Broken promise

Rating: 6/10 (10 June 2012)

In hindsight, the promotional videos ended up as an excellent predictor. The short "viral" film about David the Fassbender was brilliant, and his parts in the movie were great. Guy Pearce in the "TED talk" video came off as Eldon Tyrell's phony, pompous kid brother - and that's just how his whole plot line played. The trailer was visually spectacular, but sounded pretentious without much to back it up. We hoped it wouldn't be so, but it is.
First things first, Scott knows how to direct, and Prometheus may be the best-looking movie of the decade. Just for that, I don't regret putting down $15 for a 3D screening. After all the weak CG and derivative action we've been watching for years (orcs on jet-skis in Avengers, anything by Bay or Snyder), it's good to see amazing practical sets, tasteful computer graphics, and effects that FEEL REAL.
It's just too bad that the screenplay is murky, overwrought twaddle without a single memorable line or character. Fassbender is good. Noomi Rapace is good in distress, although, after a certain point, one has to wonder how she could run and jump without massive bleeding and hemorrhages. Almost everyone is flat, disposable, irrational and stupid.
The biggest bubble of them all is when people praise the movie for "raising questions." We're science fiction fans. We've read Wells, Asimov and Clarke. All these questions have already been raised long ago, we've been thinking about them for decades. Clarke did panspermia in "Cradle," Sagan did theology in "Contact," and Scott himself did gooshy monsters, evil androids and space ruins in "Alien." What Prometheus should have done was explore these questions, and it didn't.
There are dozens of reviews here right now from furious Brits who list the flaws, the plot holes, the perfunctory theology, the pointless twists, the stupidity of every character. There's not much I can add to that, but I would like to tie the awful science of it together. Man, the biology was bad. For a movie about genetic engineering, holy Christ was the biology bad.
So check this out. In the beginning, Earth appears barren. Giant, pale alien humanoids seed it with life. In the first inexplicable move, one of them has to drink some goop and disintegrate into a waterfall. But why?? If they can travel through the galaxy and create biospheres from scratch, surely they'd have found a way to do it without killing off one of their own guys.
OK, now DNA is in the water. Now what? Do we start out with microorganisms that diversify and organize themselves into multicellular life? Do they radiate into plants & animals, fungi, extremophiles, occupy every niche on Earth and and go through the evolutionary history that we know and love? Does this process take 3.8 billion years, and leave fossils in every geological strata? In that case, the DNA that ended up in the water must have been chopped down into really small, basic chunks. After all, if humans and holothurians have a common ancestor, it must have been pretty simple. Then how, after billions of years of mutation, did Earth produce bipedal humanoids that look incredibly similar to the ones who seeded it in the first place, down to six-pack abs and everything? Wouldn't that be vanishingly unlikely?
But wait. In the movie, they run a DNA scan on one of the aliens... and it matches human DNA exactly! But how? Didn't we evolve from goop on planet Earth? How in the world did we end up with the exact same genetic code as the beings that poured some DNA into a river billions of years ago? Even two populations of the same species, if they are split up, will begin to lose their similarities due to genetic drift.
Maybe, somehow, the Engineers programmed Earth's biosphere to produce, among millions of species in every conceivable environment and niche, with every conceivable body plan, chemistry and life cycle, something that had their exact DNA. However, those guys are nine feet tall, completely hairless, and pale like cave slugs. Wouldn't there be some differences between their DNA and ours? How come we aren't nine feet tall? How is there a genetic match with so many phenotypic differences?
You can either bash nitpickers and use the generic IMDb response, "But it's just a movie! It's entertainment!" Or, you can try to defend Prometheus as intelligent science fiction. But intelligent science fiction can't have dismal junk science. You can't break biology, then try to ride out on "raising questions."
Sometimes, it feels like we've entered the Age of People Losing their Touch. Indiana Jones 4... The Star Wars prequels... Now this. Ridley Scott... you sure know how to shoot movies, but please, get a decent writer next time...