With the film doing fairly well after a week in UK cinemas there will be many eyes on the box office return of the coming weeks as future trips to LV223 and beyond will depend on the film’s financial success.
We sat down with Damon Lindelof, one of the film’s writers, to talk about the collaboration, the legacy of Alien and the deeper questions at play here. He mentions the sequels, should they come, and the conversations serves to highlight the answered and unanswered questions of the film.
We spoke to Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski here and you can read our review of Prometheus here.
Ben Mortimer was about man around the table, keep in mind that we do SPOIL the film mercilessly.
How close was your working relationship with Ridley Scott?
Incredibly close. Coming from primarily a television background I look at writing as a collaborative process, the story to the set pieces and the dialogue. When I first came in and talked to Ridley about John [Spaihts]’s script and what my recommendations were, how to evolve it and move it forward and find that balance between what was clearly at the time an Alien prequel but really wanted to be an original movie that had two children – one of those children would grew up to be Alien but the other child, that I was more interested in, was going to be a wild card – people want to go and see movies which end in unpredictable ways. So I said ‘Let’s take these grand themes of Who Am I? and Who Made Me? and Why hath thou forsaken me?’ which were embedded in this draft and bring those themes up and push all the Alien stuff, like the facehugging, chestbursting and the acid for blood stuff down. We’ve seen that before, we love it but we’ve seen enough movie about that. So Ridley hired me and then what ensued was we would have over three or four weeks, four days a week, sometimes five or six hour story sessions, and I would write every word that was coming out of his mouth and would ask him questions. We spent a whole day talking about 2001 and Stanley Kubrick. I felt like I understood the movie Ridley wanted to make so I did my draft and we repeated the process all over again. I know, and John agrees, that we were monkeys sitting at typewriters, but we were just channeling Ridley’s vision of the movie.
Ridley Scott has mentioned that there are no original ideas left in Sci-fi, was this part of the reason for bringing in religion and spiritual elements.
Yeah, one of the things we kept coming back to was how do we take the idea of the creation myth that in Judeo-Christian culture it’s Garden of Eden, God creates Adam and Eve but Ridley was more interested in Greco-Roman or Aztec creation myths where there are many Gods and they make Man out of themselves. The idea that they sacrifice a piece of themselves to create Man in their own image I find very interesting and the question was can we do it on a sci-fi level and so the opening of the movie is that exact idea and that theme carries through to our future which, in this case, is embodied by our creations – David who we make in our own image though we don’t know why. He tries to pick away at it and he says ‘You made me to look like you because it makes you more comfortable…’. So there’s this idea of creating in one’s own image becomes a sci-fi concept. To me the movie was about creation, that’s the fundamental thematic in the same way that Star Trek is about friendship. So to synthesise a movie into one word, which is a useful tool for a writer, you have to look at each of the scenes and see if the idea is coming through. Creation isn’t just what Prometheus was going to be about, it was ultimately going to be the tie that bound it to the original Alien thematically. That movie was about creation too. No-one had thought of that before – that we make, out of ourselves, this creature, this threat. I loved that idea and now we’re dealing with three generations – The Engineers who create us, then we create robots. I thought it would be very cool to have this machine comment on the folly of this mission. It’s a weird family tree that the movie constructs as the end of the movie gives birth to the progeny of all three generations – this is what happens when an android gets involved in ‘fertilising’ something that was invented by The Engineers with a human host which then has sex with another human who gives birth who then recombines with The Engineer. It’s a very weird bastardisation.
There are a few loose ends left at the end of the film, was that part of the writing process, or the re-writes?
One man’s loose end is another man’s ambiguity and Ridley was very interesting in ambiguity. As I said we were talking about 2001 a lot and Ridley is a huge Kubrick fan and he’s still trying to make sense of the end of 2001 and he would say ‘Explain to me the end of 2001’ and ‘is it not some kind of rebirth metaphor?’ and I would agree but 2001 is far more interesting to me than 2010 which spells in out explicitly. So we have to work out if a sci-fi film is going to delve into the question of where do we come from and why has God turned against me? How much do we let people find out for themselves? How much room should there be for future films? We’ve seen the film which is about ‘ok, we’ve unleashed this creature’ and Prometheus is more about who made us, why did they make us and now this question of why do they want to destroy us? Is it at arbitrary as being done with this petri dish, or did we do something to deserve it. This is the fundamental question that we ask ourselves especially when something bad befalls us. This idea of fundamental judgement weigh in. All these questions were on the table and yes, there were drafts with more specifically spelled out versions. Ridley’s instinct was to pull back and I’d say ‘I’m still eating shit a year on from the end of Lost where we didn’t directly spell everything out – are you sure you want to do this?’ He would rather have had people fighting against it and not know then spell it out. I know its obnoxious to say that you should see the movie a couple of times to really appreciate it but that is how the movie was designed – things that seem throwaway, for example when they do the carbon dating of the dead Engineer and realise that he’s been dead for two thousand years and you think ‘if two thousand years ago The Engineers decided to wipe us out what happened back then?’ Is there any correlation between what was happening on the Earth two thousand years ago and this decision? Could a sequel start in that time period and begin to contextualize what we did to piss these beings off?
But you and Ridley know, in your mind, exactly what is happening here?
