Alien Franchise Watch-Along: Prometheus

He's just groggy and hasn't had his space coffee yet

Alien 

Aliens

Alien 3

Alien: Resurrection

Prometheus

Covenant  

Prometheus

(2012, dir. Ridley Scott)

Nitpicking has effectively obliterated online critique, but Prometheus earns an exception.

1. Engineers somehow have less drip than Jedi, who are already notoriously drip-less. Interstellar civilization and the best you can come up with is shapeless, colorless cotton robes.
2. If the Engineer in the cryptic opening is trying to seed Earth with life, there have got to be more efficient ways than this. I know it's hamfisted religious symbolism but that's no excuse for being inefficient. Planets are big! Ecosystems are complex!  
3. Stars are constantly moving, so the map would not be identical between 33,000 BC and 3,000 BC.
4. The planet they eventually go to is a moon of the same gas giant the Nostromo visits in Alien, which puts them in Zeta Reticuli again, which is visible to the human eye; those “primitive” peoples could see it just fine.
5. But only in the southern hemisphere, folks in Scotland are shit out of luck.
6. If there were any people in Scotland at the time, which there weren’t; that cave art can’t be 35,000 years old, because 35,000 years ago the Isle of Skye was buried under a continent-spanning glacier. The oldest human remains on Skye are ballpark 12,500 years ago and limited to tools.
7. Speaking of, thanks for casually destroying those cave paintings by letting all that moisture in.
8. Shaw’s father is a remarkably shitty missionary even by the standards of shitty missionaries, his reasoning isn’t even rooted in his own faith tradition. Don’t be such a coward, Ridley, have him cite the Bible.
9. Apparently that dream sequence takes place in South Africa rather than India like I thought, so instead of ignoring reincarnation he decided to be a missionary in a country that, as of writing (and thus, only shortly before that scene would be set), is 85% Christian.
10. David I get that you’re bored but Proto-Indo-European won’t help you! If the Engineers visited during the time period it was relevant they wouldn’t be speaking it, because it’d be the language of the horse-barbarians! Egyptian or Sumerian would have much better (but extremely narrow) odds of success.
11. Reconstructed proto-languages are worthless anyway if you’re hinging on contact made 35,000 years ago! Nothing goes back that far!
12. Why would you pick a reconstruction that keeps the laryngeals but merges them all into /h/? That’s extremely late PIE, well after the Anatolian split. His pronunciation passed the smell test, though.
13. Crew wasn’t briefed at any point before the mission.
14. Weyland spends half his briefing time dunking on his robot son instead of briefing the crew, which I must admit is in character for English Musk Ox.
15. “What I choose to believe” is a terrifying thing to hear from a scientist, perhaps even worse than “whoops”.
16. Even ignoring every other issue, those maps would only be evidence that some kind of contact happened, not what kind of contact. This entire movie is fueled by assumptions backed by circumstantial evidence, if any.
17. And why would they leave multiple maps pointing at an isolated factory and weapons depot?
18. It’s not a sin for an expedition led by a cultist trillionaire to be full of people who have drunk the Kool-Aid, I’ll even believe that Weyland was able to browbeat the shareholders into submission to okay the flight. But bad things happening to stupid people who bring it all on themselves is a comedy and this movie doesn’t realize that it’s a comedy. 
19. No orbital observation period and no landing craft.
20. How the hell did they find the site without spending months to years surveying the planet?
21. I feel like 3% CO2 would be a lot more conducive to plant life. Checking the wiki it says the atmosphere is still mostly a nitrogen - oxygen mix. If you have that much free oxygen in the atmosphere you need something to break it out of the CO2.
22. Did no one notice the giant skull carved on top of the site?
23. YOU ARE A SCIENTIST. IT IS YOUR JOB TO BE SKEPTICAL
24. Just because the air’s breathable in the building doesn’t mean it’s free of airborne contaminants, jackass, put your fucking helmet back on.
25. David what the fuck DO NOT TOUCH THE GOO.
26. David how the fuck do you know how to operate these control panels. How the fuck are they even still working, we know this place is subject to wind water AND severe temperature variation.
27. The Engineer security footage plays in a format that makes it impossible to view in any way that would be useful: you've have to run down the hall alongside the hologram to watch it.
28. How the shit do they know the body has been there for 2000 years? 
29. How has the body not decayed after spending 2000 years in this extremely humid life-bearing environment?
30. DAVID FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TOUCHING THE FUCKING OOZE.
31. Fifield the geolocation specialist gets lost despite special mapping drones, then provides coordinates anyway.
32. Crew decides to rush a return to the Prometheus instead of sheltering in place for a couple of hours.
33. Crew doesn’t secure cargo before leaving on the buggy.
34. Crew aren’t quarantined on their return to the ship.
35. Milburn and Fifield waste air supply moving around and bickering with each other.
36. Milburn and Fifield decide to sleep in the ooze room, the room with the ooze.
37. Millburn, despite supposedly being a biologist, attempts to touch an entirely unknown alien organism that is clearly showing a threat display. Motherfucker you are not Steve Irwin.
38. Vickers is giving off some real SS officer energy, that’s the only way I can explain it. The vibes are rancid.
39. This movie feels like it was written by someone who has a virulent hatred of both science and scientists.
40. Congratulations, you detonated your primary biological sample because you wanted to play Frankenstein. Why were you running current through it in the first place?
41. No, the Engineers are not “you”; even if the Engineers and humanity are actually related, it’s clear that both lineages have speciated heavily.
