What Was Ridley Scott Thinking When He Made Prometheus?
Prometheus. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
In 2012 Ridley Scott directed a much anticipated Alien prequel called Prometheus. Alien is of course such a part of out cultural consciousness that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. Also hard to imagine a world where studios and directors don’t take such a valuable piece of intellectual property and absolutely drive it into the ground until it cannot possibly yield up any more dollars. That’s how the Alien franchise proper has gone. But this prequel does not smack of a cash grab. It has the feel of true blue passion project, something Ridley Scott had been ruminating on for years - decades even - waiting for just the right moment to spring it on an unsuspecting public yearning for more Alien content.
You know Prometheus was a true passion project because it’s fucking insane. It’s massively ambitious, weird, divisive and daring. In other words, after a short Russell Crowe-induced lull in his career, Ridley Scott returned to his roots with Prometheus. And what roots they were! The film opens with a giant humanoid being taking some bad acid and having his nucleotides dissolved into a river or something. And then, it really starts to get weird with mysterious black sludge, ancient alien civilizations, interspecies pregnancies, zombies and robots.
The movie is visually stunning. And Michael Fassbender is absolutely tremendous as David the Android (he should have been nominated for an Oscar that year). But, and here were must ask the truly big questions, is Prometheus actually good? Or, like Blade Runner 2049 another follower in the giant footsteps of Ridley Scott, is it just beautiful confusion masquerading as a masterpiece? Not that it matters, but I think there’s a bit of both in this film. The story Prometheus tells is very convoluted and somewhat nonsensical and a really over-complicated way of explaining the genesis of the xenomorph (indeed, it would take a whole other movie to finally get to that part). But it’s still very compelling to watch.
The back-story, which is never directly explained in the film but Ridley Scott did elaborate one day after drinking what I imagine were several bottles of zinfandel, is that the Engineers engineered life on Earth and then sent someone to check on that life and that someone was Jesus and then humans killed him. So, I mean, when your film contains “Jesus was an alien” as part of its back-story you know you’re really into some weird territory. And not everyone is going to like that, especially space gore fans who are mainly into the Alien franchise because they like to watch people get dismembered in zero gravity.
For those people, Prometheus would have been an absolute head scratcher. They came to see aliens disembowel people, and instead got a strangely meditative space zombie movie about the meaning of life and the unintended consequences of creation. These are big, weird themes that Scott is playing with. And after several competent but middling films that didn’t really aspire to greatness Prometheus was a bold declaration from Ridley Scott that he was back and interested in exploring the deep and impossibly complex ideas that made films like Blade Runner into the masterpieces they are.
Does he succeed? Well, that’s really up to the viewer. For some people it’s going to be too weird, and not cohesive enough (I think, personally, this can probably be traced back to Damon Lindelof’s involvement in the script, as the man has a penchant for making things confusing in order that his work might be mistaken for art). It’s going to ask too many lofty questions and then answer them only with undead space worms. I do think that is probably a structural fault in the script.
But I also think that’s OK. Because we need big, bold massively weird and daring films like Prometheus, like Mortal Engines, like Jupiter Ascending. They aren’t always going to work, and they aren’t always going to please everyone. But it’s important that they get made, and that studios stand behind them and take chances and let Ridley Scott indulge in his passions for strange and beautiful stories otherwise we will be doomed to an eternity of competent but boring remakes of Robin Hood.