Yeah, and if enough people go and see the movie and if there’s a real sense of people wanting there to be another one then the second movie would clearly answer the question of what did we do to deserve this. And always the question is that if we want to explain this how do we do it in a dramatic way? It won’t be two people siting in a room with The Engineers sitting up and say ‘Ok, well here’s what you did to piss me off…’ I was always driven by the idea that Shaw was the only believer in the crew and that it feels outdated in 2093, it feels old fashioned – especially as she’s embracing this fundamental scientific knowledge, and she gets very excited when she learns that she was created by these beings as opposed to some supernatural deity but he doesn’t make her shed her faith, it only instills it. So, at the end of this journey and she’s only person who made it through you ask yourself why was that? Was God protecting her as the only true believer? The entire point of being alive is to ask these questions and search for some meaning so Ridley wanted the film to end with Shaw announcing that she was still searching.
David is perhaps the strongest character in the crew, can you talk about the process of writing for him?
David was clearly the most fun to write, robots are fun to write as they’re not burdened by the same emotional truths of irrationalities that humans are. You have to work out who programmed them and what did they program them to do. Then you get into the interesting area of how capable is a robot of original thought? I looked at David through the prism of a five year old, I have a five year old and if he loves a movie then he watches it over and over again, and we’ve seen robots who have read everything but I thought why not have a robot who loves Lawrence of Arabia and just watches it over and over? And in the same way as you’d mod an iPhone if there were ten thousand Michael Fassbenders out there wouldn’t you want them to have their own individuality? This one wants to dye his hair like Lawrence. Also the notion of Pinocchio robots as I call them, robots that want to be human, is used up. Why would a robot want to be human? I think it’s more interesting if you have a robot who didn’t understand humans, or who considers emotions a huge pain in the ass. Ultimately David’s purpose in the movie was to comment on the folly of the mission as a whole – these humans are seeking out their creators and this robot is hanging out with his creators and, frankly, he’s not impressed… A lot of it came from Michael’s performance, the dry wit… I could write an entire movie of David going off on his adventures.
Was there a juggling act with regards to explaining the unanswered questions about Alien while asking new questions?
Prometheus is promoting a question which is where we created by these things and did these things invite us to this place? The answer to that is yes. What isn’t answered it once we get there and realise that whatever they were making here they were going to drop on Earth but it got out and it killed them first. The new question is what did we do to make them want to kill us and Ridley wasn’t interested in answering that in this movie. He liked the idea that Shaw had that question to answer herself and had a choice – to go back to Earth or she can go forward, trying to determine what they did as a species to deserve annihilation. You don’t argue with Ridley Scott about the movie he wants to make. If you have unanswered questions some people are going to be creatively intrigue by it and others will be pissed off by it and that galvanised him – as there’s nothing he loves more than to piss people off. In the right way of course.
In your conversations with Ridley did you discuss the other Alien films?
He hasn’t seen the Alien Vs. Predator films, he likes Cameron’s sequel but he admits to feeling a little conflicted that he was passed over in terms of directing the sequel. He’s a huge Fincher fan and feels sorry that David was so hamstrung in terms of what he could and could not do in terms of Alien 3 and while he acknowledges that it’s a beautiful looking film I think he wishes that Fincher would have been allowed to do what Fincher does on that film. I have a feeling that if Alien 3 had been Fincher’s third film instead of his first then it would have been up there in the pantheon of great sci-fi. We didn’t talk about Resurrection.
nice article but typos abound
Look just because you are too
stupid and lack creativity to come up with original scifi ideas doesn’t
mean you should defecate on good scifi stories with your witless
childlike faith nonsense. Someone who says that all the scifi ideas have already been done is an idiot.
And then to use it as an excuse to drum up religion? Inexcusable. But
the great masses of semi-religious tards out there just shrug their
shoulders and proclaim “what’s the problem?, I thought it was pretty
good”. What did you expect when you threw in the asshole who wrote the
sensational spiritual garbage of the hit t.v. show “lost”? Ugh… ..sure religion can be used appropriately, but when its the basis for a movie that’s
supposed to be the prequel for Alien, which didn’t have any religious
annotation at ALL, its just infuriating…Alien was elegant, there
wasn’t some “scientist” throwing Christianity everywhere…because like
it or not religion does -not- make sense, and when you put it in a movie
-like- this and try to build around it, things (surprise!) start to not
make sense=The only part of it that
actually made me think was when the alien came out of the space jockey
and I wondered what the next steps in its evolution were to become the
xenos we know today, but still the color was off—why the hell is everything up to this point white, and 2 white beings bring about a black one?ghhgalsfalsf. The “why did space jockey’s create us? Why did that
one engineer totally wreck everyone’s shit?” questions became
completely invalid, because the whole basis for the space jockey’s
creating humans doesn’t make ANY sense. One cannot just change it and be
like “well this is how it is now”, it has to make SENSE. Unfortunately,
it did not. Our DNA cannot match because we both look FAR too
different- what about the other animals on Earth that we have incredibly
close DNA to? I can only hope the writers of the sequel realize these
holes and find a creative way to fix them, but right now left on its own
this movie just doesn’t cut it. Man I was impressed by the visuals, and
David is freaking awesome…but god..the plottttt,
the plooooooot. Alien 4 had good characters but a crappy plot, and it
failed. This movie had -okay- characters (with the exception of David)
but it made the same mistake as Alien 4 did, its plot wasn’t well
thought out enough.
