June 02, 2012Are we posting stuff like this in the non-spoiler section, now? You, just because I actively searched for every scrap of info on the monster I could find doesn't mean some americans aren't still waiting until it comes out there to know certain things about the plot.
So, I want to give you my opinion on the matter, because I think you raise a very important point, but I don't know what's safe to say here.
But since I assume it's pretty obvious the invlovement space jockies are given with "engineering" humans in the movie, I'll go with the direct comparison between those two aspects.
In that regard, Prometheus is a failure on every level. In AvP Paul Anderson (who is a total monster movie dork, and makes movies that don't try to shove made up religions down your throat but that try to create a plausible mythology that can be appreciated by dorky alien fans like myself) takes Erich von Daniken's observation about so many cultures who could have never met using these pyramid shaped building for temples or ceremonial purposes. He supposes that Erich was right in thinking that aliens taught us how to build them and were revered as the gods that were ficitonalized because, at the time, we didn't understand the concept of space travel.
Fun. Safe. Interesting. Very cool. Requires you to check some reality at the door, but no more than you would any other monster movie, where you have an expectation that Gamera is an ancient Atlantean bio-weapon in the first place, so it doesn't break suspension of disbelief anymore than you were asked to when you bought a ticket.
Prometheus attempts to take it a bit further. Thing is, if you try to take it any further, you have to establish certain things, meaning there is another level of connection to the real world that has to be lost, because now you're talking about stuff which is NOT ambiguous and can be read about on something as readily available as wikipedia if you were really interested.
Case in point: the movie STARTS when two ARCHAEOLOGISTS, who are supposed to be SMART, look for the ORIGINS OF HUMANS anywhere other than AFRICA. Even the dumbest of the dumb can type in "human evolution" on google, and find a wikipedia page that will tell you, point blank, that humans evolved in Africa, NOT outer space.
So it doesn't work because it's asking more from the audience than a movie of this type should. But more than that, the role jockies played in the creation of humans ISN'T EVEN DIRECT. We're talking about seeding life at it's earliest stage just as the Elder Things were said to have done on accident. We're talking about a pure coincidence that the life seeded by Jockies billions of years ago somehow evolves to look EXACTLY like the jockies while the jockies themselves haven't changed one bit in 4 billion years. Because even though we are made of the same stuff, and even bacteria evolve, space jockeys are completely stagnant.
It's not that science fiction shouldn't have an element of fiction, but usually the stuff you ignore are the really hard sciences like physics. Fuck the inverse square law, I want a giant monster, that sort of thing. When you mess around with the most basic understanding of our planet and ourselves, you're destroying any connection the film might have had with the real world, and so rather than creating an immersive fictional history that builds on previously established concepts in both the previous films and the real world, you get high-fantasy in some ass-backwards corny 50's sci-fi b-movie where all the aliens look exactly like humans and speak perfect english but no explanation is given.
There are other direct connections to AvP that if I mentioned would risk being spoiler-y, so I won't go there. But I did want to elaborate on this as much as I could because, frankly, I find it insulting to my intelligence that Ridley has assumed I'm religious.
Of course, for how stupid the "plot" is, it hasn't effected my anticipation to see the... other connection to AvP. :P
