Prometheus

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So I just Bought Prometheus on Blu ray DVD combo pack (I'm thrifty as a mother fucker!) and I wanted to write a little bit about it, so I pulled up my stream of consciousness review of the one and only time I saw it in theaters and thought I would compare it with my review of it on DVD.

First off I can already tell you that just by looking at what the box advertises this is going to be a difficult movie viewing experience. Not only do they advertise 'deleted and extended scenes' and an 'all new ending' but an 'alternate beginning' as well. why not just put a big fucking sticker on the box that says "THIS IS NOT THAT PIECE OF SHIT YOU SAW IN THEATERS. OH NO! THIS SHIT MAKES SENSE, WE PROMISE"* then you see that little star and flip the box over and see it says *promise not a guarantee of any increased, logic, reason, or sense in extras's it's entirely likely this movie is still a teen slasher flick pretending to be a sci-fi movie.

So before I get onto my DVD extended version with new middle, beginning and end, I present to you uncut my stream of consciousness review/critque of Prometheus.

Prometheus: The prequel to the Alien movies. Ridley Scott's not quite full on face raping HR Geiger wet dream. Warning this is a stream of consciousness break down of the film. I'm not being  analytical, although that might change as I get further into this. Major spoilers as I am not even gonna try and avoid beating around the plot points.

So it's way before life on earth. And the scenery is bitchin, An alien Powder's great^30 grandfather drinks a cup of devil snot and falls to pieces in the river (and you were worried about animals making poopies in your tap water). A fuck load of a long time later, humanity in the form of Scientist Adam and Scientist Eve are in Scotland digging up all the things. When Eve finds a picture on a cave wall that apparently is ancient Scottish for "Go here for sexy time Alien life contact" And they are like "hmmm obviously nothing ominous about that at all, sure what the fuck we'll get five guys burgers on the way".

Two years later Prometheus NOT A FIREFLY is about to reach its destination. And the bastard child of Dave and HAL 9000 is playing house (Seriously his name is David, I'm not making a huge leap here), watching the sleeping passengers dreams, making himself look like Peter O'Toole and just generally doing everything in his power to be subtly creepy short of actually touching the cryofrozen crew and making Hannibal noises. Captain Stiffy Mssblanderson wakes up suddenly because the audience was starting to worry this was gonna be some weird art house film like Moon They are about the reach planet LV 223 (savvy Alien(s) fans will note that the planet Ripley and then colonists found the Xenomorphs on was LV 426.) David wakes up the rest of the crew and Miss blanderson gets dressed and has a big ol bowl of cardboard yum yums. The crew consists of an extra from green street hooligans, an MIT nerd that stole an outfit from a random Japanese hoodlum, the basketball player and problem gambler from Down Periscope and PILOT RENEGADE CAPTAIN BLACKY MCAWESOMESAUCE. (he's part pirate cause he plays a tiny accordion). Also in attendance is Scientist Adam who has taken up drinking as an interstellar hobby. Everyone assigns themselves their mandatory social connections and establishing lines of dialog, the Green Street Hooligan is quite confused as he went to sleep wanting to go to Saturn for the Universe Cup and woke up here with a short pamphlet letting him know he was a rocks expert. Miss blanderson tells the assembled crew that it's time to watch an old man on TV talk about stuff like geritol and faith and being rich and how much life sucks when you pee seven times a night and can't pay anyone to pee for you. Then Miss blanderson tells Adam and Eve to explain why the just flew two years for no reason. Also during this scene it's blatantly laid out that David is a Robealot for anyone who didn't get that when he was being awake and subtly creepy like three minutes prior. Any who Adam and Eve are all "Check it out, all across Earth's history in numerous cultures there are these star formations in art that are exactly the same. and we're totally confuzzled because this star cluster ACTUALLY EXISTS but its like twenty Star gate trips away so how the fuck did Mulan and Hercules know about that shit?

(this scene is actually kind of cool it's well paced and it gives the sense that your about to get into something much more interesting and deeper than what actually happens)

 So the crew gets down to doing their thing. the pilot duo from Down Periscope pick up their friendship like no time at all has passed. Adam and Eve are invited into Miss blanderson's quarters/doctors office/escape pod. Adam starts drinking, cause he's gotta build something along the lines of a character for us to care about. Miss blanderson reminds the couple that they can go fuck themselves with their wants and dreams because Weyland paid a Trabrilion dollars for this expedition so the company is gonna get what it came for. The conversation goes a little like this:

Miss Blanderson: thank you for coming into my oddly opulent entirely secure room which has a med station and is actually a standalone rescue ship.

