Promethean Expectation

It’s an overcast day.  You see a field of green lined with dark rock outcrops.  The grass is so green you still see it after you look away from the screen. You rub your eyes and it doesn't go away, such is the power of that GREEN.  The rough texture of the rock is so detailed you rub your eyes to make sure it’s actually real. 

The camera swoops over the vista like a great Pterodactyl but instead of a shriek there is a massive, swelling,  orchestral boom.  The scene changes to a lake so reflective you can see the last ten years of your life playing out on its surface like a two and half acre plasma screen. 

Then it all becomes clear:  a brilliant shaft of white, dusty light from an unknown source pierces a dark place and casts ominous shadows in every direction.  All at once, you know EXACTLY where you are and why you are there…

Welcome…. To the latest Ridley Scott film. 

How could you not want to go see Prometheus? 

Ridley Scott returning to the film that propelled him to greatness after more than 30 years away, one of the most terrifying monsters ever filmed, the fifth film in a series with two interesting if flawed sequals, a cool actress (Noomi Rapace), and veiled promises to answer some of the franchise’s most tantalizing questions? 

Did we even need to discuss it?  It’s a no brainer, send my ticket in the mail.  Charge my card…

Except I started to think about how my expectations would change my perception.  I know some people who religiously avoid ANY prior information about a movie before seeing it, and I respect their ability to judge a film based on as little hype as possible. 

Not me.  I like to read reviews.  Time and money are locked up in higher priorities and I don’t have enough of either to throw at mediocre movies like when I was in college and went to three movies in a weekend because, you know, it was important. 

My expectations, through a conscious effort on my part, were pretty low for Prometheus, which colors the entire experience. 

Really? 

Challenge #1: Using it for a Coors light ad, really? 

Challenge #2: The Xenomorph was not going to make much of an appearance.  

Challenge #3: The premise is we were created by “engineers” from deep space.  Meh.  Saw that on the Speculation Channel, er, I mean the History Channel. 

Challenge #4: Does LOST scribe Damon Lindleoff have an exit strategy for this story, or will the casts of the previous Alien movies meet in a non-denominational church at the end?

Challenge #5:  Is it SMART to try to make this franchise too… smart? Is this the right series of films to examine big questions of origin, purpose, and destiny?    Should Ridley Scott really try to channel Stanley Kubrick here?  Is he up to that type of filmmaking? 

Yes, I know he made the 57 varieties of Blade Runner but look beyond that and it starts to thin out a little.  Black Rain?  Matchstick Men?  1492?  Hannibal?  Kingdom Of Heaven?

None of these movies were bad, but I’ve always found his work to be so large and lifeless, gorgeous filmmaking supporting not much story and good actors in robotic roles.

Challenge #6: Prequels have very little margin for error.  Will the mysterious questions from the first Alien have satisfying answers that don’t seem forced?  Is KNOWING something as powerful as NOT KNOWING? 

The 1^st Alien film was an exception for Scott:  a brilliant exercise in building tension with simplicity, surprise, and set design.  It started slow and hammered home two fantastic plot points that propelled the story and action forward while introducing the ALIEN.  It raised its questions and answered the ones it had to.  

Therefore, the mysteries were there to enhance the story… not to be rabbit trailed. 

The horror was captured in a giant, steel ship hunted by a horrifying monster inside and a trillion miles of space vacuum trying to kill you outside of it.  And somewhere out there, the people who should be helping you care more about the things trying to kill you. 

Even we, the audience, so transfixed by this new monster, can easily forget the people on board in comparison to its ridiculously fascinating biology. 

Truly, the movie could be summed up by its great tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” 

In Aliens, the theme is the same, even if Jim Cameron exchanged atmospheric horror for 80’s action extravaganza.  In space, no one can hear you cry, “Game Over, Man!” 

Same in Alien 3: In Space Jail, no one cares if you scream.  

Alien 4: In space, no one can help you because you are a monster. 

Promotheus expands it even further:  In space, your Creator wants to Destroy you!   

OK, I’m being glib here.

There are many excellent scenes in Prometheus, great tension and mystery with the same wonderful atmosphere only Ridley Scott is able to conjure from his cinematic tool box.  It feels familiar, but in a good way, like visiting an old friend you haven’t seen in a while.  Even if the friend is a little… confused?  

