I’ve heard it said
before that your story shouldn’t end with a punchline. If everything you’ve
done only serves to prepare the reader/viewer for a single moment that
retroactively justifies the entire experience, then you’ve done something
wrong.
On some level, Prometheus
is all about delivering the audience to certain “punchlines”—the big
mythos-reinforcing moments where the Alien
prequel calls back to the original and shows you how various disparate
pieces converge to create a single chest-bursting, vent-crawling entity. To
that end, the development of Prometheus’
plot can be seen as a sequence of events and set pieces all building to a
particular moment: the derelict vessel-base, the mural depicting some kind of
super xenomorph, the motif of the monstrous armored figure and what lies
beneath its helmet, the wormlike proto-face huggers, the gross invasion of
human bodies by alien species that burst out or are gruesomely extracted, the
android decapitation, the arrival of yet another proto-face hunger that even
behaves like its leggier counterparts, and, finally, the appearance of a baby
xenomorph.
It's arguable that Prometheus
is just checking the boxes. It’s an origin story but also one big homage.
On the other hand, the fact that a film so thematically concerned with creation
is itself one textual and metatextual evolution seems, if not intentional, then
at least very convenient. We see the xenomorph physiology and reproductive
system evolve. Likewise, we see Prometheus
evolve into Alien. How do we get
from big, pale, totally ripped giants drinking black liquid that tears apart
their DNA to the events of the first Alien?
Prometheus is here to show you.
 |
| Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 27 May 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2015. |
Like Alien, Prometheus has an interest in a strong,
female lead. (Check off another box on the homage list.) However, unlike Alien, this film puts that lead through
a not particularly inventive kind of hell. Noomi Rapace’s Shaw is barren—a fact
that we learn moments before she and her colleague have sex and she gets
pregnant… with a horrible alien fetus that she is forced to remove in a scene
so horrific it makes the ostensibly horrific stuff that follows look like
nothing by comparison. There’s something of the torture porn genre in Prometheus.[1] Shaw is impregnated
thanks to the machinations of the android David who infects her lover with the
Engineer’s black liquid; she’s forced to mutilate herself to remove the fetus,
gets roughly stitched back together, and then spends the rest of the movie
running and getting knocked around in ways that would almost certainly tear the
wound open again. If she’s not doubled over in pain, she’s heaving and
breathing heavily.
Shaw is our “Final Girl,” of course, and like Ripley
she’s destined to survive the encounter with the Engineers, but there’s
something almost mean-spirited about the rough treatment she receives,
particularly with the emphasis on monstrous pregnancies that so many other
horror/thriller films have already drawn on (see Rosemary’s Baby for a seminal example of the trope).[2] The original Alien
played off the creature’s unique physiology and reproductive methods to
comment on a male fear of penetration (and possibly on the fear of the body
being destroyed from the inside out by cancer or Crohn’s Disease). Prometheus isn’t that inventive.
Instead, it focuses on the female body as a symbol of the power of creation,
which is an idea even older and more worn than that of the monstrous pregnancy.
Anybody can create life, jokes the doomed Dr. Holloway.
Not me, replies Shaw, tearfully.
Thematically, the nature or purpose of creation is Prometheus’ chief concern. Its title
recalls the noble mythological sacrifice of the Titan who brought fire to
humanity and was punished for it. If not strictly a creator, Prometheus was at
least a benefactor and arguably the figure, mythologically-speaking, who sparked
humankind’s development by giving them something that enabled them to reach
their full potential. The Prometheus of
the film might be the Engineer race, who apparently descended from the heavens
to help develop mankind in some unexplained fashion, but it’s also the ship
that bears the name (as well as Shaw and company). The hope of the owner of the
Weyland Corporation that funds the voyage is that the vessel will return to
earth with the secrets of creation and of life and death: a new “fire” that
could further fuel the development of humankind. The question that emerges as
the film’s plot developments, however, is whether or not human development
isn’t a double-edged sword.
We’ve seen this particular issue born out in sci-fi
stories elsewhere. The main antagonists of the Mass Effect videogame series are monstrous “Reapers” that cleanse
the galaxy of all life whenever technology reaches a certain peak. In Prometheus, the creators are also the
destroyers. The Engineers created humanity but seemingly plan to destroy it. Prometheus is supposed to bring back the
“fire” but just sets off a chain reaction that results in the creation of a new
threat to all life. Was the Titan humanity’s savior by virtue of his gift, or
was he ignoble in that the gift was a curse? After all, with our fire, we’ve
gone from simply warming ourselves and cooking food to survive to polluting the
planet and finding new ways to kill one another. Prometheus doesn’t provide an answer to this question because it
never explains why the Engineers want
to destroy humanity. Either this was a serious omission or the writers want
viewers to think of our creators as capricious like Holloway suggests in his
conversation with David.
