Symbolism or Not, 'Prometheus' Still Fails as a Compelling Story

by John Shade Vick

Considering the attention that my negative review on Forbes of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus has garnered, it is clear that this film – regardless of its silliness as a story – has proven worthy of heady debate on multiple levels.

In the last couple of days, another article has also gained quite a bit of attention. It is an extremely well-written, well-reasoned treatise on the symbolism contained in the film, written by a guy called Cavalorn. There’s a fair amount of pablum in it about psychically activated black goo, but beyond that he points out numerous details within the film suggesting that the story’s alien characters – the Engineers – are connected to Earth’s religious and specifically Judeo-Christian past as well as the mythical Greek Titan that lends the film his name.

Cavalorn’s theory is that the Engineers who occupied the temple discovered by the human scientists on planet LV-223 became upset with earthlings 2,000 years ago, but were prevented from cleaning our clocks when they became victims of an industrial accident involving those jars of black goo they had lying around on the floor of their ship. The ultimate assertion is that Jesus Christ himself was an Engineer, and when we killed him, we signed our own cosmic death warrant.

Despite a comment from Scott saying that actually calling it Christ would be “too on the nose” (and a 9-foot tall albino Jesus wasn’t quite what the Good Book described), I absolutely believe that this is what the filmmakers were going for. I believe it because this has become screenwriter Damon Lindelof’s shtick, whether he likes it or not (http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1687203/prometheus-sequel.jhtml).

Lindelof now seems to be shifting the blame for Prometheus in Scott’s direction, but his writing for the ABC series LOST was rife with spiritual themes and philosophical strangeness from the very beginning, and as the series went on, it became the primary reason for its continued success. Every new image, character or happening on the show sent rabid fans searching for answers in their libraries, in the hope of uncovering the One Theory that explains everything. Whole websites were constructed for the collection and dissemination of LOST-related data, every obscure detail potentially holding the key to the series, and for everything that happened, there was some guy, somewhere, who could say, “Actually, what Locke said to Jack is mirrored right here in the Talmud. See? It’s brilliant!”

Even worse was when the writers pulled in scientific theory and then blew it off. As we all know, not only were the scientific questions raised in the final seasons of LOST not dealt with, but neither was the spiritual soup made of pieces of virtually every belief system in human history. It all ended in a church with stained glass on another plane of existence. Or something.

Scott, Lindelof and Jon Spaihts are clearly intelligent people who know a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting stuff. And, finding clues to a greater meaning in a story can be fascinating and great fun. But, for symbolism to have any real meaning, it has to make sense. It has to serve the story, and it has to come organically. The shotgun-symbolism of LOST, where countless bits of disparate philosophical ideas were blasted onto the canvas and allowed to mean everything or nothing, depending on the knowledge base of the viewer, is not storytelling. You can take the worst Eddie Murphy movie and load it with potent religious symbolism, and it’s still going to suck. Why? Because, it’s still a dumb Eddie Murphy movie injected with potent religious symbolism. The symbolism is irrelevant if there isn’t a good plot or well-drawn characters to carry the themes through.

Since the creation of language, be it visual or spoken, the core values of civilization have been passed on through storytelling. Is it any wonder that the really good stories are the ones from which we continue to take meaning? Pure storytelling, in all its forms, is the greatest information delivery system that has ever existed. A gifted storyteller can teach one person a lesson, and simply entertain another. And, it’s possible – and preferable - to do that without insulting either individual’s intelligence.

Where we get into trouble is when poor storytellers try to teach us something. As Cavalorn points out, one of the main themes in Prometheus is the concept of sacrifice. And there is really no more powerful human theme you can hit on than that. People make sacrifices, every day, on scales large and small. Soldiers die in wars. Firefighters die pulling victims out of broken skyscrapers. Parents sacrifice the things they need for the things their children need. Giving of one’s self for a greater good is the most emotionally compelling thing a human being - or any creature - can do. In a great story, it moves people in the deepest part of their beings, and can inspire others to do the same.