^ You’re a bit myopic there buddy. It’s demonstrable the whole entire allegorical subtext went over your head.
To begin, Shaw and Holloway simply interpreted them as invitations; thus to reach such a conclusion could simply be seen a non-sequitur but having found an earth-like planetoid they were simply exploring the possibility of finding
extraterrestrial life to coincide with their findings thus there didn’t have to
be anything on LV-223. Vickers was convinced they were just cave scribbles.
There you have two different takes already. Ergo, it is an assumption that the
engineers were guiding anybody to LV-223. The Titan Prometheus taught man the ability to think and transmitted the secret of numerous forms of knowledge including the art of navigation, the art of calculating time, to build and to write.
He fashioned man to be straight, vertical, standing on his legs because he wanted the men to look up and gaze at the stars, unlike animals whose eyes are always toward the ground.
The cave painting just shows a star map no different to civilizations depicting
star constellations; but notice how the figure standing pointing to the stars
isn’t pointing to LV-223 specifically? Shaw and Holloway simply extrapolated from known star systems and found one that registered high on the earth-similarity index. Weyland being highly superstitious and at death’s door prompted him to make one last chance to meet his ‘maker’ in the hope to save himself from death; he had nothing to lose. Having all the investors and money in the world he could do anything he so pleases and he found a planetoid almost identical to earth, that was good enough for him and he was going to die soon regardless. Again, he had nothing to lose.
When Holloway explains the star map, it has 6 stars and they extrapolated from known star systems and opted for a system of planets and moons that register high on the earth similarity index and started making educated guesses as to which one would be the ‘home world’. They simply honed in on the nearest star system that was mostly identical to our own and found it had planets with moons, one of which had an oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere virtually identical to earth’s.
Let’s back up. They took a guess on which star system out of 6.
What’s interesting is that these same 6 stars exist in reality in the Zeta Reticulum
system and most of them are approximately 34 to 36 light years away with more
than half being quite similar to our sun and one in particular only being 19
light years away. Now, yes it is true that star coordinates drift. For that,
you have to compensate for stellar drift over the course of many thousands of
years; so essentially, if your civilization is not advanced enough to
compensate for stellar drift then yes this would be a problem. But alas, the engineers are an incomprehensibly advanced space faring race whose technological feats far exceed mankind’s’. Ergo, it’s obvious they compensated for stellar drift in the reticulum system over the course of thousands of years.
If the particular star system they happened to choose was the incorrect one, then they simply landed in the wrong place, 1 out of 6 possible star system
locations. Thus we can’t assume they landed in the right place. I would have
guessed Gliese 581d myself! It’s also highly possible that the human race did
something to peeve the engineers so they simply chose to abort or change
mankind long after the cave paintings were drawn by humans and that’s all. They changed their minds or they just engineered mankind as hosts for bioweapons. Remember one of the other stars in that very same map has an inhospitable rock going around it, with a certain derelict ship, beaming out an acoustic message that will one day be intercepted by the Nostromo. The star on the bottom right of the map is Zeta 2 Reticuli and
LV-426 is a moon orbiting one of that star’s planets.
Remember Prometheus takes place on LV-223.
If most of these stars are 8 light years from each other then there could very
well be other outposts or even civilizations on planets or moons in each of the
close by systems.
It’s important to consider the characters that expressed scepticism at it all in the film, remember David doubted it all from the start, “Granting your thesis is
correct…” It was essentially a chance at the possibility of finding
extraterrestrial life and Weyland was superstitious enough to follow at all
costs, for one last chance of immortality. Again, going by the Greek mythology
that underlies all of it (remember the title of the film?), what makes you think that the awakened Engineer was of the group that left signs back on earth? Given his different, more biomechanoid physiology contrasted with the merely masculine engineer at the beginning it could have very well been a different faction who were responsible for it. Remember the majority of the
Titans were cast into Tartaros while Prometheus and his kin continued to
engineer man.
Now, in the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal Christian text, we have a mythology that is essentially a retelling of an archetypal story that recurs in multiple myths; where a race of Gods, Giants or Titans come to earth to teach man their wisdom. The Book of Enoch tells the story of fallen angels called the Watchers (note “The engineers, they are dark angels.” Ridley Scott) who conspired to rebel against the heavens by being particularly fond of mankind; the Watchers took as wives the daughters of men and begat children (note the DNA paternity match) and taught man the knowledge and secrets of the divine.
Among the Watchers were many leaders,
each of which taught mankind specialised fields of knowledge including;
astronomy, the manufacture of goods, writing, mathematics, etc. This was seen
as a great sin in the eyes of the Lord because “men were not born for this”.
