it's prometheus babey

i thought long and hard about the topic for this month's tinyletter - now rebranded and relocated to substack, the interface of which i cannot understand or make work properly, so apologies if instead of a blogpost you are receiving sensitive personal documents or a front-facing camera photo of one of my nostrils. i thought, to be honest, that i ought to catch new subscribers up on the point of this blog, or perhaps ring-fence some highlights - there are, if you're interested, my thoughts on seminal campaign video for the Silver Ring Thing movement breaking dawn part 1, or an extended screed on the oeuvre and appeal of patrick wilson (friend of the blog). i thought, for a while, that i ought to explain what it is that moves me to talk about the type of horror movies which are moderate-to-garbage, approaching fair - horror movies like black christmas (2019), which never ought to have existed, or horror movies like black christmas (1974), which are vastly better than anyone cares to believe. i thought that i should explain for the uninitiated what it is about movies of this pedigree, why they inspire in me a level of zen-like exultation that no other genre can touch.

i thought about all this, and then i thought fuck it and wrote about prometheus instead.

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i want to be extremely clear at the outset and confirm that prometheus is not actually three stars fine. you will have friends who tell you they rewatched it recently and that actually it's not as bad as all that, but you must ignore those friends because they are filthy liars and they mean you harm. i am, in point of fact, very much part of the problem here, given that i'm featuring this movie on a blog dedicated to the aggressively competent, but i've done it before and i'll do it again and if you wanted my opinions on the movie smile then you will have to wait until i feel moved to give them (which, tbh, i almost certainly will).

at the outset of the movie prometheus, you briefly have the hope that whatever is about to happen might actually amount to something credible, possibly even good. the whole weird intro sequence with the giant drinking a mysterious substance and dissolving horribly into the river is both gnarly and oddly satisfying and the monumental nature of the opening visuals is enough to set you up for a movie operating on a grand artistic scale. then some archaeologists who look like they learned everything they would ever need to learn about archeology during one weekend trip to burning man arrive to point at some cave paintings like oh my god this is a sign that we need to go to space and you are like ah shit.

the central premise of prometheus is that a rag-tag bunch of scientists have traveled across untold light years to some distant galaxy because a series of cave paintings featured star maps so mind-bogglingly accurate as to allow direct coordinates to be gleaned. this is to say that we are shown several images of stick figures pointing upwards at some blobs and are supposed to believe that someone was able to get accurate space directions from that. i would just like to note that deliveroo drivers often cannot find my flat despite having a full postcode and a series of written instructions on what bell not to ring, but i don't want to get hung up on details. the point of the mission, as we are informed in dialogue so stilted it sounds like someone fed everything noel from frasier ever said about star trek into chatGPT, is to meet the alien race who, apparently, engineered humankind. the fact that several characters in the movie are scripted to loudly declare this plan fucking stupid does not make the plan less stupid in the eyes of the audience.

we are introduced to the rag-tag bunch of scientists aboard the prometheus - the ship in question is named prometheus - and they are so wacky and rag-tag, not one of them credibly resembling a person who actually exists in nature. at one point, professional growler sean harris sits down opposite cosmic babygirl rafe spall and says i ain't 'ere to be your friend i'm 'ere to make money and that is the sum total of character development that is expended on literally anyone, except later when we discover that one of the archaeologists played by noomi rapace cannot have children and that is why she is so interested in who created us and woo boy is this movie over yet. also in attendance is charlize theron, who is very talented and beautiful, and to all intents and purposes playing a vase, plus michael fassbender, playing a robot who has developed a fairly convincing imitation of lawrence of arabia, but the less said about that the better because i extremely do not enjoy michael fassbender. oh, also guy pearce is there in wildly distracting "old" make-up, which is never justified because the movie never actually shows him young, so it just looks like ridley scott really fucking hates old guys and didn't want to shell out for the insurance necessary to hire james cromwell or whoever, even though actually what happened was that they cast guy pearce when the script still intended to show him young, but then decided against it and had to keep him anyway, which is a very funny way of going about making a movie. also in evidence: a three second cameo from patrick wilson (friend of the blog), playing noomi's dad in flashback footage for some reason, more or less the only crumb this movie chooses to throw me personally. i'm that pigeon at pride going yaas throw bread and patrick wilson is bread.

