Archief - Welke film heb je vandaag gezien en wat vond je ervan ? (22)

gewoon één stap opzij moeten zetten voor dat rollende schip maar liever 2km loopt

[This part is spoiler free]
This is one hell of a weird film... I both love and hate it at the same time. Certain parts are very well done, others not so much. The scenes featuring David/Fassbender are top notch and what I really loved is how they introduced lots of elements that inject a certain ambiguity, forcing you to bring your own thoughts to the table if you want to tie everything together.

On the other hand... I hated that I had to apply an excessive amount of facepalms to myself in order to make it to the end credits without shouthing in disbelief at how unbelievably retarded the crew behaved itself.

I would still recommend everyone to go see it. In the end, although flawed, it's still good. The visuals alone make it worth a trip to the theater. It's not often that you get to see a big budget invested in a true sci-fi atmostphere instead of big explosions. In the end its saving grace is its ability to not only make you read between the lines but also to create between the lines. Even though it never gets close to the big questions of 2001, it's also not as action oriented as I feared.

[Spoilers start here]
Let's get all the bad out of the way. What the hell was wrong with that crew?

The geologist shows off his fancy mapping gadgets only to get lost shortly after that. It's hard to get lost today so getting lost in 2093 doesn't sound quite right to me. The rest of the crew doesn't seem to care and doesn't even notice when they both get killed. Why aren't these suits monitoring vital signs? Why isn't the entire ship put on red alert as soon as the first one flat lines?

All in all this mission seemed really ill prepared. They spent trillions of dollars on this mission and then when they arrive they don't even bother to deploy satellites or sensors nor do they map the surface, atmospheric composition, weather system, ... No instead they go in blind and count on their eyeballs for landing information and the arrival of storms... They even scanned the atmosphere during their decent! Luckily for them it wasn't corrosive or Prometheus would have ended rather abruptly.

We are not even certain there is life on Mars but we go through a hell of a lot of trouble to decontaminate anything we send over there. These guys are exploring an alien structure and are hoping to make first contact... yet the first thing they do is take off their helmets and start shedding skin cells and other bio filth all over the place.

Basically you only have 4 scientists that get some screen time, a religious believer, an adrenaline junkie, a psychopath and a full blown idiot. None of them seem to operate in a scientific manner and they don't even seem to get along very well which is requirement number 1 if you are being sent into deep space and have to live with each other in confined spaces for a long period of time.

It's lots of little details like that which make you shake your head now and then. Like everyone standing around an alien head that's about to explode. Why not manipulate it in a quarantined environment? She went through all that trouble getting it onboard, almost getting herself killed in the process just to blow it up during her first experiment...

Don't even get me started on that biologist that's so scared of a dead alien body that he wants to return to the ship, only to see him give into his urge to pet a hissing vagina cobra an instant later.

The first act was great, especially David and how he kept himself entertained during the 2 year long trip. Things get weird during the 2nd act and the third act sort of feels all over the place. It's also rather disturbing how nobody seems to really care about what is going on at any given instance. Shaw showing up naked covered in blood doesn't raise any questions? The captain's two sidekicks scored a cumulative 20 seconds of screentime, half that time is them laughing upon being told that they are going to have to commit suicide in the next 30 seconds... Again this crew just didn't really do it for me.

So how can you write half a book on why this film is so bad and yet still kind of love it? This brings us to the good parts.

The visuals. The opening scene, every shot that features the Prometheus, The wide epic vistas of alien landscapes, the alien catacombs, ... You get the idea, almost every second the screen is filled with gorgeous sci-fi inspired visuals that are just dripping with atmosphere.

The questions. Do not go to the theatre with the idea that you are going to get answers surrounding the alien mythos. This has almost nothing to do with alien and takes pace on a completely different moon. In fact it's quite the opposite, by the time you leave the theater things will have become much more complex and you'll have way more questions than answers.
> Why do the engineers seed life?
> Why do they want to put an end to mankind?
> What came first? The black goo or the xenomorph?
> Why did those cave paintings point to what is now a bioweapons facility?
> What were the engineers in the hologram running from?
> Were the engineers created or did they emerge naturally?
I think it is up to the viewer to come up with answers to these questions and I have seen quite a few theories including the now famous space jesus theory of which I am not a big fan although it is an interesting read; Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About: cavalorn
I have my own theory, more on that below

The themes
I could go on and on about these because this is something I really like about the film. Creation/destruction, religion/belief, gods/engineers, prometheus/technology, questions/answers, ... You can truly make it your own because of the infinite amount of parallels you can draw, connecting anything and everything thanks to all the ambiguity. Just a few examples are Janek lighting a christmas tree, Shaw being impregnated by the black goo from the gods, giving birth to a xenomorph although it was made clear she couldn't have children, a mural of a crucified xenomorph. Connect these 4 and it looks an awful lot like Shaw's having a xenomorph virgin birth on christmas day... Which can lead you to interesting aveneus where you start thinking about the xenomorph as jesus. =) Did the xenomorph die for the sins of the engineers?
There are tons of such 4 second scenes in this film that don't advance the plot in anyway but instead just add layer after layer of ambiguity. Another example would be the conversations between David and Holloway that bring the questions of creation and what it means for something to be synthetic to the foreground. When David is asked why he wears a helmet if he doesn't breath oxygen as well as the scene where David spikes Holloway's drink really stand out because they make you question what's going on in an artificial brain. IMO David is a key part to enjoying Prometheus, almost every line he has can be interpreted multiple ways. Which I think also underscores the point that this is a true sentient machine operating on a higher level because you truly have no idea what's going on in that artificial brain of his.

