Prometheus Questions and SPOILERS

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!! STOP READING UNLESS YOU HAVE WATCHED THE MOVIE.

Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba and Ridley Scott all together in a film about "where we came from" and how our search for our beginning could be our end -- what else should one do but watch Prometheus?

And we did.

And the following questions came up:

1 Why does the alien look like a vagina with penis tentacles?



Does it represent the male and female psyche and thus it goes along with the movie's theme about creation and birth, life and death, entropy and evolution?


2 Was the machine which operated on Dr Shaw to take out the baby octopus alien from her body, sexist? Or does it represent technology's failure to understand the intricacies of the female body?


3 Did David's character represent the intellect (male psyche) and did Dr Shaw represent the emotions (female psyche)?





Did David find the mission's desire to meet and greet the "engineers" of the human race - "just because" his creators can - illogical?

Was him putting a drop of alien goo on Holloway's wine glass the same way as him putting one over his creators? The same way the mythical Prometheus did to Zeus?

Because David is the intellect and is solely mind-based, is that why the only thing left of him when he's destroyed was his head?

And Dr Shaw needed David's strong and powerful head in order to pursue her dream of making contact with the "engineers" despite reality presenting that possibility as nil. Blind hope much? thus Prometheus?

"Prometheus, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire ... but I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction." (Zeus to Prometheus 1. Hesiod, Works and Days 55)."

"It was then that Prometheus 1, out of compassion for that wretched breed of mortals, planted blind hope in their hearts.."


4 Was the mission - like Dr. Shaw - way over its head? The way Dr Shaw clings stubbornly to blind hope and the fact that she doesn't mind going around in circles and end up in the same place where she left off only to search for something she may have already found but the head has "chosen to believe" it hasn't represent the intellect winning over emotions? Or the emotions using the head to rationalize its unfounded desires, wishes?


5 Did you notice how Idris Elba and his crew were the only ones in the ship to die without being eaten alive, maimed, burned or squished? They're the only ones who surrendered willingly to their deaths. They were also the ones who had no preconceived notion about the mission nor did they set out to discover anything. In the Captain's own words, he "just flies a ship." They were being in the moment whatever that moment called for, whether it was to put up a Christmas tree or fly the ship to their and the alien's death. How cool was that?

That scene where they raised their hands in surrender when they crashed the Prometheus to destroy the alien spacecraft was so breath-taking it made me tear up, did you?

The captain and his crew were neither thinking hard or feeling hard, they were just being and living, savoring the moment and even surrendered to it.


6 If the original 1979 ALIEN is about the fear of being pregnant/being a mother/unwanted pregnancy, then Prometheus is its perfect prequel.

The horror in Prometheus is sex. This time, it's fear of intimacy.

See how the alien enters the body and then the host screams, shakes until the host explodes?

See how Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) is so obsessed about keeping the ship clean, lean, pure, safe and free from any foreign / alien elements the same way she is fixated and hyper-attentive to keeping her body lean and clean. Notice how everyone was throwing up after getting out fresh from the pod, but Vickers is already doing push-ups.

See how the relaxed and free-wheeling Captain (Idris Elba) advise the uptight Vickers, `If you want to get laid, just ask.'

See how when the ship Prometheus crashes with the alien ship and collide into one orgasmic explosion, Vickers is squished along with it. The Prometheus ship is an extension of her and it being destroyed means she also is. She couldn't let herself be vulnerable as that would be death.

Being intimate requires letting go and going with the flow. It requires surrender. Intimacy doesn't come from the head.

Intimacy lets go of the need for control.

If you hate your self, how can you be intimate with your self or with others?

What breeds this fear of intimacy is not being knowledgeable of the self because you don't want to know -- out of horror of what you will see.

Is that why Dr Shaw and Weyland `had to go that far in search of a miracle?'

The heavenly orgasm they need in order to satisfy themselves is always out there and is never close to home?

Or is this self-hatred the reason why those super humans wanted them dead? The creator hates his creation. The createe fires back and wants to kill his parents.

And it goes all the way back to Zeus when he created humans whom he loathed but whom Prometheus loves enough to steal fire for. Why would a creator hate his creation if it is made from his own image & likeness?

It's a dysfunction.

Prometheus is from Greek mythology.

Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean region and Europe, for which reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture.

White people issue much?




7 Prometheus it seems is also about a woman dealing with her “father issues” and her vision of THE “IDEAL” — whatever that ideal may be. As it turns out, `the ideal’ was all in her head. She was chasing her dream which in reality was a horrific nightmare. And her search lead to a lot of casualties, death and destruction all because she “chose to believe” something. Alas, she didnt even learn from her experience since she stubbornly still chooses to believe she will be lead to her "ideal" thanks to the help of the intellect who could rationalize away anything and everything through clinical denial.


"All film criticism (all writing, all filmmaking) is, on some level, autobiography, don't you think?
I remember David Thomson talking about it that way in the intro to his first edition of "The Biographical Dictionary of Film." What somebody notices, finds of interest, and chooses to write about can't help but be determined by who they are and what they bring to the movie. It's personal -- but, as I always say, it has to be rooted in specific observations of the movie itself. Otherwise it's like we're all talking about our own dreams. Close observations of the movie give us common ground for discussion.

For answers to a few of the questions on this post, go to: http://www.jessicarulestheuniverse.com/2012/06/09/alien-prometheus-and-the-biggest-fear-of-all/


For an analysis of Prometheus from a mythic perspective, go to:
Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About