We humans made androids because we could, says Holloway,
to which David replies by arguing that humans would be devastated to learn that
their creators did much the same
thing on a whim. This is the closest thing to an answer to the gift-curse
question at the heart of the film that the story offers: that “fire”/life is
neither gift nor curse—it was simply something for Prometheus or the gods or
Engineers to do when they were bored. Human life was a lark, and stamping it
out would likewise be nothing more than something to do. It is a pessimistic
outlook.
Of course, Holloway is also wrong about David. Presumably
androids serve important roles during space travel because of their relative
immortality and the fact that they require fewer resources to operate while the
rest of the crews is in stasis. It is equally unlikely that such a creation was
built only on a whim. Furthermore, androids are superior to humans in many obvious
ways—stronger, more durable, and with greater mental faculties. Even David’s supposed
emotionlessness may not be strictly true. After all, in addition to admitting
that he was afraid for Shaw during the final confrontation with the last
Engineer, David’s treatment of Holloway also suggests that he can experience
feelings like resentment. Having been the object of low-level resentment and
mistrust throughout the mission, David’s decision to “poison” the scientist
with the Engineer’s black liquid feels both coldly scientific and not quite impersonal.
He even makes a point of asking Holloway to what length he would go to make the
mission a success, thereby manipulating him into saying exactly what he knows
he would (that he would do anything for the cause) so that he can justify
poisoning him. David doesn’t need the justification, but his duping Holloway
represents a bit of spiteful fun on his part. We appreciate the dramatic irony of the question and what
it entails and so does David.
David’s very existence and the parallel the film draws
between his relationship with his creators and the humans’ with theirs,
including the disappointment that comes with knowing the Engineers are all too
mortal, calls into question the mythological importance of creators. David is
superior to his creators, and humanity might likewise be superior to their own.
After all, in addition to sharing the same DNA as their creations, the
Engineers are also not immortal and may very well have their own questions
about their origins.
Although we are told by Janek that the Engineer
structures on the planet are a military installation and that the black liquid
is a weapon, the evidence on display in the film suggests otherwise. Beyond
their prodigious strength, the Engineers do not seem to be equipped with any
weaponry. Their vessel is likewise unarmed except for the hold filled with
deadly canisters. If it were otherwise, and the ship beneath the dome was
military, why not eliminate the Prometheus
after taking off to prevent pursuit and start the human genocide early?
What goes unstated in the film is the possibility that the Engineers who were
on the planet were scientists like Holloway and Shaw. The canister shrine room
in particular suggests that the Engineers are scientists who have married
technology and theology—at least, one might make that assumption based on the
ritualistic arrangement of the canisters before the aforementioned xenomorph
engraving and a massive stone idol head (which does resemble an Engineer and might suggest that they are
self-worshipping, not unlike humans who like to render God as a man). Since the
humans and Engineers are otherwise frequently paralleled with one another, this
reading of the latter as scientists who have resolved in their culture the
age-old debate between science and faith seems highly probable given that Shaw
is doing much the same thing, personally and in her relationship with the less
spiritual Holloway.
Also, who is to say that the black liquid is actually a
weapon? It could certainly easily be weaponized,
but reading it as only a weapon of mass destruction requires assuming that the
Engineers view life and death the same as humans do. The very first scene in
the film suggests that they don’t.
The ritual suicide of the otherwise seemingly healthy Engineer is presented
largely without context; however, the act and its aftermath tells us a lot
about the Engineers’ outlook on life and death and how it ties in with the
black liquid. The Engineer willingly gives up his life to produce something new.
His body and DNA break down, but the remains are repurposed rather than
outright destroyed. Although the Engineers are certainly not without a sense of
self-preservation, which is obvious during the sequence where the holograms are
shown fleeing within the bowels of the dome, they may view self-sacrifice for
the greater good or to further the development of life in the universe as
necessary and not evil. Like the mythical Prometheus, the cost of advancing
civilization is great personal pain. The idea that the Engineers might view
humanity’s mass destruction as another step toward further growth is floated at
least once in the movie, and based on the aforementioned visual evidence, the
idea seems likely. The Engineers might have been hell-bent on wiping out
humans, but the act likely wasn’t one they would see as evil. They would
instead be creating new life from all that death.
