How to talk to yourself while watching Prometheus
To our relief, Prometheus is not a repeat of our Phantom Menace horror in which a filmmaker takes a beloved movie from our childhood and craps all over it. (See Patton Oswalt on the Star Wars prequel abominations.) Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien—and it is a prequel, even if he doesn’t say so—is weird, gripping and provocative.
It doesn’t have the claustrophobic horror of Alien. Noomi Rapace isn’t our badass Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver. There is no Jonesy the ginger cat. The plot is reminiscent of Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and the TV show Ancient Aliens. There’s nothing like that scene in the original where John Hurt is having breakfast when he has the worst tummy ache in history—a scene we acted out at breakfast for an entire year. But Prometheus is enthralling in its own right: a movie that asks the big questions and makes you come up with your own answers. And it looks fabulous.
1. The protagonist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is a Christian and a proponent of “intelligent design”, the shiny rebranding of creationism. She is on a quest to find the “engineers” of the human race.
What is the movie saying about creation and belief?
2. Think about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Do they apply to the android David, played with full Uncanny Valley brilliance by our husband Michael Fassbender?
3. Compare and contrast Prometheus with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially HAL/David and Weyland/aged Dave Bowman.
4. A common problem among prequels is that the technology onscreen is more advanced than that in the earlier movie (which is supposed to have taken place later). Worst offender: the Phantom Menace. How does Prometheus fare in this respect?
Compare the grunginess of the old Nostromo with the gleaming antiseptic Prometheus.
5. Does the captain’s (Idris Elba) big decision strike you as sudden or arbitrary?
So what is the alien?
Why Lawrence of Arabia? And why is the android more interesting than any of the people?
Are you happy to see the goo?
Remember: Don’t listen to the old farts. Think for yourselves.
June 7th, 2012 at 00:42
“But Prometheus is enthralling in its own right: a movie that asks the big questions”
i just watched it, here are my questions:
does the alien represent the masculine and the feminine psyche? freudian much? look at it, it looks like a vagina with penis tentacles.
idris elba “just flies a ship” but it’s him and his crew who `saved the earth’ from an alien invasion. because they’re not in the mission to discover, know or be anything, they have no preconceived notions of who they’re supposed to be or what theyre supposed to find out, theyre just in the moment whatever that moment calls for them to do.
were any of you guys emotionally affected when they raised their hands in surrender & crashed their ship?
was the movie about birth and death and birth again and death again and birth again and then death sort of like life and then death and then life again & death again & life and death & life and it goes on & on like entropy and evolution and the movie used David to represent this?
hasnt David been pissing on the entire mission the whole time?
does he represent the human intellect? it could take you wherever it is you want to go, but being solely mind-based — the same thing that was left of David when he was destroyed, his head — you could only go around in circles and be in the same place where you left off, searching for something that you may have already found but the head has “chosen to believe” you haven’t. thus the reason why David held on to the cross which Nooma chose to wear again despite the un-necessity of it?
if David is the “head” / intellect / the male psyche, is Nooma’s character the “heart” or the body / female psyche?
is the “operating” machine that took out that baby octopus alien sexist?
or does it represent technology’s failure to understand the intricacies of the female body?
June 7th, 2012 at 10:08
the best movie of the year. so happy the CGI was not a distraction.
June 7th, 2012 at 10:13
so is charlize “father!” theron an android too? did she have pretend sex with idris elba?
June 9th, 2012 at 10:33
cheezmiss, I like your questions.
I think I will watch Prometheus all over again. Or maybe it’s just my head just searching for something I may have already found.
June 10th, 2012 at 23:14
@ricky thanks!
hah!