42. And then even if there is a link, if we take the opening as seeding Earth with life to begin with that would mean that Engineer DNA remained dormant for a billion years before being expressed in primates and that's too nonsense to be intentional and too far-fetched to even be an accident.
43. David goes full malicious idiot by experimenting with the ooze outside of a controlled environment, which is only going to contaminate his results. If you're going to throw peoples' lives away in the name of science, at least do it in laboratory conditions.
44. Holloway, my dude, the Engineers were/are an INTERSTELLAR CIVILIZATION, maybe don’t use one abandoned weapons depot as a useful summary of the entire kit and kaboodle, eh?
45. OH JESUS CHRIST ARE YOU SERIOUSLY GOING TO INTRODUCE “OH WOE IS ME I CAN’T GET PREGNANT” FUCK SHIT FUCK THIS MOVIE
46. Vickers you are on an interstellar mission: did you honestly think this would be a quick jaunt down to the pub? You’ve been there for like three days max at this point.
47. Ah, the Star Forge map room, the room that contains the map to the Star Forge.
48. Why is there a stasis pod in the map room? Do they need a technician on hand that much?
49. There have got to be better ways to shoot movies when characters are wearing helmets. Make the suits visually distinct (patches, colors, heraldry, helmet design) and you’re fine. People love characters who wear masks, we don’t really need to see everyone’s faces.
50. I cannot emphasize enough how this movie is refined, uncut reactionary boomer horseshit.
51. Oh eat shit with this foot washing scene, fuck this movie. 
52. The effects of the ooze are entirely random, which I think negates away any real fear or suspense. It’s not real, it’s just magic oobleck. It can just do whatever.
53. No one here seems to realize that they can cut their losses and return with a better-equipped expedition despite still possessing a FASTER THAN LIGHT CAPABLE SPACECRAFT.
54. Imagine having Charlize Theron AND Idris Elba and doing NOTHING with them.
55. Aaaaaaand of course Vickers is Weyland’s daughter, because heaven forbid a movie not do this fucking trope. Always, always have to have a prominent female character be related to the more prominent male character and have issues about it.
56. The Engineers want to kill humanity (a claim based on 0 evidence), so in their infinite wisdom (citation needed) they engineer an uncontrollable ecophage (???) instead of any of the countless ways you can easily depopulate a planet. Just use a big rock! Big rock extremely effective! or a plague! Or hell, just wait and let us do the job for you!
57. The miracle med bed (the bed that heals) inexplicably needs women's health support patched in.
58. The miracle med bed (the bed that heals) has only a dozen units in existence despite being super profitable and easily sold.
59. I sure hope this monster pregnancy wasn't intentionally supposed to be dramatic irony.
60. The reproductive cycle of the oobleck monsters, like the infection itself, is entirely arbitrary - like does it just cycle through potential forms at random every time it gets a new host / ages for long enough?
61. David is not, as far as I know, speaking PIE to the Engineer. Honestly, I’m going to imagine that it’s straight-up gibberish and the Engineer doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s saying.
62. [Positive Note] - The Engineer ignoring the humans and specifically targeting David would make sense, since as an AI David is the most dangerous entity in the room. How the Engineer knows that…eh, probably some implant or function of their suit.
63. God I hate the Engineers’ design. It's so bland! I'd be hard-pressed to find a worse-looking alien outside of like, actual ufology. They're going for Gray but without the charm.
64. There’s no actual evidence that the Engineer is hostile to humans or heading to Earth! He could just as easily be going “oh shit oh shit oh shit it’s been how fucking long I need to get back to home base holy shit”
65. The slow-motion crash makes for a limp-ass climax because, as in the previous point, we have 0 evidence that the Engineer is meaningfully hostile to Earth.
66. We can't trust David's testimony on the matter, because David's a malicious idiot.
67. The Prometheus School of Running is an all-timer, of course, but the real peak comedy is the fact that David's head is apparently stuck to the floor by artificial gravity and so is spinning round and round inside the donut.
68. Oh joy, we end with a xenomorph in the stinger. I feel bad for it, it's just a lil' guy who's got no food.

I don't understand. How does a movie fuck up this much? How does this get made? People had to sign off on this! Why didn't they stick with the earlier, better draft of the script? Even at a quick glance at that earlier draft is smart enough to put the map on a giant alien obelisk at the bottom of the ocean (as one does) and the mission to the facility is trying to recover and reverse-engineer terraforming tech. Both of those are great! Love an obelisk, love an actually useful McGuffin that unobtrusively ties in to older movies. Why did they bring Lindelof on board? Lost only ended two years before this, so maybe they didn't know that his scripts struggle with maintaining internal logic when they brought him on. Or maybe they're industry people insulated from the rest of the world. Whomst can say.

There are themes introduced and never explored. There are new elements added to the setting, but never explored. Like the PIE bit: if you absolutely needed to have it be PIE instead of Egyptian and wanted it to pay off, you could have the Engineer respond with "Out of my way, horse-fucker" or something to that effect. Give them the M. Bison classic "but for me, it was Tuesday." Either that or ignore the language thing entirely because David has no idea what he's doing and there was never any chance of it working out. But we get neither, they just abandon it and have David try speaking the Engineer language despite it being even less believable than the Engineer speaking PIE.

There is a good movie in here somewhere and it just got massacred.