List of things I did not care for in Prometheus

spoiler alert!

I watched the movie Prometheus a few weekends ago, it was a decent sci-fi movie, in my opinion the more big sci-fi epics that are made, the better. Others have said similar things as I am about to. I recommend everyone read Bad Astronomy's review. In this post going to stick more to the bad science than the bad plot. Except for FTL travel, I don't care about that, I hate when people bring that up as a problem in movies, yes we know there is no currently known way to travel faster than light according to the General Theory of Relativity.


List of things I did not care for in Prometheus.

Sound in space. If there are no lasers or big explosions to make things exciting, you don't need sounds in space. You didn't need it in 2001: A Space Oddessy, so I don't know why every sci-fi movie since then feels the need to add sounds when there is an external shot of a space ship. Silence is unnatural and heightens the spookiness of space travel.

The spaceship Prometheus directly lands on the planet. Ok so they must have some super source of energy to fly FTL, but for some reason it bugs me they land their main ship directly on the planet surface. In Alien the Nostromo separated from the cargo portion of the ship, same thing in Aliens with the drop ship bringing the crew from the Sulaco which remained in orbit. Both of those movies are set at a later date, so it may be implying that these are one of the first expeditions to other star systems? Even so, it would seem technologically easier to construct an interstellar FTL ship without having to worry about landing it in on a planet with gravity and an atmosphere, let alone taking off again.

Another way you might expect them to economize their travel is by manufacturing things from the planet when they land, either fuel, or oxygen, water, etc.. all things you might not want to carry all that extra mass. I assume if you have some kind of infinite fusion drive energy source you might be able to get away with not bothering to do that, although unless they have super compression techniques, there didn't seem to be big storage tanks or anything on the Prometheus to hold the matter they would need for things like breathing and drinking. Another area where it would have been a nice thing to show them actually do for once in a sci-fi movie.

The purpose of the trip is supposed to be a scientific study but all the scientists immediately run out and dive into the first structure they see. There is no systematic mapping of the area, they landed near the first spot they came across. Even if they just land somewhere that seems interesting, if they had left the main ship in orbit or even just some remote satellites they could have begun mapping the entire world for any other interesting areas. That's not to mention that there are no efforts to survey the outside of the structure.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the scientists run around touching everything they see. The one thing they do which makes sense are sending those small robots to map out the interior, the one good idea they have seemingly. David has some ulterior motives in his programming, so I can give him a pass, although it seemed silly for the android to be the one to take the "touch first, ask questions later" approach to levels higher than the other scientists could possibly do. Overall everyone seemed pretty underwhelmed that they had in fact found an alien civilization at all! Even the remains of one would be a momentous archaeological find. It seemed like they were not interested in studying anything, and I guess it would be emotional but they seemed more greedy than amazed by anything they saw. If I remember the Alien series, there was no confirmed alien/xenomorph life on any planet ever surveyed, and since this was earlier than those movies, this would be the first proof of life outside of Earth, another amazing discovery by itself.

What was the one Engineer alien doing there asleep all this time? Did he come there after everyone else died and was trying to do something? Or did he go to sleep before all the others and didn't know that things went to shit for all the other Engineers? If so why wouldn't no one wake him? Or why would he be sleeping on a stationary ship in the first place while the others were there doing some work.

The first thing the Engineer does is start trying to kill everyone.  That was probably the low-point for me in the movie. So predictable and B-movie-ish. No dialog, no explanation, nothing profound from the mouth one of the creators of the human race, not even a thank you for waking him from his several thousand year hibernation or sleep. Maybe they are inherently violent, although the opening scene would seem to imply some sort of more thoughtful existence. It would have been better if he didn't physically try to hulk smash everyone but instead if his actions were more intelligently shown to trick or trap the humans, or even experiment on them. At that moment he would have no idea whether or not there were 100 armed soldiers just outside, what he did was careless and incomprehensible.

Plenty of unanswered plot points (I can't take full credit for these, thanks to my bro for expressing better than I can):
-- Why did the engineers, create humans billions of years ago, then come back to earth several times over our history to tell us about a military base they were building to eventually use to destroy us? Were those runes or cave paintings an invitation or warning?
-- So the engineers were planning on wiping out Earth with the goo, but something went wrong and they all died except for the one engineer who went to sleep before the others? Why are only the corpses of the engineers left but not the xenomorphs or whatever it was that killed them?
-- Did the rest of the engineers, the one not on the base just abandon the whole thing? The goo base and humans?
-- What happened to the two scientists who were trying to put the main woman [Shaw] under?
-- How does the main woman do this major surgery on herself, but no one seems to know, or notice, or react at all to it?
-- Why is no one particularly surprised that a stow-away, a man who had supposedly been dead for two years, turn up on the ship?
-- Where does EVERYBODY go? We see some people get off-ed but its a crew of 17. [>> So there were at least 3 in the bridge of the ship at the end. The Biologist, Geologist and Charlie killed by various alien things. Vickers met her end too. Thats seven. If David counts, 8, there were at least an orderly and two security guards with Weyland too, and presumably some of them were killed by the Engineer in the alien ship? I think you could count 3-4 more killed in the cargo hold by the zombie-Geologist, even if the number was only 3, then you're up 14. Two aforementioned scientists operating on Shaw, they vanished after being beat up. And Shaw herself being the 17th, not counting Weyland. ]



(Full disclosure, I wrote most of this the week after the movie came out when it seemed to matter more)