Prometheus (Film Review)
This was another film which deeply divided my flist into nays and yays.. As it finally was released in Germany yesterday, I watched it myself, and am firmly among the yays. It's an individual reaction. You may not share it. But let me explain why I loved a great deal of what I saw.
And no, it's not just because Michael Fassbender's robot David spends the entire film modelling himself on Peter O'Toole playing T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, though that was definitely a selling point, Fassbender (and the make-up and hair styling department) do a great job of an eerily convincing performance in this regard, and I'll say more about this later. Incidentally, I am amused Damon Lindelof, who wrote the script, is fanboy enough to keep up the alphabetical tradition of naming the robots, so after Ash in Alien, Bishop in Aliens and Aliens3 and Cal in Alien: Resurection, we now get D for David. David 8 in full, according to the internet, which immediately reminds me that the character played by Sigourney Weaver in Alien: Resurrection isn't Ellen Ripley, who died at the end of the preceding film, she is, as she discovers in the course of the film, Ripley 8, the eighth attempt at a hybrid Ripley/Alien clone.
Names strike me as very consciously chosen in this film, which isn't surprising, because if you recall Lindelof had great fun with that in Lost, between Locke, Rousseau, and C (for Charlotte) Lewis just among the most obvious. Most people associate Prometheus solely with his act of rebellion in bringing humans the fire from the gods (after, note, creating them in the first place), amd with the punishment he himself received for that. But what the story of this film evoked in me instead was the story of how, before Prometheus, the humans themselves were punished for existing, with the box of Pandora (who herself was created directly by the gods, not by Prometheus), containing all the evils of the world and one virtue - hope. Of course the box got opened. It always does.
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw who bears both the name of another sci fi heroine, the Third Doctor's companion, and the last alias T.E. Lawrence picked for himself (he was Private Shaw at the Airforce) has the Ripley role of being the sole female survivor, and like Ripley in the original film, the one Ridley Scott directed before, she doesn't really come into her own until the second half of the film. (One regrettable circumstance that goes with this is that early on her companion, Charlie Holloway, is so annoying that I rooted for him to get killed off and as opposed to Elizabeth Shaw could not regret it was done.) But other than their survivor skills, the fact neither of them are soldiers and thus the audience sees said skills develop in progress, and the fact they're both brunettes Elizabeth Shaw doesn't feel like a Ripley echo, she feels like her own character. Also very much like a Lindelof graduated from Abrams one, because like John Locke and Arvin Sloane, she's a driven person of faith and obsessive enough about the need to find the truths she's looking for to endanger the rest of the ensemble. (When she goes for the head despite the oncoming storm.) BUT the role of Pandora is actually shared here. Because in the Alien franchise, it's always the greedy company who is the real enemy - as Ripley once says, the Aliens simply follow their instincts, it's the company who does it for profit, and eventually she comes to the conclusion humanity might be the worse of the two species - and the company's founder, Wayland, is on board the Prometheus, looking not, like Shaw, for answers but for his own immortality. And it's David who literally opens the box. The robots in the franchise have been foe (Ash), friend (Bishop) and both (Cal, who also could have been lover - the script and Sigourney Weaver certainly try their best, but Winona Ryder is so very wooden), and so the ambiguity here is fitting, with David both bringing death and life. As opposed to both Alien and Greek myth, though, and as opposed to horror movie tropes, Elizabeth Shaw's final conclusion is something very innovative. Not "some things are better left untouched" or the mad scientist/greedy company like "must try to use obviously lethal monster for profit", but the need to seek out her and the Alien's creators and ask them why. And this was the hook that really finished selling me on Elizabeth Shaw as a scientist, making that her profession. (Archaelogy, to be very precise, which was also T.E. Lawrence's pre war profession.) It's also what justifies the film as something new instead of one more attempt to breathe life into the embers of a long dead franchise. The scene where David experiences the holomap on the bridge of the Engineer's ship has a genuine sense of wonder in it which wasn't in the Alien films (which are set in the future but definitely belong in the horror genre), of exploration, and Elizabeth Shaw's decision (diametrically opposed to Ripley's, though their closing monologue is in other parts identical) not to return to Earth but to search for the Engineers's world(s) instead, not on a vengeance quest but driven by the need to know why plays into the same emotional hook that got me. No wonder the two end up together on that ship.
The idea that the Aliens were artificially designed, not a natural grown life form, isn't new, it was there practically from the start of the franchise. But combining it with the idea that humans were also designed (by the same creators, no less - or one of them, if we by mythic example -, with the Aliens in the role of the punishing evils in Pandora's box), puts a new twist on Ripley's weary "sometimes I wonder which species is worse" observation. But the third beat elevates it to fascinating, to combine all this with the ambiguity of the robots and their own attitude towards their (human) creators. And suddenly, for the first time, I can see Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and the Alien movies happening in the same universe. "Not everyone wants to kill their parents" David tells Elizabeth Shaw, but he does kill Holloway who taunted him about robots being created "because we could" after getting Holloway to agree unknowingly to his own demise in a very Greek myth way.
