“Prometheus” (2012): When do angels, men, and other creatures get to play god?
I’ve reviewed Ridley Scott’s film “Prometheus” before on my “Movies blog on June 8, 2012, here. Today, I watched the BluRay DVD on a new LG external drive, which I bought as an older Samsung started having trouble with BluRay.
The sci-fi film was notable for some of its ideas, which I did not give justice to in earlier reviews. The BluRay DVD from 20th Century Fox came with a tier of extras, which I had trouble getting to work on the drive yet, hooked in to a large Toshiba laptop with Windows 8. The Cyberlink install process for the DVD player is pretty complicated, sometimes wanting to repeat the same steps when you play a DVD.
The add-ons basically offer an “Archive” library of special effects, and a “Sync” capability to augment the movie with other video on your iPad or iPhone. It seems a bit overdone. But in sci-fi or fanatsy, a sync-up could be useful if the movie involves journey through the “geography” of another world. It could, for example, show you a train ride (as in a Harry Potter movie, or in the third dominion of Clive Barker’s 1991 fantasy “Imajica”, if that ever gets made). It could present different kingdoms, as in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and help you keep track of where you are. A page for the iTunes app and customer reviews is here.
The “Prometheus” film is widely understood as a prequel to the “Alien” series, but it creates a certain urgency. After finding clues in caves around the world , a company and patriarch named Weyland sends a mission to a “nearby” solar system to the appropriate earth-like planet, and find it has been colonized with pyramids, spaceships and relics that resemble those of the Alien films. Gradually, the movie builds on the idea that civilizations play god, and create other beings on other planets. There seems to be a race of super-humanoid “engineers” and an array of other snake or squid-like creatures that they can gestate. And the crew (most of all the biologist Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the outspoken daughter of old man Weyland played by Charlize Theron (who else?) get a leg up on the plan that the “engineers” will soon return to Earth and destroy us and start over to build creatures that are somehow more perfect.
The film ends with a woman astronaut going alone to the original home of the aliens (rather prescient of “Ender’s Game”).
And the film also starts with a fascinating prequel, shot in Iceland, as an “engineer” takes a potion and dissolves, his body shifting into falls and ready to seed the Earth with DNA. Creation can require sacrifice, as can legitimate procreation.
And the creation theme is illustrated by the droid David (Michael Fassbender) who is said to be a sentient AI being with no soul. Can you really have free will without a soul? A similar being is invented in the “Alien” movies.
The idea that men become “relative” gods (like angels) capable of creating and manipulating other intelligent life is certainly morally provocative.
My own scripts and screenplays follow some of these themes. This isn’t the time for a lot of detail, but I’ll mention a couple of teasers. My “Do Ask, Do Tell: Manifesto” script has an aging protagonist (me) awakening in limbo, wondering if he has passed away, been kidnapped, been selected for bizarre employment. He is on another planet of sorts, a small model world partitioned into sections according to historical time. He’ll be “trained” to live in different environments, and soon learn he is to judge, in a particular ritual, which of his beneficial “captors” really get to become immortal angels.
I have another sequence of scripts, called “Titanium” and “Prescience”, about a UFO “invasion” and abductions. In “Prescience”, the treatment of which I presented to a table reading group in Minneapolis in July 2003, right before retuning back to Arlington, puts the protagonist in a high-rise apartment in an enclosed area of an extraterrestrial city. He then finds, when he is cut loose, that he the alien world is itself a colony, settled in a ring around the transition zone of a tidally-locked earth-like planet, itself highly regulated without money, with people regulated in a super-Maoist-like world, which again has been segmented geographically according to time periods matching different personal temperaments.
Chicago Sym performance on YouTube if Scriabin's 'Prometheus', Op. 60 (look up credits on YT)
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2 thoughts on ““Prometheus” (2012): When do angels, men, and other creatures get to play god?”
Matteo says:
February 29, 2016 at 2:49 am
Resisting the urge to fill this post with poo puns. It is my duty ah, hell, there one went.Not a bad logline. Snerf. Log . Not a movie I’d watch ulsens I had people tell me that the constipation was just a running joke throughout the whole thing and the plot actually went somewhere. Did I just do it again?Oookay. I’ll do my rewrite on this logline. Becoming a habit I’m sort of anal-retentive. Oh, triple Goddammit.The original: A man while visiting his Fiancee’s family discovers he needs assistance to pass very hard stool and struggles to keep the embarrassing fact from his doting Fiancee–and family. After another pass (goddammit) for redundancy, this might be: The world’s most polite man finds himself constipated, and struggles to keep the embarrassing fact from his doting fiancee and her family. Honest to God, I see Steve Carrell in the lead role and now I can’t unsee him.VN:F [1.9.17_1161](from 0 votes)
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