TAKE ONE Presents... - The Xenopod 7: PROMETHEUS (2012)

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

You descend to the surface of an alien planet and immediately remove your space helmet only to be attacked by a parasitic worm that pumps you full of critical appraisal of 2012's PROMETHEUS. Against your will, you learn about the extended development history of this quasi-prequel, the issues with the script that bog down the visual spectacle, and the film's dense thicket of thematic preoccupations.Content warning: body horror, death, chemical warfare, pregnancy, abortion, space travel, religion, nihilism.Our theme song is Alien Remix by Leslie Wai available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/lesliewai/alien-remixFull references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/BHEW63NHThis podcast was recorded during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Get away from her, you bitch away from her, you bitch! Hello, and welcome back to the Xenapod, a podcast where we're watching all the alien franchise films in order, contextualizing them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie, and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Jim Ross. Hi, Jim. Hello. How are you doing? Good, good.

You know, we're getting towards the end of our mainline journey with these films. I think, worryingly for me, I think this one, and I said this on social media recently, this is the first one where I'm going to have to either roll back on or stand by opinions that I actually published when it came out. I was going to say, for my introduction, today we're watching a film which you call spectacular, highly evocative, undeniably compelling. there's some choice selectivity

and poster quotes been chosen there yeah picking the poster that's from your take one review from 2012 when this came out yes because we are reviewing

Prometheus Ridley Scott's return to the alien franchise and yes you did review this when it came out yeah yeah and actually I am just on the the kind of first experience of this film

I was hyped for this film at the time really really kind of excited about it and I think part of it actually I think we're going to talk a little bit about the you know once we get to get on about we'll talk a little bit about the marketing of the film but genuinely I think this film had one of the best

trailers I have seen this century like without a shadow of a doubt we'll link to it on social media perhaps but there's one where like it basically it's ridiculously intense right I think it's a superb trailer

but my first experience of this I looked at it was opening night and I can remember where I saw it actually I saw it with my flat mates at the time at the arts picture house and came out yeah I had a similar experience I was in 3D

in 3D actually there we go I want to talk about that I've got a note of that but yeah before we get started in earnest I just want to mention as last time this podcast was recorded during the two 2023 WGA and SAG After Strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike,

the film being covented here wouldn't exist. And so we offer our solidarity to both those unions, although this morning WGA have announced a tentative agreement, so we'll see how that shakes out. But yeah, Prometheus was released in 2012, specifically on the 1st of June 2012 in the UK and the 8th of June 2012 in the USA. A budget of 120 to 150,000.

30 million, and a box office of 403.4 million, which is significantly higher than the films we've been discussing up until this point. It's about four times what Alien vs. Predator Requiem took in. Do you, I think we're definitely to determine you with us to meet more of a cultural impact than basically, I would say, any of the films since aliens, really, I would say. Agreed. Yeah, it's a lot. bigger and a lot more culturally impactful, like you say. You've already mentioned something of your first experience of Prometheus.

I had a very similar one. I was hyped for this. I had seen all the marketing and the viral marketing around it, which we'll discuss. But I was really looking forward to it because it looked right up my alley. Like, you know, grand space epic in this universe, but enough of a separation that it felt distinct and a very important. original. I was living in Durham at the time and I remember driving to Newcastle, to one of the big cineplexes there to see it. And having a great time, I absolutely loved it when I first saw

it. I think it lived up to the expectations that I had for it in a way that subsequent viewings have, we'll discuss it, but I generally think it's gotten worse every time I watch it. It's interesting you see that because I think, um, so I've watched this quite a few times now Right. Um, so obviously I saw it on the opening night and I've seen it, I think when I've re-watched it for this recording, I think that's at least the third time I've seen it since, right? Um, I've definitely watched it at least once at home, um, and then at second time, I'm pretty sure there's another one in there somewhere. I, my opinion on it has kind of plateaued. I think my, my, I think it came off the best with me after my initial viewing. Although if you do go to that, if you do go to that, you do go to that review I wrote and kind of like, you know, don't do the poster quotes. There's a lot of mixed feelings about it. And I think, unfortunately, when I've rewatched it since, those become a lot clearer, right? Because I think you're a little bit less bowled over by, I do think it's a fantastic looking film, right? And, you know, we'll talk about, we'll talk about that.

I do think, but I think once you've kind of acclimatized that a little bit, there are a lot of problems with it. And I think what's interesting about re-watching it for this project, right, where we're kind of looking at all these films together is we spoke a few shows ago about how we start to have a bit of an identity crisis

within this franchise about what it wants to do. This is another prime example of it, right? And I think we'll get into this, and probably even a little bit with the film after this, but this one really does exhibit that pretty clearly, I think, in a different way to things like Alien versus Predators,

and Resurrection and even Alien 3, but it does very much show kind of like the push and pool of different directions that this series of films is trying to go in. It does. It shows like you say, the identity crisis of the alien franchise at this point, but

also it is very embedded in a time. I found this to be a very 2012 film in ways that we'll discuss, particularly around the script. But, yeah, let's talk about 2012 for some context. So 2012, the highest grossing films of that year are the Avengers, the first Avengers film,

Skyfall, the James Bond film, Dark Night Rises, the first Hobbit film. Sorry, that's my Skyfall reaction. Oh, Skyfall. No, I was for Skyfall. Even with the beautiful shots of Glenn Cowell? Yeah, I'm afraid. I don't know, not to jump the gun here, but you say this is a very 2012 film. been my reaction to

my reaction to this film actually share some similarities with Skyfall. Skyfall's another film that I thought looked incredible. And I think a lot of people overlooked a lot of ropiness and bad aspects of Skyfall because Roger Deacons was a cinematographer frankly.

Yeah, I would say Skyfall, like Prometheus, has got worse every time I watch it. Where was I? The Hobbit, an Ice Age film, Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 2, Men in Black 3, the Amazing Spider, men. A lot of big franchises, you know, where we're truly in the area where franchises are dominating the box office, which we're kind of in last time as well as I recall. This came out in June, was it? Yeah, second of June. So in cinemas around this time, you have

Men in Black 3, which came out in May, Moonrise Kingdom, Snow White and the Huntsman, Piranha 3, D, and on the same day, as this, we have Madagascar 3, Prometheus, safety, Not Guaranteed. I know it's an interesting little nugget there actually that safety not guaranteed came around now because of course

the thing that I find fascinating about that film which it's not a film I love to be honest safety not guaranteed but like you know small film you know

got a Duplass brother in the lead role and the director of that Colin Trevado of course right I mean this is by a nice little example of a train

that you'll see over the decade following this next film he directs Jurassic World, you know, it's in the same way that kind of like you get all these like directors of kind of like small cult indie films or indie films that did unexpectedly well, they suddenly end up getting parachuting into these massive franchises. It's something you'll see with kind of like Marvel films and the kind of decade after that. So it's, it's

interesting that it came out around with the same sort of time as this, because it's, that's another one of these trends that you'll kind of notice over time. Indeed, he was also slated for Star Wars Episode 9, but dropped out at a certain point. still as a story credit on it, I think. I use story in the loosest possible sense with that one, but anyway. Yeah, if I were to ever watch it again, I imagine that would also get worse than more I watched it, but I never intend to.

So in terms of the development of this film, this film kind of stems from discussions between Ridley Scott and James Cameron, the director of Alien and aliens, respectively, who both wanted to look to do a potential fifth film and they had concepts around the space jockey, the creature that we see in the desiccated fossil that we see in alien, who is somehow in control of the derelict ship there. So Scott comes up with this concept inspired by Eric Van Darnocken,

who we talked about on the Alien versus Predator episode, but briefly was a fraudster and was published by a Nazi, and he has the idea that ancient aliens visited Earth, and it's this racist theory. white supremacist theory that ancient civilizations couldn't have built their wonders without aliens. Scott later said in an interview with The Hollid Reporter that gets several names involved with the project wrong, including Damon Lindelof and Eric Van Darnikun, that NASA and the Vatican agree that it is almost mathematically impossible that we can be where we are today without there being a little help along the way.

That's what Scott said. I don't know what sources for that are. God, I'm like to. And of course, the Vatican's always accurate about everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A great source for our scientific understanding of the union. I really trust the Vatican on the mathematical aspects of evolution as such, yeah. The Vatican think there was some kind of higher being you created us?

Wild. So, Cameron and Scott have these discussions, but at a certain point, it became clear to Cameron, that Fox wanted to do Aliens versus Predator, and he was so dead set against this that he walked away with the whole thing. He said in a Reddit AMA that you'll ruin the franchise, it's like Dracula versus the Werewolf, and then he lost interest in doing any kind of alien film. He didn't have anything to offer on the sequels after Prometheus either. He said he'll stick with the Avatar Universe. This Reddit AMA was after Prometheus came out.

