Explaining Prometheus, my take

Rating: 8/10 (25 June 2012)

I say Ridley Scott is an avant-garde in the context of a continuum of modern sci-fi film-making. It begins with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and then, only after nearly a decade of Planet of the Apes (1968) sequels, moves on to Lucas' Star Wars and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and finally Bladerunner, The Thing and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which make the genre more popular until Cameron's The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986) come along and blow it up.
Ridley Scott was avant-garde during the first two decades of multi-episode, scalar, sci-fi sagas. He is a visionary filmmaker with a unique and very specific blueprint: a slow build with the first half of a film to establish grand settings and an ensemble of characters within an immense context and then a hell ride for the second half of the film to its fantastic, terrorizing conclusion.
The Grand Plot Begins on Earth Before the Dawn of Man Human life on Earth began millennia ago because a being - perhaps twice human-size, capable of interstellar travel and to whom we refer hereafter as an Engineer - drank something toxic and died while visiting Earth, collapsing into a waterfall.
It is made clear in the title sequence, this Engineer's DNA co-mingled with the primordial soup to jump start evolution and ultimately to create us: smaller, weaker, less advanced versions of the Engineers. It is unclear whether this is a purposeful act, but the pain the Engineer endures in disintegrating implies not.
2089 A.D., Humans Discover the Engineers A series of ancient cave paintings are found all over Earth, each depicting one of these over-sized human figures (the Engineers) pointing upward to a constellation pattern. In the year 2089, archaeologist couple Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend Charlie Holloway discover this star map among the remnants of several otherwise unconnected ancient cultures. The two interpret this as an invitation from humanity's forerunners - an interpretation which may or may not be one of many misreadings in the grand narrative.
Ridley Scott has succeeded in imbuing contemporary human hubris onto our future behavior, making viewers unsure whether the actions and opinions of any of his characters, except Ripley, are sound.
The events of the film Prometheus take place between 2089 and 2094. Shaw and Holloway are hired to lead an expedition to the theorized location depicted in the cave drawings,a moon that orbits the immense ringed-planet LV-223. They travel via cryogenic suspension and interstellar travel with the crew of the ship USS Prometheus.
2093, the Prometheus plot Peter Weyland, the elderly founder and CEO of the Weyland Corporation, funds the creation of the scientific deep space research vessel USS Prometheus to follow the cave painting maps to a distant moon orbiting the planet LV-223, many light years from Earth.
The ship's crew travels in stasis at light speed while the android David stays awake, pilots the craft, studies ancient languages to translate for possible interactions with humanity's makers, and monitors the passengers in cryo-sleep on their voyage, going so far as to read their dreams.
Note: One flaw noted is that if LV-223 is, as stated, many light years away and the Prometheus arrives in just over two years, the craft must have traveled faster than the speed of light to cross the distance in space between Earth and LV-223. This remains unexplained and mere cryo-stasis is not sufficient to explain it. It can only be a maximum of two light years away.
The android David, the scientist Shaw and the CEO Weyland are direct parallels as characters to the androids Ash and Bishop; to Ripley; and to the Company in the Alien films. These tropes are significant on multiple levels because Scott makes use of the image we have of these characters - he constructs them to be knocked about so we can see a range of human experience - and in so doing, he acknowledges, subtly, sci-fi of the past.
In David, one senses not only Ash and Bishop, but also the cold, insouciant, horrifying spirit of HAL from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; in Shaw, the naive wonderment of Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway in Contact meets Ripleys stubborn righteousness; and in Weyland, we've the aging hubris of Jurassic Park's Jon Hammond, played so deliciously by Richard Attenborough, coupled with the billionaire boys' club attitude and ever-forward pushing of Contact's S.R. Hadden, as played by Jon Hurt Here, Weyland is portrayed by Guy Pierce as a cold, calculating and demanding CEO, inventor (of David) and an aging corporate raider obsessed with extending his own life above all other concerns.
In Prometheus, there's continuity of feeling with Alien and Aliens, and nuanced shades of many science fiction films and characters of the recent past, but there remains a doomed feeling throughout that much of our human spirit is weak and flawed. Maybe that's why people don't like it.
The principle criticism I hear from fans so far, who like the work in general, is that the characters are not developed. Very few of the characters are given depth, and it's painfully obvious that the "Hollywood Summer Blockbuster" cut is brutal. One has to imagine a lot, and much if it isn't good. That's not easy and folks don't like doing it. Ridley, the avant garde, expects a little more than most.
That said, the relationship between Shaw and Holloway is the most explored. It's revealed that she has faith in Christ and that he is an atheist. More, that in making their discovery Holloway chides Shaw about her faith. She claims to be unfazed, a believer. This, is what Weyland saw in her ...