The very story of Christ is built on this principle. But, the reason Jesus Christ bears so much weight for the people who believe is because they’ve come to know him in the Scriptures. They know what he’s about, what he stands for, and they know both what the world loses and gains because of his sacrifice. None of the characters who sacrifice themselves in Prometheus are written well enough to exemplify true sacrifice, so the overlying theme is purely academic and doesn’t serve the story in any way.

In this summer’s The Avengers, we have an amazing example of the power of personal sacrifice in S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg). Agent Coulson confronts the film’s chief adversary Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in an attempt to save Thor (Chris Hemsworth) from a deathtrap, and is mortally wounded by him. Agent Coulson manages to regain the upper hand, if only for a moment, and blasts him through a wall with an untested super-weapon powered by dark cosmic energy. I’ve seen the movie four times, and all four audiences gasped when Coulson was wounded, and cheered when he came back. This for a minor character in the Marvel movie universe with less than half an hour of screen time. It worked because writer/director Joss Whedon successfully does three things: he makes us love Coulson; he makes us hate Loki; and he never lets us forget what the stakes are. If Loki succeeds, our planet will be enslaved by a vicious alien horde that even Loki cannot control. And Coulson’s sacrifice becomes an important part of the story when his death serves to reenergize Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) after the team is shattered and all appears lost. Further, Coulson’s death inspires Iron Man to an act of heroism at the film’s climax that he could easily not survive. Again, I have heard multiple audiences clap and cheer when Tony Stark survives this final ordeal.

Contrast this with Prometheus. Early on, we’re introduced to ship’s captain Janek (Idris Elba) and two forgettable pilot characters who clearly have no interest in discovering an alien civilization. They are stereotypical “we’re in it for the money” types. Our storytellers never spend enough time with these pilots to humanize them, and Janek’s main purpose earlier in the film is to get Vickers (Charlize Theron) into bed and find out if she’s a robot. (He succeeds, and she isn’t. Hooray for Janek.) Later in the film, when a big alien ship containing dangerous black goo – and one angry Engineer - is headed to Earth to carry out that 2,000-year-old vendetta against humanity, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) basically says, “Hey, you guys gotta stop that ship from leaving or Earth is finished!” And they basically say, “Well, we don’t have any guns, so I guess we’ll just crash into it and die!” You know, like Kirk’s dad in Star Trek, or a million other movies. And, these three characters, who have in their minimal screen time shown almost nothing but apathy, are all suddenly super-patriots, and are visibly cheerful about dying for Earth. I thought they were going to start chest-bumping and high-fiving each other as they crashed into the alien ship and vaporized. Tellingly, nobody in the audience cheered. People actually laughed (including me).

So, what is gained by threading themes of sacrifice into Prometheus if we aren’t affected by it when it happens? It is commendable to explore it as a theme, but the movie I watched was a logic-free sci-fi explode-a-thon, full of stock characters and wonky physics and ideas and set-pieces I’ve seen before, with bits of philosophical dialogue squeezed in here and there. Nobody behaves like a real human, so vital human themes are lost. The details chronicled by Cavalorn are there, but they’re really just Easter eggs for the erudite, hidden in a squall of screaming and disemboweling and stuff blowing up.

In my previous review, I spoke of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is my favorite film of all time. And I think I have a fundamental understanding of its meaning. There are questions that will never be answered. I don’t expect answers. I don’t want them. Their absence doesn’t detract from the film’s simple, elegant story. And, when I watch it, I feel it. I actually cry when the Star Child turns its neutral gaze toward our planet. Seriously. Every damned time. And I have never needed to bring anything into the experience except me. It does not require decoding to be a powerful experience, because it is so beautifully crafted.

If I have to bring in my personal knowledge of mythology and religion in order to find meaning in a story, instead of feeling the meaning, then I believe that story has failed to do what stories are meant to do.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there are throngs of people who are going to overlook all the stuff that doesn’t make sense and truly love Prometheus for the religious details running through it. Perhaps, 40 years from now, people will get misty-eyed when that slimy proto-Xenomorph explodes out of the dead Engineer who got face-raped by the giant squid and howls at the audience like a Jurassic Park T-Rex. But, from where I’m standing right now, I don’t feel it.

You can find John's Shade Vicks's original review here at Forbes.