The moment I posted my review for "Prometheus," I knew we would have to run a second piece that asked more questions about the film and that tried to offer a deeper analysis of it.
Greg Ellwood also followed up with me, asking if we were going to do a piece about the unanswered questions. The thing is, the questions that people are talking about when they discuss this film range from the easily answered to fundamental confusion about the nature of the story being told. I don't have any special inside knowledge, but at this point, I've read enough from the people who made the film and from other people who have watched it that I have questions, I have comments, and I have observations and frustrations. All in all, I have mixed feelings about "Prometheus," and it drives me sort of crazy as a result.
Any time you watch something a second time, it's going to be a different experience, especially when it's something that arrives with the sort of expectations and hype that "Prometheus" had. I'd honestly seen as little as possible before seeing the film. After the first one or two trailers, I checked out. I haven't seen the last five or six trailers or the TV spots, so I didn't have every image in the movie already in my head by the time I walked in the door.
And make no mistake… this is a visual experience. There is a reason to recommend this movie, and that is because of the remarkable technical craft on display. The entire frame is just art, from beginning to end, with individual frames of the film representing some of the best things Ridley Scott has ever done.
When I saw "Blade Runner" for the first of four times in the summer of '82, I was 12 years old. My dad was in the next theater over seeing "Firefox." It had been a real point of contention between us, and in the end, he bought two tickets for the R-rated film, walked me in, sat me down, and then left so he could watch what he wanted to watch. And so "Blade Runner" happened to me by myself. Just me and the movie.
From the moment the first images appeared on the screen, I felt like I fell into it. I can speak at length now about how I think the text and the subtext of "Blade Runner" are both masterful, a true accomplishment of writing and editing and performance, a collision of things that were all sort of big risks, all of it somehow working together like magic. At the time, though, what mainly knocked me flat about "Blade Runner" was just looking at it. That first spinner ride over the city is one of those moments that I'll always remember with full sensory recall. I know what seat I was in, which row of the theater, and exactly how far I levitated above the seat for pretty much the entire running time.
There is some of that magic in "Prometheus." As a visual craftsman, he is pretty much as good as anyone working today if not better. We've seen a lot of big names take their shot at space travel and 3D and Ridley creates a complete atmospheric feeling for this film. He uses all of his tools to make you feel like you are in the Prometheus or in the giant Beehive Of Alien Doom. He dazzles at every opportunity, and since he's free to do whatever he wants this time, each new scene is like a brand new movie, a brand-new episode of "Let's See What Ridley Thinks Looks Amazing," and each time, it really does look amazing. And I can't deny that I've been thinking about the film almost constantly in the week since I saw it and reviewed it the first time, and that most of what I've been thinking about in that "I have an itch I need to scratch" sort of way is the visual elements of the movie.
Writing about a film twice in the same month in any depth is unusual, and in this case, this is a movie with huge ambitions. If you've read or watched any of the interviews our own Dan Fienberg did with the cast and crew of the film, it's obvious that everyone approached this very seriously, and it was treated as A Very Important Film from day one. Honestly, that might be part of the problem. "Alien" wasn't treated as A Very Important Film by Fox. Ridley Scott took it very seriously, and his cast got what he was trying and the producers were hip enough to understand that they were getting above and beyond, but the studio? The studio greenlit "'Star Wars' plus a monster movie." The film they got was not what they expected, and the reason it matters is because of what Ridley Scott brought to the table that was not part of the original conception.
This time out, we have a very different Ridley Scott, someone who is now pretty much an industry legend, a heavy hitter who felt like he got screwed out of the "Alien" franchise early on. He's often talked about how slighted he felt when he found out James Cameron would be writing and directing "Aliens," since he never even heard that there was a sequel in development. He decided to cash in some of that clout and make the sequel they stopped him from making 25 or 30 years ago. Because this is a film that represents a pretty pivotal moment for a major filmmaker, it's worth taking this second look.
We're going to drill down, really see what secrets the film holds, what themes it wrestles with, what questions it raises, and which answers it fails to find. Hopefully, you'll take this as a starting point for a larger conversation, because I'm certainly open to other reads on the material. All I can offer is my perspective on what is genuinely one of the most frustrating films I've had to review in recent memory.
ANALYSIS
"You should always, always, always write to theme."
