Prometheus Unbound

Out of curiosity, I watched Prometheus again the other night, at least the second half, as I caught it in progress on television.  I wondered if I had missed something the first time around, but no, it was just as painfully boring to watch with an odd sort of God fixation that seemed to owe more to Erich von Daniken than any deep existential thoughts on what it means to be where we are in space and time.  I'm glad someone else thought the same thing, but for the most part Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien got rave reviews like this one.

Part of the problem is the screenwriting. Damon Lindelof is probably best known for driving Lost into the gutter with its shift from playful science fiction themes to a search for some ancient godhead, although I would argue that even with the reduction of episodes per season it had lost all its steam and crawled to a sad ending, making me wonder why I had invested so much time in this nonsense.

Damon had a chance to redeem himself with Prometheus, but here again we get into this perverse notion that somehow we were made by aliens, or at least our intellect was prodded by ancient astronauts.  How else to explain all those wonderful monuments of the past like the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, along with this ancient astrological search for our origins in space.  So, we get these big white men who go around terraforming planets and planting images of themselves on them.  So inspiring.

Yet, Prometheus drags you along, mostly thanks to an excellent cast that makes you think something interesting will come out of all this, but all we get is the good doctor Elizabeth Shaw flying off with the head of android David in further search of the origins of these mysterious men, to be followed up in later installments.  

I think I caught part of Prometheus 2, a.k.a. Alien:Covenent, as I vaguely remember Billy Crudup and Danny McBride in spacesuits.  Smartly, Sir Ridley Scott brought in a new writing team, but I can't quite bring myself to watch it  Now, there's a third installment on the way, but Ridley is being very coy about its subject matter.  Seems he produces one every five years.

Alien was best left alone, but of course the movie studios couldn't resist following up on the cult classic, which pretty much slipped under the radar when it first came out in 1979.  What made it work was its crafty blend of science fiction and horror to create a truly suspenseful movie that had you on the edge of your seat throughout.  Rather than try to explain all the haunting imagery, Ridley very cleverly left the backstory hidden in visuals, leading to a chilling final sequence where Ripley goes one on one with the alien, displaying a remarkable vulnerability and resourcefulness at the same time.

Alien 2 didn't come along until 7 years later after several very poor knockoffs.  Ridley Scott wisely didn't want anything to do with it so the studios hired James Cameron of Terminator fame to deliver an action packed movie that had none of the suspense of the original but was captivating enough in its own right.  Then came two more Alien films that progressively got worse.  There was even an Alien vs. Predator at one point, maybe even two of them, I don't know.  But, I had long given up by this point.

The idea of revisiting LV223, which apparently was little more than an asteroid that the aliens were terraforming, was too good an idea to pass up.  My daughter's husband was so excited by it that he offered to take us all to the movie theater to see it on the big screen. I guess Ridley needed the money or was upset at how his original idea got franchised.  I don't now.  Sadly, this wasn't some story that had been rummaging around in his head for 30 years but rather a poorly contrived script that looked like it was written on paper napkins in a diner by Lindelof and Spaihts.  The only thing that made it worthwhile were the glorious special effects.  

It does seem that Ridley has become obsessed with some sort of godhead in his autumn years.  As director, he can pick and choose from the script, and he seemed to be very much obsessed with Elizabeth Shaw's cross pendant.  He could have gotten into all sorts of interesting theories on the cross, especially since one of his previous subjects had been Christopher Columbus in the movie 1492.  Columbus was as much obsessed in Christian symbolism as he was in finding a trade route across the Atlantic Ocean to China, thinking the headwaters of the Orinoco flowed from the nipple of Mary's breast.  Scott wouldn't have been the first to equate early ocean explorers with space travel.  Gene Roddenberry did the same with Star Trek, as Captain James T. Kirk bears remarkable similarities to Captain James Cook.  But, Ridley decides to leave it up to the viewer to read into Liz's cross what he or she likes.

The biggest flaw with Prometheus is its utter lack of suspense and this Ridley Scott cannot be forgiven for.  You knew Elizabeth Shaw would be the only one to get out alive, unless somehow Meredith Vickers survived the alien spaceship rolling over her as Elizabeth did.  I never really could figure out what the story was behind the malevolent Meredith, but it didn't really matter.  Just needed someone to burn Elizabeth's boyfriend alive rather than letting him back into the spaceship after being contaminated by the alien.  

For the most part, Prometheus followed the same plot as the original, just writ larger that's all, as Ridley Scott had done the first Alien on a shoestring budget.  He couldn't even afford to make a full-bodied dark alien, so he made it in parts, using close-ups to create a hyper sense of claustrophobia, which added greatly to the film.  Here, we see it all, as Ridley was given a Promethean budget of 130 million US Dollars.  Too bad it lacked the same level of creativity.