Space Oddity

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.