There are no innocents here. But there is the need to know why in Elizabeth Shaw and David alike though that same scene between David and Holloway reads also as a metatextual warning by Lindelof that the answer may be banal (David saying to Holloway: Imagine how disappointed you'd be if that was your creator's answer), that it was the quest which was interesting. It's also a constant engagement with and sometimes refutation of tropes of genre and specifically the Alien franchise. The second film, Cameron's Aliens made motherhood central - we learn Ripley had a daughter (not mentioned in Scott's Alien who because Ripley was frozen for decades is irrevocably lost to her, the big showdown is between mama bear Ripley and newly adopted daughter Newt and the Alien Queen (another Cameron invention and addition to the franchise) and her brood. The third film twists motherhood into violation as Newt dies in the opening and Ripley turns out to have the latest Alien gestating inside her, which leads her to her suicidal death. Whereas we're informed early on Elizabeth Shaw can never have children, and when she finds out she has something alien (and lethal) gestating in her womb anyway, in the breakout sequence that turns the character into the film's heroine she uses the earlier introduced emergency medical unit to operate it out of her before it can kill her. (It's hard not to read that as: no more alien pregnancies; this woman has an abortion instead. No more motherhood as motivation to become superwoman, either.)
The other parent on the film is Wayland, who produced a) his company, destined to be the real big bad in the future, b) his daughter, who gets rejected by him because he can't accept the natural order of things, the demise of parents and the ascendancy of their children, and c) David, who gets called "the nearest thing I have to a son" (in front of said daughter, no less, and the resentful siblings dynamic between Vickers and David is another emotional hook for me with my thing for messy family relationships) but gets used primarly as an instrument to prolong Wayland's life. And then of course there is the awakened Engineer, the only deducable intention of whom is to kill the questing creations, humans and robot alike. (The Aliens have no way to ask why; it's designed out of them.) Which makes both him and Weyland to me Kronos avatars to me in this particular mythical game - Kronos, Saturn, god of time, Titan eating his children in order not to be supplanted by them until he's tricked and one of them escapes and supplants him anyway.
And thus in the end we have Elizabeth Shaw - who herself contributed to the Alien achieving its final form by feeding the Engineer to the facehugger that she operated out of her body - continuing her quest with David as her ally by necessity, in the full knowledge of what he earlier did to Holloway and how that makes him also responsible for what almost happened to her. It's such a promising tension ridden dynamic that I only hope they've secured Rapace and Fassbender both for any sequels that might be made. And went looking for fanfic right away.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/810149.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
And no, it's not just because Michael Fassbender's robot David spends the entire film modelling himself on Peter O'Toole playing T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, though that was definitely a selling point, Fassbender (and the make-up and hair styling department) do a great job of an eerily convincing performance in this regard, and I'll say more about this later. Incidentally, I am amused Damon Lindelof, who wrote the script, is fanboy enough to keep up the alphabetical tradition of naming the robots, so after Ash in Alien, Bishop in Aliens and Aliens3 and Cal in Alien: Resurection, we now get D for David. David 8 in full, according to the internet, which immediately reminds me that the character played by Sigourney Weaver in Alien: Resurrection isn't Ellen Ripley, who died at the end of the preceding film, she is, as she discovers in the course of the film, Ripley 8, the eighth attempt at a hybrid Ripley/Alien clone.
Names strike me as very consciously chosen in this film, which isn't surprising, because if you recall Lindelof had great fun with that in Lost, between Locke, Rousseau, and C (for Charlotte) Lewis just among the most obvious. Most people associate Prometheus solely with his act of rebellion in bringing humans the fire from the gods (after, note, creating them in the first place), amd with the punishment he himself received for that. But what the story of this film evoked in me instead was the story of how, before Prometheus, the humans themselves were punished for existing, with the box of Pandora (who herself was created directly by the gods, not by Prometheus), containing all the evils of the world and one virtue - hope. Of course the box got opened. It always does.
