#to Astounding Frontiers of Cartoonishly Bad Bench Work

[cellarspider]

10/30 The team puts their foot in it

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We return to Prometheus, the movie that makes me want to use the “Leave it” command I’ve taught the family dog.

Apologies if the screenshots are hard to visually parse on this one, this part of the movie is not meant for viewing on a bright, sunny day. May I recommend the alt-text? I've got image descriptions in there, as well as rambles that almost double the word count of these posts.

Also, your daily reminder: Go into your blog settings, scroll down to "visibility", and turn off 3rd party data harvesting! Do it! Happiness is stored in the not-getting-comodified!

My antipathy toward the archaeologists was reaching unprecedented proportions. The only character I didn’t fault for putting his hands on everything like a two-year-old: the literal two-year-old android, David.

Is there a long and dumb history of infantilizing dudes’ behavior? Yes. Was it very funny to see the archaeologists suddenly freak out because someone else was getting too handsy with the alien archaeological finds? Also yes! 

David opens the door, having to climb up a collapsible ladder to comfortably reach the controls, which is a nice touch. The next room contains the head of the decapitated Engineer, and also

I don’t know whether the set designers put this together prior to the decision that this would be where they put the decapitated body, but in hindsight, it seems a little on the nose. What the set wants to communicate is a religious feel–an idol of some kind, delicate reliefs on the walls that some consider to be plot holes because they look xenomorph-y, and a bunch of black urns.

The visual intent, delivered beautifully but with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, is that this is the room where shit will begin to go down. It’s a refined miniature of the egg room in Alien. Something is going to get inappropriately intimate with a man’s face here.

I suppose we are meant to find it a plot twist when that happens later, and not now, but I was still experiencing Archaeological Rage at this point.

Despite telling David not to open the door, they wander in like utter lemons, breathe all over everything, and are surprised when this has consequences. The art starts melting off the walls.

Admittedly, when the moist breath and germs of gormless tourists has caused irreparable damage to ancient egyptian tombs and 17,000 year old cave paintings, it took much longer than this. One of the characters exclaims that they must have disturbed the atmosphere in the room by opening it, which is possible. However, we literally see accumulated dirt in this room. Alien worms writhing in it. This is a plot point for a few scenes from now, because the black urns have started sweating a Mysterious Goop that the audience may remember as “that DNA melty stuff from the opening scene”.

Back when I was talking about setting mood, expectation, and feeling pretty good. I miss that.

There’s apparently a cut scene where Millburn the biologists finds those alien worms somewhere, and has a near-religious experience. It’s the first macroscopic alien life ever witnessed by modern humans. Something that evolved entirely separately from us. He’s in awe. 

The scene no longer has any logical home in the flow of the movie–the worms are only seen by the audience, in the urn room. Millburn left with Fifield the geologist, following Fifield’s panic attack. Still, it would’ve gone a long way to humanizing his character if it was still included, showing that the cast isn’t all treating this like kindergarteners at a toy store, and partially explaining a dumbass thing he does later.

It would also stand in stark contrast to further desecrating an ancient body, which is next on the agenda for our cast.

With the room literally melting and the Prometheus calling in the approach of a sandstorm, they heave the head in a duffel bag and sprint away.

I hate this. There’s the feeble justification that they already fucked up the room anyway, but they have been viewing the body as a thing they want to have, an emblem of their own efforts, and not an ethically distinct class of object that has to be treated with extreme care.

Nope! Into the duffel bag it goes. David, for his part, duffels an urn. I hate this less, for the aforementioned reason of “two-year-old who everyone’s been robot-racist at”. Also because frankly, he’s an android in an Alien movie, one that is very self-conscious about the tropes. He is either going to be an absolute saint like Bishop, or he’s going to be an extension of a callous corporate power like Ash. David is a unique spin on it, but he’s absolutely the Ash.

He manages to be all that and the only one who knows what he’s doing. David saves Shaw and the poor goddamn head from getting swept away in the sandstorm, with calm efficiency and an air of either “I have done a good thing, please praise”, or “yes, I am better at this than you”. Honestly can’t tell which. He’s certainly begun to develop antipathy toward his creators, which is one of the few character arcs that manages to occur in this movie.

So, great. Our cast has blundered into, breathed all over, and botched their exploration of humanity’s first alien structure, on the urging of an allegedly-archaeologist who literally treated it as a christmas present. They return with stolen artifacts and somebody’s head. They do not return with their biologist and geologist, who have apparently gotten lost in the alien structure, despite the geologist also being the one who was making the team a map of the place.

Things do not get better.

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Alt-text rambling citations:

1. https://www.cap-that.com/prometheus/index.php?page=1 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing#Cultural_variations  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture#Negative_denotations