PROMETHEUS regia di Ridley Scott

boodi  27/09/2012 11:15:05 » Rispondi
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" The movie opens with an alien “Engineer” preparing to seed a primordial planet—presumably Earth—with life. He accomplishes this by drinking a black goop which causes him to die in agony, disintegrating at the cellular level. It looks cool, but forces you to wonder: Is this really the best means available for this incredibly advanced species to introduce genetic material to a planet? It’s a little like finding out that Prometheus brought fire to humanity by setting himself on fire despite the ready availability of kindling. As with many, many other bizarre moments in this movie, this makes sense at a thematic and allegorical level, but fails at the level of elementary plot logic. This is why doing allegory well is hard: Your story actually has to work at a second level without shattering the viewer’s suspension of disbelief on the first level. Throughout the movie, you get the sense that the authors have decided that if it works symbolically, it doesn’t need to make sense narratively.
Is it possible that this “engineer” simply doesn’t have the same sense of self-preservation that you or I might have? You point out the mythological Prometheus, but didn’t his very act of giving fire to humanity ensure his own painful torture for all eternity? And that he basically knew he would be punished horribly for this very action? How is this act of self destruction any different? Who knows, maybe the alien was dying already? Maybe he had come to the end of his life cycle and wanted to go out with a bang? I feel this is what makes Prometheus interesting. The possibilities. For example, Noomi’s character questions why did the Engineers create then want to destroy humanity? Is it possible the Engineer in the beginning of the movie was from a different faction of aliens? And that the aliens encountered by the scientists were a more aggressive war-mongering faction? Sort of crunchy granola vs. warhawks?
• The movie proper begins with the discovery of a glyph that appears in the art of many human civilizations separated by vast distances in time and space. Apparently the configuration of five stars, depicted at the resolution of cave paintings, is sufficient to uniquely identify one area of space 35 light years away. Noomi Rapace concludes that this is an invitation from the aforementioned aliens, who not only visited earth in ancient times, but actually created the human species. Not one shred of evidence for this hypothesis is ever provided, but it’s what Noomi “chooses to believe,” even though this is in fairly obvious tension with Christian doctrine, which she also “chooses to believe.”(She later suggests that maybe God made the aliens, without any acknowledgement that this would rescue deism, not Christianity.) Nevertheless, this is all it takes to persuade the Weyland Corporation to spend a trillion dollars sending not an unmanned probe but a ship full of human scientists on a two-year voyage in cryostasis to see if Erich von Daniken was right after all.
I dunno. You could apply this same argument as to why the United States government would sponsor Indiana Jones to stop the Nazis from finding the Ark of the Covenant. Belief is a powerful drive. It’s why the Winchester Mansion was continued to be built creating over a hundred rooms, because the Winchester widow believed that the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles and guns would not haunt her if she continued to build upon her mansion. Faith can be a powerful motivator, especially for someone like Welyand, a man with immeasurable wealth and a strong drive to find immortality.
• A big chunk of this tedious exposition is delivered by a hologram of CEO Peter Weyland, who is inexplicably played by Guy Pearce in bad latex makeup rather than an actual old person, even though no younger version of the character is ever seen. Weyland claims he will have died by the time they see this recording, but this turns out to be a deception: He’s actually also in cryostasis on the ship. Since Weyland’s plan involves him being revived once they’ve made contact with the aliens, he must know that this will be exposed as a deception within a day or two, making the whole elaborate ruse completely pointless, except as a setup for a lame third-act reveal.
I’ll give you that.
• Ditto the fact that Charlize Theron is Weyland’s daughter: This is kept secret for no reason beyond setting up a meh-inducing late reveal. Her motives are even more opaque. She believes the entire mission is just a hazardous wild goose chase, and only wants to inherit her father’s empire. She joins them on this 4-year-plus mission because she doesn’t want to hang around squabbling over who runs the company… even though her best-case scenario would appear to involve doing this when she gets back from the perilous mission, having given her rivals 5 years to scheme in her absence.
Actually, I liked this. I was puzzled as to the hostility she showed to David in the beginning of the movie, but when it’s basically revealed as a form of sibling rivalry (Weyland even refers to him as the son he never had), it makes it an interesting relationship. Is it possible that she also wanted to try to cure her father’s delusion (so she believed) that they’d be able to meet the creators of mankind?
• Weyland’s primary motive, we eventually learn, is the hope of learning from the aliens some means of further prolonging his life, as he has hit the limits of artificial extension and is near death. Except he can apparently remain alive in cryostasis indefinitely. So instead of funding a probe and further medical research while he waits on ice for the next breakthrough, he has packed himself on this unprecedented and incredibly hazardous voyage.
