Micro changes in air density, my ass.

Ridley Scott has one of the most impressive Science Fiction pedigrees of any living director.  Blade Runner and Alien are absolute gems and seminal works of the genre.  When I learned that he was returning to the Alien universe with a prequel, I was extremely conflicted.  While I have incredible faith in his ability to provide me with exciting and inspiring visuals, I've been burned so hard by other directors I once had faith in returning to their science fiction franchises I couldn't shake a lingering feeling of dread.

But with every teaser and trailer I saw I grew more hopeful.  It looked beautiful.  It looked scary.  It looked interesting.  Prometheus was easily one of my most anticipated films of 2012, and there was no way to temper my expectations.  And then I watched it, and I once again felt the sting of disappointment and the fall of an icon.

Explanation and analysis of Prometheus to follow.  *Massive* spoilers ahead (seriously I will ruin this movie for you if you haven't seen it.)

First things first, don't think I'm legitimately comparing this film to the Star Wars prequels, or the 4th Indiana Jones movie (that doesn't exist...) Prometheus is not the same epic failure on all levels that those movies were, but the fact that it had moments of true greatness make many of its epic shortcomings all the more difficult to accept.

The film starts out BEAUTIFULLY.  We get some sweeping vistas, and are treated to a scene with a totally ripped albino alien looking man doing something that will not make sense until later in the movie, but sets up an interesting stage.  Then we get my absolute favorite moments of the entire movie.  A slow, steady, cerebral, and classic Science Fiction scene where a man (who we can pretty easily guess is an android) is shuffling about a ship full of people in some kind of suspended animation.  He plays basketball, rides a bike, watches Lawrence of Arabia, and imitates Peter O'Toole.  It's a wonderful set of scenes that got me really into the feeling of the universe.  And then the crew wakes up, and the film quickly begins to stumble and eventually falls on its face.

We are introduced to our intrepid crew in a mission description carried out by main scientist woman A and main scientist man B.  I use letters because I honestly can't recall their names, and don't feel a strong compulsion to look it up.  This introduction tells us that the mission they're on was kept a secret from most of the crew.  Why was it kept a secret?  We don't really know, and there is never a compelling reason provided, but lets just say it's because this mission was funded by a mega-zillionaire who believes everything should be kept secret for no good reason (more on that later.)

We also learn that different cultures of humans all have cave paintings that point to a giant race of humanoids (who A&B like to call The Engineers) pointing them towards a set of 5 stars, and this clearly means they want us to come and visit, and these giant humanoids are the beings that created us!

At this point, one of the crew members who currently seems reasonable asks them what evidence they have for their conclusions and the response is essentially "because?"  And now they've started to lose me. Somehow these two scientists convince a bazillionaire to spend a trillion dollars on a mission that spans multiple years and trillions of miles, and they don't have a single convincing argument for why this mission is more than a waste of time and money.  This scene actually gives us a glimpse into just how little the screenwriter actually respects/understands scientists, and ends up undermining a movie predicated around a science mission to an alien planet.  Any mediocre scientist could go on for HOURS about something they were passionate about, but all these two can drum up is "Well, I mean, look at these pictures, right?"

Moving forward, we land on the alien planet (or moon? I wasn't entirely clear on that point) which they told us was capable of supporting life, to discover it is mostly inhospitable to human life (and from what we see while trekking around the surface...inhospitable to any life.) And now the movie really loses me.  They find what they're looking for.  A dead Engineer that was apparently decapitated by a door that had poor safety features.  At this point, one of the characters (who I had previously assumed was some manner of security personnel based on his behavior leading up to this point) begins screaming about how he's a geologist who loves rocks and didn't sign up to deal with dead things.  And then the biologist also decides that he's horrified of dealing with a dead alien species, and they're both going to run away.  So once again, we're able to conclude that this trillion dollar mission also hired the ABSOLUTE WORST SCIENTISTS ON THE ENTIRE PLANET EARTH.  We've got a geologist who has shown zero interest in geological features of an alien world, and a biologist who is terrified at the thought of interacting with a deceased alien life-form.

The geologist (who was acting as the team tracker using his "pups" previously) manages to get them hopelessly lost in the tunnels so that they get left behind. (How does a guy in radio contact w/ the ship that has a 3D map and constant updates on their positions get lost?)  And while they're lost and running away from basically anything that might be a dead body or a creepy sound they end up in the room from before, and they encounter a creepy alien cobra (slash penis vagina snake).  And the biologist who previously shit his pants at the mere sight of a clearly dead alien, suddenly decides that this creature is beautiful and friendly and he wants to touch it.  You can pretty easily guess how that ends for him, and I just have to wonder if this movie was written by a series of different people who didn't read what the others had written.  His behavior in that scene is the complete antithesis of everything he has done previously in this movie.  It happened PURELY as a means to move the plot forward, because obviously the audience wants to see some monsters killing people.