Thus the Lord set out to destroy the human race for their perpetual ‘evil’. The
subtext here seems to emphasise that knowledge of the Gods incurs wrath and
punishment just like the myth of Prometheus, thus the author of the Book of
Enoch suggests that higher understanding and knowledge of the Gods was contrary to man’s nature and purpose and thus the progression of technology inevitably led Man to his ills and woe. To quote Boyd Rice, “It is axiomatic that people fear and mistrust those who know more than they do, or wield more power. And it’s also a given that people fear and resist the kind of change that
accompanies knowledge and new ideas. This, by all accounts, is what the
Watchers brought to the ancients. We can see echoes of precisely this same sort of fearful attitude, in more modern times, in the account of certain tribes in
Africa who were observed practising a kind of negative eugenics. When a
researcher watching from a hidden position in a bush saw a tribesman put to
death a perfectly healthy child for seemingly no reason at all, he questioned
the motive for their act. They replied that every so often a child was born who
was too beautiful, too curious, or too intelligent, and it was simply
understood that such people would eventually be the source of problems.” The
parallels here with the Engineers’ possible motives are striking.
The motif of rebellion against the supreme God stems both from
Mesopotamian myth and Greek myth featured in the Atrahasis and Hesiod’s
theogony. Rebellion has the same results in both – the creation of mankind and
the imposition of toil and sacrifice. Ridley Scott has ingeniously combined
both in Prometheus. The rebellion against the supreme God takes two forms in
the Atrahasis epic: the rebellion of the younger Gods the Igigi, led by one
figure, against the harsh rules of Enlil and the rebellious activities of Enki
who tricks Enlil to aide mankind.
The role of Prometheus as rebel God combines the role of the wise
and clever rebel whose name denotes “Foresight” hence intelligence and a leader who is punished and Enki’s role of wise and clever rebel God; both thwart the supreme God in his attempts to disadvantage or destroy the races of man.
Enki/Prometheus is therefore responsible for the perceived star maps spread out across the world in the film warning of Enlil’s/Zeus’s impending plans for
mankind. The tall figure pointing to the stars is thus Enki/Prometheus.
In the atrahasis epic the result of rebellion of the Gods is the
creation of mankind where one of the Igigi, Geshtu-e, is sacrificed to create
man with his blood (or DNA) as advised by Enki. In the theogony we have the Titans who inhabited the earth before the creation of man. One of the Titans, Iapetos “the piercer,” Titan-god of mortal life-span and
ancestor of man; the powers of mortality and craftsmanship appear in
the characters of the sons of Iapetos, Prometheus and Epimetheus, gods who
crafted mortal creatures out of clay. The sons of Iapetos were also described
as possessing some of the worst of human traits: on an intellectual level,
Prometheus is overly sly and crafty, Epimetheus a guileless fool, Atlas overly
daring and arrogant and Menoitios prone to rash and violent actions. Their
natural traits led each to their downfall. Iapetos and his family were regarded as the ancestors of mankind; a race which inherited the worst qualities of these four
sons including: crafty scheming, foolish stupidity, excessive daring, and rash
violence. It is no coincidence each character in the film exemplifies
all of these qualities.
Another event in the theogony includes the creation of
the first woman due to the results of Prometheus’ rebellious trickery. As a
consequence of the Gods’ revolt in the Atrahasis epic, mankind receives the lot
of hard toil. In Hesiod, this fate is Zeus’ revenge, and it comes about through
the woman via a woman called pandora. Note Pandora’s jar, the urns in the film,
and Shaw’s pregnancy. This represents a different application of the same motif
and Ridley is ingeniously weaving both mythologies with his own applications
also.
Mankind’s role like the Igigi before him was to supply sacrifices of
food to the Gods; ingeniously this is why the carbon dating works since the
humanoid Gods, Titans or Giants inhabited Earth before man then lived for
generations along with man thus they share the same carbon cycle as well as
sharing DNA long before they were cast out. All life on earth is carbon-based. A lot of your body is made of carbon and some of your body carbon parts were plant parts a few months ago.
Carbon, used by all living organisms, continuously circulates in the earth’s
ecosystem. In the atmosphere, it exists as colourless, odourless carbon dioxide
gas. Plants take in carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and release carbon
dioxide during respiration.
When herbivores eat the plants, they acquire the carbon stored in plant tissues
and much of the food (carbon compounds) eaten is used up for the herbivore’s
life processes and given off as carbon dioxide in respiration but some is
stored in animal tissues. If that herbivore is then eaten by a carnivore (or
omnivore) the carbon (stored in the animal tissues) will be passed on again.
Thus we can see that the knowledge of the Gods given by the disobedient Watchers brought power, discord and corruption and thus the Watchers were punished as oppressors, to quote Enoch,
“Let every oppressor perish from the face of the earth; Destroy… the
offspring of the Watchers for they have tyrannized over mankind.” The offspring
of the Watchers were the Giants who were essentially demi-gods due to
miscegenation between the Watchers and early man. Allegorically speaking,
mankind are essentially descendants of these giants. (Again, note the DNA match in the film and the matching carbon cycle)
These giants were pitiless brutes that
kept men as slaves for toil and hardships…
Ringing any bells yet?
The film demonstrates many examples of human folly brought on by their own overreaching arrogance, the modern tower of babel that is corporatism and faith in technology, and their follies are juxtaposed with David who further emphasises this thematic; where David is smarter and more interesting than the crew much in the same way the homicidal Hal was in 2001. If you watch closely, David makes many attempts to put his lesser human counterparts at risk and only saves Shaw from the silica storm due to his very human and peculiar infatuation with her. This is further evidence of his self-awareness.