He said that he thought Prometheus was an interesting film, thought provoking and beautiful, visual, mounted, but at the end of the day, it didn't add up logically. So at this point, Fox brought in a writer, John Spates, who was best known for his blacklist script, Passengers, which was later made into the film Passengers with Chris Pratt and, what's the name, Jennifer Lawrence. Have you seen Passengers? Yes, Passengers is the subject of a running joke between me and my partner because of the one scene that we remember from the film that we couldn't stop laughing at is where Lawrence Fishburn gets in a med pod, similar to a med pod in

Prometheus, actually, and the computer says he has 600 diseases. And so we're just laughing at the idea of him having everything that is possible for a human to have and his body absolutely falling apart. Yeah, a bit of a digressionist, but passengers, I think, an interesting one, because, like, I think... It's one of these things where, kind of, like, it proceeds,

it's actually quite decent for a lot of it, but then once you take a step back and look at the Central Prem, it's absolutely horrendous, you know? Absolutely awful premise. Yeah, but I saw, but interestingly, I did see, sorry for people to go look up, they've seen passengers and they think this, I haven't seen it, there is a very interesting

video I watched that basically says that this could have been an excellent film if it was reframed basically as a horror film from Jennifer Lawrence's perspective, right? Yeah. And if you look at it from that perspective, there's actually potentially a really great film in there, but of course it completely changes the tone of the piece, but it's

It's an interesting thing about how different framing can take the same idea and actually make it pretty decent. So John Spates was brought on to write this script. He had this concept of looking at what comes before Alien. So he ultimately writes this script called Alien Engineers. And you can find this online. I might put it in the references for this episode. But you can find the summary online.

It is basically the same as Prometheus, even down to character details and broad strokes of what happens in the action. The major differences are, there's a lot more explicit, kind of xenomorph stuff. There's facehuggers and chess busters and whatnot, and they land on LV426, the planet from the original alien. As the title for this draft script kind of implies, it ties into alien a lot more directly than Prometheus would ultimately end up doing. Yeah, it's truly an alien film. But the action more or less proceeds exactly the same way. We've got people searching for the creators.

of human life coming on this planet and getting infected. Blah, blah, blah. By July 2010, Damon Lindelof was brought on board. Damon Lindelof at this point is a very trendy screenwriter, who is coming off his success show running Lost, which I'm going to argue when we get to the script is kind of a defining point for this early 2010's period of screenwriting. So Lindelof comes in and brings a lot of his thematic preoccupations to the script,

and this becomes Prometheus. We've Ridley Scott on board to direct it. The next thing I want to mention is the viral marketing campaign, which you kind of mentioned around the trailer, but there was a terrific marketing campaign for this film with a series of short films that kind of did a lot of the world building and fleshed out the world. And they're what got me interested in the film initially.

So the first one is Happy Birthday David, which has Michael Fassbender's Android from the film talking about being an Android. It's kind of a fictional advert for Wayland Industries and the David Android in particular. It's directed by Johnny Hardstaff, though IMDB says it was Luke Scott, which is wrong, and it's got some really creepy world building around this android

and like Fassbender robotically weeping while saying out loud that he doesn't feel emotions and there's some kind of creepy skulls in the background. It's very effective. And the style, Johnny Hardstaff's style, is very different from the film itself. And I really wish the film had been more like this. There's also a TED conference,

which is called TED Conference 2023, which is interesting to look back on from our perspective now. This one was directed by Luke Scott, who is Ridley Scott's son, and this was written by Damon Lindelof. And Damon Lindelhoff wrote this because he wanted to introduce new audience to the TED conference itself.

Yeah, and this is the one that I, This is the one that I most clearly remember. Yeah. And we'll talk about this when we get to it, because it centres on Guy Pearce's character, Peter Wayland. Right. And as we'll get into the film, basically, I'm beginning to think that the reason Guy Pearce was cast

was so he could be in this, really? Yeah, totally. And so briefly, this has Peter Wayland at the TED conference delivering a presentation, I guess, where he talks about his limitless ambition and his grandiose aims for the human race. He kind of got an Elon Musk vibe to the grandiosity and the pomposity of his vision. It's a different style to the actual film. It's far less visually interesting than the David film that I just mentioned.

But it's interesting. It's effective world building. It's effective marketing. I remember this one as well. There's also one called Quiet Eye, Elizabeth Shaw, which again was directed by Johnny Hardstaff. I never saw this at the time, but I watched it for this. It's got Elizabeth Shaw sending a message to Peter Whelan to say, you need to investigate what we're going to investigate in the film.

It's, again, visually interesting, but perhaps the least interesting of these shorts in general. But yeah, a very effective marketing campaign that really had me interested in the film and did a lot of the world building that the film implies, but doesn't explicitly touch on. I thought it was very effective. in particular David, but we'll talk about how effective David is throughout the film. Before we go through the summary, I also want to mention the 3D. So I was reading Vivian Sopchak's film comment piece about this film, who mentions that it was filmed and released in 3D,

and I had completely forgotten that 3D was ever a gimmick for cinemas. But you saw it in 3D, yes? Yeah, I think that was probably, I mean, my feelings on 3D are kind of indifference, to be honest. like, you know, I've seen films where I think it probably works reasonably well, I think, you know, and I think it needs filmmakers to kind of embrace it in the storytelling, so I think the best uses of it I've seen are probably Scorsese's Hugo, and I think actually Stephen Spielberg's tintin actually made pretty good use of it, and I think that's something they probably didn't get enough credit for at the time, you know, the film itself is fine, but I think it makes pretty good use of it. I think by and large it was just never, it's never really, it You know, I mean, it takes a particular vision to actually make it useful in a storytelling way, and I think it basically just never really kind of made much of an impression on me on that. Combined with the fact that when you think about kind of the actual kind of like cost of implementing it effectively, I think really the only things that then had the budget to do it were these big tentpole comic book films that did it as post-conversions and it's not quite the same, you know.

It's fine. It's never particularly bothered me, but I don't lament its kind of slow decline until the Avatar sequel. came out. It's not something I particularly missed, to be honest. Yes. On opening weekend, 3D showings were 54% of ticket sales, and IMAX was 18%. I think the majority of the IMAX sales were also 3D. Yeah. I think for this particular film, it did okay with it. Like, I think there's some scenes where, I think it worked quite well. Like, I think when David's looking at star maps and things like that, there's certain aspects of it, which I think works quite well in 3D,

but as I say, I don't think it really... I don't think the fact that I saw it in 3D, made me any more or less impressed with it than I would have been otherwise you know certainly certainly I don't I don't lament the loss of anything um in the you know because every viewing I've seen since then whether it's two or three and I can't quite remember they've all been two D right I don't have a three D television or anything so I don't recall anything hitting remarkably different as a result of it not being in three yeah I imagine the scenes where David's looking at the kind of astral projections and stuff like that is where it would be most used, most effective.

And, you know, there's nothing jumping directly at the camera, which you've got in kind of lower budget 3D films at the time. But yes, let's run through Prometheus. So the film opens with these grand shots of a barren arctic tundra. At this point, it looks great. I think we're immediately dropped into some great production design and great visuals. We see the shadow of a spaceship on the ground, and we see the ship hover over some waterfalls.

And we see a figure, an engineer, as they'll come to be known, this pale human-like figure, watches the ship leave and then performs a ritual that dissolves him into the water. We see his DNA breaking apart over a title sequence where the letters come up bit by bit, like the start of an alien. We cut to, we assume, many years later, Sean Holloway, who are some of our main characters, are exploring a cave system on the Isle of Sky in Scotland. and they discover cave paintings with 5,000 years ago, were a tall figure pointing to some stars, and they say, I think they want us to come find them.

We cut to space to the scientific exploratory vessel, Prometheus, on December 21st, 2093, because Prometheus is a Christmas film. We'll be reminded of this later when Idris Elber's character makes up a Christmas tree, and that's it. We'll never be reminded of it again. David, the android, played by Michael Fastbender, is pottering around the ship, he's taking care of the passengers, he's watching Lawrence of Arabia, he's dying his hair. He views Dr. Shaw's memories, which is important for establishing the religious themes and nothing else. And I do love Fastbender's performance in this.

He comes across very creepy and very well. He's consistently one of the best performances in the film, I think. I do have an article by Cynthia Craman about the representation of Shaw and David, kind of how these show different kinds of gender politics in the film and femininity in particular with regard to David. She does point out that it's ironic that even now in the modern age, the best way to make an artificial intelligence team evil is to make him pretty and queen it and presumptively gay, which we do get a lot of in Fastbender's performance, no matter how much I like it. Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I think it's interesting. I think it's funny that performance, and not to jump the gun on the alien covenant discussion, right? Because I understand, you know, as far as I haven't re-watched it yet for the show.

I haven't watched it yet, but I've, you know, seen it in the past, and I know Fasbender plays two characters in that, is that right? Yeah, yeah, right. And I think that I find that interesting because I think in terms of that being a response to this film, I think it realizes that one of the best things about, this film is his performance, right? And I think it even plays with the idea of the history, to certain extent, you know, not in a way that I think it relies on those previous films, but it kind of plays with the history of asteroids within this film series, right?

Because it's kind of balancing this, is he a positive force here, or is he a negative one? And it's kind of constantly flicking between the two. And this is one of the things where I think maybe I appreciate you know because I think like you each time I've watched this film it's not got worse in my mind but certainly as I say

kind of like my best reaction was the first one it's kind of plateaued into a slightly negative one maybe over time but I think one aspect that I've maybe grown in appreciation for it is the way that it actually handles David and the way that it kind of constantly keeps you guessing

around that and I think when you come to talk about Lindeloff and kind of the script and stuff and it's like some of his storytelling modes and things like that. This, this, you know, the, you know, the JJ Abrams mystery box nonsense, right? This is one thing with this film where I think it actually does it well. I think there's a lot of aspects in this film where it doesn't do it well, but I think his performance and the way that that progresses and what we know about him, what we don't know about him at certain point. I think that's one place where this film actually does it quite well. And I think it actually links in quite well with some of the ideas that other films in this series have presented around Andron. It's definitely, for me anyway, looking back, the aspect of the film that I think combines both execution and kind of interest the best. There are things that I might find more interesting, but I don't think they're executed pretty well. There's things that are executed quite well, but I don't find particularly interesting. This is maybe the best balancer, too, for me, is his performance and how it's presented.

