Prometheus

(warning: spoilers)

Take Bill Gates’ net worth and multiply it by Mark Zuckerberg’s. Multiply that by the combined assets of Jobs, Wozniak, and, oh, let’s say Paul Allen. That’s now the grand total of all my bank accounts, domestic and overseas, for the sake of this review. In other words, in this thousand-word post, I am a multi-gazillionaire.

Take my age and double it. I am now pushing ninety and though my mind is sharp, my body is in decline.

What suddenly comes to my attention reading through the science-y mags? Why, there’s this boyfriend-girlfriend archaeology power couple who’ve come up with this theory, based on cave paintings, I think, that we need to journey to a certain four-star system to find who seeded earth. Not God or whatever Name you give the First and/or Final Cause. Not some primordial meteorite containing organic molecules that crashed into molten earth millennia ago, if you don’t believe in spontaneous generation (aside – who generated those organic molecules?) No, an advanced alien civilization this pair calls “The Engineers” created us from their DNA. All this deduced from cave paintings. I dunno. Must be a persuasive argument, ’cuz it made a True Believer out of old multi-gazillionaire me.

So I decide to invest a trillion of my dollars – that’s $1,000,000,000,000.00 – on making this star voyage happen. A trillion dollars! You know how much a trillion dollars is? You’d have to spend a little over $19,000.00 a minute, every minute of every hour of every day of every year to get rid of it all in a century! Can we agree that’s a lot of coin?

Considering that massive expense of my personal fortune, would I …

Not tell the crew the nature of the mission until they arrived at the four-star-system?

Not psychologically test the crew in advance, i.e. how they react to stress, how they problem-solve, how they get along with authority figures, how they get along with members of the opposite sex, how they get along with androids, etc., etc., etc.?

Not even ask them the following question – “If a giant wheel was rolling toward you and could crush you to death, would you run in a straight line in the direction it was traveling, or would you take a couple steps to the left or right and allow it to pass?”

Allow the joined-at-the-hip archaeologist couple who specialize in cave paintings run the scientific end of this mission?

Make sure I hire geologists who have no sense of direction and exobiologists who freak out at new life forms? Or, as a corollary, hire exobiologists who show no adherence to basic security and self-preservation measures when encountering overtly hostile life forms?

Let the missions proceed without any thought-out protocols, i.e. “wing it,” like exploring a vast subterranean complex with only six hours of daylight left simply because we just landed?  Let everyone break up into small groups or go solo to experiment on this and that, with no coordinating meetings or discussions about progress, results, conclusions?

Allow the landing party to walk into alien spaceships (or whatever) completely unarmed, even for self-defensive measures?

Hire crew who think that just because sensors tell them there’s oxygen in the atmosphere, it’s okay to instantly chuck off their helmets, microbes-be-damned?

Think it okay to override any strict quarantine procedures, i.e. dissecting alien body parts without wearing masks, bringing menacing vats of black goo into the ship, having no decontamination air locks, using flamethrowers as really the only safeguard against alien microbiology?

Have the only futuristic surgery machine calibrated only to work on males (especially since I’ve hired at least three women for the mission)?

Send my spaceship out onto its voyage of exploration and discovery … unarmed? (But well-stocked with booze.)

Even send out human crew when android technology is so advanced that just three robots (as opposed to 17 human crewmembers) would have the strength, intelligence, ability, and obedience to carry out all my objectives logically and dispassionately? (Although I will concede that the Android Dispassion Chip is prone to malfunction.)

Not send in robotic equipment to record and explore any dark, slimy places before allowing the human crew to step foot in them?

And, finally, would I spend all this money to make a hologram film of myself addressing the crew, secretly stow away on board the ship, and when I get to meet one of these “Engineers,” who my scientific geniuses say created life on earth, would I demand the secret of immortality from them? How does one necessarily follow from the other? Or is this all just a trillion-dollar roll-of-the-dice wish fulfillment long-shot?

Oy.

Beautifully and wondrously filmed movie, some incredible sights committed to celluloid. No argument there. It’s light-years ahead of all it’s Alien-ish predecessors. And some of the most tense, edge-of-your-seat, almost-too-painful-too-watch-yet-can’t-turn-away scenes created in recent memory. I’m thinking of the medical pod as well as the “alien-cobra” scenes.

But man is Prometheus one stupid, stupid, stupid dumb movie. Nothing any character does is believable. Indeed, many go to extremes against human nature (and these are the humans we’re talking about!), what normal people would do and say. And the “big ideas” of the film – extraterrestrial seeding, who seeded the seeders, how this all links in to the Alien quadrilogy, immortality – none of it is developed in any coherent manner.

So, my initial review coming out of the theaters was A-minus. After a few days of thought, I have but no choice to adjust that grade downward to … oh … how about a B-minus? (I’m a sucker for awesome visuals in an SF flick and nail-biting scenes – deep thoughts and realistic characters I’ll get from my SF books, normally 20+ years ahead of Hollywood, anyway.)

Prometheus:  You’ve been warned!