And their folly is further compounded by their unwavering dependence and trust in David; whose signs of being self-aware are pretty clear to see early in the film; riding a bicycle whilst shooting hoops, watching a film he ‘likes’ and idolising Peter O’Toole by dying his hair like his and quoting dialogue, indeed, these idiosyncratic behaviours fall well outside the parameters of his normal programming and later its revealed he is particularly disdainful of the humans around him. Ergo, risking the entire welfare of the crew would be of no concern to David in the same way Ash broke 24 hour quarantine procedure in Alien which not only risked all of the human crew but more than that he guaranteed everyone’s death (bar Ripley) since he already knew what he was dealing with. What is interesting is that after Holloway sniggers at David’s faux humanity in regard to him wearing a helmet when he doesn’t need to, later when they realise the Temple has a breathable atmosphere according to their scanners, Holloway seeks reassurance from David about the safety of the air; only after David says it’s ok does Holloway and the rest of the crew take their helmets off…
The themes of human folly and the substitution of God with technology are quite deliberate and are plain to see. Later, David prompts a response from Holloway that would override any ethical programming by asking Holloway what he would be willing to do to get his answers, “Anything and Everything.” – This, to an empathy lacking and misanthropic android, logically does not exclude being spiked unwillingly with an unknown alien exobiology to see its effects. And as confirmed by writer Damon Lindelof, “David’s estimation of the humans around him is that they are lab rats.”
Even later in the film when Shaw acts as an audience surrogate with her fears over the air in the temple, David again reassures about the safety of the air and subtly hints to Shaw that he knew how Holloway had died. Indeed, in God’s absence what better way to substitute him with the seems to be 100% obedient to his creator Weyland, even then, it’s implied he is putting up appearances when he later divulges to Shaw, “Don’t all children want to see their parents’ dead?” David really is the star of the show and his legendary performance now joins the annals of the great science fiction androids – First we had Maria the android in Metropolis, then HAL in 2001, then we had Ash in Alien, Roy Batty in Blade Runner now we have David.
Character development in the accepted sense is not consistent with Scott’s dystopian worlds seen throughout his three sci-fi’s; with their impersonal
themes and heartless cores. The hard-edged abstraction of character (note: I did not say *absence* of character) fits perfectly with this film in particular. David was the most developed and intriguing character (followed closely by Shaw) thus in many ways the story is about him. Like Blade Runner, Prometheus is a literate
science fiction film, thematically enfolding the philosophy of religion and the
moral implications of human mastery of genetic engineering in the context of classical Greek drama and hubris; where the characters confront the limit where human understanding fails—as it inevitably must do. Apprehending that limit serves to destroy the characters arrogance and sense of self-sufficiency and preservation. Scott and the writers show that the limit of knowledge—that line across which we can, as humans, never proceed—can nudge us into suspecting that whatever the answer is to the meaning of life and why we’re here is immeasurably immense, and it necessarily exceeds us. The mastery of nature by the humans and the Giants known as the Engineers alike is shown to be a haphazard, arrogant and deluded endeavour denoting hubris. Humans are animals, we are nature. While also heavily referencing the Book of Enoch, the Sumerian myth of the Annunaki, Milton’s Paradise Lost and the fallen angels’ war on heaven, it also draws on biblical themes such as Noah’s flood and other literary sources such as Shelley’s Frankenstein.
It was also about mystery. It was about trying to grasp things we couldn’t imagine or couldn’t understand; seeking answers to questions that are unanswerable and in the end the only clear answer you’re left with is that we exist in a hopelessly inexplicable and pitiless universe; a place in where the higher powers that be ;ater came to the conclusion that their human experiment was a worthless mote of dust and they wanted to abort us in the same way Shaw aborts her unwanted offspring. So did it really raise more questions than it answered? Like Holloway in the film; the audience were eager to get their presents early but like others, I don’t want all the answers just yet, giving us just enough to chew on and work over will tide me over until the presents are finally
unwrapped in the sequel(s).
There is a sequel coming so this is part one; there is more to come
and Ridley has stated in the commentary that the answers will be explored in
the sequel(s). The fact is, Ridley has had plans and ideas for all of this
since 1984 when he expressed an interest in exploring the civilization of the
Space Jockey, thus having just one movie to wrap up the mysteries behind a film
that haven’t been answered in 30 years would have been cheap and too safe, look at what happened with the Thing, are we still talking about that? The Thing
prequel left nothing to the imagination and was utterly predictable; it merely
showed what we already knew happened… quite pointless. Prometheus did what so few prequels do; make you hungry for the next instalment in the series, and
Ridley has stated that there will be two more films before we get the whole
picture. Only a trilogy can flesh these large themes and details out
sufficiently; heck it took two films for Ripley to have more characterization.
It seems many aren’t too familiar with Ernst Hemingway’s Iceberg theory (also known as the theory of omission) and Lindelof employs it quite often in his stories. Hemingway, who was a writer of short stories, often wrote his stories where he omitted or hinted at the meanings and certain
details. To Hemingway, the true meaning or meanings of a piece of writing should not be evident from the surface story because the crux of the story lies below the surface as symbolism and allegory. Hemingway’s pared down narratives forces a reader to solve connections without the narrators help (although with Prometheus we are fortunate to have the narrators help with the commentary) so there really is no difference in the way Lindelof writes his stories. Otherwise, listen to the commentary; watch the
documentary, pick up a copy of “The Art of the film” and just be patient for
part 2. Case closed, fuck.