And that's just par for the course.  Nobody acts in a manner that makes any sense, characters are not characters, they're shells that move around and give a reason to show off another beautiful set piece.  Scientist B goes from starry-eyed hopeful scientist to alcoholic cry-baby within a few hours of arriving on an alien planet and discovering an alien species that may have been responsible for the creation of life on Earth. He is inconsolably sad and only wants to drink because the ones they found were dead and now he can't ask them to tell him the meaning of life (or whatever his burning questions for them were.)  As a scientist who had spent his life learning things about ancient human civilizations who were all long dead you'd think he would have understood that you can still learn things from the dead (especially ultra advanced civilizations that he knows had holographic recording devices because he SAW A HOLOGRAM RECORDING.)  David the android could have easily been the best part of the entire movie (thanks in part to a PHENOMENAL performance from Michael Fassbender) but his actions don't make any sense.  He infects scientist B with some black goop that turns him into...something, and also causes him to impregnate scientist A with a squid monster, but David also seems interested in helping, but he's also maybe interested in everyone getting killed, but he'd like to help scientist A at the end of the movie.

And speaking of being impregnated by a squid monster, after finding out she has a squid monster inside of her, David and the other scientists try to sedate her and put her back in cryo sleep, but she hits them in the face with something heavy, runs away, tricks the surgery machine into thinking she's a dude so it will essentially give her a C-section...and then NOBODY EVER SPEAKS OF IT AGAIN.  Nobody wants to know why she's limping around with surgical staples in her stomach, or why she's covered in blood, or why she hit them in the face earlier, and she doesn't think it's relevant to tell anyone that there's a squid monster she cut out of herself in the escape pod.

No, we are moving on from that, to the exciting new reveal that eccentric bazillionaire has secretly been on the ship the WHOLE TIME.  Why was this kept a secret?  Why does it matter?  Would anyone on the ship have been upset to find out that the dude who paid for the journey tagged along for the ride?  It was honestly somewhat satisfying when they woke up the still living Engineer and he just killed everyone, because it signaled that the movie must be ending soon.

In the end, I'm left feeling as empty as the characters in this movie, and Ridley Scott has made it clear to me that while he has great skill with visual style (seriously, this movie is AWESOME to look at.) he is incapable of overcoming, and possibly even incapable of recognizing a poorly written movie.  Nobody behaves in a way that makes sense, characters frequently behave in ways completely opposite to how they had previously, and many of the scenes feel like they've been played out of order, or belonged to a different version of the film (it was like reading a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book straight through.)  I can forgive some of the bad science in the film, but if you're going to have bad science, at least have some internal consistency.  The very premise of the movie is that humanity was led to this planet because The Engineers left our ancient civilizations those maps.  But then we learn that this planet (moon?) is some kind of weapons depot where they created black goop that makes heads explode/squid vagina monsters/chestbursters/whatever the fuck else.  So...why were they leaving humans a map to this place?

I think the most disappointing part is they had a chance to delve into some REALLY interesting territory with the whole creator/createe relationship.  We get a small taste of it when David is first introduced, and his "father" talks about how he doesn't have a soul, and then they touch on it once more when David is chatting with scientist B who says humans created David "Because they could".  They could have really gotten into the parallels between the relationship between the humans and David and the relationship between the humans and The Engineers, but they just threw it away on those two scenes and never came back to it.  Instead it seemed more interesting in tackling every deep question it could think of, but handles them all clumsily and halfheartedly.  They tried to say something about faith with Scientist A's religion, but again it was handled so poorly as to be more of a distraction than of any aid to the film.  There was opportunity here, by having Scientist A go through a crisis of faith after discovering the Engineers they could have said something about faith, and how it affects us on personal levels and what it takes to maintain it in light of things that can shatter it (and not just religious faith either, it could have touched on the very roots of humanities' need to believe in things and how we respond when that belief is shaken.)  But they don't, they just have a woman who believes in the Christian God, continues to do so after learning humanity may have been created by an advanced alien race, and essentially never even wavers in the face of learning that their creators intended to wipe them out via giant vagina squid monsters. 

Prometheus showed promise, and had some themes that could have really been great with some proper handling and expansion, but empty characters and undeveloped ideas brought it down to a level that I simply could not enjoy.  I don't know if I'll be able to keep myself from watching Ridley Scott's new Blade Runner project, but my expectations have been dropped incredibly low after Prometheus.