But, he also believes he can meet his creator. And that because he feels he deserves to. Why should he believe this is a hazardous mission? Long, perhaps, but hazardous?
• Weyland also takes off on a forced and clunky tangent about how his Android “son” David can’t appreciate his own immortality because he lacks a soul. There’s no hint that scientific supergenius Weyland detects any tension between this quaint notion and his apparent conviction that humans, too, have been “engineered” by an advanced biological race.
Well, we actually don’t know if he’s a supergenius or merely a rich CEO. And who says he has to be philosophical? Clearly with how he treats his daughter and other people (like Noomi), he’s a bit of an egomaniac.
• Upon arriving at their destination, we see that the team has incredibly sophisticated mapping probes, but charge into an alien facility themselves without waiting for the probes to finish scanning the structure. Immediately upon discovering that there’s a breathable atmosphere within the facility, one Dr. Holloway brazenly pulls off his helmet—chiding his colleague and lover to not “be a skeptic,” because apparently skepticism is anathema to good scientists. Though it’s later confirmed they have no way of being sure the air isn’t full of strange pathogens, and everyone else points out that this is insane, the rest of the team nevertheless immediately follows suit when it doesn’t result in his instant death.
There’s a lot of episodes of Star Trek you probably hate.
• A hologram recording showing the apparent deaths of many of the aliens millennia earlier is triggered. The supposedly superintelligent android shines a flashlight on the holograms in an effort to see them better.
I know it bothered you, it didn’t bother me.
• The Shaggy and Scooby of the film—a biologist and a geologist—freak out at the sight of dead alien bodies, despite having been willing to truck 35 light years on a perilous exploratory mission, and hasten to head back to the ship in a panic. They get lost, despite the fact that the geologist is the one with mapping expertise. This fear then evaporates as quickly as it appeared, as the biologist decides he should recklessly cozy up to a terrifying alien serpent creature. To nobody’s surprise, it quickly kills the biologist, while his geologist colleague is dissolved in black goop, only to later reappears as a zombie in a completely pointless fight scene. This is a pattern. In almost every scene, members of this handpicked group of top scientists for a trillion-dollar mission routinely make the kind of wildly irrational blunders that we strain to accept when it’s half-drunk teenagers in slasher pics. Nobody, at any time, acts remotely like a scientist
I will definitely give you the biologist’s behavior as being idiotic. However, I would equate Noomi’s passion for wanting answers to Indiana Jones refusal to blow up the ark of the covenant. They’re both driven by thirsts of discovery, even if they both prove to be at a self-destructive level. That being said, Noomi’s character was one crazy bitch.
• The DNA of the alien Engineers is apparently a perfect match for human DNA, despite the fact that they’re like 8-feet tall with grey skin, no body hair, and completely black eyes. Just how this could actually be true so many millions of years later remains a puzzle for the viewer.
Eh. A great dane and a toy poodle look profoundly different, but they’re both still dogs.
• Android David indicates that he thinks he can read the alien language. Nobody follows up with him on this or suggests that deciphering their records might be urgent, especially when it’s clear they’ve got a lethal contagion on the loose.
This was probably my biggest issue with the movie. People don’t seem freaked out when someone mutates or turns into a crazy crab-postured maniac. And then they go into the structure again! However, I do think a few more scenes of people being convinced/blackmailed/bribed could have fixed this for me.
• With half the team out exploring the hazardous alien facility, Space Captain Stringer Bell decides to abandon his post at the comms station to bang Charlize Theron. Which, at some level, fair enough… but nobody ever suggests this is a gross dereliction of duty.
Please, how many straight men would NOT leave their posts for a chance to sleep with Charlize Theron? And he’s in no position to help the scientists anyway with the killer storm outside.
• Android David infects one of the scientists with the black alien slime for no apparent reason, despite the obvious danger this poses. (Oddly, David’s actions do make sense if you assume he has the same goal as the treacherous android Ash in Alien—to preserve the xenomorph as a biological weapon—though there’s no indication of this, and it would seem to require knowledge none of the characters could possibly have.)
I think it was pretty clear that David had emotions, though somewhat stunted. He clearly wanted to please Weyland and showed resentment for the unintentional belittling remarks the scientists make, assuming he has no capacity for emotion. This is also shown after watching the footage of Sir Laurence Olivier and changing his hairstyle to match his. He wants to be considered human and thus emulates this respected actor.
• The aforementioned infected scientist can see there’s something obviously wrong with him, but instead of immediately seeking medical attention, decides to risk himself and the entire crew—including the love of his life—by pretending he’s just hunky dory until he literally collapses.