The Engineers might
actually see themselves as Promethean, delivering to humanity the source of
further evolution and development that Weyland is seeking. Ironically, though,
the life it would deliver would mean the death of the individual who seeks,
greedily, to preserve his own existence. The alien of Alien is an apex predator that results from the mass death of Prometheus. It’s the punchline of the
film but also its literal and thematic culmination, suggesting that it may be
the next step in Engineer-human evolution and therefore a superior being much
like David is. To create is to risk being upstaged by the offspring, and to be
a creator is to be outmoded, if not outright destroyed by the next generation.
*
Prometheus is a great sci-fi film. The
futurism of the technology and the backdrop of deep space only serve as the
icing on the thematic cake. This is a film concerned with deep-rooted questions
regarding the ideology of creation and of humankind’s place in the universe. As
someone with a religious background, I find the issues Prometheus interrogates especially salient. There are a lot of bad
Christian movies out there: God’s Not
Dead, 90 Minutes in Heaven, War Room. Stuff like Billy Graham’s The Homecoming (which I grew up with)
has always existed on the periphery of the major movie business, which used to
use “spiritual” stories like The Ten
Commandments as an excuse to hype up the violence and sexuality of the film
without censure. The new wave of theatrical Christian releases, however, is
more dogmatic than ever—concerned less with thematically rich narratives and
more with (literally) preaching to the choir. Ridley Scott’s own Exodus: Gods and Kings was so bland and
uninventive that it’s hard to imagine the Christian it could offend.
Meanwhile,
films that explore Christian themes or stories that aren’t particularly dogmatic or traditional in their approach, such as
Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, are
lambasted by Christian audiences for taking liberties with the Biblical source material—while
it’s apparently ok to tell viewers that college professors are out to force
students into becoming atheists and that victims of domestic abuse just need to
try harder to be faithful to God rather than seeking real world counseling or
leaving a dangerous situation. I’m sure that it offends some Christian viewers,
but Prometheus is a film with an
interest in faith beyond how one’s particular beliefs explain creation alone.
Although belief in a specific creator (or creators) of the universe is not
unique to Christianity, in the western world, it’s not hard to see Prometheus as a largely Christian film,
especially given the way that human beings are fundamentally (at the genetic
level) created in their makers’ image. What the film has to say about faith
specifically isn’t entirely negative or ambivalent either.
Prometheus implies
that Shaw is a Christian, and she maintains that belief through everything that
happens to her. While Holloway is quick to give up hope when the Engineers are
seemingly all dead, Shaw continues to believe that there are still answers to
be learned from them, though they may be physically absent. Furthermore, the
question of who created the Engineers is also raised, so while Prometheus might be blasphemous for
suggesting that God didn’t directly create humankind, it doesn’t entirely rule
out the possibility that there wasn’t a divine hand involved. Since the
Engineers are human on a genetic level, one extension of this revelation in the
film’s universe is the possibility that the Engineers are the first humans
created by God and we’re they’re “offspring.” The movie does question whether
there is an afterlife or not, since the dying Weyland claims that there “is
nothing,” presumably on the other side—a fact which the decapitated David
seconds, though his agreement is not proof positive that Prometheus does not believe in an afterlife since David is, after
all, is nothing if not duplicitous. Weyland himself is not religious in the
traditional sense. Since this is the film’s final word on the subject, however,
after young Shaw is seen posing the question of where people go when they die
to her father in a flashback earlier in the movie, it’s not altogether
impossible that it is suggesting that there is no divine hand involved, and if
the Engineers aren’t the source of all life, then they themselves sprang from
mortal origins.
The point that I’m trying to make here is that Prometheus is a better “Christian”
film—especially insofar as it tackles some big questions and themes relevant to
that faith—than other movies that are explicitly marketed as such. Of course,
this is my personal opinion, and my opinions trend more secular and liberal
than many Christians would abide. The financial successes of films like the
ones I mentioned before is proof positive that this super conservatism still
exists. I think Prometheus is a good
film for Christians who are interested in asking questions and entertaining
“what if”/alternate universe explanations for the stories they’ve heard so many
times before. It doesn’t serve as an echo chamber, though, and that seems to be
what a lot of Christian films do—provide an experience that doesn’t question or
even do much at all with the interesting ideas offered by the faith. There are
no challenges to face or obstacles to overcome there. These movies are
celebrations of a particular mindset and don’t demand anything of the viewer
other than that they also celebrate that mindset. Prometheus is in its own way far from revelatory, though, and the
nihilistic nastiness and quasi-misogyny lurking in its heart are nothing new.