Yeah, it's very interesting to pitch him as an Abraham's-type mystery box, which works a lot better with, a human mystery, human, you know, in the broadest possible sense, rather than a gimmick, like you've often got in Abrams films like Mission Impossible 3, for example. So the ship arrives at a planet, LV. 223, and we see various characters emerging from stasis. Vickers, played by Charlie's Theron, does some push-ups, Shaw, Nomi Rappas, throws up. David pronounces stasis wordly, he says starsis, just a note on that. Idris Elba wakes up, he is the captain of the vessel, and everyone has breakfast, just like in Alien. So there's a great cast, we're introduced to a couple of other minor characters, played by Rafe Spal, and what's his name from Mission Impossibles?

Sean Harris. Thank you. At this point, I think the ropy dialogue starts to become evident, because up to this point, there's not been much dialogue. David has parted around on his own. we had the shots of the engineer and we had some static shots of the crew in their life buds. As soon as

people start talking, the quality of the film dips. Is that going to be on the Blu-ray box along with my quote you put out earlier as soon as people start to talk the quality of the film dips? I doubt it.

We get the Alien versus Predator Briefing scene. So you mentioned in Alien versus Predator that the setup of this film and that film are very similar. We get the large hole, we get Mr. Wayland. And they're talking about how

they found these ancient civilizations pictograms with pictures of giant figures, pointing to the stars, and it makes a map. Prometheus has followed this map and Mr. Wheland has funded this to find the origins of life, to find our creators. It becomes clear that Shaw

is looking at this from a quasi-religious perspective. She wears a Christian cross. She believes in some kind of higher power. It doesn't seem to be the Christian god, but never mind. Holloway is more scientific. He just wants to find who these figures are and communicate with them. And Wayland, who is played by Guy Pearce under a staggering amount of prosthetics, gives a briefing about how he's advancing scientific knowledge with this and the push towards the stars. It's very unclear why they didn't just get an older act. to portray Wheland. We get into kind of, I think at this point we see, and I'll mention the Damon Lindelof stuff, because we get a lot of his recurrent obsessions from this period of his writing.

We get some science versus faith stuff. You know, people are like, how do you know? I don't, but it's what I choose to believe. Which is a thread through the entirety of Lost, incidentally. Exactly. Yeah. And we get some hints of familial tensions,

in the Wayland family and there's some father-sons stuff around Wayland and David, the android and as we'll discover later, it doesn't matter. Vickers, Charlize Foron's character. I think at this point we get into these kind of thematic obsessions

of Lindelof. You mentioned Lost. Lost has a lot of these themes around bad fathers, fatherhood, fathers and sons and science versus faith these are kind of Lindelof's preoccupations for this period of his writing as evidence also by the the names of the characters

and like Lost is probably the best example of a lot of this stuff going on because the father-parent issues like I mean there's multiple characters with that right and then the trying to marry kind of like religion philosophy and science comes through the character names like you know you've got you know you've got a John Locke John Locke. In Lost, you've got a Desmond Hume. It's supposed to David Hume.

You know, like, yeah, exactly, right? This comes up again, and I think Lost, because it ran for so long, is probably the best example of it, but it comes up here as well. I mean, it's all over the place. Yeah, and I think this is very late 2000s, early 2010s, because Lindelof seemed to be everywhere for this period. Like, he'd just come off Lost, where he was one of the showrunners with Colton Cues, and he was involved in Star Trek Into Darkness.

He wrote that, and this is kind of a period where his writing appears in a lot of places. It's worth mentioning that Maureen Ryan's recent book on Hollywood and systems of abuse and toxic workplaces specifically mentions Lindelof as a bully doing racially motivated bullying in the Lost writing room. To his credit, it's not my place to accept his apology, but he did a more sincere apology than other people who were accused. And it did sound like he has grown and changed. And I think his writing has got a lot better as he moved on to the leftovers and the Watchmen HBO series.

I think his writing has gone on in leaps and bounds and is a lot less focused on these thematic obsessions that come through in this film. Yeah, and just to put my car, on the table here was the guards of Lindelof and his writing, right? I think, I agree with that, right? I've not seen enough of the leftovers to call on the leftovers, but certainly the writing on Watchman was very good,

and I think that's a indication of how it's improved, right? Because I think, so I think he did some writing on the Star Trek reboot, but, like, you know, I think he's not credited for it. Where he does have a credit, is Star Trek into darkness. And somewhere out there, somewhere out there, there is a recording, of me reviewing this

on community radio in Cambridge because I did when it came out I don't think I wrote a review of it but I was on the radio reviewing it I consider Star Trek into darkness a terrible film I absolutely hated it and it is indicative to me of all the you know and that's even putting it

you know I'm not trekkie right so even putting it aside whether it fits as a Star Trek film right I also think the writing on it is terrible and it's precisely an example which is very common around this period and I think this film is guilty of it to a certain extent but we'll get into this

of relying on the iconography of films that have come before that have absolutely no meaning within the story itself right and Star Trek Into Darkness for me is the worst example of it and the spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness if you haven't seen it the idea of this reveal that Benedict Cumberbatch

is not John Harrison he's Cannes right and it's revealed as a big dun dun dun dun moment right it's horrendous that name means nothing within the world of that story and I think that that's a real problem with a lot of filmmaking around this point

but it also pops up a lot of times in Lindelof's writing because I think it's a little bit in here it's in Star Trek into darkness and I think it's indicative of a problem that will kind of come in over the next few years with the films of that happening

what I will say is I agree with you that I think some of the stuff that he's written since then is markedly better and I think Prometheus is a damn sight better than Star Trek into darkness but it does suffer from some of the same issues and it kind of hamstrings the film in a lot of ways it does you've mentioned that idea of later films using the iconography of earlier films

in Alien versus Predator for example the Alien versus Predator films so we get some quite clumsy exposition of Sean Holloway meeting vickers in a self-contained module of the ship this self-contained module and they're very clear that this is a self-contained module that'll be pulled later.

Exactly. This also has its own portable medical bay which can do everything a doctor can but it's just a portable thing. Wink-wink at the other... Check-off's medical board. And Vickers reasserts her authority in the Wayland Company agenda.

During these scenes of the crew getting to know one another, Holloway is a real asshole, especially to David. He's very patronizing and dismissive to everyone, but especially to David, who spent two years deconstructing ancient languages for this project, and he's still so rude to him. He needles David about not being able to breathe because he's an android. There's very clumsy dialogue around establishing the planet's constitution during the landing sequence, like what parts nitrogen and oxygen it has. They say God does not build in straight lines as they're landing, and they land on this strip.

of rock carved out of the mountains that seems to have a structure down below I think there's plenty of straight lines in nature but whatever the survey team immediately suit up and they head out with an ATV and some personal transports despite there only being six hours of daylight left so one of the things that's going to come up

and this is probably the first good example of it right I think something that's going to come up as we talk about the way this film plays out is supposedly incredibly smart people making incredibly stupid decisions. And the film does try to mitigate this a little bit, right? Because I think they have the line where Holloway says sort of like, you know, it's Christmas and I want to open my presents. Again, Prometheus is Christmas film.

Right. So it does try to mitigate it. It's kind of like, you know, like they're, you know, they really want to get out there. But it's just like, we're, you're meant to be talking about a scientific expedition here, right? And people go to lengths to say, this is a scientific. expedition, right? There's a big who has made about not taking weapons because this is a scientific expedition and blah, blah, blah. But again, the way that the characters are being presented and the way

that the characters act is completely contradictory. And this is something that will kind of like builds as the film goes on and probably robs it of some of its kind of impact and mystique, but this is kind of the first example of it. Yeah, so they enter the hollow structure and they discover these structures that were clearly constructed. They start mapping it out with 3D scanning drones. They say that the CO2 levels are high enough, so Holloway decides to take off his helmet, because he's a dumbass and an asshole. And like you say, they don't act in a way that makes sense for who they are, scientists. So there's a review that I read in Siniaast by Thomas Docti, who says that the characters are rendered dumb and reckless by screenwriterly machinations.

They proceed to disobey every law inscribed in the sci-fi manual of common sense. Don't take your helmet off in off-willed atmospheres. Don't touch the infectious goo. And most definitely don't play with the snake-like tendrils of the creature lurching out of the primordial ooze. In an attempt to avoid spoilers, right, I didn't kind of lay things out explicitly. But in the review I wrote, right, I think I've got it here, right? Because I've re-read, I just checked, I didn't say anything horrendously stupid. I don't think I did.

