Ridley Scott, What Happened To You?

Warning: There be spoilers.

Dear Ridley,

Hey buddy, how you doing? Are you feeling ok?

I heard some rumors that you’ve been coming down with something, and I really want to express my condolences. I know we all go through this phase where we feel like the world is on our shoulders and we try to overcompensate for this otherwise understandable apathy and emptiness that comes with being under the weather. I take it this is the explanation for Prometheus. If so, I forgive you.

Don’t get me wrong, Ridley, I still want to be friends! I super duper want to be friends, I promise. It’s just that, well, it’s hard to watch a good friend loose it. And I feel like you’ve lost it, mister.

I was never surprised to find a wonderful collection of images that capture the imagination as I saw in Prometheus. The standard-bearer of modern sci-fi was bound to show us jaw-dropping worlds, where we work out the wonders and horrors of our own humanity. Bringing us like Dante through the inferno of Blade Runner and into the Fruedian abyss of space in Alien, I would have expected nothing less than divine mental and spiritual gymnastics, the likes of which no other filmmaker could compare.

But there’s no sound in space, Mr. Scott.

I don’t know if you stumbled into your sound mixing session doped up on Robitussin and Quaaludes and just happened to miss the addition of purring engines from a ship moving through space, but I must inform you: it actually made it into the movie.

OK, so you made a rookie sci-fi mistake. That’s cool. No one’s perfect. Except, I always took you to be respectful of science fiction. But you’ve let that guy from Lost walk all over it, and I think he’s a bad influence on you. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Ridley.

The essence of sci-fi is really not that complicated. Your characters exist in a world that is predictable and understandable, and whenever they see something they don’t understand, they perform tests that then provide data. Sometimes people have to get eaten for us to learn things, but it’s still scientific. Like how we Westerners view reality.

So when you open the film with a weird alien dude who kills himself by drinking some sort of poison, it’s kind of important that we understand why. Is he on the planet where this film takes place, or is it Earth? Is it Earth circa 10,000 BC or circa 4 million BC? And most importantly, assuming we ever learn what it is he actually ends up doing (i.e. does he create life or does he alter the life that already exists on the planet?), why does he do this? We are given no information, and so we can draw no conclusions. The scene adds nothing.

Ok, so the studios told you to open the film with a hook and that’s what you came up with. Fine. They also probably insisted that we see the discovery of the cave painting that ultimately leads to the mission, but it probably wasn’t necessary.

I understand you have to sell popcorn, too. I looked past it and thought, “we’ll get to the really good stuff after Ridley gives the studios what they want.” I get that. Sometimes when my boss is riding me, I just give him what he wants and when he goes away, I go back to whatever it is I wasn’t doing.

Well I don’t want to be insensitive, but I don’t want to beat around the bush anymore either: the script for Prometheus is like a dying mother with a crying baby in her arms. It’s depressingly bad.

I’m not sure where I would begin to explain how mired with flaws the film actually is, but let’s start with Dave. Playing into our tendency to mistrust androids is a bit tired, but you could make that interesting if you wanted to. And you have before. Added to this is the obvious fact that he serves little purpose other than being an easy avenue to figure out alien technology without having to actually explain it.

So he’s smart. How original. But you, Mr. Scott, once created androids with more of a purpose than merely being a Greek chorus who knows alien shit. There is only one scene in which there is a notable narrative meaning to his presence, and the scene itself was not written very well.

It is the scene where he poisons Holloway. This scene has so many flaws you would need a wheelbarrow of putty to patch them. We know so little about Dave’s agenda and it’s hard to even know what’s at stake. Does he know what will happen if Holloway drinks the black goo? If he doesn’t, what part of his programming says that it’s OK to experiment with human life in this way? Is he taking orders from someone or acting of his own volition? This act of free will would be significant and meaningful, if we knew it for sure. The film ended, and I do not feel I got an adequate answer to any of these questions.

What I did grasp was a sloppy attempt to dramatize the cynicism behind thinking that our makers would not care about us, like we don’t care about that which we’ve made (i.e. Dave). It is sloppy, not just because Holloway looks less like a thought-provoking philosopher and more like a drunk douche. It is sloppy because both characters exhibit logos and pathos in the wrong proportions.

I expect the scientist to have emotions, but he seems to lack any logic at all. They’ve just arrived on this planet, and in a discipline that would normally require months in the real world to form anything close to a conclusion, he’s jumped right to it and he’s quite a baby about it.