Additionally, I’m not sure there isn’t something
transmisogynistic about the portrayal of Charlize Theron’s Vickers. We learn
that she is Weyland’s child, but he is apparently not pleased with her. In his
fake will he describes David as the son he never had. Now, either Weyland is
simply expressing his displeasure at having a daughter (an Assigned Female At
Birth daughter), or he may be implying that Vickers is trans. She is depicted
as a strong or even masculine figure (we first meet her as she’s doing
push-ups, for example), and Janek asks her at one point if she is a
robot—questioning her humanity but also, by extension, her realness. Possibly
her womanhood. Consider also that when Shaw attempts to use Vickers’ medical
equipment to extract the alien fetus that the machine explains it is
“calibrated” to only treat men. There are other explanations for these weird
beats, of course, but a reading of Prometheus
as rather typically transmisogynistic (on top of every other typical thing
it does) is still possible and very bothersome.
The box art and menus for the DVD emphasize three
characters: David, Shaw, and Vickers. Vickers and Shaw both survive longer than
any other human character in the story, but neither is treated very well. Shaw
gets put through the wringer, and Vickers lives because she’s a coward. We are
shown her antagonism early on when we learn she doesn’t share Shaw and
Holloway’s faith. She’s a bureaucratic presence who refuses to let the
wide-eyed scientist believers make contact with any intelligent life they might
meet. She constantly wrests authority from the easy-going, likeable Janek.
She’s designed to be unlikeable, and the possibility that she might also be
trans means Prometheus, like so many
other films, has nothing new to say about trans people either, suggesting
instead that they are fake, duplicitous, inhuman, etc. Unlike Charlize Theron’s
wonderful turn as Furiosa in this year’s Mad
Max: Fury Road, the woman she plays here is less obviously a figure worth
praising. Prometheus might feature
two of its three (only three) female
characters prominently and might cast itself as some kind of pseudo-feminist
narrative by having Shaw survive, but its treatment of them—especially of
Vickers—is questionable.
After seeing Prometheus,
I have since read a lot criticism levelled against it. More than anything, a lot
of people have pointed out the illogical or just outright bad decisions made by supposedly intelligent people in the film as
annoying typical. I’ve felt for a while now that most horror movies take place
in alternate universes where for some reason the genre does not exist, and Prometheus must occupy a similar space.
I can see the flaws now; however,
when I was first watching it, I was very much swept up in the film and its
mythology. It may hit a lot of familiar notes (some more problematic than
others), but it’s also a film that seems to be greater than the sum of its
parts. That it made me think about its themes at all is admirable, and I
personally find it well-paced and beautiful. CG landscapes always look dead to
me anyway—Disney’s attempts to create a sense of wonder with them in Alice in Wonderland and Oz the Great and Powerful have been
laughably bad—so the stuff in Prometheus actually
looks good because of how devoid of life it generally is. And that’s just
another metatextual element that enforces the theme of the movie: From death
comes new life. Of course, as a human being living a finite, fragile existence
in a dangerous world (see the number of deaths by gun that have occurred in
this particular country this year alone), that’s also a hard message to
stomach.
Notes:
[1] According to Urban Dictionary “torture porn” is “[a]
term coined by various critics which discusses the current trend in horror
Hollywood which consists of horror movies having no story whatsoever but
gratuitous images of people having random body parts removed. . . .” (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=torture+porn).
In essence, films like Saw and Hostel qualify as torture porn because
of their heavy reliance on body horror—on creating a sense of unease, horror,
or disgust by deforming, mutilating, or deconstructing the human body. The
drawn out manner in which the removal of the alien fetus from Shaw’s abdomen is
conducted feels reminiscent of this sub-genre of horror.
[2] The “Final Girl” is
the female character in a horror film who is usually the one to confront and
defeat the killer or monster in the end. Though her survival is not always
guaranteed, she will last the longest, and according to TV Tropes, “[e]specially in older works, she’ll also almost
certainly be a virgin, remain fully clothed, avoid Death by Sex, and probably
won’t drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or take drugs” (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinalGirl).
Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods plays with this horror trope by building an
entire mythology around the fact that characters in horror movies always fill
certain roles (of which the Final Girl is only one; another is the
stereotypical “stoner”), and Carol J. Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws examines issues of gender and
identification in horror films by suggesting that male viewers actually root
for and identity with the Final Girl
rather than the murderous, rampaging monster or killer (the ostensible source
of their interest in the film).
