Published originally at WhatCulture*
*Number 1 in WhatCulture’s Top 12 articles of the year…
Part 1/3 in this ‘Answering the Titan’ series:
You could feel it happening even before Prometheus announced itself on our cinema screens – as anticipation for the movie reached fever pitch, Prometheus was dividing the disparate Alien fanboy collectives into variant factions. Your inclusion depended on which side of the fence you sat with regards to how you believed the movie would answer the Alien connection question… Was it an Alien prequel, or wasn’t it? Was the xenomorph going to appear in the movie, or not? And yet all that tension pales into insignificance next to the spats that have arose since Prometheus exploded at the box office, as vitriolic posts either in defence or in support of the film are spewed onto blog and forum alike.
There appear to be two key camps: i) those that view Prometheus as an existential work of soul-searching genius that has delivered the sci-fi genre back from the nadir it reached with Alien Vs Predator, and ii) those that consider it a plot-hole ravaged carcass masquerading as a masterpiece that may very well have damaged Ridley Scott’s film-making legacy as he moves into the twilight of his years. In space, it seems, there is no middle ground from where people can hear you scream.
Chief to the creation of these divisive splits is the failure of Prometheus to provide answers to the grandiose questions that it poses. Though the movie is rather heavy-handed and far from subtle when dealing with its underlying themes and motifs, it relies on a heady mix of ambiguity and enigma when it comes to hinting at answers. Deliberate ambiguity applied to film can be a wonderful thing- a kind of magic employed by the expert film-maker who can use it challenge and stretch their audience. However, in order to achieve this rare feat the fundamentals of the film must be strong: a movie that utilises ambiguity and enigma to satisfying effect should do so skilfully and sparingly, and whether Prometheus actually does this is seriously open to question. The myriad plot-holes and other screenplay issues are certainly causing many people to see what purports to be deliberate opaqueness as sheer ineptitude.
Ironically, Ridley Scott was previously considered an expert when using ambiguity in the science fiction field: people are still debating today whether or not the principal character of Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, is a replicant. And, prior to Prometheus, the plot point on which many people continued to dwell after watching Alien was the enigmatic character of the Space Jockey, the giant extraterrestrial humanoid who appears- momentarily but very memorably- as the long-dead pilot of the derelict spacecraft on LV-426.
To silence the critics and to vouch that Prometheus is not just a melting pot of quasi-philopshical posturing designed to short-circuit your small human brain, Prometheus screenplay writer Damon Lindelof has stated that the triumvirate behind the movie- himself, John Spahits and Ridley Scott- do indeed have a set of pre-defined answers:
“Ridley wanted to know what the answers were as well, and we talked about those at great length,and then he determined what it was he wanted to put in the movie… those answers are not definitively presented in Prometheus, though if you look through all the materials, I think that the evidence is all there to form a very informed opinion as to what happened…”
After my third viewing of Prometheus I believe that the film does indeed present clues to potential answers, but- as per Lindelof’s comments above- few if any are definitive. Here I seek to offer my interpretation of the events of the movie. For the sake of levity and brevity this ‘Answering the Titan’ series will be divided into three articles: this particular article will focus on what I believe are the answers to the Prometheus conundrum, whilst the next two articles will delve into the mythological and thematic motifs explored within the Prometheus narrative.
Whether or not I am a victim to the genius of Damon Lindelof or am a sucker who spent several hours of his life trying to make sense of an empty shell of a movie– you can let me know your opinion below…
And so here we go – let’s answer the titan!
Move to ‘Page 2’ to begin the analysis…
Amazing.
Fantastic articles sir.
Adresses all my queries.
Are you English?
If so you should knighted.
Amazing as always Benji!
Best Prometheus stuff on the web from you and What Culture!
Another wicked wicked article!
Enjoyable.
Sorry, a bit late to this blog but had to comment as its so interesting!
I have a slightly different take on the murals and the origins of the xenomorph and some tensions between Alien and Prometheus.
I think your spot on about the mural, its clearly there to show that the engineers have reverance for the xenomorph and have encountered it before.
It’s origins however remain a bit of a mystery to me. That is, whether it “evolved” or whether it was “created”.
In Alien, Ash says some telling things in his post death speech to Ripley. He calls the Alien “a survivor” and “the perfect organism”. He talks about it being “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality”. I always took this to be a speech about how the Alien was driven almost completely by the instinct to survive. I assumed |(perhaps wrongly) he was labelling this the peak of evolution and the result of natural selection, the utimate survival machine possibly honed by millions of years of evolution.