^ You’re a bit myopic there buddy. It’s demonstrable the whole entire allegorical subtext went over your head.
To begin, Shaw and Holloway simply interpreted them as invitations; thus to reach such a conclusion could simply be seen a non-sequitur but having found an earth-like planetoid they were simply exploring the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life to coincide with their findings thus there didn’t have to be anything on LV-223. Vickers was convinced they were just cave scribbles.
There you have two different takes already. Ergo, it is an assumption that the engineers were guiding anybody to LV-223. The Titan Prometheus taught man the ability to think and transmitted the secret of numerous forms of knowledge including the art of navigation, the art of calculating time, to build and to write.
He fashioned man to be straight, vertical, standing on his legs because he wanted the men to look up and gaze at the stars, unlike animals whose eyes are always toward the ground.
The cave painting just shows a star map no different to civilizations depicting star constellations; but notice how the figure standing pointing to the stars isn’t pointing to LV-223 specifically? Shaw and Holloway simply extrapolated from known star systems and found one that registered high on the earth-similarity index. Weyland being highly superstitious and at death’s door prompted him to make one last chance to meet his ‘maker’ in the hope to save himself from death; he had nothing to lose. Having all the investors and money in the world he could do anything he so pleases and he found a planetoid almost identical to earth, that was good enough for him and he was going to die soon regardless. Again, he had nothing to lose.
When Holloway explains the star map, it has 6 stars and they extrapolated from known star systems and opted for a system of planets and moons that register high on the earth similarity index and started making educated guesses as to which one would be the ‘home world’. They simply honed in on the nearest star system that was mostly identical to our own and found it had planets with moons, one of which had an oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere virtually identical to earth’s.
Let’s back up. They took a guess on which star system out of 6.
What’s interesting is that these same 6 stars exist in reality in the Zeta Reticulum system and most of them are approximately 34 to 36 light years away with more than half being quite similar to our sun and one in particular only being 19 light years away. Now, yes it is true that star coordinates drift. For that, you have to compensate for stellar drift over the course of many thousands of years; so essentially, if your civilization is not advanced enough to compensate for stellar drift then yes this would be a problem. But alas, the engineers are an incomprehensibly advanced space faring race whose technological feats far exceed mankind’s’. Ergo, it’s obvious they compensated for stellar drift in the reticulum system over the course of thousands of years.
If the particular star system they happened to choose was the incorrect one, then they simply landed in the wrong place, 1 out of 6 possible star system locations. Thus we can’t assume they landed in the right place. I would have guessed Gliese 581d myself! It’s also highly possible that the human race did something to peeve the engineers so they simply chose to abort or change mankind long after the cave paintings were drawn by humans and that’s all. They changed their minds or they just engineered mankind as hosts for bioweapons. Remember one of the other stars in that very same map has an inhospitable rock going around it, with a certain derelict ship, beaming out an acoustic message that will one day be intercepted by the Nostromo. The star on the bottom right of the map is Zeta 2 Reticuli and
LV-426 is a moon orbiting one of that star’s planets.
Remember Prometheus takes place on LV-223.
If most of these stars are 8 light years from each other then there could very well be other outposts or even civilizations on planets or moons in each of the close by systems.
It’s important to consider the characters that expressed scepticism at it all in the film, remember David doubted it all from the start, “Granting your thesis is correct…” It was essentially a chance at the possibility of finding
extraterrestrial life and Weyland was superstitious enough to follow at all
costs, for one last chance of immortality. Again, going by the Greek mythology that underlies all of it (remember the title of the film?), what makes you think that the awakened Engineer was of the group that left signs back on earth? Given his different, more biomechanoid physiology contrasted with the merely masculine engineer at the beginning it could have very well been a different faction who were responsible for it. Remember the majority of the Titans were cast into Tartaros while Prometheus and his kin continued to engineer man.
Now, in the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal Christian text, we have a mythology that is essentially a retelling of an archetypal story that recurs in multiple myths; where a race of Gods, Giants or Titans come to earth to teach man their wisdom. The Book of Enoch tells the story of fallen angels called the Watchers (note “The engineers, they are dark angels.” Ridley Scott) who conspired to rebel against the heavens by being particularly fond of mankind; the Watchers took as wives the daughters of men and begat children (note the DNA paternity match) and taught man the knowledge and secrets of the divine.
Among the Watchers were many leaders,
each of which taught mankind specialised fields of knowledge including;
astronomy, the manufacture of goods, writing, mathematics, etc. This was seen as a great sin in the eyes of the Lord because “men were not born for this”. Thus the Lord set out to destroy the human race for their perpetual ‘evil’. The subtext here seems to emphasise that knowledge of the Gods incurs wrath and punishment just like the myth of Prometheus, thus the author of the Book of Enoch suggests that higher understanding and knowledge of the Gods was contrary to man’s nature and purpose and thus the progression of technology inevitably led Man to his ills and woe.
