, what passing of the torch and the meaning of life is ultimately about.

As far as I´m concerned, a fun movie with more going for it than most other Hollywood titles. YMMV.

One thing I did find interesting was that the Engineers were shown to be only slightly more advanced by a degree than human technology. The humans used holograms almost as advanced as the Engineers’. The Engineers needed cryo chambers for long interstellar flights just like the humans. At the very end, the Engineer ship had the same “ion effect” that the Prometheus faster than light drive used.

The only distinct advantage the engineers had was in their bioengineering ability, which was just plain magical.

The idea being that if the human race was allowed to continue unimpeded it would eventually develop a civilization as advanced as the gods’.

@Artturi: an excellent exposition! I haven’t seen this, but if it really does make that sort of sense as an allegory of morals and ethics, akin to Greek myth and legend, it can go ahead and be terrible as science-fiction. Though of course it would be best if it worked both as fable and SF.

@01: did you say something about nazi raptors would be the most awesome trash epic evar? Possibly from before your time, see the 1984 TV movie and series, “V”. 😀

Thomas Hardman: @01: did you say something about nazi raptors would be the most awesome trash epic evar? Possibly from before your time, see the 1984 TV movie and series, “V”. 😀

Sadly, I am old enough to remember “Old V” ;).
In fact, this lady is the first woman I distinctly recall being sexually attracted to. Ah, the memories…

One more layer of clues before I shut up:

What aspect of a psyche does each character represent?
What is the ship?
Where is the character in relation to the ship in a given scene?

I won´t spoil further. I´ll just state that Ridley Scott is a clever director and deserves credit in my opinion. Even though there is much I disagree with in the answers etc., the film made me think on multiple levels. And I´m not even usually into films much. A sign of good artwork or is Prometheus like mankind; too clever for its own good? Not clever enough? Maybe watch the movie again or go stare in a mirror. You decide.

I´ll stop rambling about the topic now. Paging our resident Titan Watts… 🙂

@ Artturi

Hmmmmm… well, I’m not buying the “stupid duo” being some kind of metaphorical mirrors of David and Weyland.

David and Weyland are single most competent and successful… entities in the entire shebang.

Weyland, while dying and hobbled, designed an ingenious plan to do the impossible and reach for immortality, and it almost worked. Yes, the “gods” turned out to be douchebags and didn’t give him any immortality juice (giving him a solid punch instead), but it’s not like Weyland had much to loose, and the sheer amount of success his mission had (successfully locating an alien planet based on clues that border on nonsense, successfully reverse-engineer an alien language, etc.) is fascinating.

David is the “effector component” of most of his plans, it is through David that any sensible results in this mission were achieved. Meatsacks are dead weight compared to him. Also, David is one of the two survivors thanks to his absurdly redundant design, and thus is a poor match for any of two members of the stupid duo.

Now, what happens when Shaw probes godhead for answers? hm… I suspect the godhead probes back (dun dun dun)

I am not entirely certain what you mean by “aspects of psyche”, but I am an IT person, so “psyche” isn’t really something I’m very keen with (a friendly shrink used to babble something about something or other many schools and something something models by those schools of thought being neither verifiable nor falsifiable and that being bad, or something)

P.S.:
I don’t think Prometheus is “too clever for its own good”. It certainly has some clever stuff in it, but I think it’s worth recognizing that in order to make some of its points (some of which it would be better off not making) it mishandles a lot of fairly basic things in a manner that is far too obvious for even a casual observer, and it kind of spoils the impression. Okay, maybe I am not enough of an artistic person to get over visceral WTFBULL response to some obviously implausible things that were probably intended as metaphors.

It would have been better off as urban fantasy about a super-old vampire queen seeking to summon an Elder God to petition it for true immortality or something along those lines, methinks…
That way, it wouldn’t run into any of those “scientific yada-yada this, implausible yada-yada that” problems.

@01, I´ll pose a bunch of hints and rhetorical questions, mull them over or not, ok?

