"Prometheus" on Birth and Predation
What's the universe's ultimate goal? Even pop sci-fi films imagine the answers for us
The other day I had an unusual hankering for a forgettable movie I’d seen. Curious about why, I had to explore.
The thing about exploring anything, movie art being no exception, is that you have to be careful that your curiosity doesn’t harm you. Because the movie could not just act as a time sink, it could be downright, aggressively bad.
Anyway, the hankering was for the “Alien” franchise reboot “Prometheus,” the fourth Alien movie from 2012, which beckoned strongly, and I partly knew why. There’s a scene in that movie that I’ll never forget, because of who I saw it with and under what circumstances.
God knows why I watched this one with my wife, the lovely lady who jumps even at innocuous rom-com scenes. She could only do one thing during any Alien movie, and that is squirm to the point of frightened contortion.
What was wrong with me? I must’ve been too young to know better, in my early 30s.
The scene in question is perhaps the most horrifying surgical procedure scene at the movies. If you know anything about “Alien,” you might even be able to guess at this specific terror of “Prometheus.”
My wife had just given birth twice in the previous four years, one natural birth and one Caesarian, the latter because of twins. I witnessed that Caesarian in person. It was among the most bizarre sights of my wife.. The top half of my wife, sedated I think somewhere around the thorasic section of the spinal cord, was normal, friendly, smiling, a bit drugged from the anaesthetic.
The bottom half was, well, being cut open. Out they pulled, within two minutes, two kids. Half the people I know would’ve fainted. I’m sure the only reason why I didn’t was excitement and adrenaline.
In “Prometheus,” a female character is literally impregnated with “bad seed.” This is all a bit complex to describe precisely at this point in the essay. The short way for now is that an amoral android put a bio-engineered organic weapon into her boyfriend, he didn’t know about this, they copulate at night, and then the next day, this boyfriend becomes a host organism and the female character has gotten his bad seed during the night before.
The bad seed is of course colored as black in the film. Under movie color-logic, for SF spectacles especially, black means it’s probably bad.
Anybody who knows the Alien franchise knows what’s inside of her. The chestburster scene from 1979’s “Alien” here is modified for great effect.
“Prometheus’” heroine, with no one to help, uses an Auto-Doc to perform emergency abdominal surgery. At first she tries to input the word “Caesarian” into the Auto-Doc, hoping for the right kind of surgical extraction, but it tells her that it’s only configured for male anatomy— a humorous millisecond in a usually humorless franchise.
It’s one of those extraordinary science-fictional moments that describes why I love the genre completely. At the moment of total cinematic terror, there’s an awesomely visualized kernel idea for medicine, the Auto-Doc and its possibilities, the surgeon who can heal without a sentient surgeon. As always, the “Alien” franchise, “Prometheus” especially, tries to figure out whether humans are even necessary to the telos of the universe at all.
Anyway, the Auto-Doc quickly performs abdominal surgery — probably in about one-minute of screentime — while the alien inside the woman nearly gets her. My wife’s squirming was off the charts. She watched, but she shouldn’t have, but yet she did. That’s how cinematic curiosity gets the best of us.
Brave this one if you dare.
The Apex of the Predator?
I figured out my hankering for the movie: “Prometheus” turns out to be a longish “Star Trek” episode, my favorite kind of story arc that must’ve registered somewhere in my imagination back in 2012 and then popped up again 12 years later. These things have a way of gestating and then emerging, these curious wants of ours, the origins of which often remain total enigmas.
As you know, the plot arcs of “Star Trek” feature a merry crew of scientists and explorers looking for answers to life’s great mysteries, such as the answer to why we exist and what’s beyond the universe. Episodes introduce novel mysteries, clever characters solve them, but in solving them, new mysteries come up. That keeps both the merry band of explorers exploring, and audiences like me watching.
I never took to “Star Trek” that much, utter utopian fantasy that it is, arguably a modified militaristic, socialist utopia on the lines of Edward Bellamy’s late 19th-century “Looking Backward.” I do love those dreams of total socio-political and economic bliss; yet they just don’t seem to have really ever happened, yet.
But “Star Trek” has something on 2012’s “Prometheus,” which is Ridley Scott’s return to the franchise he birthed via “Alien.” At that point in 2012, the first two “Alien” movies, different directors with different objectives, were pop-culture classics. The next two movies, “Alien3” and “Alien: Resurrection,” spiraled lower and ever lower in terms of love and critical acclaim. (Full disclosure: I really like the religiously-tinged “Alien3” set on a prison planet. But it’s the director’s cut, by first-timer David Fincher, that is the only way to try to watch it.)
The utopian hopes of “Star Trek” mean that there are no wants except the want to discover. As the title narration of the original TV show goes, the want was always and only “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” and nothing more, because there is nothing more to achieve once all political, economic, and social problems have been largely solved. (Okay, Trekkers, I concede that there are still problems involving galactic harmony between advanced species.)
“Prometheus” acts as a counter to Trek’s never-yet-achieved dreams, telling us that seeking for life’s mysteries — here it’s the biological origin of the human species — results in nothing but disappointment and ruin.
Moreover, what any advanced species creates is the means of its possible, total destruction.
It’s a bit of a downer, the “Alien” franchise lore, to say the least. If you asked it about AI and ChatGPT, it would cackle, and then point to the end of “Prometheus"!