But basically, I've said, so like, Prometheus occasionally falls prey to the worst types of blockbuster logic and plotting, the same decision-making process that the characters in battleship and Transformers go through. I actually think they're dumber than the characters in battleship and Transformers now rereading that, right? I think it's because they're supposed to be scientists. Because they're on a scientific expedition that makes them seem dumber by comparison with how they should be acting. Yeah. And this is, it really starts to ramp up on this. And I think you could forgive it, but so many key things that happen in this film hinge on them behaving that way. And then when you look back at it, it basically becomes apparently clear that the reason they do this is to advance the plot. That's why they do it, right?

Yeah. And it somehow feels more egregious than the kind of way that this was done in Alien Resurrection, which I talked about at length in that episode. Because they are meant, it's supposed to be a scientific expedition. like that is the whole point of this like they were smarter about this in Alien and these were guys

these were like working class truckers in space they were just hauling yeah and that's the key thing like I mean do do if you think back to alien of course and I think it is a relevant comparison here because obviously it's the same director right this is the director returning to it and if you look at the behaviour of the characters

in alien does everybody always do things that are sensible no not necessarily but at no point is it illogical, right? Yes. You can see why something's happened, like why somebody's gone off on their own or something. You know, it kind of makes

it's not even that it makes sense. It doesn't not make sense, right? You don't look at anything that anybody does an alien go, what in God's name are you doing? You know, whereas you find yourself doing it multiple points in here,

both as just from a, I don't think an actual human would behave this way, all the way up to, I especially don't think a supposedly, you know, scientific, you know, learned individual who's, you know, worked towards us for years would behave this way. And we're going to come back to Holloway, actually, once we've kind of got through this. Oh, we're going to come back Holloway. Yeah, because the script, the way the script goes with him, and I don't have a problem with him being characterised as a bit of an arsehole, right? Because I think some of that

bouncing around with David gives an opportunity for some of that stuff that spoke about with David before and I think Fastmender's performance with it is excellent but in terms of the way that he then behaves we're going to come back to it because that's probably that's probably the most sustained examples the script goes on there's little individual instances really like

what the hell is going on but his character is the one where it recurs the most often in the very next scene Kate Dickie the fabulous Scottish actor says it's minus 12 down in the cave system and I've written in my notes so put your fucking helmet it's back on then David discovers an ancient recording which

shows the engineers fleeing from something and entering a room. Just for a moment, there's a lot of effects like this one of the engineer's hologram, which are made up of dots in a kind of 3D dot matrix. And the silica storm later on also has this effect of a lot of little bits flying over the screen that don't look good under streaming's digital compression. So I watch this on Disney Plus, and the digital artefacts of these little bits do not look great in streaming. I imagine it looks great on film and Blu-ray. Streaming

didn't, did it no favours. Fyfield, Sean Harris, flips out suddenly for no reason. He's very unprofessional. Rafe Spall also decides to go back to the ship with him. Rocks. I love rocks. I love rocks. Right, there's rocks all around you, dude.

Like, rocks that no human has ever seen before. Don't worry about the corpses. This is an archaeological expedition. They're not coming back to... They enter a room and they find a giant human slash engineer head carved out of the stone. There's lots of sweating little jars and there's the head of the space jockey from alien, the original kind of elephantine fossil that we saw in the original alien.

There's a mural which seems to depict a xenomorph, but in the framework of the film and the next film, obviously can't. These murals were actually designed by H.R. Geiger, who worked for 11 months on this film and designed all these murals around the room, but nothing else. And I'll talk about that later when we talk about the production design. David says a lot of things like remarkably human and organic, and he steals one of the little jars. There's a storm coming, because multiple things need to be happening at once,

and there's some false jeopardy about them getting back to the ship before they close the doors. Fifeield and Rafe Spall never make it back, so they have to hunker down until the storm passes. Meanwhile, Shaw, David and Kate Dickey examined the head, which explodes as soon as they take the space jockey helmet off and trick the nervous system into thinking it's still alive. We see David commune with a mysterious figure in stasis and Vickers confronts him about it. David looks at the mysterious jar while Shaw examines the DNA of the engineer and discovers that engineer DNA is the same as human DNA. David discovers a mysterious black goo and goes to Holloway, who is drunk and despair. for no real reason.

His logic seems to be... He's entirely given up on his dream because the engineers are dead and I guess he just wanted to talk to one. And it's like you're still sitting on an alien planet with proof of some sort of civilization. You've proven,

or at least have very strong evidence that some other alien race has created humans, you have actual samples of this race of aliens, you have photographic and video evidence of the structures they've created

and it's just, it just makes no sense to me, it just makes no sense to me and like this this entire character, the Holloway character, just is wildly inconsistent, wildly inconsistent. I hate him for

being an asshole but I also hate that he's so inconsistent and he becomes drunk and despairing at this point for no real reason you know like you say this is the most significant discovery in the history of humanity and he's getting drunk because he can't talk to the engineers to the aliens who he believed ceded life on earth 5,000 years ago combined with the fact there well it's not even like did he think they were still there even without kind of like speculating about the character's mindset, the behaviour and the script

isn't consistent because he's, when they get into the structure and there's an atmosphere and he takes his helmet off and they've found this like, he's jubilant. Like it's an absolutely celebratory kind of tone that he has.

And at that point, there's no, it's not like there's engineers milling around, right? You know, it should be basically quite apparent to everybody at that point. even if this alien race is alive, there doesn't seem to be a lot of them around at the moment, right? So the idea that he's

just like a static at that point, right? So high on the excitement of this that he's taking his helmet off and got to say, oh, it's amazing and he's shouting in the echoey chambers and basically sort of like, you know, acting like over-excited

child. And then, even within the timeline of the film, we're talking about only a few hours later, He's suddenly in the pits of depression, right? Because they found a few dead ones, right? And it's not so much kind of, you know, the idea that he would be despondent. It's that complete about turn on it. It's just, it's like emotional whiplash.

And it does make no sense. It does make no sense. Yeah. There is a good discussion between David and Holloway, where they talk about creation and creator. and we get a lot of good David dialogue around the disappointment that he feels when he asks Holloway, why did you create me? And Holloway replies, because we could. And can you imagine the disappointment you would feel as a human if you heard that?

This is good stuff. That's the article that I mentioned earlier. Cynthia Crayman article mentions this as particularly good. And David's low-key Frankenstein creature responds to it is very good. But David poisons Holloway. He puts the goo in his job. We cut to Idris Elba, who is reporting a detected life form to Fyfield and Rife's Bowl. Holloway, drunk, goes back to Shaw and tells her to take her necklace off because he's an asshole. He insensitively upsets her by mentioning the ability to create life as fundamental to humans, and he presumably knows that Shaw cannot have children.

They have sex. In another scene, Vickers and the captain, Idris Elba, also have sex for some reason. for some reason. And this scene absolutely should have been cut. I don't see any reason for it at all. It feels like a deleted scene. The only redeeming feature is Idris Elba, who's quite fun in it. We cut from that, it never comes up again. Fyfield and Rief Spall hunkered down in the room that they initially ran away from, and they're attacked by a phallic-looking alien parasite, which jumps onto Rief Spall, breaks his arm and breaks through his helmet and infecting. The Alien vs. Predator Wiki calls these hammerpedes, and it says that they are the indigenous worms of LV-223, which were mutated by the black goo of the engineers.

Now, I didn't get that on any viewing. There is a deleted scene, apparently, where they discover the indigenous worms and say, look, there's some worms on this planet, and then later we see them mutated into these things. But I don't think this comes across in the film at all. That's interesting. I mean, in terms of like, you know, when are these worms and digits or not, I don't know, but there are no shots that linger on the worms rigging around in the black goo, right? So I do think, I do think like the implication that one has come from the other is there. I think weird. This actual scene, right, I think about the scene a lot when I think about this film, because it's basically indicative to me of everything that this film does well. but also everything that it does badly, right? Because in terms of once it starts to lean into some of the horror action parts of the film, I think this has done really well, right? I really like the creature design of the hammerped. I like kind of the way it behaves and how it ends up actually in taking out these two guys eventually, right?

And I think that's all executed really well. However, where it all falls down is again the behavior of the characters in this scene, right? These are the guys who basically checked out several hours earlier because of some desiccated dead bodies right

and we're like, nope, didn't sign up for this, I love rocks, I'm fucking off now, right? They wander around, they circle back to this spot and then this time, like, yeah, okay sure, we'll hang out here until we need to leave for the morning. They go back into the room, they already ran away from. Yeah. and then the reaction once

a fucking alien snake appears out of the ground is to you know and it tries to set up with Ray Spall being like a biologist and he's intrigued and blah blah blah but like these two absolute scaredy cats who ran away earlier not I blame them I probably would in the same circumstance as myself but putting myself in that situation

I wouldn't then be trying to pet the ridiculous alien snake especially when the captain of the ship signed off by saying we're detecting a life form in the street structure. I wonder, you know, and then I was freaking out about that. Again, it is completely inconsistent behaviour. And I find this scene an interesting one because it, it really does put across the strengths and the weaknesses of the film in one, one key bit. I think that there are other things that the film kind of like huss and inconsistencies between the ideas and the themes. I don't think this film, sorry, I don't think this scene demonstrates that. We'll get into that

later. But in terms of what it executes well and what it executes badly, this scene really is a prime example of it. The behaviour of the characters, nonsensical. The actual execution of the set piece and your kind of visceral reaction to it, really well done. And it's, it kind of just highlights the frustrations I have with this film that it's a push and pool between those two things constantly. So the next morning a survey team go out to find these two and investigate what the probes detected. David discovers a room full of the jars of the black goo chemical and a room like the original space jockey room in Alien.