i don't intend to narrate the entire plot of the movie prometheus, because i will not live that long, but the headlines are as follows:

- the planet on which we have touched down is bad vibes and riddled with large pots seeping an oozy black substance that several members of the crew - most of whom are trained scientists - have to be told not to touch

- rafe spall and sean harris get trapped in the oozy pot hall overnight, during which time they encounter a hissing vagina snake thing, which rafe spall chooses to poke directly in the face because, again, he is a trained scientist. this goes about as well as you would expect.

- michael fassbender turns out to be bad, or at the very least morally ambiguous, which we all knew from the outset because he is michael fassbender and also because we have seen the movie alien and know how these things typically pan out. he puts some of the black ooze in noomi's archeologist boyfriend's coffee or something and he immediately turns into a pile of veins.

- sean harris returns from his night in the ooze cave, but now he is upside down and a mutant. or something. it's extremely hard to tell what is going on.

- noomi's archaeologist boyfriend disintegrates and charlize theron sets him on fire. this is quite hot.

various other things happen including the severed head of a giant alien that someone brought home in a bag and also charlize theron has sex with idris elba, who is also in this movie but with whom the script refuses to do one whole significant thing despite his being far more charismatic then 99% of the other people on board. i'm serious - he decorates a small christmas tree, has sex with charlize theron and then dies heroically along with benedict wong (both of them presumably deemed far too good to live), and that is all that happens.

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i do of course have to note that the one unassailably excellent sequence in this movie concerns the moment when noomi rapace discovers she is pregnant with an alien squid because of reasons and proceeds to perform caesarean surgery on herself in a medical pod, which is a truly choice piece of cinema and worth the price of admission alone, depending on what mood you're in.

my only note is that, having now experienced invasive abdominal surgery myself, i can attest that one simply cannot emerge from a medical pod and immediately run down a corridor and out into the bleak environs of a hostile planet, but that is a by the by

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there are some other things.

charlize theron is crushed by a falling spaceship.

guy pearce is there.

michael fassbender i think plays the recorder? and then someone rips his head off.

noomi's squid child lives.

something happens with the giant aliens who created mankind.

noomi lives.

at the end we briefly see a proto-xenomorph, but by this point the movie has been going on for so long that you have completely forgotten it is supposed to be a prequel to anything at all, let alone the movie alien, so you are literally just like why is there a xenomorph.

the end.

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nb it was at this point in writing this piece that i went into the bedroom to read what i had so far to my wife and she looked at me in dull horror like i do not remember any of this.

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anyway.

the key problem with this movie (there are so many problems with this movie) is that it forgets that alien was only ever tangentially a sci-fi movie. alien, as a truly core and iconic piece of late-1970s cinema, was a lot of things and spanned a lot of genres, but it was always downbeat horror before it was sci-fi and it was always a surprisingly nuanced commentary on the way it felt to be a worker under grinding capitalism before it was horror.

prometheus, in my opinion, is primarily a failure not because it is incoherent or because it is too long or because it features charlize theron trying to run away from a falling spaceship in a straight line like wile E. coyote, but because it entirely fails to remember what it is that alien and, in my opinion, aliens, were about. both movies may inhabit sci-fi settings, but they are movies which are first and foremost about the body, and specifically the body of the worker ground down under the societal boot. they are about working, and about having to work, and about the bonus situation, and about the often-bleak lengths to which people will be pushed in the name of financial survival. the space truckers of the first movie and the jobbing marines of the second may nominally resemble the scientists and space millionaires of prometheus, but they are crucially imbued with a substance the prometheus cannot recreate. it is for this reason, i think, that the sci-fi trappings of alien and aliens read so naturally, whereas every line of dialogue in prometheus sounds like there was a lot of clink on the plasma-stuffer and also our anti-gravity boots are on the fritz. without the substance, there is really only jargon.

you can, of course, make a sci-fi movie about anything, but if you don't know what that thing is then all you have is people wearing bubble helmets, and no amount of chat about the meaning of life can actually fix that.