Prometheus
Since I saw the first trailer at Christmas I’ve been looking forward to this day: then, the December early evening darkness, the loss of leaves, the cold weather. The trailer came to us as a Christmas gift, along with a trailer for Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (July 20) and The Hobbit (December). Then at the end of February, the first viral video, the TED talk, followed by the Weyland website(s) and more viral videos, of David and of Elizabeth Shaw. Now, finally, the movie is in North American theaters, having opened a week ago in the UK.
I saw it today in IMAX 3D and I was thankful that I had, being rewarded with glorious landscape shots for the first part of the film, and then the glorious space shots as we see the ship shrunken against the backdrop of both interstellar space and alien cloud. It lands in a clearing, facing a series of mounds, which contain the sculpted head we’ve seen throughout. The science team investigates, runs into problems, everyone dies, but in the end Shaw and the head of David the Robot survive, and take off in one of the other alien ships (associated with the other mounds) heading to the stars and presumably the Engineer’s home world.
Some s-f movies (and tv shows) can be dignifying: you leave their world feeling infused by the narrative of a mythology, a feeling undoubtedly behind the ancient myths. Sometimes, stories can animate the imagination in such a way as to give a sense of meaning and purpose. I recognize this as real, but also a trick – an illusion (or, a mental illusion, a delusion) that has something to do with how our brains are wired. Just as certain patterns can trick our visual sense, certain narrative patterns can trick our ‘meaning sense’. All of religious history is probably a side effect of such games. Now, we play these tricks for entertainment, using them for movies and television shows.
So it isn’t so much pretense as actuality when the films makers talk of creating a new ‘myth’. Prometheus the 2012 film is a new myth, taking for its name an old myth, and taking for its back story a successful monster film (set within a 20th Century space-age context) directed by Riddley Scott 33 years ago. Who were the ‘space jockies’ of that film? We now know they were Engineers, who seeded Earth through sacrifice millennia ago (or at least it is implied, as that scene is not dated). The Engineers play with genetic technology: our sacrificer drinks a concoction that causes him to disintegrate, in the process converting his cellular structure into a virus, or merely genetic fragments: he falls into the primordial waters and thus the human DNA matrix has been introduced, to emerge out of mammalian primates later on.
The story of the ancient astronaut is compelling, I’ll admit. Four years ago I attended a Charles Darwin exhibition at the ROM, and was struck at the end by the display of skulls. Even though I’d studied physical anthropology in university, and even though I was familiar with the scientific narrative, to see all the skulls together made an impression that something is missing in the genenomic treeline. One can see how Homo Erectus is a form of Homo Neanderthalensis, all have a similar shape, similar brow-ridge, all are evidently part of a evolutionary story. But the outlier is the gracile Homo Sapiens Sapiens, all smooth boned, high forwarded, small chined. Perhaps something did intervene to make the brow ridges disappear, to make us more graceful.
Prometheus leaves the story open for a sequel: presumably in the next movie Shaw finds the Engineer’s home world and some more story elements are revealed, and the third movie will probably be an alien invasion flick set on Earth, post post … perhaps the Engineers are the reason Earth is destroyed by the end of Alien3
I didn’t feel dignified leaving the theater, but rather diminished. My humanity cheapened, the delusion only playing the depressing trick of making our Creators seem malevolent. Perhaps the overall implication is that we’re some kind of livestock to incubate the biological weapon of the xenomorphs.
(In reality, the story will probably turn out that sapient life evolved out of the dinosaurs and colonized parts of the solar system either before 65 million years ago, or during a time between (human beings comparatively have a 2 million year timeline, so there’s room in history for this), and the so called Greys are of the oceans of Europa, and for some reason had fiddled with our genome in the past -has has been suggested by The X-Files tv show of the 1990s, whose last episode told that the aliens were coming back on Dec 21 2012. In fact, Prometheus seems to owe much to The X-Files, in as much as both use a life-force of “Black Oil”).
Prometheus is also a generational parable: Vickers wants her father (Weyland) to die so that she can take over (Vickers being his daughter was pointless otherwise), but this model is also that of the whole: the children of the gods (humanity) want their parents (The Engineers) to die so that we … can take over the universe? And here an echo of the Promethean 1.0 myth: the God P give man technology and his fellow Gods are angry and inflict their famous punishment, because they know that with that technology man will one day challenge them for supremacy.
This tale echoes in a summer of student protest in Montreal.