Holloway becomes sick and there's a recapitulation of the quarantine procedure stuff from Alien except Vickers has a flame thrower. Again, like Ripley, Vickers is correct not to let him in and Vickers burns him up. He kind of commits suicide by walking into the flame. David discovers that the room has a kind of musical interface and he activates this planetarium which points towards Earth. There's a tiny Earth model. This is legitimately a great scene that not only advances the plot but subtly speaks to David's character. So we get a lot about how David feels about the engineers just from his silent performance. It's very good.

He discovers an engineer in a cryopod. I should also mention, I think this is the best soundtrack since, since the original Alien. Yeah, I'd agree with that. It's a very, there's a lot of really good standalone tracks and kind of leap motifs. I've been listening to it on Spotify actually while I wrote a lot of these notes

and you also get hints of Jerry Goldsmith's original score from Alien, especially in the opening tracks. It's very good. The thing that I find interesting about the score actually is like if you think back to, just to go back to the start of the film and this is where we maybe,

and it'll start to come in now with like what's actually it happened, the plot, like the point of the kind of the recap you're at. But that score and the music combined with some of the opening imagery, if you go way back to the start of the film of kind of the, you know, the shots of the landscapes and things, I think I'd forgotten how in the initial kind of like lead into the film, and it tries to lean back into it later on, quite how much this felt, you know, and it seems like a bit of a cliche, you say a sci-fi film was inspired by 2001 of Space Odyssey, right? But it really does feel

that way. And I think what's interesting is it really sets out what I think this film wanted to be in terms of the themes it's dealing with and the sort of ideas that it wants to talk about. It has a much bigger scope. It has a much grander scope

than the likes of alien and aliens, right? And it's a very different type of film. And I think that's set up Best Byers opening scenes and the way it continues through the film is through the music, right? And I think it's why I'm glad

you brought it up because I think it best exhibits what I think this film wanted to be and then once we start to get into kind of like the way this clashes in kind of like the second and third act we start getting to the way that one holds back the other I think in my view yeah the Thomas Dockety

review from Cineas that I mentioned refers to 2001 a number of times and interestingly the alien engineers script the original script has a large black obelisk that the Shaw and Holloway characters on Earth that has the kind of alien pictogram on it similar to 2001 and they meet with Peter Wayland on a kind of ring space station

like the start of 2001 so there's clearly these links in the original script and in the intent to this kind of grand science fiction to this tradition of grandeur and I think there is a lot of that grandeur that does come through, but it is hamstrung throughout, like you say, by the scripts and by what actually happens. It might be worth mentioning the production design at this point, because David's been playing around with the kind of engineer interfaces, and I think a lot of the production design is very good. There's a visual inventiveness that we haven't seen since the original alien, I think. Even aliens doesn't quite get to this level of inventiveness around these kinds of lovecraftian, mysterious alien figures,

but there is a real flattening out, I think, of Geiger's original design. I think there's a lot of superficial similarity to his aesthetic, but without the same sense of invention or artistic impulse. You know, it doesn't feel like their technology coheres in the same way as aliens. As one example, there's these kind of fleshy buttons that David presses on the console, activate the planetarian thing. And it feels like someone thinking, what's weird?

What would Geiger design? But it's not what Geiger would design. Geiger would design something that you hadn't even conceived. He would design something that kind of disgusted and repulsed you. And these kinds of fleshy pods look interesting, but don't have that same level of visual and aesthetic invention. Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I think, I think so.

I think so. I mean, I think there's still a lot of it there, but I think a lot of it is leaning on what was already, what already existed, right? You know, so I think once they get to, you know, it's not obvious in the initial go-around in the structure, but, you know, it becomes apparent later on that part of the structure is a ship, right? And it's the ship that we, or it's a ship of the type that we saw in alien, right? And like the interiors of that and things like that, I think that's all very much leaning on what went before. The, you know, even kind of the suits that the engineers wear, you know, that's again pre-established. Yeah, we've seen those before. Yeah, exactly, right. I think the things that work the best are, well, let me

put this in our way. The things that work the best are the things that were either already established within this universe as part of Geiger's design, or things that it does that are new, right? So I think the things like Star Map that we spoke about, like that looks fantastic, right? And I think that

works really well. I think the space suits that they wear and the design of them, I think that's really, it feels quite unique to me and I think that really worked well. The drones that they use for the mapping, right? Again it looks very good. But these are things

that basically have been, are new to the world, right? And I think the contrast of the alien, of the engineer structures and the engineership with the sort of like the much cleaner lines of particularly like Vickers chambers and stuff within Prometheus, that contrast is quite good.

But those are all things that are new and things that are pre-established in the universe. These things are trying to ape the sensibilities of Geiger, and are trying to ape that design and kind of impersonate it to a certain extent. I don't think they're bad, but they're not memorable. It's not alien, you know? And I think that idea of trying to glum one set of aesthetics onto a pre-existing set of aesthetics is a microcosm for the entire problem of the film, which in a film comment article, Vivian Sopchak talks about this, the film being pulled between Scott's desire and demand for originality

and on the other side, on the other hand, a huge parasitic multimedia franchise and a stifling mythology. So he wants to both create something original and hook it into this pre-existing what has now become a huge mythology and he just struggles to do those two things like you say the original bits stand out

the bits that directly pulled from aliens stand out but the bits trying to glue the stuff together the glue doesn't quite cohere yeah so Vivian Sobechek

ultimately ends up saying that Prometheus acts as an allegory of its own struggle with and resistance to its origin you know it has this origin that it can't accept or fully accept. And interestingly, I found an interview that Ridley Scott did just after the film came out.

I think he did it with Kermode and Mayo on their BBC show at the time. They directly asked him, is this a prequel to Alien? And he replied, absolutely not. When it clearly is. So there's this tension between Scott wanting to do something original and pursuing this franchise route. So where are we? David returns to the ship, he scans Shaw, and discovers that she's three months pregnant, which is impossible because she only had sex yesterday.

Again, I think this is a great scene because of the two actors and the characters. David tells her that it's not a traditional fetus. And he's very creepy in this. Where Ash was a weird little guy, David is a creepy tall guy. But I think this works because Holloway and Shaw are clearly, not Holloway, definitely not Holloway, David and Shaw are the best written characters by a country mile because they have actual arcs.

So Shaw ends up not doped enough to be putting cryosleep and she escapes and she makes it to Vickers unsecured med pod for an emergency C-section but discovers the med pod is only calibrated from male subjects. Typical institutional medical bias. There's quite a visceral scene that looks great of Shaw having automated surgery without general anesthetic, the machine kind of cuts her open and pulls out, rips out this creature hibernating inside her, growing inside her, this squid-like creature. It's visceral. For me, it wasn't quite emotional because she hasn't had enough time to connect with all this. It all

happens a lot very quickly. I think for me, this scene worked pretty well. I remember watching it in the cinema at the time, and in terms of what I think it's meant to achieve, and again, back to that point about the things that I think the film does well, I remember watching the scene going, holy shit. It's very full on. Like a lot of the articles and reviews I found talk about this. There's one article by Jessica Lempit about human transformation and transhumanism in, well, in Alien, Prometheus and Blade Runner that talks about this scene specifically as a site of a body transformation, of bodily mutilation. It is clearly evoking an abortion, like the Shaw character is desperate to not have this thing inside her and has this medical, not abortion, because the machine isn't set up to do that, but this emergency medical procedure.

But Shaw just leaves this kind of squid thing in the med pod. Stumbling around the ship, all sweaty and bloody, stumbles upon David and Peter Wayland, who has been revived from cryosleep. and despite the fact that Shaw is obviously in distress, that all suddenly becomes secondary to Wayland's story because the script requires it. And Wayland wants to meet the one engineer that David discovered in cryosleep, and he wants to be saved from death. He's very close to death.

And Shaw has decided they need to leave the planet. Fifeield comes back as a zombie, kills a bunch of the crew. Doesn't really matter. Yeah, a scene with Shaw and Idris Elberg, they decide that this was... There's some kind of clunky exposition. they decide that this was a biochemical warfare installation

where the chemicals got out and turned on the engineers and he doesn't care what the engineers have to say, he just wants to leave. We see more shots of Wayland prepping for going to meet the engineer. There's a strangely sexual scene where Vickers is revealed to be Whalen's daughter. Makes no difference to anything. Short also joins Wayland on the mission despite just having had surgery. I think at this point David is kind of taunting Shaw on the way to the mission and said,

doesn't everyone want their parents dead? And I've written, no, Damon Lindelof, that might just be you, mate. They take their helmets off again. Even though they know there is a parasitic infestation on this planet and they know that there are parasites that can infect you, they all take their helmets off again.

Idris Elba realizes that they've entered a spaceship and we see that it's shaped like the derelict from alien. David tells us that the engineers were leaving to go to Earth before their chemical weapons were released. He releases the engineer, who they tried to talk to, but Shaw confronts the engineer about why the engineers wanted to destroy Earth. And the engineer flips out, he goes into a rage, and he rips David's head off, like Ash's head gets ripped off in Alien,

kills Whalen, he kills Kate Dickey, and he kills one other dude. The engineer brings out what appears to be a control chair, like the space jockey chair from Alien, and he sets course for Earth. Shaw tells the captain that he needs to stop the alien ship and he commits suicide to do so. He flies the ship into the alien ship. The alien spaceship falls back to the planet and show on Vickers' run. Vickers is crushed. Now this scene here is another one of where...