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw who bears both the name of another sci fi heroine, the Third Doctor's companion, and the last alias T.E. Lawrence picked for himself (he was Private Shaw at the Airforce) has the Ripley role of being the sole female survivor, and like Ripley in the original film, the one Ridley Scott directed before, she doesn't really come into her own until the second half of the film. (One regrettable circumstance that goes with this is that early on her companion, Charlie Holloway, is so annoying that I rooted for him to get killed off and as opposed to Elizabeth Shaw could not regret it was done.) But other than their survivor skills, the fact neither of them are soldiers and thus the audience sees said skills develop in progress, and the fact they're both brunettes Elizabeth Shaw doesn't feel like a Ripley echo, she feels like her own character. Also very much like a Lindelof graduated from Abrams one, because like John Locke and Arvin Sloane, she's a driven person of faith and obsessive enough about the need to find the truths she's looking for to endanger the rest of the ensemble. (When she goes for the head despite the oncoming storm.) BUT the role of Pandora is actually shared here. Because in the Alien franchise, it's always the greedy company who is the real enemy - as Ripley once says, the Aliens simply follow their instincts, it's the company who does it for profit, and eventually she comes to the conclusion humanity might be the worse of the two species - and the company's founder, Wayland, is on board the Prometheus, looking not, like Shaw, for answers but for his own immortality. And it's David who literally opens the box. The robots in the franchise have been foe (Ash), friend (Bishop) and both (Cal, who also could have been lover - the script and Sigourney Weaver certainly try their best, but Winona Ryder is so very wooden), and so the ambiguity here is fitting, with David both bringing death and life. As opposed to both Alien and Greek myth, though, and as opposed to horror movie tropes, Elizabeth Shaw's final conclusion is something very innovative. Not "some things are better left untouched" or the mad scientist/greedy company like "must try to use obviously lethal monster for profit", but the need to seek out her and the Alien's creators and ask them why. And this was the hook that really finished selling me on Elizabeth Shaw as a scientist, making that her profession. (Archaelogy, to be very precise, which was also T.E. Lawrence's pre war profession.) It's also what justifies the film as something new instead of one more attempt to breathe life into the embers of a long dead franchise. The scene where David experiences the holomap on the bridge of the Engineer's ship has a genuine sense of wonder in it which wasn't in the Alien films (which are set in the future but definitely belong in the horror genre), of exploration, and Elizabeth Shaw's decision (diametrically opposed to Ripley's, though their closing monologue is in other parts identical) not to return to Earth but to search for the Engineers's world(s) instead, not on a vengeance quest but driven by the need to know why plays into the same emotional hook that got me. No wonder the two end up together on that ship.
The idea that the Aliens were artificially designed, not a natural grown life form, isn't new, it was there practically from the start of the franchise. But combining it with the idea that humans were also designed (by the same creators, no less - or one of them, if we by mythic example -, with the Aliens in the role of the punishing evils in Pandora's box), puts a new twist on Ripley's weary "sometimes I wonder which species is worse" observation. But the third beat elevates it to fascinating, to combine all this with the ambiguity of the robots and their own attitude towards their (human) creators. And suddenly, for the first time, I can see Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and the Alien movies happening in the same universe. "Not everyone wants to kill their parents" David tells Elizabeth Shaw, but he does kill Holloway who taunted him about robots being created "because we could" after getting Holloway to agree unknowingly to his own demise in a very Greek myth way.
There are no innocents here. But there is the need to know why in Elizabeth Shaw and David alike though that same scene between David and Holloway reads also as a metatextual warning by Lindelof that the answer may be banal (David saying to Holloway: Imagine how disappointed you'd be if that was your creator's answer), that it was the quest which was interesting. It's also a constant engagement with and sometimes refutation of tropes of genre and specifically the Alien franchise. The second film, Cameron's Aliens made motherhood central - we learn Ripley had a daughter (not mentioned in Scott's Alien who because Ripley was frozen for decades is irrevocably lost to her, the big showdown is between mama bear Ripley and newly adopted daughter Newt and the Alien Queen (another Cameron invention and addition to the franchise) and her brood. The third film twists motherhood into violation as Newt dies in the opening and Ripley turns out to have the latest Alien gestating inside her, which leads her to her suicidal death. Whereas we're informed early on Elizabeth Shaw can never have children, and when she finds out she has something alien (and lethal) gestating in her womb anyway, in the breakout sequence that turns the character into the film's heroine she uses the earlier introduced emergency medical unit to operate it out of her before it can kill her. (It's hard not to read that as: no more alien pregnancies; this woman has an abortion instead. No more motherhood as motivation to become superwoman, either.)
The other parent on the film is Wayland, who produced a) his company, destined to be the real big bad in the future, b) his daughter, who gets rejected by him because he can't accept the natural order of things, the demise of parents and the ascendancy of their children, and c) David, who gets called "the nearest thing I have to a son" (in front of said daughter, no less, and the resentful siblings dynamic between Vickers and David is another emotional hook for me with my thing for messy family relationships) but gets used primarly as an instrument to prolong Wayland's life. And then of course there is the awakened Engineer, the only deducable intention of whom is to kill the questing creations, humans and robot alike. (The Aliens have no way to ask why; it's designed out of them.) Which makes both him and Weyland to me Kronos avatars to me in this particular mythical game - Kronos, Saturn, god of time, Titan eating his children in order not to be supplanted by them until he's tricked and one of them escapes and supplants him anyway.
And thus in the end we have Elizabeth Shaw - who herself contributed to the Alien achieving its final form by feeding the Engineer to the facehugger that she operated out of her body - continuing her quest with David as her ally by necessity, in the full knowledge of what he earlier did to Holloway and how that makes him also responsible for what almost happened to her. It's such a promising tension ridden dynamic that I only hope they've secured Rapace and Fassbender both for any sequels that might be made. And went looking for fanfic right away.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/810149.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.