Rest Day Ruminations: Aliens, Aliens, Everywhere
But few can seize the fire
Last week I saw Alien: Romulus. I work at a cinema, so it has to be a rare temptation to make me cough up money to watch a film as a customer. And yet, I ended up disappointed.
It reminds me of when I saw Prometheus at the cinema in June 2012. It was Ridley Scott’s attempt to create a prelude to 1979s Alien. I love the film Alien. It is one of those rarities where I can’t find anything to criticise in it, nothing that distracts from the central ritual of experiencing a story. Blade Runner (also Ridley Scott) is another of the handful of films that I can’t fault. I knew very little about Prometheus on entering the cinema. I’m going to talk about what annoyed me, because it all comes down to storytelling, good characters, and believable actions.
[Note - please don't read on if you haven’t seen Prometheus but intend to: this post contains spoilers.]
Prometheus (2012): Some Thoughts
First, the positives. I liked the way things were set up for the film Alien (including the evolution of the alien); I enjoyed the many visual references to the earlier film; I was left guessing as to exactly what would happen and when; generally the cinematography was impressive and fitted the story. If everything had been spot-on I would have loved it. As it was I was left feeling that it was only better than average (despite being a genre I love) because it kept including incongruous elements that pulled me out of the story. I’m going to dive in and list them.
The human crew come down at random on the planet - what a surprise, it turns out they’ve come down exactly where the secret alien military base is! A ridiculous coincidence that any story writer shouldn’t have allowed.
The technology used by humans was well in advance of the film Alien, yet was supposed to be a long time prior to it.
Every implication is that the ship they knock down at the end of Prometheus is the one discovered in Alien. However, in Alien the Nostromo crew find one engineer-alien (as I shall refer to them in future, rather than the traditional ‘Space Jockey’) in the control seat with its chest burst out. Whereas in Prometheus the last of the engineer-aliens leaves the navigator seat and is killed elsewhere by a chestburster. So those two don’t match up at all.
The writer obviously wanted to separate two characters so they could be the victims. How did they do that? They chose to have two scientists leave the party to go back to the ship on their own. Their motivation is most peculiar though. The biologist travelled across space, and he is later shown to be fascinated by alien life - yet when they first encounter a dead alien he suddenly seems to be scared, uninterested, and preferring to leave the safety of the group to head off into darkness with someone who doesn’t like him, also seems to have no interest in amazing scientific discoveries, and has just acted incredibly aggressively to another scientist for no reason at all. What we have here is inconsistent characterisation that is obviously only there to create a contrived situation in order to set up a “kill the ones on their own” scene later.
The scale is wrong. In Alien a human is shorter than an engineer-alien’s forearm, as seen in the photo above. In Prometheus Ridley Scott tried to retrospectively scale them down (see photo below - the engineer-alien is also stood on higher ledge than the humans!). This inconsistency makes no sense.
The decision to make the engineer-aliens more humanoid, revealing that the ‘elephant trunk/bio growth’ (see the photo from Alien, earlier) is just a mask and suit removes a lot of the ‘alien’ element of the film, reducing alien mystery to banal familiarity. To me the engineer-aliens look like proto-Cenobites (see below).
If the message being picked up in Alien was just the protagonist’s warning from the end of Prometheus, why couldn’t they understand it?
There is a scene when the alien navigation is turned on and David revolves in a holosphere of planets. Cue: “This is the bit where you are meant to be in awe, cue lots of 3D (yes, I saw it in 3D, which added nothing) and swelling orchestral music, come on people, say wow!” It is so manipulative as to be obvious. The music in Alien is always understated, but in Prometheus it frequently barges in as either ‘epic’ or ‘generic action movie’.
How does the robot David know how to extract a drop of bio-contaminant, and then infect a human with it, acting as if he knew it would lead to the birth of an alien? This was their first encounter with the race and their technology. The reason seems to be just so that the writer can set up later scenes.
There is an expensive medical system on the ship. What do we find out when it is used? That it is only designed for male biology. What? Despite their advanced technology, they can’t come up with a machine designed for men and women? It was just silly. A broken arm or heart issue would be the same in either sex. And even though this is a super-advanced surgery machine, it does not anaesthetise the patient prior to surgery, forcing them to undergo major operations with just a mild spray to numb the surface skin. In a future where robots have been designed that are superior (and indistinguishable from) humans, this is silly.
The rolling spaceship scene. Did it really take her that long to work out to move sideways to get out of its way? Again, visual effects and fake tension put before realistic behaviours.
Guy Pearce is a great actor, I love his work. However, his inclusion in this film as an old man was just strange. It detracted rather than adding anything, partly because the makeup effects were so obviously that - makeup. What would have worked better would have been using a real old man. There are many who are fantastic actors and would have loved a job. Hollywood seems so addicted to the artificial and averse to age that it would rather take a young person and cover them in unconvincing makeup than use a real old person in the film.
The characters were one dimensional apart from Michael Fassbender and Kate Dickie. It would have been a better film if she had been the main character. If you haven’t seen her in Red Road you are missing out on a realistic, sad, sometimes scary, yet uplifting film.
These irritations mean that, for me, Prometheus is the inferior film to Alien. It entertains, and is worth seeing, but sadly flash-bang often replaces good story. Maybe that is the general truth behind films designed with 3D glasses in mind.
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