It’s unlikely to be carbon monoxide with that much free oxygen in the atmosphere. Yes, both CO and CO2 come out of a car exhaust but the CO doesn’t hang around for long or else we’d all be dead on Earth by now, courtesy of our daily commutes and other fossil fuel dependencies. It would have also killed the helmetless engineer off very rapidly during his jaunty walk to the life boat. So, flub or not it just doesn’t work. Its just more evidence of the very poor science in Prometheus.
And as it was cold and horrible yesterday I watched both Alien and Prometheus back to back and it highlighted the differences and difficulties in both films more clearly to me.
Firstly even after thirty years the true beauty of the original film lies still with the truly “Alien” atmosphere it provokes. A strange planetoid, a fantastic space wreak ,terrifying evidence of a shockingly different alien life cycle beyond human comprehension and that brilliant Giger/lovecraftian design to the sets and creature that immediately captures the darker aspects of your horrified imagination. It was and still feels like nothing I’d ever seen before . You also get a feeling from the analysis Ash does that the creature the crew are dealing with is way beyond our normal range and knowledge of biochemistry and physical experience. So the decisions the crew make, whilst flawed ,as things go from bad to worse ,feel totally consistent with human nature as the chaos and panic mounts.
We are truly dealing with the Alien here.
Prometheus immediately bursts that bubble by using one of the oldest ideas and overused ideas in sci fi , ie ancient astronauts with periodic visitations to our ancient civilizations. That idea has been Stargated to hell for decades on television. In fact the longer and more times I’ve watched Prometheus the more I realized I was seeing a film filled with ideas lifted by writers who have obviously watched more sci fi from television than really read or written it. It feels so generic, an out of the box , scripted by numbers ,high budget /low concept movie. What saves it from being just another walk in the park are the brilliant production and design values, the superb effects work and some of the set pieces which are just wonderful to look at. And of course David as the unfailing polite,but murderously mechanical Lector android.
However, all the bad science aside it’s the character arcs and motivations that constantly work against the story.
Take Shaw an intelligent, committed woman of Christian faith with Mankind’s best interests presumably at heart. And focus of the story.
And yet ,after loosing her boyfriend to terrifying cellular corruption, escaping the chilling intentions of an android, having a terrifying and bloody forced alien abortion, convincing her shipmates to commit suicide by ramming a ship in order to STOP it getting to Earth and eventually being saved from strangulation by an Engineer (that clearly doesn’t give a damn about humanity) by her giant tentacled squiddie son, she then STILL wants to go FIND THE REST OF THEM to ANSWER her question. Which is
“Why do you want to now wipe out the human race.”
Is it just me or doesn’t this seem a particularly clever thing to do?
The one thing that this film clearly seems to indicate is that the human race has apparently only just survived a terrible apocalypse at the hands of the Engineers “weapons” because of a fortuitous accident two thousand years ago, and yet Shaw STILL wants to go , find the engineers and remind them the human race is still running around!!!
What the HELL is wrong with this woman?
This doesn’t make her look very bright, remotely heroic and more like angel of the apocalypse or a MOD (Moron of Death). Risking the entire future of humanity over what is a pretty philosophical question is a ridiculous course of action. But off she goes without hesitation , with only a beheaded, logically murderous robot for company on an alien ship which also presumably contains another deadly cargo of death with the same maps back to Earth.
All because SHE WANTS HER ANSWER!!
It is tantamount to somebody finding an abandoned nuclear silo plus missiles and asking loudly “Why haven’t we had a nuclear war yet?” yet insisting on continually jabbing their finger on the red launch button to see if they go off. Not very clever at all.
As a stand alone film without any links to the original it would work better, but only just. Having watched it a few times since on DVD, having almost totally divorced my belief that its connected Alien (by hitting the stop button before the chestburster scene at the end), I can just about make up a story in my head that makes it a better experience for me, explains many things away and leaves it open for a sequel. But that’s an awful lot of work for a two hour film and no other story in my experience has ever provoked and needed so much effort or examination. Even the Phantom Menace didn't cause me this much analysis. I just gave up on that. I think its because, despite all my complaints about it ,Prometheus is still a very descent film. I just wished it was better written and had a more critical eye cast across it before it got into production.
