I’m too sad to review Prometheus. I will say that it’s absolutely gorgeous and I am glad I saw it on a quality screen. Ridley Scott’s eye for composition and spectacle is still remarkable. There’s nothing wrong with the directing, the acting is mostly very good, and conceptually the movie worked. The script sucked, though. Kept trying to reach big emotional beats, but none of them had proper setup, and without setup there is no payoff.
I do have a theory, though, which is full of spoilers.
At one point the ship’s captain, Janek, asserts that the planet is a weapon factory and that the biotech they’re dealing with is a weapon. Nobody argues because the script is truly crappy and because people are a bit busy, but the idea doesn’t make much sense. The biotech is a terrible weapon: as people keep mentioning, it’s been millennia since anyone’s been active on the planet but the biotech is still there waiting for company. You wouldn’t drop this on a planet unless you never wanted to visit that planet again.
This also clashes with the intro sequence. There’s an Engineer carefully, solemnly drinking the biotech as his spaceship leaves him alone on the planet. That’s not a weapon delivery system.
The Engineers on Earth left all those pointers to the planet Prometheus visits. Why would you leave signposts to a weapons factory all over a primitive planet?
The giant head in the first room the scientists visit doesn’t make sense for a weapon factory. More interestingly, the sculpted door behind the head is a stylized xenomorph queen, or something fairly similar. Who builds big awe-inspiring replicas of their terror weapons?
Well, maybe aliens do. Although the Engineers are aliens with our DNA, so I kind of think the idea that they just think differently would be a cop out. Which means we need to think about why the surviving Engineer was so pissed off at the scientists. It’s almost like they’re invading sacred ground.
Which is, I think, what’s going on. The Engineers worship the black goo (which winds up spawning xenomorphs) as a superior form of being. Those urns echo canopic jars. The introductory sequence is an act of worship. The Engineers spread their descendants on new worlds — Earth being one of them — and then sacrifice those worlds to the black goo. By this act of sacrifice, they keep their god happy. I mean, not all that happy, because in reality the xenomorphs would eat them too… but it’s the symbolism that matters.
That’s what the Engineers in the cave paintings are telling early humans. “That’s where god lives.”Watch Full Movie Online Streaming Online and Download
And that’s the theme of the whole movie: religion. Doctor Shaw’s faith is a parallel to the faith of the Engineers. If the Engineers aren’t motivated by religion, the idea of seeking humanity’s creators loses power. But if the Engineers’ origin ties back into the black goo, Prometheus sets up something really interesting.
I really wish it’d been a better movie, though.
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