'Prometheus,' parricide, and Ridley Scott's returning of the 'Alien' franchise to the big questions
Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' is out now Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
5:53 pm Jun. 8, 20122
Director Ridley Scott's Alien franchise, of which Prometheus, opening today, is the latest in the series Scott began in 1979, has always revolved around freaky parent-child relationships.
Aliens, after all, are essentially sexual predators who forcibly impregnate host bodies and then have their offspring kill their “mother” during childbirth. In fact, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood underwrite a huge chunk of the franchise’s lexicon: the Nostromo’s onboard computer named Mother (Alien); the Weyland Corporation’s attempts to impregnate Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) with an alien to bring back to Earth (Aliens); Ripley's role as protector/mother to her crew, a small child, a robot (Alien, Aliens, Alien Resurrection); the ubiquitous presence of incubator-like hyper-sleep pods; on to the seemingly matriarchal structure of the alien hives themselves.
Near the end of Prometheus, one of the characters declares: "Every child wants their parents dead.”
As a prequel (of sorts) to Alien, the film seems just as invested in parricide as the other films, but it's also a mirror of our own very Earth-bound obsession with the origins of life. In that sense, the Scott-directed Prometheus serves as an appropriate origin-story to a franchise that includes everything from Scott’s original sci-fi/horror masterpiece to action figures and key chains. It is almost as though the offspring spawned by Scott’s brainchild, after having passed through the hands of three other directors (James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet), have overrun their creator’s intentions. With Prometheus, Scott has both reasserted control and brought the series back to something like its former glory.
And so, while Scott explicitly invokes the myth of Prometheus, the consequences of delving too deeply, the film is also clearly possessed of some Oedipal anxieties. The prologue presents this combination of death and rebirth in miniature: an incredibly muscular, bald, luminously white man stands above a waterfall, drinks a cup of mysterious black liquid, and then falls into the water as we see his DNA disperse and reform. The film proper begins in 2089 when Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a series of representations in ancient cave drawings, Mesopotamian art, and the like, all of which similarly depict a star system and a giant man. Based on this, Shaw and Holloway surmise that the pictures are evidence that humans did not evolve in the way we understand, but were engineered by an alien race (something along the lines of Chariots of the Gods?-style theories).
Shaw and Holloway convince the aging Peter Weyland (a prosthetically-aged and incomprehensibly casted Guy Pearce) to fund a two-year, $1 trillion trip to the planet that they think the drawings point to. When they wake up aboard the spaceship Prometheus, they find themselves in the company of the laid-back captain Janek (Idris Elba), frosty company woman Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), a goofy biologist (Rafe Spall), an abrasive geologist (Sean Harris), and David (the spectacular Michael Fassbender), the resident android who spends his days as most of us would, given the time: riding a bike, playing basketball, learning ancient languages, and polishing his manner by aping Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence.
Finding a huge structure on the surface of the planet and a pile of humanoid corpses inside, Shaw, Holloway, and Prometheus’s crew begin to infer what kind of disaster happened and what the corpses have to do with Earth in the first place. To give away much more of the plot than that would deprive the film of its carefully intertwined senses of discovery and dread. But much of what makes the film such a success isn’t the primary plot, but the adeptness with which Scott is able to shuffle between 2001-scale speculation, horror-movie carnage, and subtle emotional drama. Many of the hallmarks of earlier Alien films are present: the impregnations, the combination of sci-fi technology with Cronenberg-style body horror, and the sub-rosa machinations of the Weyland Corporation.
The film also retains much of the pleasures of the other films. Even at their worst, Alien movies have a baseline watchability—the spectacle of sleek, insectoid aliens shredding the hapless and deserving (or those who have, at the very least, been driven to become their worst selves by the maddening presence of the aliens) never seems to lose its appeal. Our fascination with them, just like the Weyland Corporation’s, lies in their obvious superiority, and part of the pleasure we get is the pleasure in abasement that comes with watching the play of domination by the super-human wreaking havoc on the human. It's especially fun when our inferiority is linked to our less-admirable tendencies (greed, cowardice, hubris, etc.). Here Scott reformulates things a little bit—the line between good people and bad people is more fungible. While Vickers initially comes off as a martial ice queen, her motivations come to take on the kind of human ambivalence rarely seen in other Alien films (or any kind of film, really). Theron’s performance ably transforms what could have been a one-note character into someone who fears and craves power in equal measure.
