Had issues with the movie, "Prometheus"?

[mckitterick]

... or didn't grasp what in toothy hell Ridley Scott was trying to do? Well, suffer no more! Here's an excellent blog post that examines all the symbolisms. I stand by my prior declaration that Prometheus rocks. Best, Chris

Comments

[chalcedonygrey.livejournal.com]

Your link to the blog post appears to be broken?

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Odd. Like tama grey, I got an error message when I hit on the link. Odd. So I went to Cavalorn's blog - the blog titled "Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About" sounded right. I clicked - worked fine. Odd.

*Really* odd - the URL for that page is exactly the same as what you posted. I see no difference.

So. For the rest of you - if you have problems, go to Cavalorn's posts and look for the recent one titled as I wrote.

Odd.

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

And, amid the oddities, I forgot - -

Thanks for posting it !

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

I posted some other replies, but, I had the same trouble, went to Cavalorn's blog, found the post, with the same URL!

[etcet.livejournal.com]

It's kind of adorable watching Cavalorn's head explode over the attention that essay has gotten (he's apparently been referenced or interviewed on some UK television shows and whatnot, too).

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed that - huh. Wonder if LJ is having glitches today.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

That's pretty cool!

[dotar-sojat.livejournal.com]

Took me a while, but I got a response put together exploding cavalorn's views of PROMETHEUS.

http://dotar-sojat.livejournal.com/178988.html

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

I hate it when that happens.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Haters gotta hate ;-) Here's my take:

I very much look forward to the home version, which will have (rumor sez) at least 30 minutes of extra footage, plus lots more stuff, you can be sure.

Here's my read: Our killing Space Jesus isn't why the Engineers decided to wipe us out; it might just be that they consider us irredeemable, or they made something they like better and want to give that a try instead, or that they're unknowable creepy space-gods (hence the cosmological horror angle).

I assumed that the first scene (post-gratuitous-helicopter-shots) with the Engineer and his cup o' horror was how they seed lifeless planets. Doesn't matter where it is; it's just a glimpse into their process. No life? Well, their life-creating goo won't work, so they need someone willing to sacrifice him or herself to create life. Why? Why do any sentient life-forms do shit? 'Cause they CAN.

They've been leaving clues for us to come visit them forever, right? Well, it's not because they love us and want us to meet our makers. It's because THE SENTINEL by Arthur C. Clarke. Once we are capable of reaching their planets, we are a DANGER, so it's time to start over on Earth.

Seems pretty straightforward to me: Once we reach star-travel stage (and hence can use enormous energies), and we want to meet other kids in the galaxy, we become a threat to REAL life (everyone thinks they're the real people and all others are the threat). So they give us clue over the millennia about where to find them... but not their home planet, of course, but a place that, when visited, destroys the explorers and then triggers the sleeping genocidal crew (or life-creating crew - all a matter of perspective) to go to the place where we came from.

Viola! Problem (threat) solved, and new life experiment begun.

This is the core of it, I believe, and it's all in the movie. The rest is just symbolism that the writers and Scott use so we don't miss it and because they thought it would be cool to provide an alternate take on the whole "God is love" notion. That is, they wanted to inject cosmological horror into that assumption....