In Space No One Can Hear You Groan . . . Or, A Prometheus Re-Watch

By Steven McLain

I originally saw Prometheus in theaters opening weekend.  I probably wasn't fanatical enough to see it at midnight, but I definitely saw it the next day.  When the credits began to roll, I looked over at my friend and asked, "What the hell?"  Because, at first brush, Prometheus seemed to be a steaming pile of poo.

But I couldn't imagine that the creative genius that had given me the original Alien franchise (which I enjoy in all of its incarnations, including Alien Vs. Predator) could make such a blatant promise to expand the Alien universe, and so horrendously fail at delivering an interesting, engaging movie.  I didn't want to believe the hype about it not being an Alien prequel, and I felt pretty smug when the first alien popped out of the black goo and immediately sucked itself to a witless scientist's face.  That seemed pretty blatantly out of Alien.  Imagine my surprise, then, when characters began behaving inexplicably, plots went nowhere, an albino colossus arrived, and suddenly not-Ripley was being chased by aliens.  I felt cheated.

So, I had to wonder if maybe I'd expected too much from this movie.  Maybe I brought too many preconceptions and simply failed to let the movie speak to me on its own merit.  With that in mind, I rented it from a local RedBox, and now I'm going to give it go.  Fresh, as it were.  Let's see how it stands up to a second viewing.

Press play.  Let's get this party started.

***Major SPOILERS ahead***

Oh, a planet.  What planet is it?  Could it be Earth?  Is it the past, present, or future?  Who knows?  (It's gorgeous regardless, like something the BBC would produce.)  And a giant shadow sweeps from overhead, obscuring the sun--quick cut to a lone mendicant figure approaching a waterfall.  He's strangely buff, and pure white.  What kind of crazy technology does he have?  Wait, he's drinking it.  And while the spaceship ascends into heaven, he dissolves and we dive deep into his body at the cellular level to see his own DNA breaking apart.  As he tumbles into the primordial waters, cue "Prometheus" and a montage of new cells replicating.

Super flash cut to some time later (millions--billions?--of years) to an archeological dig where some sort of scientists find cave markings (dating 35,000 years ago) and we've suddenly told that "they" want us to come find them.  And another quick cut to the spaceship Prometheus, heading to an undisclosed destination, and David the Android making the rounds, checking up on the ship, being super-athletic, super-smart, watching old movies to imitate human behavior and generally being the most interesting thing we've seen so far.

Once they've arrived at their undisclosed destination, and everyone is awakened (and Meredith Vickers proves she's a bad-ass by doing pushups while still dripping from the cryo-sleep) they receive a debrief from Peter Weylan (who manages to make his artificial son both immeasurably happy and immeasurably distraught in the same sentence by reminding him he has no soul) and tells the crew they're looking for the creators of humanity.  The archaeologists (why are they in space?) tell everyone that ancient civilizations, millennia and continents apart all describe giants reaching toward a particular "galactic configuration" so far away that no one from Earth could possibly have known about it.  And they "choose to believe" that its a map toward the "Engineers."  After paying over a trillion dollars to get them there, Vickers reveals that the scientists (archaeologists, biologists, just what the heck do they study?) can't actually make contact (if the aliens even happen to be there).

Now, for no particular reason, they land the ship on the planet.  The CG is gorgeous.  Once more, Scott has demonstrated his acumen with special effects.

After discovering an alien structure, everyone gung-hoes it on over (after a quick quip about how inhuman David is, underscoring the not-very-subtle theme of Creation/Creator) and proceed to immediately knock on the front door.  The first thing they do is map the structure with automated mapping drones.  And the guy whose job is to map the structure, who comments that the drones are his "pups" is the very first guy to get lost!  But before that happens, off they go meandering into the depths of the structure and discover there's a breathable atmosphere within the structure (with hints that the aliens have been terraforming the planet).  Then, just to prove how bad-ass everyone is (or trusting, or stupid) everyone takes off their helmets.