Now we've spoken a lot about Lindelos script and the issues that it has. I'm actually going to poke some holes here at Ridley Scott's direction, right? Because One of the things that really struck me, even on the first watch of this film, like in the cinema, right, they basically started to put together my, this relying on blockbuster plotting, is the way that Vickers dies, right? So this ship, it crashed, and the crash looks spectacular, by the way. I think up until the point that it actually hits the ground, this is a fantastically sort of like imagined scene. A lot of the outdoor scenes look very good. You know, I mentioned at the start the kind of grandeur of these scenes flying over this tundra. and the planet that they land on, LV-223, always looks very good from the outside. But the thing is, as soon as it hits the grid, it rolls, you know, if you remember the ship from Bailey, it's kind of like a do-up with a segment cut out of it, effectively,

and it starts to roll on its edge, right? And the Shaw and Vickers are running away from this thing in the direction it's rolling, right? Now, the thing's vast, right? You can have a certain suspension of disbelief about how they're trying to evade this thing. that where the problem comes in is how Shaw survives and how Vickers dies and the shot choices

that Ridley Scott and his editor have put together for it, right? So the first problem is if Vickers dies by kind of like running in a straight line away from something that's narrow and rolling a straight line, fine, right? But you can't then have Shaw survive by rolling

sideways, because then it just looks absolute ridiculous and that's what happens. Combined with that, you probably heightened the effect of how stupid this looks by having a wide shot pulled back from above showing them running away from it in that manner

and it's another one of these things where I do, it's false drama, I do not understand why the film does it this way. Yeah. And you know, we're speaking a lot about the script, but that's a directorial choice. That's an editing choice, that one. Yeah, it looks

very silly that the ship crashes on its edge and then starts rolling in the way that it does, as if you dropped a coin on a desk and it suddenly being rolling on its side. It's very unlikely. But Shaw survives, Rickers is crushed and Shaw runs to the life pod which was ejected. She finds there a giant squid creature in there that the wiki calls a trilobite, which is what, you know, came out of her abdomen just a few hours ago. David tells Shaw that the engineer is coming for her and she sicks the trial about creature on him.

David tells Shaw that there's other ships and she goes back to retrieve him, retrieve his head, so she can operate one of these. She wants to travel to the engineer's home to know why the engineers wanted to destroy Earth. David tells her that it's irrelevant and frankly I agree with him. I don't understand either

why you would want to know why the engineers want you dead. Also not to again, not to jump the gun. It would see the film Alien Covenant agrees with you there as well frankly. Yeah, I just agree with David on this. Maybe I'm a broken robot as well.

Shaw gives her final report, like the final report of the Nostromo. It's New Year's Day, she says, and they take off in a derelict to go searching for the engineer home world. In one final scene before the credits, a deacon, which is a proto-Zenomorph, emerges from the chest of the engineer. And it looks superficially like the xenomorph with the kind of... curved head and a little mouth inside the mouth. But it's, yes, unclear what relation this actually has, too. And basically, it's reminiscent of a xenomorph, but it's less interesting. I mean, if we're being frank about it.

Is that one going on the Blu-ray? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, in all honesty, the only thing that I find interesting about this creature is the fact that, and I can't remember it, I think it's the fandom, basically, that I ended up referring to it as a deacon, right? and given all the religious tones of the film, I find it interesting that that's the name that was then applied to it. That's literally the only thing I find interesting about it.

It has absolutely no bearing on anything. And even based in your imagination of how this film plays out, even if Alien Covenant didn't exist, your imagination of how this thing plays out is this thing maybe survives for some indeterminate period of time on some scraps, and it's just going to die. What is the point of this thing? I think there's like a sequel comic or a sequel book

where people go and find the wreckage of the Prometheus to find out what happened to it and there's some adventures with the deacon and they encounter it and blah blah blah it's not canon so we don't care about it it's not a film although frankly I think that probably indicates a little bit of another problem

that you have with films around this time in this film particular if you think about the viral marketing and some of the other stuff of extra textual exposition right things that would inform your understanding of the film and character and I think one of the thing that's particularly

egregious of this is actually the sequel, Alien Covenant, but we're not going to talk about that right now. But it's another example of an issue with films around this time. I don't think Prometheus is a particularly sort of bad example of it, but again, you're starting to see the hints of it. Yeah. Well, one of the best articles

I found when researching this film is by Rudiger Heinz, and it talks about heterarchy in fictional universes. And the core concept of the article is essentially what we've been talking about for the past few episodes, this idea that there is different roots into this fictional universe and there are different branching paths into this universe and different cultural capital of mediums. So films are more significant than novels. And essentially the franchise, as we have been arguing, is subjectively constituted

and it's largely dependent on personal preferences. So there's a very valid reading of these films that go straight from alien to aliens to Prometheus, skipping out all these middle ones that we've covered on here. And, yeah, Hinesi's article is very good at laying out the different routes into these fictional universes, specifically using alien as an example. And there's an interesting diagram that essentially shows this. I've shared on our Twitter and Blue Sky accounts, but I would encourage you to look for for a better understanding of this. That very much shows how to get into these story worlds and how these are

heterarchical in this rather than hierarchical And it's interesting in terms of like your subjective experience of these films Right? Because when I saw that diagram In that paper which I said Which is an interesting read actually It's worth it's worth going to looking at

It actually reminded me a little bit of And as you have the more and more Of these franchises that just start to grow arms and legs Right And I think I think Alien is one of the best examples of it hence the reason we're doing this podcast, right? But it actually reminded me a little bit of kind of like that eternal debate that always goes on about kind of like,

what order should you watch the Star Wars films in, right? And it's obviously grown more and more complicated as you get things like Rogue One and the Disney Plus series going and all the rest of it, right? And it's kind of like what your experience is of it. The thing that I find interesting about it with this film in particular is if you've seen Alien, well Alien in particular, but the other films, but alien in particular, right?

It has a very clear link to them, right? Just in kind of like imagery, design, and all the rest of it. But there's a perfectly valid route into this series of films where you start with Prometheus. Yeah. Right, because you don't really need it. I think what I find interesting about it, and this is why I don't think it's as bad an example of this relying on the iconography thing as Star Trek Into Darkness was, right, to stick with the same writer. It's not reliant on you knowing anything from those previous films, and I find that interesting for a couple of reasons, right?

One being, it's obviously trying to act. It's exactly what you described earlier about kind of being caught between the desire for originality and the desire to be part of a franchise. Mark's ability, effectively, right? But all the best things about this film really, or let me put it as a different, all the best potential things about this. this film, because whether it executes them well or not as a completely different discussion, are not in any way related to alien, right? In some ways

they're almost diametrically opposite, right? Alien, part of why it works is, I mean, it's there in the title, right? There's unknowable, there's things out there that we don't know about, and we don't know how they act and behave, and we can't make sense of them, and they're terrifying. Whereas this film is rooted

entirely in the desire for explanation, right? The entire point of alien is that none of this is explained, right? We don't know what's happening and not only are we, as viewers, okay with that, that's where some of the film's power comes from

is the fact that we don't know what we're dealing with. You then come to Prometheus, where basically it's all predicated on the promise of explanation. And I think a lot of the problems that people have with this film coming off the back of it, I don't think it's particularly one that I, you know, any shortcomings I hear spoken

about this film are kind of like, oh, well, it sets up questions and it doesn't answer them, right? that's not a problem. Alien sets up questions and doesn't answer them. We don't know where this creature came from. We don't know what the space jockey was then. We don't know where the eggs came. We don't know any of this shit, right? And I think if you were to release that film now, people will be wanting, you know, explanations for it. And this here is kind of, and it's interesting that you've got, like, coming out in the same year as The Amazing Spider-Man, right? Because it's this desire for everything to have an origin story, right? We also have an origin story, right? And I think a lot of people came into this. thinking and basically it seems to have been tied to Alien as the origin story of Alien and I find it a really really weird film in that respect because the entire premise of Alien is that you don't have an origin story for any of this nonsense and I think where this film is interesting is I think and I see what Ridley Scott was getting at in the sense that if this was more of a

spinoff, right? I think it would fare better. The funny thing I find about it is if it's a spin-off and it doesn't connect particularly directly in any way, why is it even a part of it? Right? And that's the thing that I find interesting about it

is it really is caught between two stools. It wants to be this big, grand, questioning sci-fi about origins and why are things the way they are, and why are we here, what are the motivations of our creators, blah, blah, blah. But it also wants to do the alien body horror type stuff. And when it's actually executing them in the scene,

I think it does it quite well, but the problem is these strands don't mix. They don't come together. And I think what that results, and you're taking a lot of shortcuts in the script, that both short out some of the horror, because it feels like it's been tacked on. It feels like it needs an explanation, but it doesn't have one, right?