My theory
I hope I am not polishing a turd by applying too much of my own imagination but I've had quite a bit of fun trying to make everything fit so either way, for me this film was a nice experience.

The Engineers farm planets for interesting mutations. They seed life all over the galaxy in the hope of giving rise to interesting organisms with traits they can assimilate into their own codebase. It's obvious that their technology is biotech based, from the squishy and slimy buttons to their ships and armor;

Their Ships look very organic; the hallway seems to have a spine and its texture as well as the color look similar to that of the xenomorph carapace.
The same goes for their armor; A very organic xenomorph like look and it seems to be a part of them, grown instead of traditional fabrication.


The Xenomorph Mural
The opening sees an engineer give his life away in a ceremonial manner to create new life. Which is the opposite of what the xenomorphs do, they will destroy life to preserve their own. This entire room looks like a shrine which brings us to the main question. Why do they have so much respect for the xenomorph? Did the engineers change since the opening? Yes. They used different more traditional looking ships and they wore robes instead of the bio-armor. The other mural might provide some hints as well.

The Engineer Mural
http://www.prometheus-movie.com/media/concept001.jpg
This seems to portray an engineer having control over a creature that looks similar to a xenomorph. Why would you be so proud of gaining control over these things that you decide to dedicate artworks to its enslavement? To me this indicates that they had to fight long and hard to get this creature under their control. If your enemy is really tough, you will respect them for it. On top of that, if most of their current technology is based on genes they got from these creatures, then it would have made them quite a prize. This doesn't answer the question as to whether they seeded a planet with hostile environment, making the xenomorph one of their creations, or whether the xenomorph emerged naturally and they just stumbled upon them by accident.

It would follow that if they are only interested in farming planets for traits they can use, then they never seeded earth with creating mankind as the objective. They could have been far more interested in our dinosaurs and other creatures. Perhaps this is the first time that a species similar to themselves has emerged in their entire planet seeding history and they weren't sure what to do with us? This might not seem that likely but unlikely things happen all the time in our universe. Also keep in mind that, for example, eyes have developed independently multiple times on different branches of the tree of life. If you keep on seeding planets with similar conditions for billions of years it might not be that unlikely for bipedal, opposable thumb, culture loving entities to emerge naturally?

In other words they created life because they could, and humans are a byproduct of their work to improve their technology, just like we created machines because we could with sentient machines being a byproduct of us striving to improve our technology as was stated by Holloway.

If you thought the this was nothing but speculation and fan fiction you have seen nothing yet because now we are getting to the heart of the matter.

As soon as the engineers noticed that a species had a chance to become similar to themselves it created a rift in their society. Some wanted to set up our ecosystem in such a way that it would push us in the right direction to become ever more like them. They saw us as children and visited us throughout history to teach us about the universe and the possibilities of technology. The other group wanted to put an end to this frankenstein experiment and saw no use in it. They feared what we would become. They saw that we liked killing each other, they saw that our technology improved in leaps and bounds and anticipated that we would soon have weapons of mass destruction as well as the means to cross the void of space.

This starts a civil war among the engineers and with both sides being equal, one side needed an advantage over the other... Which brings me back to their reverence of the xenomorph and its crucifixion... Perhaps this is when they turn to the ultimate weapon, the xenomorph, creating a new class of ships and armor that alienates them (pun intended ) from their fellows. Perhaps some of the engineers even willingly sacrificed themselves, infecting themselves to mutate into xenomorphs to be used as weapons against our "parent" engineers? Although it would make more sense for them to use other creatures I do think it is a possibility considering that the good guys don't have a problem with ritual suicide for a higher purpose either.

In the end the side that wanted to destroy us won and in the final phases of that war they exterminated all the "good" engineers as well as the remaining xenomorphs. The xenomorph died for their sins and is a testament to it. It was created for destroying their own. Which would make it easier to understand why that room looks somewhat as a shrine, it could be a memorial dedicated to their fallen brethren. (I know this feels a bit contrived, prolly wrong here but there has to be some deeper meaning behind that crucified xenomorph and I keep coming back to it dying for someones sins.)

Perhaps the cave paintings pointing to the home of our parents indicate that good guys used to live on the moon LV-223? Perhaps it used to have a breathable atmosphere which was destroyed by the war? The engineers that weren't killed sought refuge in underground terraforming structures only to have the others unleash the xenomorph bioweapon upon them? This would explain the engineer massacre and them running away in fear in the holograms. The winning faction could then have turned it into a weapons facility/memorial after the war. As a bonus the engineers would also be following a parallel with Weyland; wanting to destroy mankind because they fear their offspring. They know that they are getting old and the new kids on the block, their offspring would do a better job at running the show. Vickers/Theron also talked about how a king has his reign. The engineer's reign is over, mankind has entered the stage and demands the crown.