When people want to make fun of German philosophy, they often accuse the Germans of conflating vagueness and depth. The disappointing summer blockbuster Prometheus is guilty of the same crime. It isn’t just that the movie raises questions that it fails to answer, as Roger Ebert lauded it for, it’s that the questions the film raises are incoherent at best and boring at worst. What follows should be read as a list of charges against a film that I had high expectations for; a film that broke my heart.
The “deep” questions ineptly raised and then awkwardly abandoned by Prometheus consist of the following:
[WARNING: MANY SPOILERS]
A. Artificial Intelligence: The android obviously experiences feelings. This is something that is “hinted” at in the film in the same way that some people coyly suggest that the modern Republican party “might” be racist. The android then kills his creator, showing that he has the human emotion of tormented rage, but later doesn’t understand the concept of curiosity. I wasn’t left with any new idea about the nature of what it means to be alive, just a sort of fuzzy feeling that “life is mysterious, no?”
B. Humanity’s Alien Origins: We might have been created by an alien race that kind of looks like us, but is huge, pale, and super mean. Why they created us is never discovered. Fine. But what’s annoying is that no one really speculates. None of the characters engage the profound ideas that all these discoveries imply. There’s nothing beyond a sort of sense of “it’s amazing, right?” — the kind of thing a sullen teenager might say when his teacher asks about the field trip to the planetarium.
C. Faith: This word was used quite a bit. Maybe it was hoped that the audience would keep theirs throughout the entire debacle. The French woman with the British accent has faith in both Christianity and the existence of aliens. The homunculus bro-scientist has faith in his relationship with the French/British woman. Lots of characters have faith in being financially rewarded for the mission. But in the end, the repetition of this trope is a cruel joke, because the only thing I learned about faith is to never put it in a director just because they’ve done amazing things in the past.
I could write an exhaustive scene by scene dissection of this horrible movie, but it would only make me more mad than I already am. Instead, I’ll end with one thing that I liked about the movie: there’s a Stephen Stills reference.
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