By exploring the ancient alien ruins, the movie clearly embeds itself in hard-core science fiction.  Discovery is the name of the game in any sci-fi; the sense they we are all tiny parts of a greater, universal whole drives science fiction, and the first forty minutes or so of the movie are clearly sci-fi.  These, then, are the tropes the audience will come to expect, and the questions that must be resolved by the climax.

Back to the movie.  After David inexplicably touches a couple buttons, the hallway plays back a recording of three or four aliens sprinting down the hallway, and we see the violent death of the fourth when he is decapitated by a closing door; its dead body (2000 years dead) is lying in the dust.  And now the geologists (who is in charge of mapping the structure, and has a nifty mapping app on the smart-doodad on his wrist) goes wandering off back to the ship.  Once more, David pushes buttons without any particular rationale, and opens the door; and we discover both the head of the dead alien and what appears to be an egg room, filled with the same egg sacks we saw in Alien.  Not an Alien prequel, my butt. 

And then Not-Ripley makes the first (and possibly only) sensible statement of the movie: "Don't touch it."  Don't touch the strange alien technology, please.  With a storm on the way, the scientists head on back to the ship (but not the first two, who have instead gotten lost).  On that note, when the scientists rush back in the face of the storm, they note that "they have already taken off" seeming to refer to the two scientists who left earlier, but who are in actuality lost in the structure.  Where the heck did the transport go?  Silly director can't keep track of all his superfluous characters.

After a minor mishap, everyone gets back to the ship, except for the two scientists who are lost inside the alien structure.  Since I've already addressed how ridiculous this is, I'll move on.

Oh look, they brought the alien head back to the ship and now they're doing experiments on it.  Except it's not a head, it's a helmet and there's a head inside!  It's one of the white guys we saw at the beginning.  And it's perfectly mummified.  So perfectly mummified that they can see new cellular growth on the skull.  And using some sort of psuedoscientific technobabble, they manage "trick the nervous system" (which has been dead 2000 years) into believing its alive.  And then it explodes.  There's green goo everywhere.

After the first intimations that Peter Weylan is alive and on the ship, Vickers assaults David to find out what he told David.  "Try harder," is the nebulous answer.  But then David goes and extracts samples from the alien device he found in the egg-room.  At the same time, Not-Ripley gene sequences the sample from the exploded head (isn't she an archaeologist?) and discovers that it's the same as human DNA.  And David ominously states that "big things have small beginnings" once he extracts some of the black goo from the device.  Most ominously of all, he then slips Dr. Holloway (male scientist) some black goo in his drink.

The two engage in a tete-a-tete about the nature of creation and the theme of Creator/Creation is expanded so that David expounds on the disappointment he feels about his own creators, and the disappointment that we would feel realizing the Engineers are our own.

Back to the structure, where the lost scientists discover a pile of dead aliens, ruptured from the inside.  And a mapping probe discovers a life-form and the lost scientists are tasked to go see what it is.  But then it mysteriously disappears and the two scientists head in the opposite direction.

Back on the ship, Dr. Holloway whines about how he wanted to chat with the aliens, but now he can't.  "Life isn't special" we're told, anyone with some DNA and a dash of brains can make it, and Not-Ripley reveals that she is infertile and the two have hot make-up sex.  And then, for no good reason that I can discern, ice-queen Vickers gets some jungle-fever and heads down to the bridge to seduce the captain.  Actually, she headed down there so that the screenwriter could get empty the bridge so that no one could witness the travesty about to transpire in the alien structure.

Said travesty being the two scientists, one who has modified his suit into a gigantic bong (giving excuse for their idiocy), poking the cobra-like alien that suddenly appears.  As Steve Irwin knew, you shouldn't poke things that don't like being poked.  Then, inevitably, the alien manages to invade one suit and implant an egg deep inside his chest.  (And of course, since this is not an Alien prequel, I have no idea what's going to happen next.)