Dave, on the other hand, is too emotional, and I’m not referring to the manner of his delivery. Just because Fassbender doesn’t emote does not mean the dialogue he was given comes from a place devoid of passion. Why would he ask Holloway how he would “feel” about anything, such as if our makers said they made us just because they could? We are made to empathize with him emotionally over something that is clearly emotional, yet we are expected to believe he is incapable of feeling?

So we come into the scene not really knowing what the motivation is for either character (except for guessing), and when we leave, we still don’t know. We believe, but we don’t know.

And every scene is like this. It feels like everything will get an explanation later on, but we never get one.

What were the giant people running from when the big dude got his head cut off by the door? And for that matter, why did he fall under the door to begin with? Did he trip? Where are the bodies of the other people who made it into the room that was presumably sealed off until the Prometheans opened it? What even was that retro simulator thing that showed them to us anyway? What created the breathable environment in the alien structure, and how did opening the door disturb the canisters? Where did the maggots come from? Is there any other life on this planet, or just the maggots? And what the hell is the black goo? The only thing we learn about the black goo is that its black and its gooey and it turns maggots into super-maggots.

Did we ever find out why the head exploded? Do we ever learn why the maggot-snake grows his head back so quickly, and why the acid eats away Fifield’s helmet, but instead of killing him, turns him into a super-creature? Where did all those crew members come from that were killed by Super-Fifield? Actually, how many crew members were there period? After this scene happened, I thought they were down to like five, but then after we discover Weyland has been in stasis the whole time, we discover several other crew members, the presence of whom is never addressed.

You see what I mean, Ridley? It’s cool to beg questions with your film, but if I can’t trust you to answer any of them, or at least stick to the pursuit of them, it’s hard to stay interested.

So your heroine gets pregnant with an alien. I don’t care! Not only is it unoriginal – it has been done by you! – it is not written well at all. She discovers her pregnancy, stumbles to an infirmary, calibrates a male-patient-only machine to do a Cesarian, escapes the pod from her offspring and runs away. All in the span of about ten minutes.

I didn’t believe it for a second.

Sorry man, but if I had a disgusting squid monster kicking and screaming in my belly, I don’t think I’d be competent enough to operate a Cuisinart. This scene could have been so much more gripping if it was not written as an action scene. If you know that it’s going to be terrifying when it gets pulled out, it’s not going to be that terrifying when you pull it out. If, however, you have her perform the Cesarian under normal conditions, the suspense would be much more compelling. It could have been deftly handled by a master like yourself.

And this is the problem with your movie, Mr. Scott. There are great ideas, but I wish you had pushed back a little more on that Lost guy and actually taken charge. You know how to do this right, so why didn’t you?

What lead you to believe that the revelation of Weyland being Vickers’ father was going to be anything but contrived, undeserved, uninspired and totally pointless? Your jealousy of Lucas? And why even give Vickers a back story if you intend to make her just as useless. Why does Weyland think the Engineers will give him everlasting life when they very clearly do not possess this themselves?

Perhaps most importantly, how are we supposed to feel about the fact that our heroine ends the film in the companionship of the same droid who lead to her impregnation with the squid monster? She never gets even for this. In fact, the movie seems to suggest that its OK to get pregnant by sleeping with horrible men, because you can just abort the fetus and it will all be OK. You can even call up the guy that hooked you up with that douchebag and have drinks together and talk about your ill-fated quest for “answers.”

I, like her, would like answers. I’ve only scratched the surface with my questions. In the original Alien, there was only one: where do the aliens come from, and who made them? But you see, it’s acceptable not knowing the answer to this one because by the end of the film, we have never doubted what we’ve seen. We know exactly how these aliens work, how they reproduce, etc. Every development or discovery leads to a change in the group dynamic and has a meaningful moral outcome. The characters use what they've learned scientifically against their foe in order to beat it.

I have no idea what the group dynamic in Prometheus is. It’s like all the people that work at my local Starbucks got on a ship and arrived on a foreign planet. They all lack insight, the attention to detail that science requires, and maturity.

The only believable one is the ship’s captain, Janek. But even he suffers from tokenism. You give him a musical instrument and some dialogue about shagging? So deep. Still, he’s the only one that attempts to put the pieces together as a scientist would and posit a guess as to what this place is and what really went on – and he’s not even a scientist!

You can do better, Mr. Scott. It’s all I’m saying. You can fool the masses whose appetite for good sci-fi has been whetted for years with dizzying Micheal Bay light shows and confusing Christopher Nolan mind trips. But you’re not fooling me.

Get some rest. Maybe try a romantic comedy, or perhaps a farce. Anything but sci-fi. Take my advice and drink lots of fluids, then call me in the morning.