Any sci-fi fans that saw Prometheus and disliked it have plenty to complain about—they also have plenty of things to discuss too.

Let's back up. Let's also go over the facts. Ridley Scott directed Alien a long time ago. It is the single scariest movie ever. Unassuming at first and practical with its horror, every movie with an unkillable, unmotivated monster has wanted to be Alien ever since it came out. Later, James Cameron directed Aliens, a sequel that ostensibly brought the Space Marine into public consciousness. It is one of the single greatest action movies ever.

Then a bunch of shit nobody cares about happened and the guys that directed Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem went on to make Skyline, but you don't need to worry about that, and Donald Faison would probably prefer that you don't mention it. For all intents and purposes, the Alien "franchise" has been drippy corpse since 1986.

Then Damon Lindelof made 1.5 great seasons and 4.5 less-great seasons of the TV show Lost and Ridley Scott made Blade Runner, Gladiator, and two versions of Kingdom of Heaven, one of which was actually pretty amazing. A few years ago, Ridley Scott decided he was sick of making movies about the search for God on Earth and decided to make one about the search for God in space, and he could get funding for it if he also made it a part of the Alien "franchise." But that would have been a bad movie, so he got Damon Lindelof to re-write the script a little bit to be less Alien'ey and more Lost'ish. And that's what we got in Prometheus, which is a good movie that is apparently bothering a lot of people with its ambiguity, because as well as Scott does action-drama, Lindelf does muddied theology, creepy old men, and yes, ambiguity, well. That's what Prometheus is, for better or worse.

Everybody has one or two (or more) points in the movie that irked them. I read somebody complaining about what David really meant when he repeated Weyland's advice of, "Try harder" to Vickers. What? Where's the difficulty there? Weyland's a dick being mean to his children. Question answered. Others are mad that the goo-vases started bubbling exactly when they open the head-chamber—that it's too coincidental. No, it was hermietically sealed because they were a bioweapon and the reintroduction of an atmosphere allowed the micro-organisms grow again. Shut up and take the answer and enjoy the beautiful, alien scenery.

I was personally bugged by other stuff, myself. How did they not psychologically evaluate every person, and their relationship with every other person, before allowing them on the ship upon leaving Earth? It was a trillion-dollar investment and they let some emotionally-unhinged, psycho, punk-rock geologist onboard? Nobody had met each other before waking up? Bullshit. That would never happen, especially in the private sector, and especially under the gaze of Future-Rupert Murdoch. Having flamethrowers and pistols and shotguns on the ship is fine, but if you bring along the world's most moronic biologist, you deserve to have him be deep-throated by a primordial space cobra. Yes, the Engineers created fast-gestating fuck-snakes—why? Because they're effective at killing. And because they could. They created life because it was an efficient way to cause mayhem. How tragic that that might be the actual meaning of life, at least according to Prometheus.

Time to explain Prometheus' plot (and plot-holes).

The argument Prometheus makes is that life itself is a biological weapon of mass destruction. The goo in the vases generates monsters -- it warps their DNA and turns them into monsters. All of the life that the Engineers created were biological weapons. And the Engineers were not benevolent. Their culture appears to be violent, or at least these military-style members of their race are, and all their visible creative efforts went into making weapons. We humans, and possibly all life on earth, are derived from the Engineer's DNA, who are not just kids with a chemistry set -- they are trained scientists that left their genetic code on Earth. It hardly seemed by accident either. It was rather ceremonial, actually, with the Engineer in his robe, sipping the his cellular ooze out of a sake glass. Going further, it hasn't even been confirmed that the scene from the prologue takes place on Earth, reiterated by how rugged and similar to LV-233 it appeared during the intro fly-over. This suggests that the Engineers did this life-seeding frequently, meaning that not only are humans not special, but they were delivered to a planet with as disgusting ill-intentions as any of the monsters being made on LV-223 in the movie. In short, humans are a biological weapon, just like the various xenomorphs.

The Engineers are the gods Prometheus' crew went looking for, and they found that life, and humans, were indeed created by God, but only because God needed some destruction done—some unknown, ugly destruction. They saw what a mistake creating the humans was, which was why they wanted to go back to Earth to eradicate them near the end of the movie. I would say that they created the humans out of benevolence were there not the possibility that they did such "planetary seeding" frequently. So there you have it. God exists, he is biologically identical to us, he hates us, and he realizes what a mistake we are.

What a miserable, nihilistic view of existence. I kinda hate it and it sounds like a lot of other people do too. Shaw showed off her defiance to the Engineers' indifference and kept on searching for something better because that was her choice.

-- Alex Crumb (originally published 6/20/12)
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