Eve: why did you just tell us all that?

Miss Blanderson: no reason, would you like a drink? David make them drinks.

Adam: I like drinks.

Eve: honey when did this obsession with alcohol start?

Adam: about the time you found out that you're as fertile as Dudeatudes career.

Eve: who?

Adam: exactly, David skip the olives in mine please, i never was one for foreplay.

Miss Blanderson: I have a wall that's a television, see? you thought that was actually a real forest but its not because we're on a space ship.

Eve: no...we were aware, did you ever think this expedition might have cost significantly less than a Trabrillion dollars if your quarters weren't this ostentatious?

Adam: Eve if you don't want your's Ill just take care of it for you.

(Miss Blanderson takes her shot while Adam finishes Eve's drink)

Miss Blanderson: To pointless plot information squeezed into awkward conversations!

Adam: I'm not wearing pants!

David: I would have been fucking GREAT in Laurence of Arabia BTW.

Anywho PILOT RENEGADE CAPTAIN BLACKY MCAWESOMESAUCE (PRCBMAS) has the pilots stop bickering over their bet and land the ship near plot point location Alpha 1, which is a big giant dirt boob.  They park just far enough away to be annoying and have to use that much more fuel in their land vehicles (This will become an issue later, the distance not the fuel). So the bridge crew and Miss Blanderson stay behind as everyone else gets into space suits and their vehicles and head over the hollow dirt boob to investigate.

Inside the dirt boob the scientists hang out and wait for their mapping probes to check the place out and they find that while the planet isn't breathable atmosphere, inside the boob it is. So SIX PHD clad SCIENTISTS decided to TAKE OFF THEIR SPACE HELMETS and breathe the air in an unknown alien inhospitable place....cause....you know, nothing weird or wrong or strange about that at allllllll. They wander around the boob and David turns on a recording that leads them to a door, where a corpse is beheaded against a wall. GSH rock master scientist flips out cause they just found a dead alien body on an alien planet and he apparently wasn't prepared for that having just flown two years to an alien planet in search of alien life (to be fair he wasn't exactly told ahead of the flight why they were going) so he and the other meat sack soon be sacrificed to the plot head off to get a cappuccino while the others open the door and find the severed head, a giant human like stone head statue and a bunch of sorta neo Egyptian vases with devil snot all in them. thankfully the scientists decided to put their helmets back on because well...you know. And start checking this room out. The scientists start dealing with the severed head and David goes into super don't pay attention to me sneaky ninja mode and bags one of the vases of devil snot. They all do this quickly because they get word a silica storm is on the way and that's bad. So man vs storm race ensues.

Upon the completion of a mostly pointless action sequence they get the head and devil snot vase onto the ship and start messing with the head in quarantine. Which explodes and that depresses Adam a lot because he wanted a planet full of magical ninja death metal ponies to hang out with and go on adventures. So he drinks more. David puts devil snot in Adams drink SUPER subtle like Adam discovers that he likes the lime in the coconut so he drinks it all up and goes to hit on Eve.

They Bonercise

twice ( guessing)

PRCBMAS is playing his pirate accordion on the bridge and hits on Miss Blanderson because watching the two scientists video feeds who got left behind in the boob is fucking BORING. Blanderson and PRCBMAS head off to "make sweet sweet off screen cuddle joy time" and the two scientists left behind go back to the giant statue head room and pay no mind to all the sloppy drooling vases, they chill out and talk shit for a while and then notice a white sorta snake thing with no eyes come up out of the river of demon snot. and before you can say "why are people with PHD's so God damned dumb?" the snake thing has multiplied and killed both scientists.

 The next morning everyone refuses to talk about all the sex that happened on the ship and instead we see that Miss Blanderson apparently knows something that David knows as well, WHAT SECRET COULD THEY BOTH SHARE ABOUT THE UNKNOWN INFLUENCE ON THE SHIP? (spoiler: Wheyland is alive and on the ship being old and insane.) (Spoiler the second: this is a prequel to the movie Alien....pssst don't tell nobodies) David goes to check on Adam who is definitely under the influence of new and interesting biological happenings. They decide to go rescue the stranded scientists who they haven't heard from in hours. (nothing out of the ordinary there). Back in the Boob Adam is getting way sicker and Eve is feeling a little under the weather. they find the scientists dead and fear that they have all been contaminated because THEY TOOK THEIR FUCKING HELMETS OFF AGAIN!!!! five PHD's and not one working brain amongst them, fucking shameful. Everyone books it back to the ship where Miss Blanderson has suited up and has a flame thrower ready to smores Adam for being a fucking gross petri dish. Eve is not happy about this. Adam is kinda liking the idea of going out in a blaze of eternally burning flame glory. The scene goes a little like this:

Miss Blanderson: Hey Adam Truth or Dare?