  

Prometheus opens with an intriguing scene of an “Engineer” destroying himself on a Pre-Cambrian earth and thus causing the chain of events that eventually bring forth our hero scientists who discover the engineer’s existence via cave paintings and recruit a creepy old trillionaire to fund them into the vast reaches of space. 

They arrive on the planet and after some great set design and creepy camerawork all hell breaks loose.  As it should. 

The movie is most successful when two things happen: David the android is onscreen and when horrible things are happening to the characters.  David is the one shining example of how good this movie should be, interesting that the robot is the most complex character in a cast of mostly single minded human beings. 

The most interesting character in the film

The horror scenes are reminiscent of earlier Alien films with a dollop of early Cronenberg body horror to spice things up.  When people get offed in this movie, they feel it… and so do we.  Vicarious suffering all over the place.  

I love the scene with the giant Engineer head on the table.  Alien dissections are fascinating: the right mix of science and fiction, and Prometheus has a doozy.   Later on, an automated C-section is even more visceral and disturbing. 

There are other gems: a silica storm, nifty technology, and new monsters to behold. The endless vases of black slime are more than creepy... it's like bottled sin and death on an evolutionary scale.  Mysterious and awe-inspiring. 

 I left the theater surprised and overall satisfied. 

Until I started to think about it.

You know how, when you watched the Star Wars prequels and you thought, “This is OK and all, but something is very, very wrong…” So you start to think about it and the movies get bad in a hurry.  

The new “mysteries” that arise from Prometheus start to feel like less a mystery and more like sloppy loose ends (but they whip around like tentacles so I guess it’s a push). 

Inevitably, Prometheus fails most of the challenges. 

Challenge #1 – Speaks for itself.   I could probably comment on how the marketing had a serious effect on the backlash against it, but I won’t because I don’t like marketing.  Even if I like the product. 

Challenge #2 – When my favorite acid bleeding being finally makes it to the screen, it is quite cool.  For about three seconds.  And the context of its birth makes little to no sense, at least scientifically, and is probably just there to appease the fan boys looking to read the Edith Hamilton Alien Mythology Handbook.  Or maybe just an Alien Wikipedia.  I don’t know.   

Challenge #3 – While the Engineers are interesting for a moment, the interest devolves because very little of what we see makes sense.  I understand not everything needs to make sense, but in a film that claims to contemplate such things it doesn’t offer much of anything substantial.  Except monsters, grotesque death and an interesting android. 

 Challenge #4 –  I guess I will have to wait for the inevitable sequels and hope history does not repeat.

Challenge #5 – Alien was one of the best horror films of all time because it was so simple and effective at what it wanted to do.  Scare you.  This movie tries to be too much.  This ain’t Tree of Life or 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It divides the movie into two unequal parts: an atmospheric science fiction film and a monster movie in space.  Ridley Scott creates realistic, textured worlds, not visual poetry to make a statement on the origin and meaning of life. 

Challenge #6 – No.  Not knowing is almost always more exciting, more psychologically satisfying than trying to build a mythology that explains everything.  Let me elaborate... even if I'm wrong and there is a specific reason for every decision in this film... I think I would rather not know everything.  

So, in the end, Prometheus is a large, beautifully filmed,  interesting science fiction film with horror elements.  It makes goo goo eyes at those big questions, but doesn’t really engage them in a meaningful way. 

Regardless, go see it anyway and enjoy it for what it is. 

***

YES, there is a reason for that large can of baking powder

One last thing... 

I recall watching a youtube video about Stanley Kubricks The Shining.  I felt the same way about The Shining that I do about Prometheus.  It was good… but something was missing.  I liked the novel better and the film, though technically brilliant, left me cold. 

But this youtube video, I wish I could find it again, explained EVERYTHING and my mind was blown.  

From simple visual cues I NEVER would have picked up on to explanations of events that flew over my head like so much air on a windy day, it made me realize that Kubrick never made an unimportant decision, or this reviewer thought way too much about The Shining.  I don’t know. 

So anyway… perhaps a youtube video will arrive soon that will explain all the decisions made in Prometheus. 

Any ideas? 

Don't ask me, I don't even think I was in ALL the Blade Runner Director's cuts....

Look Out For Landmines

I love good fiction, but find very little that grabs my attention these days. 

Time is short, and even though Stephen King may read sixty books a year, he’s a multi-millionaire who can get by working four or five hours a day and spend the rest of the time reading and guest starring on Sons Of Anarchy.  I can’t do that.  But I wouldn’t say no to a guest spot on Sons… I would make a good biker.  As long as I don’t have to ride a bike.