I must briefly do plot summary. In “Prometheus,” two scientists discover ancient-alien ruins that point to a stellar map. Years later, those scientists and a small crew head toward the planet they think the ancient-aliens are from. They’re funded by a presumably dead trillionaire and his corporation, which has ulterior motives. On board is an android with, as always, other ulterior motives. The entire crew land on the planet, encounter vast mysteries, get infected, get hijacked, encounter monsters, and as usual and to the delight of audiences like me, all hell breaks loose.
This all seems like light entertainment when described in this way. Yet for “Prometheus,” there’s major philosophical assumptions that, every day, major political actors base their decisions on! As usual, they’d better get the right assumptions.
I suggest there’s a choice between “Star Trek” assumptions and “Alien” assumptions out there. These aren’t the only two, but even in popular currents today, you can see them playing out.
Contra “Star Trek,” “Prometheus,” following the brutal realist logic of the franchise, shows that an advanced species’ annihilation comes from the intelligences they engineer, either biologically or mechanically.
Example number one is the amoral android. In a role that he was completely meant for, Michael Fassbinder plays “David,” who strangely models himself on Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence from “Lawrence of Arabia.” David helps prove that humanity’s vast intelligence, which we sometimes love to rate highly, could create other intelligences capable of annihilating us and anything else.
(By the way, I must disclaim that all of this is standard SF material, which if “Alien” in 1979 could’ve pulled off, it should’ve. “Prometheus” is one giant Rehash of everything in Scott’s classic horror flick — the capital “R” on Rehash is well deserved — with the intellectual and narrative seeds of it being used in SF stories no later than the 1950s. In a way, it’s too bad we can’t go back and make “Prometheus” the first Alien franchise film, as it is by the franchise’s own internal chronology.)
Now the rub. “Prometheus” completely inverts utopian Star-Trek quests by adding in one factor that Trek omits: predation.
And here’s a common difference between utopian dreaming and dystopian worries that “Prometheus” uses: Is the universe, or existence itself, one where predation is the highest concern that we must acknowledge, heed, respect, and squirm about?
We’ve come to a fundamental assumption of our existence: is the engine of the universe anything more than predation that leads to destruction and creation? Is it “live, reproduce, eat, die, repeat — until the heat death of the universe”?
Star Trek basically has no predation, none at all. First, the Trek crew can replicate food on their starships. They don’t even kill plants anymore in the 25th century! Second, the galactic political body known as the Federation seeks — in the general Trek lore — a peaceful coalition of intelligent, star-worthy species to do nothing but the only thing you can still want in the Trek universe: “to boldly go” somewhere where nobody’s been yet.
Contra that, “Alien” is all predation, the entire franchise. When you go boldly to that somewhere no one’s been, the franchise says, you’re going to get eaten.
Aside: I want you to really ponder this if you love Ridley Scott, a director who has been catering to various ideological causes such as the #MeToo movement in his movies. Ignore that kind of posturing. The undercurrent in nearly every Scott film — every single one that I can think of off-hand right now — is that predation is the rule of nature. This means that hierarchies of power rule, over which nothing else can conquer or dominate, such as “true love,” or the grace of God, or equality and political rights.
Scott’s “Nature” — that’s a short-hand for his movies, though they are obviously collaborative, with screenwriters penning the stuff — is one that’s Darwinian enough.
The alien can infect you, burst you open, reproduce itself, and call it a day. Its blood melts your skin off. It wants you, and it wants you now, so that it can survive. You will die, of course, so that it can remain at the top of hierarchy.
In the franchise, this extends to colonization efforts, which is also based on predation.
“Prometheus” introduces us to the progenitors of humans, borrowing from the silly ancient-aliens lore that’s been good fodder for pop-culture speculation. The movie considers that ancient aliens were basically trying to spread their seed across the galaxy, or else bio-engineer creatures as weapons to stop the seed-spread.
The Prometheans seem to have been at war, which is the default setting of the universe. Hence they were just playing along in creating humans.
Everything “human” in the “Alien” franchise, therefore, involves bio-engineering. That leads to the doom of the Prometheans, the ancient aliens who seeded humanity at the beginning of “Prometheus.” These bulgy, plasticky proto-humans — who I must say are not the finest looking creatures in science fiction — die out because their experiments or engineering goes wrong.
What will be said next may bother fans of the franchise, and you might as well know that spoilers are coming: The Prometheans are the creators of the acid-for-blood terrors-of-the-night that stalk the “Alien” movies and repeatedly hunt down poor skinny 30-something females in them.
Also, I come away with another thought that “Prometheus” introduces, though it’s an interpretation and not a for-sure way of looking at the film: the Prometheans bio-engineered the human species, and so humans themselves are created as weapons of a sort.
That means we are no different, as far as our core mission, than the aliens that haunt the “Alien” movies.
Of what sort of weapons are we, according to “Prometheus”? Either humans are colonizers, a nicer word for an invasive species that infests everything, or else humans are a simulacra of the proto-humans who will create the technological marvels that will dominate the universe.
That includes David the android, and anything that is AI, computerized, or robotic. By the way, this does make sense of the film’s forced connections between David and Lawrence of Arabia.
No matter what, “Prometheus” says — and I realize my hankering for it is for its pop-cultural bliss — humans are a means to an end, a step from one predatory colonizing species to the next, or food for a bio-engineered master alien species, or a beta program that will launch the androids-take-over-the-universe revolution.
You can see now that, by contrast, “Star Trek” holds that bipedal humanoids are the apotheosis of the universe (besides — yes thank you Trekkies — the Q continuum, etc.).
“Alien,” meanwhile, has us as just another menu item on the universe’s infinitely bottomless food chain.