To quote Boyd Rice, “It is axiomatic that people fear and mistrust those who know more than they do, or wield more power. And it’s also a given that people fear and resist the kind of change that
accompanies knowledge and new ideas. This, by all accounts, is what the
Watchers brought to the ancients. We can see echoes of precisely this same sort of fearful attitude, in more modern times, in the account of certain tribes in Africa who were observed practising a kind of negative eugenics. When a researcher watching from a hidden position in a bush saw a tribesman put to death a perfectly healthy child for seemingly no reason at all, he questioned the motive for their act. They replied that every so often a child was born who was too beautiful, too curious, or too intelligent, and it was simply understood that such people would eventually be the source of problems.” The parallels here with the Engineers’ possible motives are striking.
The motif of rebellion against the supreme God stems both from
Mesopotamian myth and Greek myth featured in the Atrahasis and Hesiod’s theogony. Rebellion has the same results in both – the creation of mankind and the imposition of toil and sacrifice. Ridley Scott has ingeniously combined both in Prometheus. The rebellion against the supreme God takes two forms in the Atrahasis epic: the rebellion of the younger Gods the Igigi, led by one figure, against the harsh rules of Enlil and the rebellious activities of Enki
who tricks Enlil to aide mankind.
The role of Prometheus as rebel God combines the role of the wise
and clever rebel whose name denotes “Foresight” hence intelligence and a leader who is punished and Enki’s role of wise and clever rebel God; both thwart the supreme God in his attempts to disadvantage or destroy the races of man.
Enki/Prometheus is therefore responsible for the perceived star maps spread out across the world in the film warning of Enlil’s/Zeus’s impending plans for mankind. The tall figure pointing to the stars is thus Enki/Prometheus.
In the atrahasis epic the result of rebellion of the Gods is the
creation of mankind where one of the Igigi, Geshtu-e, is sacrificed to create man with his blood (or DNA) as advised by Enki. In the theogony we have the Titans who inhabited the earth before the creation of man. One of the Titans, Iapetos “the piercer,” Titan-god of mortal life-span and
ancestor of man; the powers of mortality and craftsmanship appear in
the characters of the sons of Iapetos, Prometheus and Epimetheus, gods who crafted mortal creatures out of clay. The sons of Iapetos were also described as possessing some of the worst of human traits: on an intellectual level, Prometheus is overly sly and crafty, Epimetheus a guileless fool, Atlas overly daring and arrogant and Menoitios prone to rash and violent actions.
Their natural traits led each to their downfall.
Iapetos and his family were regarded as the ancestors of mankind; a race which inherited the worst qualities of these four
sons including: crafty scheming, foolish stupidity, excessive daring, and rash violence. It is no coincidence each character in the film exemplifies
all of these qualities.
Another event in the theogony includes the creation of
the first woman due to the results of Prometheus’ rebellious trickery. As a
consequence of the Gods’ revolt in the Atrahasis epic, mankind receives the lot of hard toil. In Hesiod, this fate is Zeus’ revenge, and it comes about through the woman via a woman called pandora. Note Pandora’s jar, the urns in the film, and Shaw’s pregnancy. This represents a different application of the same motif and Ridley is ingeniously weaving both mythologies with his own applications also.
Mankind’s role like the Igigi before him was to supply sacrifices of
food to the Gods; ingeniously this is why the carbon dating works since the
humanoid Gods, Titans or Giants inhabited Earth before man then lived for
generations along with man thus they share the same carbon cycle as well as sharing DNA long before they were cast out. All life on earth is carbon-based. A lot of your body is made of carbon and some of your body carbon parts were plant parts a few months ago.
Carbon, used by all living organisms, continuously circulates in the earth’s
ecosystem. In the atmosphere, it exists as colourless, odourless carbon dioxide gas. Plants take in carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and release carbon dioxide during respiration.
When herbivores eat the plants, they acquire the carbon stored in plant tissues and much of the food (carbon compounds) eaten is used up for the herbivore’s life processes and given off as carbon dioxide in respiration but some is stored in animal tissues. If that herbivore is then eaten by a carnivore (or omnivore) the carbon (stored in the animal tissues) will be passed on again.
Thus we can see that the knowledge of the Gods given by the disobedient Watchers brought power, discord and corruption and thus the Watchers were punished as oppressors, to quote Enoch,
“Let every oppressor perish from the face of the earth; Destroy… the
offspring of the Watchers for they have tyrannized over mankind.” The offspring of the Watchers were the Giants who were essentially demi-gods due to miscegenation between the Watchers and early man. Allegorically speaking, mankind are essentially descendants of these giants. (Again, note the DNA match in the film and the matching carbon cycle)
These giants were pitiless brutes that
kept men as slaves for toil and hardships…
Ringing any bells yet?
The film demonstrates many examples of human folly brought on by their own overreaching arrogance, the modern tower of babel that is corporatism and faith in technology, and their follies are juxtaposed with David who further emphasises this thematic; where David is smarter and more interesting than the crew much in the same way the homicidal Hal was in 2001. If you watch closely, David makes many attempts to put his lesser human counterparts at risk and only saves Shaw from the silica storm due to his very human and peculiar infatuation with her. This is further evidence of his self-awareness.