Prometheus seems to go in a slightly different direction. The black goo seems to lead to either a xenomorph or something with xenomorph like characteristics whenever it is used. We get the facehugger like behaviour of the worm, there was unused footage of fifield as a slender limbed xeno type creature (rather than the zombie) which wasn’t used, and our course the facehugger squid which eventually leads to something much like the familiar xenomorph.
I think these differences are one of the reasons why I struggle with Prometheus as its more creationism, whereas Alien could be taken as natural seelction.
I can understand natural selection being powerful enough to create something complex and deadly, but I just can’t accept the magic goo!
Cheers ears
Slipp
Legendary!
Quite the film buff!
Great read…
Mind-bending analysis! Sorted me out.
A very well written blog, but there seems to be one little piece of information that was forgotten that throws your whole theory on how this movie ties into Alien into question. In Alien we see Kane lowered into a large room full of eggs, which leads to his run in with a facehugger. The big thing in this scene is he had to break a sterile field in order to trigger the egg to hatch. For your theory to be true the Engineer would have to be alive to set up such a device for the eggs. There is no scenario that I can come up with where that stasis field (or incubation chamber if you prefer) can exist if the Engineer was alone on that ship and died BEFORE the eggs were laid/placed there.
That ship looked more to me like it was transporting the eggs than an escape-gone-wrong. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and if it could in any way have an impact on your TIE-IN TO ALIEN question. I’m not looking to troll or bust up your blog, I really enjoyed it; I just can’t make the connection of “one lone Engineer escapes then dies due to infection” with the existence of that chamber and the field protecting the eggs (be it stasis or incubation).
Michael,
Thanks for commenting. I think a lot of people believe that ‘Alien’ implied the eggs were in stasis, perhaps for millions of years.
However, it’s all very ambiguous. Assumptions that the eggs had been there for millions of years stem from Dallas’s comments in ‘Alien’: “Alien life form. Looks like it’s been dead a long time. FOSSILISED. Looks like it’s growing out of the chair…” Yet this was Dallas’s interpretation because the crew of the Nostromo assumed that the SJ was a lifeform, and not a suit/ lifeform hybrid that was integrated with the chair in that spacecraft.
The ‘laser-mist’ might be something that stems from the eggs themselves, stems/ derives from the queen that birthed them, or be Engineer created. It’s far from conclusive as far as I can tell and certainly not an established fact – then again what is an established fact in Ridley’s cosmos?!
Also the Eggs were lined up. If the ship crashed on LV-426 with eggs ALREADY ON IT then it’s unlikely they’d all be there in a neat set of lines.
Ridley’s ingenious use of ambiguity back in 1979 keeps us guessing to this day!
Plus we don’t know the egg hold was part of the ship, it may have been a natural cave. As far as I can see the Alien footage does not provide evidence either way as to whether or not that’s a cave or part of the derelict.
And the presence of acid having burned the metal leading to the eggs also conveys to me that there was a xeno there BEFORE the eggs were there.
What are your thoughts?
Hey Benji,
Kane’s words in Alien were along the lines of “there’s a layer of mist over the the eggs, it reacts when you interact with it”, which seems to me to infer some sort of man-made barrier (or an artificial atmosphere suitable for the eggs to survive in stasis, much like the mural room in Prometheus that once opened causes atmospheric changes). I have a hard time coming to the conclusion the Queen and/or the existence of eggs simply created this barrier that reacts to being touched/broken.
So what we have is:
1) a crashed ship (we actually don’t KNOW the ship has crashed since we have never witnessed the crash; it could have just touched down either before the SJ died or after with the assistance of auto pilot) holding a bunch of eggs in perfectly arranged order. I like that you pointed out that if the ship had crashed the eggs would have been tossed all over the place.
2) A dead SJ who doesn’t appear to have ever made it out of the pilots chair.
3) Facehugger eggs under some sort of laser barrier.
I don’t want to be one of those guys that takes the mythos of Alien way overboard. I think at the end of the day Ridley sat down, decided to make a movie about an alien encounter, and didn’t think the history of the story through because he never intended it to get picked apart to this degree. Blogs, internet forums and this level of mass sharing of ideas did not exist in 1979. Prometheus was his chance to show us he didn’t paint himself into a corner, but he clearly has. With that said I don’t really care, because I enjoy watching movies for entertainment purposes and both Alien and Prometheus have entertained me
I just wanted to present a little piece of info not addressed in your blog, but you’re right it’s all so ambiguous! One thing I can say though is this blog is bookmarked, you have yourself a new reader
Good to have on you board!