I've spent many mornings, after just waking up, going through my head how to rewrite this film and turn it into something that does justice to all the nightmares and day dreams the early
Alien franchise inspired in me.
Here are some of my many, many issues with the film:
1. The film opens by showing us the Engineer. This immediately devours a whole chunk of the mystery and suspense.
Alien was all about what you couldn't see - that's where the atmosphere came from. But
Prometheus hits us right in the face with TEH ALIENZ! in the first five minutes.
2. The film opens with an Engineer consuming some black goo and getting broken down into more goo. This goo, as the close-ups suggest, is modifying/creating biological life. However, the same goo is seen later as a biological weapon. Are we to assume that the same goo has now been modified into a bio-weapon? Or was the Engineer in the opening trying to destroy a planet with the goo, since it wasn't made clear if the planet in the opening sequence was Earth or not? There's probably a simple answer to this, but shouldn't it be a bit more apparent?
3. The next part of the film has Naomi RapeFace finding a cave painting. Who made this painting? If the Engineers created life by the
suicide-bomber method, then how could the eventual humans have ANY IDEA what the Engineers looked like? For humans to evolve from the goo it must have taken many many many years, which means the Engineers must have come back to Earth, in order to be noticed by enterprising cave-painters. But why would they come back to Earth? Do they need to give
booster-goo-shots to the ecosystem? Quite a logistic effort, considering the amount of planets that David found in their database.
4. Naomi Rape-Face then interprets the cave paintings as an INVITATION. This is not too dumb a leap of logic, if you think about human nature. However, WHY does this so-called invitation lead them to a planet that is NOT the Engineers' homeworld, but instead a random weapons facility? And WHY did the Engineers originally want their children to find them? In the very early synopses that were released, there was a good explanation - i.e. that the Engineers wanted to be proud of their creations. However, this plot element was completely absent from the final film. There was no hint of the Engineers being curious about their creations. The film's finale makes its clear that the Engineers have changed their minds and now think humans are poopy-heads, but WHAT WAS THEIR ORIGINAL INTENTION? I think it's really important that we know this.
5. Next we see the crew of the
Prometheus. They consist of an ambiguous Android, Mr and Mrs RapeFace, Black Captain and Ice Queen McBitchy-Pants. There's also a tattoed guy who says mean things, a stern-faced doctoress, and a geeky Darwinist. And that's it (apart from two pilot dudes who are making bets and are happy to commit suicide at the end of the film). The rest of the crew are faceless NPCs who we don't give a flying fuck about. In
Alien I cared about every member of the Nostromo - I feared for them. I also knew and distinguished between every member of the Colonial Marine unit in
Aliens. They were distinct and sympathetic personalities. In
Prometheus the crew are establised as FODDER from the word go, and as such we don't care about them. Not good in any film, let alone a horror/suspense movie.
6. Which leads to my next point - character motivation. Every character seemed schizophrenic:
Charlize Theron spends most of the film being either angry at her father or desperate for his approval, but then seems quite content to fly off and leave him at the end. Did she want the Company for herself? Was she trying to get him to sign it over to her? Why was she on the expedition? To make sure he didn't do anything stupid? I really lost track. And why give her such an elaborate death scene? There was no point in her escaping and then running away from the falling ship with RapeFace. It didn't highlight any themes or develop any character. In the early part of the film there was some nice mystery - about her personal quarters and whether she was a Synthetic. But after that, it seemed they ran out of uses for her. She didn't achieve anything, after building her up for so long. She just seemed like a random bitch who got squished after sneering at everyone for the first hour. Her relationship with her father, her relationship with David, her fling with the Captain, and the parallels between her and RapeFace were never adequately resolved.
And then there was David, whose ambiguity was probably a deliberate homage to Ash and Bishop, whose motivations were always in question. However, Ash and Bishop eventually explained themselves, which is something David didn't do. It was suggested that he resented humans, or at least ascribed to the dream of "killing his creators", but then it was revealed that he was watching Naomi's dreams and enjoying Lawrence of Arabia and working for Weyland all along. So does he like them or hate them? And what was his job, exactly? To prove that the goo had healing properties? How does infecting Mr RapeFace and endangering the entire crew help towards that? David witnessed firsthand the goo turning people into murderous zombies and infecting RapeFace with a tentacle baby. So how does that validate his mission? Was he just looking for proof that the Engineers were hot shit, so that Weyland could go ask them for supah powarz? This just wasn't made clear.
Charlize Theron states in an early scene that she disapproves of the ragtag mercenaries that the RapeFaces have assembled. But the RapeFaces don't seem to be friends with anyone. Shouldn't there be at least a hint of history between the doctors and maybe the tattoed guy, or the biologist, or the other female doctor? These secondary characters don't seem to have any solidity. The tattoed guy is intially introduced as the mutinous wild card who isn't here to be anyone's friend, but then later turns into a cowardly geologist who runs off after a misogynistic hissy fit. None of these people had any arc. Even Kane and Brett in Alien had arcs. Kane wanted to be an intrepid explorer and bit off more than he can chew. Brett was a sycophant who paid the price for always doing what others said, and his death served to give impetus to his friend Parker. The secondary characters in Prometheus could REALLY have benefitted from having a few lines written about WHAT THE FUCK THEIR PURPOSE WAS.