If you check the middle of my first post regarding Fifield etc. and consider his desires, motivations and interpersonal dynamics (hint: wolfhowl) with Millburn maybe you’ll see some of what I see. Which can be right or wrong ofcourse. 🙂 Events are foreshadowed throughout the movie and everything has layers and layers of significance, especially in terms of psyche. What instincts and traits would you associate with Fifield? When encountering dead vs. live organisms what are Fifield and Millburn up to? Think of them in
more abstract terms. Where are they going? What ultimately happens with Fifield and who stops it and why? Also, are Weyland and David ultimately succesful? The stupid or naive vs. not as clever as they think is something to consider isn´t it? Fallability. Overreach.

Does Shaw understand or accept answers when they are in front of her? What (in detail) happens to “god’s head” as a result of her actions? What does Shaw symbolise? What does she expect vs. what she actually gets? Words or something else? What are her conclusions?

If you are an IT person and all this subconscious stuff is seemingly Alien to you, don´t mind. 😉 Each person brings their own background along for the ride. It´s ok to not see through a mystery right away or at all. Sleep over it. Often helps me.

As to the mishandling of things in the film, there are errors and omissions, true. Many of the issues people have with the script also involve their perception of what to expect from a movie or a character etc.. If you consider the movie to fail you as a viewer, then that is a valid viewpoint. Each person sees a different thing in the mirror too. There are always different perspectives and the success or failure of movies is not something I can
judge beyond my own.
Scientists behaving against common sense? Making stupid mistakes? Ha, never! 🙂
Well, from where I´m standing the universe and common sense don’t always get along, but that’s beyond this discussion for now I think. I´ll just shut up. Again. 🙂

It is too kind to treat Prometheus as being about religion. It belongs more in that area which gets referred to as “spirituality”, since “religion” is too tough-minded and logical for its adherents. To put it in another way, if we have a spectrum stretching from Thomas Aquinas and Isidore of Seville at one end and crystals, astrology, and homeopathy at the other, Prometheus would be in among the crystals.

RE: “Killing Elvis”
Loved this. I was giggling to myself all the way through.

Peter Watts: I may have to use it for my Polish SF-magazine column instead.

Wait, you have a column? Why was I not told about this?

Oh, before I forget, B-Max and Seppuku arrived in the mail today. Gotta say Alibris is a damn good service for the harder to find stuff, and at a not utterly-fucked-in-the-brainpan price point too.

As far as the mystery of the engineers, what I thought it would be about is kinda Arthur C Clarke meets HP Lovecraft.

Forget the religious overtones – instead, this is simply a vast secret experiment by a relatively small group of the engineers to see how they themselves developed. When David asks the idiot Holloway why men made him – the answer was, obviously, among other things, to determine the nature of what is human and what is not. Not the ridiculous “because we could.”

Why not the same question for the godlike engineers? Imagine a race that has been advancing so long, they have completely forgotten their origins and decide to seed a planet with their DNA and create a species mimicking their own in some kind of grand several thousand year long experiment to see how their own race developed. To see, in fact, if there was some purpose inherent to their own origins (“Who made the engineers?” Shaw asks, and the next question is “Do they know who made them?”)

Then, to their horror, when primal humans turned out to behave in eeriely familiar ways – when it became clear that the gene and their own DNA actually does have some sort of innate programming regarding the acquisition of culture, knowledge and technology – the Engineers freak out.

First, just like the old Garden of Eden myth, God and his angels are afraid that if Adam and Eve, who’ve tasted of the tree of knowledge, then take of the tree of life, they will be as gods themselves. And, actually, left alone for 2,000 years, we develop a technological civilization almost as advanced as the one the Prometheus finds.

Second, the human race itself flies in the face of the idea that their own evolution was completely random. In other words, it places them in the same position the humans find themselves, and that David is in. They are the creations of something else and they don’t know what the purpose of that creation is.

Therefore, we become scientific evidence that the “mainstream” finds abhorrant – an abomination of science that must be eradicated. And if humans on Earth were a special case – not a standard gardening ritual by the Engineers – then it makes sense that when the space gods running the experiment panic and get wiped out by their own xenomorphic weapon, no one else would be any the wiser and come to wipe mankind out.