And the reason it feels like it needs an explanation is because the rest of the film, the grand kind of scope, sci-fi stuff on the other side, constantly promises explanation. So if you're doing it here and setting that tone, you're expecting it over here, whereas I think if you go with one or the other, that's fine. I think ambiguity in your storytelling and whether you answer certain questions is fine, but you need to set the tone effectively, and it never quite resolves these two things.

And again, I keep saying this, but not to jump the discussion on the next film. I think the next film also has that issue, right? I think it also has an issue, but it manifests in a very different way, almost as a response to the reactions to this film. But to go back to the heterarchy point, it is interesting, in that there is a perfectly valid route into this franchise that involves just this film, right? And I think your expectations around what the other films should be

would be markedly different if you come in with this as your first experience. of this collection of story worlds basically. Yeah, well, Heinz essentially says that this hierarchical approach is very good because it involves a degree of interpretative freedom and cognitive participation on the part of the audience. That is a good thing to have. You don't have to have Disney or Fox telling you what the canon is. You can interpret it for yourself.

And I think it's ironic that this comes through a discussion of Prometheus, where Ridley Scott, the originator of this universe, has come back to it in grand fashion to kind of reassert some level of authorial control over the franchise. I really like your point about how this film needs to offer explanation and how it feels like he needs to offer explanation in the way that the original didn't. I think that's a really valuable insight.

And you've already historicised it a little bit, but I want to go a little further and mention like, You know, if you parallel Star Wars, for example, came out in 1977 and Obi-Wan Kenobi mentions the Clone Wars in one tossed-off line that he's never explained and never goes anywhere. And, you know, audiences wait until 2002 to have George Lucas explain what the Clone Wars are. Whereas today, I do think, similar to what you've discussed with Alien, you'd immediately have novels or graphic novels explaining what the Clone Wars are. is because of that desire to explain and not have ambiguity, which you have in today's modern blockbusters. You know, everything is explained to the empty degree in a way that it wasn't in the 70s and 80s. And I think the problem, the problem with that in this film is

it sets up things that it can't pay off, right? And I think within the film, as I've said, with the correct tone, I don't think that's a problem, right? But when you're tying it to this franchise, and not only that, you promise sequels, it becomes a problem, right? Because it's almost like preordaining where you need to end up, right? And it's a problem that's been brought up with prequels in particular before, right? And I think it was a problem, it was a problem with the Star Wars prequels, right? Which I don't think are as bad as people make out, but they're still not great in my view. But, like, everybody knows the end point, right? We know that you're going to end up with Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader, right? So the

idea is how do you make that process interesting, right? Now, did the Star Wars prequel succeed in that? Maybe, a little bit, don't know, right? Other people have spoken about that far more eloquently with much greater knowledge than I ever ever will or ever care

to, to be perfectly honest. But I think what's interesting with this film is it kind of suffers from that issue within the text of the film itself, which is rather ironic given it, it did, begin life as alien engineers, it began life as an alien script. It basically doesn't really have much interest in answering those questions. Everything that does that is tacked on, like

the xenomorph mural, the deacon, like it's all kind of tacked on, really. Yeah, I mean, I very much criticised Damon Lindelof's script for being clunky, bad dialogue, pacing issues, etc. But to Lindelof's credit, he did seem to understand that idea of making a prequel. He specifically said in an interview that if your alien prequel ends with Kane walking into a room full of eggs, that's not interesting because we already, we've already

seen that and we already can intuit how we get to that point. The interesting thing is to do something else, something that doesn't lead directly to that. Which is, you know, not to preempt our discussion, where I think Prometheus is more successful than Alien Covenant. I mean, I think a problem

that both of the films have, right? Alien Covenant and Prometheus, That is not true of the other films, right? And I even include Alien versus Breditor in this particular discussion is, and this is where the time this comes out is interesting, right? Is this idea that it needs to link back, right? Why does it need to link back? And I think the problems I have with the next film are probably largely based around this idea,

but Prometheus is still guilty of it to a certain. extent is to go back to this idea of demanding an explanation. I've said it kind of like, you know, it sets the tone of the film and the body horror stuff, you know, it then sets expectations for that part that it cannot and should not meet, right? Why do we need it to circle back to the start, right? And it feels a lot like the mode of storytelling that we'll end up with with comic book films, right? And I'm thinking particular about the Marvel. universe and the way that all these characters interrelated and the way that they've interacted with each other in the past that is revealed in later films and all the rest of it it's like now in the

context of that you know I'm no apologist for the Marvel cinematic universe but you know I've enjoyed large chunks of it but it kind of makes sense there to a certain extent right it's still all very you know earthbound and character driven for a lot of it the idea that a lot of these characters have interacted you know okay fine it makes sense at a certain extent I don't find myself kind of like, you know, being weirded out by that, right? It makes sense to its certain extent and that's okay. I think with this is just, it just feels so antithical to the entire premise of the film that kicks all of this off. And I see the strands of it across all elements of this franchise, right? So we're restricting ourselves to the films here, right?

But you see it in, you see it in other parts of this as well. Like I think about the, the game alien isolation, which I've not played, right? But me being me, I've gone down Wikipedia rabbit holes with this franchise. And the main character there is Amanda Ripley. It's Ripley's daughter. Why? Like, why? Like, you know, I mean, I get the motivation for why she would become

involved with that in a story sense within the kind of realms. But like, this desire to connect everything together it just makes it so, and I'll put it this way, quite deliberate, incestuous and boring. You know, and

that you see the elements of it here, right? But I think, as you said, to Linda lost credit, there is the idea that it needs to offer something new, and the grander big sci-fi, you know, who are creators, what would you say to them if you met them, this sort of thing, that is a new idea. And it's interesting, but because everything needs to circle back and connect, it doesn't really get time to explore any of them in a meaningful way. Well, no, it undermines itself with this final shot of the deacon, the proto-Zenomorph creature, because it's promising something that the film was never set up to deliver. The film wants to be more original,

but with a tangential connection to this universe, in a way that is completely undermined by having a xenomorph, what is, in essence, a xenomorph in the last shot. With the fact that it does feel to act on, I mean, like, if you were to recut this film, right, and make that a post-credit scene in 2023, nobody would bat an eyelid. No.

It is a post-credit scene that isn't a post-credit scene. That's entirely what it is. It is completely unrelated to the main story. Yeah, we talked about Alien versus Predator Requy. I'm doing that post-credit scene that's not actually a post-credit scene last time. It's tapping into that kind of energy that is emerging at this point.

And, you know, I've already said The Avengers was one of the top films of this year. so Marvel Cinematic Universe is well on the way to the market domination that it will have. It doesn't work having this tact-on thing at the end. But it's just, it is interesting in the context of this franchise because we've spoken about kind of like the identity crisis it would have and, you know, the direction it wants to go in. But then when you look at kind of the films that we've spoken up to this point, right?

So the original kind of four, Alien, Aliens, 3 and Resurrection, right? one does logically fall from the other it builds, well, one falls through the other, where it logically falls from the other is a separate discussion, but like they are direct sequels, that's the point, right? And then Alien versus Predator and Predator record, and they kind of

sort of imagine themselves in that sort of vein, certainly, more of the Predator films are more kind of like pseudo-prequels with Alien, right? But they imagine themselves as part of that, right, and it's kind of going for similar things. This is the first one where there is a distinct shift in tone and scope of the themes, right? And it doesn't really pull it off,

and it's entirely because, in my, well, not entirely because, but it's largely because it's so beholden to those other films, right? Yeah. Whereas I think it would have room to explore these ideas more if it wasn't, if it didn't feel the need to tie it back and to relate it back. Where we'll get into an interesting question with the next film is there's a also an argument, there's this actually kind of like, certainly if you come into, if you come into, like to go and return to the heterarchy point, if you come into the series from this film, I think it markedly changes the impact of the other films. I think it makes the other films less effective. And I think that in some ways is probably the biggest damnation you could put at this film. And, you know, we'll talk to talk about more covenant, right? Because I think it lessens the impact of them to how, some sort of explanation here. It's where this idea of the origin story actually kind of lessens the storytelling of the other films. And I think that's the more egregious error with this film, to be honest. Yeah, I think this film has some grand aspirations towards themes, but it doesn't

pull it off. Again, I'll point to the script, but I think it's thematically dense, but in a very incoherent way. So it's got these grand themes about mythology and God and creation and created, that it talks about in a very muddled way. So we talk about the Greek gods in the form of Prometheus and the Titans. We talk about the Christian god. We talk about the origins of ancient civilizations and the kind of Eric Van Darnican, Charity of the God stuff. But we're not really exploring them in an interesting way.

We're just using them as kind of set dressing for this narrative. There's not really anything interesting. Yeah, it's all very... said. Yeah, it's all very superficial, right? And I think where this actually probably is is particularly indicative, is the title of the film actually, Prometheus, right? And it brings up two things immediately, right, once you hear that title, right? Okay,

so there's the Greek mythology aspect and then there's the subtitle to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, right? And to take the Mary Shelley angle, right, because that's the one that I know better, it was a book that I studied quite a lot in secondary school and compared it with another Scottish author's work but the question then becomes if you try and transpose those sort of ideas to this who is Frankenstein and who is the creature here right

are we talk about the engineers and humans are we talking about humans and davids is the idea that there's maybe a parallel between the two or are we talking about kind of you know the engineers and these horrible mutations that come out of like something that they've scientifically developed. Like the point is there are plenty of superficial similarities that will have people kind of like slightly drunk in the pub after watching the film.