I could be that cool.  

Glancing at novels on Amazon and in bookstores (you know actual, physical places that sell books with a roof and walls and such), I get tired and overwhelmed.  I see a title or cover that looks interesting and inevitably read, “BOOK 119 of the BLABLABLA series featuring BLABLABLA in the world of BLABLABLA”. 

And then I ignore it.  Many novels are just big and boring. I like to think of finding a good story as stepping on a landmine, you don't know it but it will blow your mind. Bad metaphors aside, most novels I pick up are well-written duds that put me to sleep.  

William Faulkner (of all people) once said:

                 “I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

HE wanted to write poetry
 and short stories 

Poetry is undiscovered terrain for me, but I LOVE short stories, always have. I love the simplicity, the focus, and the textures of very small worlds that hide even smaller worlds.  The complexity is there, but it hides from you and dares you to find it.  Mystery and wonder abound in the little things and the magic therein need not be held up in a bulky framework of plot and subplot and more subplot. 

 I like novels, but it’s rare I get excited about one, the time and commitment to a novel is often well spent, but so many novels I read end up like stars, collapsing into themselves to form a black hole where no light or ideas can escape. All is exhausted and very little left to the imagination.  Like television without the pictures. 

 I’m sure there are treasures to be found within these long novels, but I can’t help but think they are written for folks who only want to read one or two stories in their entire lives.  Because they just can’t get used to anything new. 

Stephen King wrote, I think, in Hearts in Atlantis, that a good book is like a pump, give it 45 pages or so of work, and the book should do the rest.  With these series books, I wonder if people just don’t want to pump their own water but stay caught up in the East Australian Current of fiction.  Reading with the flow…

Short stories often require pumping from beginning to end.  Every page.  When you read them, you don’t often find out what the main character ate for breakfast when he was twelve and how it affected the rest of his life in great detail and how it relates to the cast of thousands that inhabit his world.

You might get a single detail, colorful and vital, but hidden from plain sight.  And from that single detail all the chapters and volumes spring forth… but not on paper, in your mind.  The man in the black suit laying on a bed with a single stalk of wheat.  A cloudy jar with a resident imp.  A brick wall in a basement.  A man sitting on a porch waiting for a panther.  A dried up monkey’s paw.  A man turning into an arthropod.  A love potion with a consequence you may not see coming. 

All those were classics with classic names attached: Bradbury, Stevenson, Jacobs, Poe, Bierce, Kafka, Collier.  Some are famous, some not so much.  But all are wonderful storytellers.  

They are also all dead. 

And while I don’t think the short story is dead, it’s certainly on life support in a hospital basement waiting for visitors.   

A short story can be an exclamation point, thrusting you into something constructed for maximum tension and drenched in saturated color.  Think Bradbury.  A story can be subtle and disturbing, presenting ideas that linger long after the end.  Think Kafka.  Some tales can tell vast stories about people’s lives in a space reserved for a good bar joke.  Think Hemmingway.  Some stories are like mini-novels telling a tale with complex plotting and great detail.  Think Stephen King. 

 Now, I prefer strange stories full of wonder and the macabre, but there are stories out there for everyone.  Mystery.  Science Fiction.  Romance.  Literary.  Why limit yourself to just novels?  You’ll find the world a much more colorful, remarkable place with textures that will stretch your reading experience. 

Some classics online:

The Lake

The Monkey's Paw

The Metamorphosis

The Lottery

Hills Like White Elephants

The Chaser

Who Goes There?

A Rose For Emily 

For those of you who read short stories, these should be familiar.  Who cares, read them again!  For those of you who don’t, just keep reading, turn the page, read and think about it after it’s over.  Good short stories will change your reading life. 

Afterwards, scour the net and find some new classics.  They're out there, hiding and waiting like forgotten landmines, ready to detonate and scatter their ideas like happy shrapnel.  

And if you step on the landmine and it doesn't even spark, let me know.  Share some of your passion for what you like to read.  Convince me it’s a good thing to latch onto a series you enjoy.  Even more, I want to hear from poets.  Convince me.

 I’m just a guy who likes stories looking for other folks who like stories and need to get away from the television.   I am easily persuaded... 

And lastly, I’m always looking for NEW stories.  Send me a link if you know of a great one.  

I'm gonna miss this guy.