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Joe Stracke
MemberOvomorphOct-11-2012 3:06 PM To begin, I liked the film. While that may seem an overly-base statement, it’s one that often overlooked by the zealous. However, since this is not the place for a review, I’ll jump right to a couple of nagging questions: The first about general cinematography and the second about the film-specific script.
[u]First off, why is it that directors almost exclusively choose to film flashbacks and dream sequences in the third person?[/u]
If it’s about establishing a visual link between a present and past character, there are many, many ways to provide a contextual visual (in this case, the child Shaw) and still keep things in a proper first person. Nothing takes me out of the storyline’s momentum faster than cliché exposition-memory where someone remembers themselves from an impossibly external point of view. In this particular instance, the sequence looks to me more like Elizabeth Shaw spending time with a husband and daughter. This would be a lesser distraction had the dream not been plot-relevant.
[u]The second dilemma pertains to the ease in which our protagonist scientist-Christian runs with the assumption that since the DNA matches, the ‘Engineers’ created us.[/u]
That would be like a British expedition to Africa finding pigmies and deducing, “Well, our DNA is the same and their culture is older… therefore they must have created us despite the size difference”. I’m no scientist, nor even Christian (though I am an amateur theologist), but logic would seem to dictate that the initial conclusion given their extremely narrow data field (a few hours of study of one structure on a single planetary location… I can’t see a real scientist considering ancient wall paintings as empirical data) would be that Earth is a colony of the ‘Engineer’ race… while religion would assume that both were made by the same God, in the image they’ve assumed He made us in since Christianity began (as opposed to Shaw logic of God made Engineer, Engineer made Man, we should have her conclude God mad both races separately but in a single image). I know the audience is given the correct answer in the opening sequence, and I’m sure there is a cinephile term for characters that erroneously have an audience’s plot knowledge (but I don’t know it)… but it makes it needlessly more difficult to suspend disbelief when it happens.
On a side-note: Kudos to the writers’ commentary for throwing in ‘Spoiler Alert’ when revealing where babies come from... a laugh from commentary is a rare and wonderful thing.
2 Replies
MoonMan
MemberOvomorphOct-11-2012 5:01 PMTo your first point:
Yes, this bothered me somewhat. We rarely dream in the 3rd person. It would have made better sense to me if the camera's eye was Shaw's. I didn't think there was much point in us actually *seeing* Shaw as a little girl. But anyway...
To the second question:
You're one of the few who seem to get this issue. I harp on it all the time, but few seem to care too much.
To be clear, according to RS in the Directors Commentary (as well as Lindelof's and Spaights), Holloway wrote his PhD thesis in which he weaved together data from ancient languages, cave drawings, and masses of other data into this hugely complex dissertation that was revolutionary. All of this led to Holloway and Shaw to come to the conclusion that the engineers were "creators". It wasn't just the cave drawings that they found. It was this massive effort of data that they pieced together that lead them to this conclusion.
However, the movie never depicts this. For some reason, the movie never reveals anything of the thesis, ONLY the cave drawings. So the movie makes it appear that Holloway and Shaw simply were a couple of archeologists who found these drawings and come to this wild conclusion of the alien race being "creators". When Shaw is confronted by Milburn and Fifield as to why she thinks they were "engineers of humans", her only reply is, "It's what we choose to believe." But...this is not correct!! Holloway's thesis is really the driving engine as to why they believe this, but the movie decided to keep that from the audience and make us assume that they were leaping to a huge conclusion based off of the cave drawings alone! This is one piece of the movie that doesn't work. It basically dropped the ball.
As to your question about finding the DNA match, this simply confirms Shaw's assumption that the engineers' DNA pre-dates ours and so it all adds up. It was simply a confirmation.
zzplural
MemberOvomorphOct-12-2012 2:30 AM@Joe Stracke:
"[i]Nothing takes me out of the storyline’s momentum faster than cliché exposition-memory where someone remembers themselves from an impossibly external point of view.[/i]"
The Neuro Visor constructs a video and audio representation of brain activity so that the user may infer meaning and context from a mass of distributed electrical signals in the subject's brain. It is not a camera. Just like you build an internal perception in your mind from a mass of electricity, the Neuro Visor builds its own 'perception'. It probably knows more about you than you do because of its massive computing power.
Since the decoding creates its own context, it is entirely reasonable that it can assemble whatever kind of view is desired. It could easily have a first person or third person 'mode', for example, selectable on demand.
Do you see the colour yellow the same way that I do? I can tell you what yellow means in terms of a specific measure of distance (the wavelength of a yellow photon) but your brain constructs its own perception of what yellow means. A yellow photon doesn't 'look' yellow in absolute terms. In my mind, yellow might appear very different, and for some people even has a 'sound' or 'taste'. Some people enjoy what you might call 'pain'.
The Neuro Visor builds its own world and that is what we see.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent
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