It's like, oh, did you pick up on this? But there's nothing deeper there. Yeah. You know, it's basically a highbrow version of I got that reference. Like, that's what it is, you know. And then if you then try and look at it from the Greek myth perspective, again, it's like well who's like who is it that's the gods of fire stole it like it the point is there are superficial ideas there but that's all they are yeah you can find lots of scholarship around this comparing it reading it in terms of greek myth and mary shelley's frankenstein like you say and i'm sure they're interesting but i am not personally invested in them just because they seem such obvious readings and readings that the film is pointing you towards and i'm not interested in doing that kind of obvious reading, especially Greek myth, because that's just in the text, like Whalen talks

about the Titans and Prometheus and Sealing Fire. Well, exactly, but this is the thing. I mean, I think even if you do to put those readings onto it, I don't think the film does anything deeper there to offer. That's the thing, right? You know, and I think that that's probably, that's one of the issues with the film. It sets up these grand ideas, but it doesn't really have the material, you know, like, And I'm hoping I didn't describe it this way in my review at the time. But I've heard people talk about Prometheus as being a thought-provoking film. Is it, though?

Like, you know, I think about other sci-fi films and even older ones. I'm thinking about things like silent running or something. And kind of like the way that kind of like it sets up these ideas that then echo in the decades that follow, are we really going to be looking at Prometheus in 2052? and thinking, oh, this has got some really interesting ideas floating around, you know, like creation and mankind and, you know, what we would ask of our gods if we could meet them. I don't think we will. You know, it's not interesting in that perspective. It's not interesting in that perspective. I think it will maintain a presence in pop culture because it's linked to the alien films because I think it looks very good.

I think it's a spectacular looking film. I think it's got some action horror elements to it that I think are really effective and will stick in people's minds. But in terms of the ideas it is set out with around these much bigger, grander and scope ideas, it will not persist in the cultural mind as a result of those.

And I think that's a failing of the film because that's what the film wants to achieve and it doesn't. The most interesting article I found is by David M. McWilliam, and it's talking about the film in terms of post-human nihilism, in the kind of vein of Lovecraft, Thomas Legotti, Eugene Facker, this kind of nihilistic approach to post-humanism, to expanding your view of the subjective beyond the human. And it talks about it in a really

interesting way, paralleling it with Lovecraft and talking about how the film thematically links to these ideas of post-humanism through David the Android and through meeting these creators. It's a great article. Really interesting. I recommend it. But I don't think, I think it's a stretch to say that the film intended any of these. I think it's an interesting theory layered on top of the film that doesn't particularly link with what the film was actually trying to say. You know what I mean? Yeah. And to link into kind of like this idea of, you know, contextualising it within the franchise. The funny thing is, if you think about the most effective things in the film, right?

I think part of it is David and David's motivations and David's reaction to his human curate, human creators, right? And as I say, I think the sequel realizes this is one of the strongest things about this film because of the direction it goes in. But what's interesting is if you think about the way that he reacts to human, and regards them and kind of interacts with them. This might have actually been a much more interesting film in the Blade Runner universe, right, to even stick within like the Ridley Scott kind of Uvra, right?

Because the way that he interacts and regards them versus kind of the, you know, the replicants in the Blade Runner films, I think that would have been a more interesting dichotomy, right? It would almost be kind of like, you know, two sides of the same coin in terms of like how they want to be regarded by their creators and behaviours that you react and even how humans react to them, right? I actually think that if you were to kind of transpose these ideas into that a little bit, I actually think that would be a much more interesting film thematically than what this ends up going for. And I think it would actually give, within that world,

it would actually give you a better strand to explore those than the alien universe. So it's just, I find it interesting like what things get glommed. on to. I think if this, you know, the film started life as a script called the Alien Engineers, right, and it went through various things, and we've ended up with Prometheus, I think if it was to start as some sort of pseudo-blade runner spin off and then get transmogrified in the way that it's been since, I think you'd actually end up with a better film. I mean, I realize that's a pretty bold claim, right? It's a big hypothesis that, but because of what it wants to deal with and the things in the

film that end up the most effective, I think you'd end up with a more interesting film that way. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. While you've been talking about kind of interesting approaches to science fiction films, I've been trying to remember what I am thinking of, what is coming to mind for that. And I was thinking of June, but it's not June. And when you said Blade Runner, it's Denisville Nerves Blade Runner 2049, which I think deals with a lot of themes around creator and created and Frankenstein and blah blah, blah, in an interesting way and actually says something thematically resonant in a way that we'll leave for our

two episode Blade Runner miniseries but yeah I think that's the way you do it in a way that this film doesn't The only other thing I've got a note that is like my post viewing notes I've got here the only thing I've got is that basically there's a thing

it's up to you whether we want to talk about this or not because we've probably got quite a lot of material there already but there's the I'm pretty sure Ridley Scott said in an interview that part of the reason that the engineers are mad at humans and want to wipe them out is because Jesus was an engineer basically, right?

Okay. And, you know, he was sent to kind of like show humanity the way and humanity punished him, right? And, and, and killed him. And basically, that's part of the reason for it, right? But this is not expressed anywhere in the film. No. Nowhere.

Absolutely nowhere, right? So there's that part of it. And then there's various other bits and pieces that have come up, right? And basically my part of my point about extra tech structural reading, right? There's an omission of certain things, even like some cut scenes, I'm trying to remember what the hell it was, like something which was cut from the film. I'll have to come back to it, but basically there are an omission of certain elements that completely cloud the character motivations, and that's the entire problem with this film.

You don't understand why anybody is doing the things that they're doing, right? And again, in this need to kind of like, you know, capture the two elements, it's excise things that would make the film make more sense, right? whether it's still effective as part of the franchise or that's open to question, but it would at least still make sense within itself. But, like, yeah, no, have you not seen that? Yeah, there was a thing. I'm pretty sure he's

explicitly, he's explicitly suggested in an interview that basically that that's what was going on. That was the motivation for the engineers wanting to like wipe out humanity and start again. Yeah, I've just been

Googling this while you've been talking and I can't find out where it originally came from but there's definitely an interview with Ridley Scott and yeah he says and you can say let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it guess what they crucified him which absolutely isn't

in the text no at all and is a fascinating thing to have in your mind when you're making this film yeah because you know I mean it opens up all sorts of things like well I mean like what's the deal of the resurrection then you know like

like is that something that something that didn't happen in this world? Like, you know, like, what are you even talking about? It's, yeah, it's, you know. Interesting. Interesting. You know, were the disciples engineers as well? Who's Judas Iscariot

in this? Like, you know, it's, it's weird. It's just weird. Yeah. It's a bag of ideas with nothing behind it. Like, it's... Well, I don't have anything for the xenobiology feature. Because I don't think there's a xenomorph in this film to speak of. I think the most you get is these mutated

creatures, indigenous worms or whatever grows inside shore. But there's no xenomorphs here. There's maybe one in a mural. Maybe one in a mural. Maybe one in the mural that Geiger did. Hard to say. But we'll get back to the xenomorphs next time, don't you worry? As we cover Alien Coven next time. So thank you for listening. As I say, Next month, we'll be covering Alien Covenant, the final film in the Alien franchise series. For now. For now. Until then, do follow us on Twitter at the Xenapod.

Do follow us on Blue Sky at at the Xenapod.bSky.com. It occurred to me after the last recording that this kind of looking through a franchise and historicizing it in the way that we've been doing is somewhat similar to when I watch all the Mission Impossible films a few weeks ago. and did the same thing on my blog reviews per minute. com.com. So if you're interested in what we do here, go and look at me talking about the Mission Impossible films

because they're very much embedded in their time and place stretching from the 90s to now. It's a long period of time for a film franchise. Not as long as this one, but still, go have a look at that. It's interesting. There's probably even more heterogeneity

between directorial approach and the Mission Impossible films. actually, you know, De Palma, John Wu, like, you know, it's, it's, uh, pro, yeah, JJ Abrams, I've already spoken about, Brad Bird, you know, and then, you know, I think Christopher Macquarie's done all the ones since then, I think, is

and then, yeah, the reign of Christopher McCrory, which I argue isn't entirely a good thing. No, I would agree with that. I mean, I think Christopher McQuarrie has been a better writer than, anyway, at a point, we're not going to do it here, especially already that, but yeah, it's interesting, and I think I'll, I'll take a read of that, because it's even more

varied an approach, I would argue, in these films, even are. Anything to plug yourself? The medium that we pushed us out via Take OneCinema.net, you know, we've got continually getting reviews and stuff up there. I think, I think, basically, this podcast series has been interesting to me, really,

and I think as we're getting towards kind of like the mainline series, I think really, it kind of has hammered all my initial thoughts where we started out on this and that these really are indicative of the time and place which they're made and you can chart history a little bit

and I think the last film that we're coming to I'm looking for to talk about that because I think that is really, really representative of where we are kind of now actually at the point of recording

because I think the point we're at now like there's certain elements I think are aging out a little bit but it's really smack bang in this kind of like mode of big studio filmmaking that we're in now and I think the next film exhibits

a lot of it so yeah cool Well yeah, join us then for Alien Covenant. Until then, I'll just say, it's clear you two don't give a shit about Rocks. It's game over, man! It's game over! All right. We're going to be.