The next morning, after male-scientist discovers something dark and wormy in his eye and dismissing it, the lost scientists are discovered incommunicado and everyone goes off looking for them.  David, meanwhile, goes off on a secret mission to figure out what that mysterious glitch (and the intermittent life-form signal) was from the night before.  Oh look, a room full of those strange black-goo canisters.  And the alien command center.  David, of course, must explore.  And the dead scientist and the implanted scientist are both discovered, and Holloway's sickness is revealed.

David, meanwhile, has managed to restart the command center and is once more shown a playback of the crew's last moments, which includes a map of the known universe and the planets that have been seeded with Engineer DNA.  Grand, sweeping music plays to remind us that we are still in a science-fiction movie (not the action/horror into which it is quickly devolving).  Then David discovers the Engineer in stasis.  So maybe Holloway and Weylan can meet their maker after all.

On the way back to the ship, Holloway begins to change.  They realize it's not a simple illness, but rather an alien infection, and Vickers is determined to impose quarantine (with a flame-thrower, no less).  To protect the woman he loves, Holloway submits himself to the flames.

Fears of contagion spread; Not-Ripley undergoes a bio-scan and discovers that she is pregnant (but how can that be, since she's infertile?  Oh that's right, she's incubating alien spawn.)  David gets steadily creepier by this point and dopes Not-Ripley so that they can put her in cryo-sleep to take her home, but she's wise to the plan and fights her way to med-pod and uses the auto-surgery function to cut the bastard out of belly.  (Assuming some pretty hefty antibiotics, you still have to wonder how she can go superwoman later in the movie with a foot-wide gash stapled closed in her abdomen.)

Once the alien is removed, stoned-scientist returns to the ship.  Or does he?  Nope.  It's his body possessed by the black goo and while Not-Ripley is stumbling around, bleeding and weak from her surgery, he goes on a fiery rampage in the cargo bay.  Nothing but the captain (and his flame-thrower) can stop him.  Not-Ripley (pretty high on morphine, I've gotta admit) stumbles into Weylan's pod where people we've never seen before are tending to his recently thawed self.  He gets to meet his maker and jaunts off to see the albino colossus.  With all the recent carnage, however, Not-Ripley tells him that the Engineers aren't what the scientists (seriously, what did they get their doctorate in?) thought they were.  Weylan taunts her by wondering if she's lost her faith.

Back in Not-Ripley's cabin, the captain posits that they've stumbled over an Engineer weapons depot; they made weapons of mass destruction and they turned on the Engineers.  Not-Ripley and the captain wax eloquent about preventing the spread of contamination, then Not-Ripley follows Weylan into the alien structure to see just what the heck it's all about. On Prometheus, the captain discovers that there's an alien ship inside the structure.

In the alien structure, David reveals that the Engineer ship is heading to earth to destroy everything living there.  Then he wakes up the sleeping Engineer, who is not pleased to see David, Weylan or anybody else.  And suddenly we're running form baddies.  Not really sure why.  Perhaps it's a comment on the inherent hostility of the universe, or its ultimate unknowability, or simply the Lovecraftian notion that we're not all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Regardless, now that he's been awakened, the Engineer launches the ship toward Earth, sealing himself in the space-jockey suit that has nothing, whatsoever, to do with the original Alien.  And the rest of the movie is running, trying not to be fried to a crisp when the alien ship launches, outrunning a tumbling alien space-craft, fighting off an alien whose metabolism defies thermodynamics, and ultimately defeating the Engineer.  In the process of which, the alien impregnate its Engineer creator and the xenomorph is created.  Because, you know, this isn't a prequel to Alien.

So, other than the fact that this isn't a prequel to Alien, I actually enjoyed this movie a lot more on the re-watch.  I'm still uncertain about a lot of the plot holes, and genuinely unsure why any of it happened, much less how human beings were created 35,000 years ago by alien Engineers who then (roughly around the time of Christ) want to destroy humanity.  That being said, it holds up better than I initially thought, and generally feels like a good science fiction.  But the initial premise, the early questions, are left unanswered (even though David tells us "the answer is irrelevant"), and ultimately, the promise that the movie made in the first sequence is unfulfilled.