But it’s the Weyland Corporation that, in a certain sense, acquires the most surprising dimension in Prometheus. In previous films Weyland is the paradigmatic Evil Faceless Corporation whose desire for profit knows no bounds and stands not just to ruin space voyages, but to eradicate humanity. We’re led, mostly through inference, to see Weyland as a one-company Military-Industrial-Carceral complex, a determining force on an Earth that has, in the near future, completely monetized human life. In Prometheus we get Peter Weyland in the flesh, a Ray Kurzweil-type figure whose refusal to accept the certainty of death has allowed Shaw and Holloway to explore the origins of human existence.
Weyland’s presence as a character rather than a corporate moniker reorients the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that runs through every Alien film. As a man who sees his own destiny bound up with humanity’s origins, Weyland’s ambitions come to figure the twin dangers of finding where you came from and meeting your maker (both of which, it turns out, can get very messy). That those ambitions also sketch out a sad and barely hinted-at family drama running in the film’s background shows that there’s still plenty more to the Alien concept than action figures and keychains.
Yes. Motherhood and parturition are effective devices conceptually and visually. The original ALIEN derives so much of its terror from the sight (and suggestion) of penetration/impalement and projection/purging into/out of the body. In ALIEN, John Hurt's character delivers by stomach. Ripley's violent ejection in the escape pod at the end is a dramatic delivery--and her near nakedness adds to the bodily effect. The Alien ships are like wombs or incubation chambers: they have eggs, they are dark, and we do not belong inside of them.
Pregnancy terrifies because it introduces an unknown entity that the mother/host cannot see, yet this entity is also within her and part of her. In the Alien films, the process of creating life works by contamination and bodily corruption; blood is acid. The possibility that a mother may have to die in order to kill off her malevolent offspring hangs over every female lead in Scott's pictures. We are made to celebrate the quick-thinking and can-do of these maternal figures who successfully commit infanticide and survive. I liked how Shaw's character fights for her right to choose in one of the creepier scenes of PROMETHEUS. It did provoke me, however, that the characters who do self-sacrifice to stop the contagion are the ethnic and racial "support staff" of the PROMETHEUS; I suppose their deaths are volitional, while the white scientific crew members die less honorably.
Though Scott uses discrete phallic and vaginal imagery, his monsters undermine such certainty with their genetic adapting and shapeshifting. Almost any organism that comes into contact with the source of threat becomes incorporated into it (recall Tom Skerritt and Harry Dean Stanton's faces in the sprawling alien goo aboard the Nostromo, Holloway's mutation, or, as Sussman has noted, the peculiar opening sequence of PROMETHEUS in which the white man drinks fluid and genetically morphs).
Scott throws us a pleasurable reversal of the horrors of pregnancy with the occasional "baby alien" shot, which is eerily cute and curious. All creatures have a beginning. Precious moments.
About androids--soldiers of scientific progress. They are absent all this biology (yet touch up their roots). They are pregnant too--with secret stores of information, which they inevitably spit back out after a suitable gestation period (as warranted by plot). I was piqued by a rare moment of sexual tension between David and Vickers (who seems bodiless herself, though she invites the Captain over for sex in another scene). All soldiers of enlightenment, whether they are human scientists or androids, ultimately perish in the face of procreative power or they rely upon it (as Shaw reconstitutes David).
ALIEN sets up the terrors of surprise pregnancy—of being pierced by an unknown inseminator. This theme starts with the mysterious transmissions from LV-426 and the contractual obligation to explore the signals. Goldsmith's score worked well for this purpose, and I appreciate its patient and steady silence (time for the baby to grow). PROMETHEUS, conversely, demonstrates the terrors of willful projection. Streitenfeld's score thus sounds expansive, fulsome, and grand, in a garish march-of-progress kind of way.
The last thing I imagine Alien & all thereafter - is being a franchise, but alas! This is what wiki predicates. If anything, it's more of a wonderful opportunity for great director's to piggyback on. Scott's evil vs good theme is somewhat put aside here, and themes of maker vs creation and omnipotence vs self/world is revisited from Bladerunner days. I'm just happy to see RScott go back to his set roots since I believe him to be a master of set directing. Was worried there for a second because for the recent past, it seemed he had a film set allergy! Major Kudos to Fassbender, Pearce, Elba, Rapace & Theron's acting as well. The film is more about coming full circle with age old dilemmas at best.