Guillermo Del Toro said that to Scott Swan and I about something we were working on for him, and it was something he stressed both before the first draft, after the first draft, during the rewrites, and pretty much each time we started to take the material apart again. It's something I react strongly to when I see it done well in films because I think it's hard for some people. I think some people like to just tell good yarns, and themes in their work are somewhat unintentional, arising more from the way they tell the story and the choices they make within than any conscious decision to write "about" something. But some people work from theme to story, and "Prometheus" feels like a film where a few big images, a few big ideas, and a few franchise touchstones were all thrown together and then connective tissue had to be created to try to make some sense of those elements. It is not a film that feels like it fully explores any of the ideas it raises, and a few big things it introduces are almost incidental in the end.
For example, in most movies, a technical device that allows you to watch the dreams of other people would be the main plot of the film. Here, it's something we see David use early in the movie once, and it's remarked on one other time, but it's not a shock to anyone in the film, nor is it particularly important. It exists merely so later in the movie, David can say, "By the way, I was watching your dreams. SICK BURN. FACE." It's a huge idea thrown away to very little effect.
Oh, wait, that's not true. David also uses it to talk to Weyland while he's asleep, leading to that very, very dramatic scene between Vickers and David where, having just established that David has much more pronounced-than-human strength, we see Vickers throw David up against a wall and hold him there while she questions him. If Vickers isn't an android… and the film seems to go way out of its way to say that she's not… then how does she do that? And if she is, then a lot of the other beats the film shows us involving her no longer make sense.
Self-sacrifice is a major element in the film. The movie opens and closes with self-sacrifices that are incredibly important. In the beginning of the film, it is a ritual, an act that seeds a planet with change, bringing forth new life, a new world. In the end of the film, it is an act of desperate heroism, an act that saves a planet from destruction, stranding the Engineers and their weapons. Only… that's sort of not true. But we'll get to that.
Why sacrifice? Why, specifically, self-sacrifice?
I saw a movie at the Cannes Film Festival this year called "Reality," a film by Matteo Garrone that is very, very, very Italian and very, very, very Roman Catholic. The film is awash in religious symbolism and the second half of the movie could be viewed as a head-first attack on the notion of living a life of good only because you think someone's watching you and taking notes. It is a movie that is almost wholly consumed with ideas of faith and Catholic dogma, and yet it is not nearly as consumed with the overt use of Catholic imagery as "Prometheus" is. It may be named after a Greek myth, but this film has got religion on its mind, and in the most literal, lunk-headed way possible.
Another of the films I saw this year at Cannes was Bertolucci's "You and Me," and like Francis Ford Coppola's most recent films, there's something about it that strikes me as Bertolucci almost re-learning his craft from scratch. There's a film student quality to their work that is very interesting and unexpected, given the scale of films they've produced in the past. These guys have marshaled the resources to make films like "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Emperor," but their newest movies feel like they're just figuring out how to block even the most rudimentary of dialogue scenes. Ridley Scott may have the technical craft polished to an almost absurdly accomplished level, but the script itself feels like the stoned-at-3:00 AM musings of a first-year philosophy student. It is deep in the most shallow of ways, asking some of the biggest questions of our existence with a puppyish enthusiasm and without even the vaguest hint of an answer.
It's easy to draw comparisons between this film and "2001: A Space Odyssey," and Scott seems to be inviting those comparisons with his first image here, an almost-direct quotation of Kubrick's movie. The difference is that Kubrick didn't graft the Hollywood structure onto his examination of the moments where life has taken a quantum jump forward in complexity and sophistication. He had enough faith in the strength of what he was doing that he told a very unconventional version of a narrative. But anything he raised as a question in that movie, he answered. If you think "2001" is in any way "vague," you need to see it again. That is a movie where every piece of information you need from it is contained within. Although I enjoy "2010" as a piece of mainstream science-fiction, it is very much the dumb cousin of the first film. It spells things out, or tries to, in a way that is almost insulting after how carefully constructed "2001" is to reveal it secrets to a patient and inquisitive audience. Unfortunately, "Prometheus" is far more "2010" than "2001."
"Prometheus" suggests to me that Ridley Scott, Jon Spaihts, and Damon Lindelof all must have had some very interesting conversations and some very heady goals when they sat down to start work on this movie. I appreciate the ambition. I think the most basic conceptual mistake they made was attaching this in any way to "Alien." I think the idea that the film is structured like a mystery, slow to yield any real information, is also a problem. It is a largely passive experience for the characters, and as a result, it is the sort of film where it feels like we're watching something happen at a remove. Because there are things that have to happen to underline the points of The Big Message, characters act in ways that no human being would, functioning more in service of the action than having the action result from the expression of character. If none of that matters to you, then "Prometheus" might well be a great experience for you, but when I don't recognize basic human responses, then drama doesn't work for me. It's that basic
