Re-watched Prometheus, realizing how a brilliant premise was likely ruined by simply being tied to a franchise

tl;dr - The premise of humans meeting their makers but being completely incapable of navigating the conflicts it creates with their own expectations would have been a gold-mine if not insisting on being tied to the Aliens franchise.

When Promotheus originally came out I was way too frustrated by what I had seen to extract the good from the multitude of bad things I took away from the film. I had shelved the movie and hadn't re-watched it until last night, when I put it on as background noise to chores I was doing around the kitchen. Ended up sitting down to earnestly watch the back half of the film, and was struck by one main takeaway: there was a really cool premise lying among all the busyness that was crammed into the story, and I am left to wonder how that potential was ruined by the insistence of tying it to the Aliens franchise.

The premise I'm referring to was obviously explored and was likely meant to be the film's tent-pole: the idea that we actually get a chance to 'meet our makers', and how that event would actually unravel when its collides against the varied expectations and motives people have going into that experience. This is explored through the characters of Shaw, Weyland, and David - each has a different attitude and inspiration that drives their quest for finding out 'who made us, and why?': Shaw the doe-eyed optimist like a missionary abroad, Weyland the ego-driven megalomaniac simply trying to cheat death, David the emotionless vacuum intent on discovery at any cost. It's awesome to see them each navigate what happens as they unravel 'the truth' of the Engineers and how it conflicts with or confirms what they expected to find.

If Prometheus had just played with that idea and that idea alone it could have been incredible. Having the crew find the Engineers but then grapple among one another with what to do next, how to respond, how to get ahead of the other faction's goals, how to deal with their own disillusionment/shock at the discovery of why we were created, and how all of that human-generated drama ultimately sours the reaction of the Engineers to meeting us again - that could have been an immensely gripping film set against the same tonal & cinematographic backdrop Ridley Scott created.

Instead, that idea is buried by all the other things the film tried to do, which largely seem to stem from trying to be in the same universe as the Alien franchise. The desire to explain (and yet seemingly not manage to explain) where the Alien xenomorph came from, the tie to Weyland corporation, the same beats of jump scare/sci-fi horror & action originating from the original films, insisting that the rest of the crew be seen as motley or weirdly comedic (the biologist and geologist wtf?) - all in some way seem to have their origin or inspiration solely from the franchise's baggage. This extra stuff sucks up so much of the film's time and energy and ends up leaving so little for the central premise that you walk away not even realizing what was trying to be explored.

I'm convinced that if Scott had gone into this film completely free of any desire to tie it to Aliens (of which I am a fan) Prometheus could have turned out to be something much more special. Wonder how much of what was produced was Scott's own desire to tie everything together versus a result of other stakeholders injecting franchise aspirations into whatever he originally came up with.

Submitted October 11, 2020 at 10:52PM by Naught_A_Bot https://ift.tt/3jKK2Yh