And their folly is further compounded by their unwavering dependence and trust in David; whose signs of being self-aware are pretty clear to see early in the film; riding a bicycle whilst shooting hoops, watching a film he ‘likes’ and idolising Peter O’Toole by dying his hair like his and quoting dialogue, indeed, these idiosyncratic behaviours fall well outside the parameters of his normal programming and later its revealed he is particularly disdainful of the humans around him. Ergo, risking the entire welfare of the crew would be of no concern to David in the same way Ash broke 24 hour quarantine procedure in Alien which not only risked all of the human crew but more than that he guaranteed everyone’s death (bar Ripley) since he already knew what he was dealing with. What is interesting is that after Holloway sniggers at David’s faux humanity in regard to him wearing a helmet when he doesn’t need to, later when they realise the Temple has a breathable atmosphere according to their scanners, Holloway seeks reassurance from David about the safety of the air; only after David says it’s ok does Holloway and the rest of the crew take their helmets off…
The themes of human folly and the substitution of God with technology are quite deliberate and are plain to see. Later, David prompts a response from Holloway that would override any ethical programming by asking Holloway what he would be willing to do to get his answers, “Anything and Everything.” – This, to an empathy lacking and misanthropic android, logically does not exclude being spiked unwillingly with an unknown alien exobiology to see its effects. And as confirmed by writer Damon Lindelof, “David’s estimation of the humans around him is that they are lab rats.”
Even later in the film when Shaw acts as an audience surrogate with her fears over the air in the temple, David again reassures about the safety of the air and subtly hints to Shaw that he knew how Holloway had died. Indeed, in God’s absence what better way to substitute him with the seems to be 100% obedient to his creator Weyland, even then, it’s implied he is putting up appearances when he later divulges to Shaw, “Don’t all children want to see their parents’ dead?” David really is the star of the show and his legendary performance now joins the annals of the great science fiction androids – First we had Maria the android in Metropolis, then HAL in 2001, then we had Ash in Alien, Roy Batty in Blade Runner now we have David.
Character development in the accepted sense is not consistent with Scott’s dystopian worlds seen throughout his three sci-fi’s; with their impersonal
themes and heartless cores. The hard-edged abstraction of character (note: I did not say *absence* of character) fits perfectly with this film in particular. David was the most developed and intriguing character (followed closely by Shaw) thus in many ways the story is about him. Like Blade Runner, Prometheus is a literate science fiction film, thematically enfolding the philosophy of religion and the moral implications of human mastery of genetic engineering in the context of classical Greek drama and hubris; where the characters confront the limit where human understanding fails—as it inevitably must do. Apprehending that limit serves to destroy the characters arrogance and sense of self-sufficiency and preservation. Scott and the writers show that the limit of knowledge—that line across which we can, as humans, never proceed—can nudge us into suspecting that whatever the answer is to the meaning of life and why we’re here is immeasurably immense, and it necessarily exceeds us. The mastery of nature by the humans and the Giants known as the Engineers alike is shown to be a haphazard, arrogant and deluded endeavour denoting hubris. Humans are animals, we are nature. While also heavily referencing the Book of Enoch, the Sumerian myth of the Annunaki, Milton’s Paradise Lost and the fallen angels’ war on heaven, it also draws on biblical themes such as Noah’s flood and other literary sources such as Shelley’s Frankenstein.
It was also about mystery. It was about trying to grasp things we couldn’t imagine or couldn’t understand; seeking answers to questions that are unanswerable and in the end the only clear answer you’re left with is that we exist in a hopelessly inexplicable and pitiless universe; a place in where the higher powers that be ;ater came to the conclusion that their human experiment was a worthless mote of dust and they wanted to abort us in the same way Shaw aborts her unwanted offspring. So did it really raise more questions than it answered? Like Holloway in the film; the audience were eager to get their presents early but like others, I don’t want all the answers just yet, giving us just enough to chew on and work over will tide me over until the presents are finally
unwrapped in the sequel(s).
There is a sequel coming so this is part one; there is more to come
and Ridley has stated in the commentary that the answers will be explored in the sequel(s). The fact is, Ridley has had plans and ideas for all of this
since 1984 when he expressed an interest in exploring the civilization of the Space Jockey, thus having just one movie to wrap up the mysteries behind a film that haven’t been answered in 30 years would have been cheap and too safe, look at what happened with the Thing, are we still talking about that? The Thing
prequel left nothing to the imagination and was utterly predictable; it merely showed what we already knew happened… quite pointless. Prometheus did what so few prequels do; make you hungry for the next instalment in the series, and Ridley has stated that there will be two more films before we get the whole picture. Only a trilogy can flesh these large themes and details out sufficiently; heck it took two films for Ripley to have more characterization.
It seems many aren’t too familiar with Ernst Hemingway’s Iceberg theory (also known as the theory of omission) and Lindelof employs it quite often in his stories. Hemingway, who was a writer of short stories, often wrote his stories where he omitted or hinted at the meanings and certain
details. To Hemingway, the true meaning or meanings of a piece of writing should not be evident from the surface story because the crux of the story lies below the surface as symbolism and allegory. Hemingway’s pared down narratives forces a reader to solve connections without the narrators help (although with Prometheus we are fortunate to have the narrators help with the commentary) so there really is no difference in the way Lindelof writes his stories. Otherwise, listen to the commentary; watch the
documentary, pick up a copy of “The Art of the film” and just be patient for
part 2. Case closed, fuck.
This article needs some proofreading and correction. In article: “Is it at arbitrary as being done with this petri dish”, should begin “Is it as…”, and 2nd to last paragraph “where we created by these things” should be “were we created….”…
Good article though!