Adam: Dare

 Miss Blanderson: I dare you to let me set you on fire.

 Adam: ok

 (Miss Blanderson burns Adam alive. Even is less than thrilled.)

 Eve: Bitch just toasted my man!

 Mis Blanderson: I DONT EVEN KNOW WHY I'M IN THIS MOVIE!!!!

 (Everyone goes inside for grilled cheese sandwiches)

David quarantines and inspects Eve only to find out that she is indeed with fetus. Eve is once again less than thrilled and demands an abortion as she had the sex less than ten hours previous but the fetus is three months along. David suggests Cryo back to earth because well it's a theme in these movies. Forced impregnation is scary shit kids, don't mess with it. When your partner says NO it means NO, unless your playing freaky BDSM games which is a whole different mess.

Any who Eve sneaks off to get the surgery machine in Miss Blanderson's  escape pod/quarters to do a Cesarian section on her and its a genuinely creepy awesome scene that ends with her getting stapled back together while her squid fetus thing is in forceps above her torso flailing around and being gross and super creepy and just fucking insane. She gets out safely and David is all "bitch, I just lost the game." everyone in the theater and on the planet groans with frustration and Eve is all "I just cut a space squidlet out of my own body and you fucking say something about some stupid internet fad? Go back to the X-men movies." Sense everything has gone to shit city Wheyland is woken up from cryosleep to absolutely no one's surprise...wait? what?....Eve was fucking surprised he was on board?...for serious....well you are correct she did just have an emergency C-section style abortion so she's probably pretty tired and wiped out mentally so maybe she chose to ignore all the "clues" the movie kept dropping like big super obvious bread crumbs, but considering the other intellectual leaps of faith she took this one genuinely surprises me that they had her be surprised.

They take Wheyland to see the last living Engineer on the planet…cause this place is exactly where you want to take a frail old man who want's to meet "god". So they take the old man into the same place where demon snot mutated into penisnakes and skull fucked two guys to death, (Hollywood is liberal but the penis is scary…whaddagonnado?) Except they go past the sign that says "you must be this old or this robotic to ride this ride" and wake up the last cast member on the supernap extravaganza, which is when he promptly realizes that holy shit our way to convoluted etchasketch chemical weapon species has come back to wipe us all out because…tacos, KILL ALL THE PEOPLES!!! and kills the old man (super useful character there, cannot wait to see how we were supposed to derive anything from his time on screen at all, but hey lets wait to see all the deleted scenes he was in.) And rips Davids head off which is cool and not at all bad cause he is a robot and survives as sort of a severed head kinda creepy edgar allan poe wrote Lawrence of Arabia kinda way.

Any who the Now awoken and very pissed off engineer is rampaging after Eve and not that its hugely important but this is about the time all hell kinda breaks loose, and I start to really loose track of why any of this shit is happening….WAIT I REMEMBER! so the engineer starts the ship which is supposedly going to go back to earth and etchasketch shake the planet cause the current drawing sucks and obviously we don't want that so EVE tells the captain over the com channel that they have to stop the Engineer ship that is going to take off and nuke Earth. Eve makes a run for it and the ground is opening up and its a wild action scene and PRCBMAS and the pilots decide "fuck it we were never making it to the sequel" so they use the prometheus NOT A FIREFLY to ram the alien ship which does catastrophic damage and Miss Blanderson is not on the ship no mores cause she jettisoned her super expensive escape pod 1/5 of the fucking ship and yet still ends up along with Eve trying to outrun the crashing alien spaceship the long way rather than running a shorter distance to the side and she gets squished…good bye Miss Blanderson.

So Now the escape pod is the only part of the prometheus NOT A FIREFLY that is left and there is alien spaceship wreckage everywhere and Eve is all "fuck it I'll fly the escape pod out of here." which is exactly where she and the Engineer have their final showdown. With fighting and kicking and shoving and…wait no she unleashes her abortion alien on the Engineer and they fight it out instead. Which is awesome because we're about to see what EVERYONE wanted this whole movie to be about in the first place. The engineer looses to squidbortion and it impregnates him face hugger style and Eve goes back to the launch control room to get David's head and they then commandeer an alien ship of their own and go look for another alien planet to land on and fuck around with. Then we cut back to the dead Engineer and see that the thing in its stomach pops out and the first baby alien is born. SO Aliens are devil snot, prematurely dug out of a human woman, which impregnated an Engineer, and then properly birthed creepy explodo style….QUESTIONS WERE ANSWERED!!!!!!!!!!!

