- Joined
- Sep 19, 2020
- Messages
- 350
- Reaction score
- 693
Beware many spoilers ahead.
The movie opens with an aerial sequence showing mountainous landscapes, valleys, lakes and waterfalls to the sound of majestic and epic music until we see a flying saucer hovering over a waterfall. On the edge of the waterfall we see a tall, human-looking being with well-defined muscles and strong. It brings a substance into your mouth that quickly creates a kind of chain reaction in every molecule of your body. It falls into the water and falls apart, as if its DNA fertilized planet Earth, creating a new species: humanity.
As director Ridley Scott stated in interviews, he wanted to pay tribute to Erik von Daniken (author of the bestselling Chariots of the Gods) and his thesis that humanity would descend from aliens and that the gods worshiped at different times. and cultures would actually be reminiscent of this extraterrestrial civilization that intentionally created us.
This initial sequence leads us to believe that we are facing another movie that will pay tribute to this “new age” utopia of being star children where we will find the answers to all the clichéd questions of the genre: who are we? What are we doing here? What is the purpose of everything?
But we have to remember that Ridley Scott returns with this film to the sci fi genre where he left as his main mark the dystopian worlds he created: “Alien” of 1979 (a mining ship manned by astronauts destitute of any nobler ideal meets a xenomorphic monster which initiates a brutal slaughter) and 1982's "Blade Runner" (replicants have more feelings than humans do in a gloomy Los Angeles where an insistent acid rain falls). Therefore, knowing that the director was responsible for these two classics of the genre, nothing is as it seems.
The sacrifice of one of the "Engineers"
The narrative is centered on a pair of archaeologists, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Dr. Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) who discover a series of ancient rock drawings of different cultures separated by thousands of years that point to a single place in the stars: a distant moon, LV-223. Shaw and Holloway believe that on this moon will be found the ancient truth about the origins of humanity - a belief that is also shared by billionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), CEO of Weyland Corporation. After hearing the archaeologists' conclusions about the "Engineers" (as they define the aliens who would have raised us), he agrees to send them along with a crew of fifteen people aboard the Prometheus ship.But Weyland's intentions are not as mystical as those of archaeologists: He wants to find the "Engineers" to achieve eternal life, since he is old. To secure his interests, he sends an android named David (Michael Fassbender), whose job is much more than keeping the ship afloat while the crew is cryo-sleeping during the voyage: he must conduct “independent” research and report directly. Weyland.
The Future of the Past
Ridley Scott's sci fi fits into what researchers call the so-called "postmodern aesthetics" they call the "future of the past." Unlike modern science fiction where the futuristic and utopian imagery with unprecedented places, situations, and opportunities for humanity (“going where no man has ever been,” as the celebrated opening of the “Star Trek” TV series) urged, Ridley Scott told us. shows future worlds that look similar to the present: corporate plots, betrayals, suspicions, broken dreams, viral monsters. The "too human" associated with bad technological functions create actually atopic worlds. That is, a paradoxically future without future, because it replicates the ills of the present.If in "Alien" and "Blade Runner" we have retro sci fi (remember the neo-baroque design of both the Nostromo ship and the space jokey and xenomorphic monster or Los Angeles with old neon-framed buildings and lots of hats and overcoats from 1940s), in "Prometheus" we have the height of this future of the past: if the archaeologists hypotheses were
correct, we would not have attended the 1979 "Alien" crew slaughter.
Ridley Scott's neo-baroque: sci fi "future of the past"
For example, it is striking that after Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey” where spectators follow the epic human journey to meet its creators and witness the birth of the “star child” that will change the future of humanity, we have the dystopia of “Planet of the Apes” 1968: The future is post-apocalyptic and repeats the same dramas as the present world. This film features a post-apocalypse world dominated by apes that evolved far more than men after a gigantic nuclear hecatomb. We have reached the future, but it no longer exists. “Alien” (1979) and “Mad Max” (1979) confirm the arrival of this future without future, post-apocalypse, sad and melancholy.
"Prometheus" and "Blade Runner"
In "Prometheus" Ridlet Scott also returns to the theme of the movie "Blade Runner": the encounter with the Creator. If in 1982 we see a replicant named Roy seeking a meeting with his creator of Tyrrell Corporation to live longer (the replicants were scheduled to live only four years), in “Prometheus” the whole purpose of the LV-223 moon expedition is to find in the "Engineers" the answers about the purpose of existence and the fight against old age and death.“Blade Runner” was an adaptation of the work of writer Philip K. Dick (“From the Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”) with explicit Gnostic inspiration: the man in search of his Creator / God finds that, in fact, He is but one. Machiavellian Demiurge who doesn't love him.
The android David finds the divinity in the human soul itself,
for "Prometheus" returns to this Gnostic theme: "the Engineers" are neither gods nor benevolent and wise, they are crazed Demiurges about a technology that turned against them in a cold moon lost in the middle of nowhere.
Rather than finding comforting answers to the great religious and metaphysical questions, the ship's crew faces the first generations of the "Alien" xenomorphic monster.
The archaeologists' disillusionment with the "Engineers" about their purpose in creating humanity is the same as that of David David in relation to the humans who created him:
David: I'm sorry the "engineers" are all dead, Dr. Holloway.
Dr. Holloway: Do you think we wasted our time coming here?
David: What purpose brought you here? What did they hope to achieve?
Dr. Holloway: Meet our Creator ... get answers ... Why they made us.
David: Why do you think your kind made me?
Dr. Holloway: We made them because we could.
David: Do you realize how disappointing it would be to hear the same thing from its creator?
Here "Prometheus" returns to the nihilism of "Blade Runner": just as replicant Roy finds disillusionment in realizing that his creator Tyrrell created him for no more noble purpose, android David experiences that same disillusionment. In turn, Holloway and Shaw will know this disappointment in the worst possible way when seeking the truth about the "Engineers."
In proposing nihilism as the result of the search for gods and the meaning of existence, "Prometheus" addresses the old central theme of Gnosticism: indeed, the search for the sacred lies within man himself, in the soul, not in some external entity or sense (God, All, etc.).
This is clear from Android's effort to understand in man what he lacks: the soul.
Remembering the little Disney animated robot “Wall-E” (2008), David spends his time watching the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), memorizing the lines and trying to look like actor Peter O'Toole (Wall - And watch the 1969 musical "Hello, Dooly!"). David is fascinated by his creators, just as humans are fascinated by the "Engineers."
But the archaeologists Holloway and Shaw fail to realize that the truth is before them, not the "Engineers": it is in the android David who can see within himself the divinity itself.
Text: Os deuses estão mortos no filme "Prometheus"