This is just my interpretation, but I think he just didn’t believe what just happened. If I saw a worm pop in and out of my eye, I might think, “holy shit, did I just dream that?” Then, when he starts to feel worse and worse, he realized it wasn’t his imagination but that it was now too late for him.
• Android David tells Noomi she seems to be about “three months pregnant” (about ten minutes after we awkwardly introduce the idea that she’s infertile for the first time)—then immediately reveals that the “fetus” is an alien squid thing. Maybe he read something about the normal gestational cycle of alien squid things in the hieroglyphs? Because… how the hell does he know what “three months” looks like? When she pleads with him to cut it out, he attempt to knock her out and put her in stasis, again for reasons unclear. She then neglects to mention this unsporting behavior to anyone, and nobody seems at all curious when she shows up bloodied and bedraggled after performing an emergency auto-caesarian.
I don’t think he meant that the alien was three months pregnant, but more that the size of the mass was equivalent to a woman who was pregnant and in her third month of pregnancy.
• At one point, Space Captain Stringer Bell abruptly intuits that they’ve landed at a WMD manufacturing plant wisely situated far from the Engineers’ home world, though it’s not remotely clear that his explanation is anything more than a wild guess. Maybe it’s just what he “chooses to believe”? This raises the additional question: Why did the aliens leave us with an invitation to their weapons depot?
See, this is where it gets interesting to me. For all we know, their people could be like ours. With different drives and political leanings. Who knows, maybe the aliens originally at that location were the ones who created us. And then were conquered by another more warlike or xenophobic branch. I know I’m just guessing here, but the open possibilities for the engineers’ motivations is what I find fascinating.
• The sophisticated alien computer has a sort of flute-like control mechanism, apparently used exclusively to turn the system on, at which point it’s operated by buttons. Which is like having a remote control for your TV, except for the power button, which takes the form of a flute. Why don’t they just have an on button? Or an entirely flute-based control system? Because space, shut up.
This bothered you? Really?
• A member of this incredibly advanced species that created humanity is found in stasis and awakened. Confronted by a group of humans, including an android that speaks its language, and obviously lacking any knowledge of how many others there might be, or what weaponry they might have, this advanced being makes no effort to gather any information. It roars and begins acting like a space monster, attacking the party with its bare hands.
I see several possibilities for this:
1. This engineer is part of a different “political” group from the one who created humans. Or possibly religious faction. Maybe they see humanity as an abomination against their god. Who knows? But for whatever reason, he’s clearly offended by humanity.
2. We saw the geologist character is driven by an intense animalistic aggression because he was infected by the black goo. Is it possible this engineer was infected too, bringing about high levels of destructive aggression?
• When Space Captain Stringer Bell decides he must sacrifice himself to stop the Engineer from returning to earth and destroying humanity, his crew almost gleefully volunteer to join him, on the grounds that he is a bad pilot and will need their help… to ram a spaceship the size of a city block. (As a commenter suggests, it’s possible that this is said sarcastically, and they’re actually just needlessly throwing their lives away in a gesture of solidarity. Hey, what are buddies for?)
Honestly, I don’t remember, were they able to see all of that interaction with the Engineer? Yes, it’s true, they didn’t seem to be that bothered by the idea of dying. I guess it’s a quick stab at heroism. Should they have run for the escape shuttles instead?
• Charlize Theron is crushed to death when said ship topples because she runs along its falling length instead of, you know, going sideways. (In an apparent repudiation of Newton along with Darwin, the fast-moving ship basically drops out of the sky in a straight line rather than falling in an arc to crash miles away.)
I know people say this, but people also panic. For example, when someone tried to mug me in NYC, I was actually a half a block away running at full speed before I had even realized I was running. Sometimes instinct just takes over. Sometimes people on train tracks just run along the tracks when a train is coming. Stupid, yes. But it happens.
• The Engineer survives this crash and almost instantly locates Noomi Rapace in order to continue the effort to kill her, again with his bare hands. The rationale for this is, again, totally opaque, especially given that we then learn there are dozens of other ships—possibly including other Engineers in stasis, though nobody exhibits any curiosity about this possibility either.
I suppose see my earlier response to the earlier problem you had with the engineer.
• Noomi’s squid-fetus, meanwhile, has grown to monstrous proportions despite being locked in a small room with no sources of food or other places for the additional mass to have come from.
This also happened in Alien, when the chest burster grew larger than a man in an incredibly short amount of time. Did it bother you there too?"

è in inglese .. cmq condivido il 90% delle risposte ai dilemmi esistenziali sollevati da chi si confronta con questo film di fantascienza .. ;)