Ultimately there are many interesting things about Prometheus that would make for a fascinating story what with the idea that we were a faulty science experiment, that biology is a play thing to other beings as machinery is a play thing to us, the dependent and very dysfunctional balance between science and faith, the all consuming power of corporations, and the danger of educated ignorance, but what the film develops in its first 20 minutes is never again referenced or expanded upon. From the second that Elizabeth responds the the question "What evidence do you have that the engineers engineered us?" with the simple statement "It's what I choose to believe." we see that the film maker has chosen to accept what the audience has seen in the pre credits sequence as a form of faith for the main character. She has seen nothing more than cave paintings and has incredibly accurately surmised that these taller drawings are aliens that created man, the audience knows that this is true in the context of this story because we saw it happen but Elizabeth is pulling fictions out of her asshole and with her single statement of belief we are exiting a story about science and discovery and entering a story based on faith and obsession. Do not be fooled by the spaceship or the psudoscience jargon, this movie is as much or more a way of looking at man kinds relationship with "god" than it is about exploration and finding 'answers". Faith needs no answers all it requires is continued subscription to an unchanging idea. And if the Engineers represent 'god' in this story, then ultimately we must assume that the dead engineer in 'Alien' is also God and it remarkably changes the entirety of the Alien saga for one simple reason. The xenomorphs in all four films, represent the 'Devil". The heart of 'god' torn out and corrupted by the sins of man and science. The sins of turning your back on faith and choosing to require concrete answers and explanations, the sins of expectation and demand. The film is very clear on the fact that God cannot withstand the introspective and curious nature of man kind, it ultimately destroys him and frees the devil to wreak havoc on the universe.

But that doesn't explain away the incredibly large number of weaknesses in the script. From the point that we see Elizabeth's dream sequence logic is no longer a point of interest in the film. We are given assumptions, superstitions and incredibly un reasonable behaviors to explain away the reasoning behind the plot points in the film.

with 17 people on board all of whom are highly skilled and intelligent as we assume the would have to be in order to warrant being hand picked for an interstellar mission of discovery, you have several scientists two of whom spent their LIVES trying to figure this puzzle out, who upon getting to the planet and checking out the first artificial formation they could find and seeing some dead bodies both of these incredibly well educated and intelligent individuals decide that means the ENTIRE planet is dead. And because the story of the film needs the entire planet to be dead their assumptions are in fact correct, but there is not a single shred of evidence that any of what happened at the location they arrive at has effected anything other than the location they are currently inspecting. But the story needs the engineers to be dead so the entire planet is dead. The movie then sloppily damages this incredibly ignorant assumption beyond repair by allowing the characters to find an engineer in stasis, why was this engineer in stasis? Because the humans had to eventually meet their 'god' and discover it to be a raging mass murdering psycho that will chase them around. There is no logic given for the engineer to be in stasis, Not a single person wonders what else might be happening on this particular moon. Every single character makes MASSIVELY unreasonable jumps in logic and base almost all activities and behaviors on the fact that the first structure they found on the the moon is some how the ONLY location they need to inspect, or investigate. It would be like aliens landing on Earth for the first time and checking out Chernobyl for two days and then deciding that the entire planet MUST be dead because this one location is fucked. These people did not die at the hands of an incredibly volatile alien world, they died because they were all stupid.

The best and clearest way I can sum up how much this movie doesn't care about logic, character consistency, or making any kind of sense beyond it's chosen metaphor's is with the Rock obsessed mowhawk scientist. He has these mapping droids that he unleashes and they map everything out and create a map, back at the spaceship. This is beyond retarded for two reasons. Why does this guy not have like a tablet or a wrist projector to see the map his droids create? You want to be able to see the map your robots are making. Having it projected back at the ship wheres it is literally useless, is beyond stupid. Then if that were't enough, the map/rock scientist is one of the people who gets lost trying to get back to the vehicle, which is fantastic because he leaves before everyone else and still somehow gets turned around, which would never have happened if he had a way to see the stupid fucking map his robots made…but then he wouldn't have died to penisnake and thats the whole point of his character.