And then there were all the acts of self-sacrifice. Mr RapeFace somehow knows that he has to let Charlize Theron incinerate him. Mrs RapeFace completely over-reacts after David tells her she has an "unusual foetus" by attacking her friends and perfoming amateur surgery. And Black Captain and his two friends decide to blow themselves up because RapeFace starts babbling something about "BAD SHIP IS BAD!" on the radio.
7. Throughout the film the action flits back and forth between the Prometheus and the Chamber. There is no sense of immersion. In
Alien we begin in the twisting, dark, claustrophobic corridors of the
Nostromo and then go down to the surreal landscape of the planet, then the bizarre Giger-scape of the Space Jockey ship. It is a spiral through the layers of hell, the grip of horror ever-tightening. But in
Prometheus we keep coming up for air. We keep going back to the shiney, hi-tech, luxurious ship where everything is brightly lit and under the whim of superior technology. As with revealing the Engineer in the first scene, this is destroying any chance of
atmosphere taking hold.
8. The goo makes no sense. It is being contained in metal cylinders. These then start to open when the atmosphere is compromised by human intrusion. The goo then gives birth to snakey face-hugger things, which infect the crew and turn them into unstoppable killing machines who turn on each other, except for Mr RapeFace, who retains enough sentience to know he has to incinerate himself. But this is not before he has passed the goo on to Mrs RapeFace, who then begins to grow a weird tentacle monster in her belly. However, the same goo, when reactivated in the Engineer's head, causes it to explode. But at the end of the film the tentacle monster infects the Engineer and gives birth to the Xenomorph-style creature. So.... WHAT EXACTLY IS THE BIO-WEAPON? Is it a goo that turns people into Zombies? Is it an evolutionary accelerator? Is it a goo that breaks down the genetic code in violent explosions? Or is it something that creates a parasitic chain that eventually leads to the birth of the Xenomorphs? The latter would make sense if this is an
Alien prequel, since the ship the Nostromo finds is carrying alien eggs, suggesting that this ship has a more refined version of the bio-weapon. But none of this is clear. Like the characters, the goo is schizophrenic.
9. The Engineers "changed their mind about humans". That's fine. It's a nice mystery - a chance for us to reflect as an audience on how our species might be judged. However, the Engineer they awaken at the end of the film leaves too many questions. At first he is peaceful and seems a tad curious about the humans. He doesn't seem to care about the rest of his mates who got horribly killed, but at such a late stage in the film it would be distracting to explore that sub-plot. He then looks at David and gets inexplicably pissed. Is this because David, a synthetic, represents the epitome of human arrogance? Is the Engineer upset that the humans are now playing God? Or did David say something to the Engineer that pissed him off? This kind of thing needs to be answered. Obviously, whatever the Engineer felt was enough to motivate him slaughtering the humans and then determinedly resuming his mission that got fucked over thousands of years ago and resulted in the death of his mates. However, the fact that the Engineer then crawls out of his crashed ship at the end of the film then runs across the valley to chokehold RapeFace in the escape pod suggests that he's simply a GIANT DOUCHEBAG who just wants to kill things. If he was that dead-set on exterminating mankind then surely he would've legged it to the next Chamber and found another Armageddon Ship to pilot out of there. But no - he leaves everything behind to go choke a bitch. What a douche.
10. The film ends with RapeFace taking another ship to the Engineer's homeworld. Is this also full of goo? And what does she hope to achieve, now that she has witnessed first hand that the Engineers are MURDERING FUCKHEADS? Does she intend to goo-bomb the homeworld? I'm happy to accept that she wants to find her creators, but when the creators have proved themselves to be fickle assholes, we have to question her tenacity a little bit.
11. The final scene shows the birth of a..... thing..... Is this the Xenomorph? If so, why does it look like that? The major argument among fans is whether
Prometheus is or isn't a prequel to
Alien. But this scene fucks it up whatever way you look at it. If it IS a sequel, then why does the alien look so different? And if it ISN'T a sequel, then why does the alien look so similar?
So in conclusion, this whole film would have been a lot better if they stuck to the original synopses that I saw a few months ago, namely
"Humans discover clues about their origins and travel to the planet of their creators. The Engineers are initially proud to meet the humans and begin to show them wondrous things. But then one of the humans steals something he shouldn't have, and in anger the Engineers unleash the Xenomorphs as punishment to cleanse their planet."
This would fit the title of the film -
Prometheus - stealing shit that you really shouldn't be stealing. It would also allow much greater exploration of the themes of man and god. It would also make
Alien seem even more profound if the ship the
Nostromo finds was originally on course to wipe out mankind. It would give David/Weyland a much clearer motivation and allow all the other characters to blossom as they come face-to-face with the prospect of God. It would make the Engineers seem less like anrgy twats. And, most of all, it would be a LITTLE MORE FUCKING ORIGINAL than the quasi-slasher thriller that
Prometheus turned out to be.
>:[
