Quote from: episodenone on Aug 06, 2012, 03:18:48 AM
Wait a sec... you're saying the the question of where the Human Race and everything else on the planet Earth if not the entire galaxy / universe is not a profound question?
Surely you jest. Because I'd dare say that most astrophysicists and religious zealots would argu it is THE most profound question in Human History.
Problem is, it isn't asking a question about the origin of life.
It's asking about the origin of
terrestrial life.
And then saying "Aliens did it".
This is not profound. This is not intellectually deep, nor is it difficult to fathom. It's every bit the cheap, lazy answer of "God did it". Something
did it, something
made it; we think this because this is how things
work on the human scale. The existence of a watch implies a watchmaker, ergo we conclude that the existence of Man implies some Creator.
Prometheus, being sci-fi, proposes its Engineers, and so thinks it's made some grand statement.
It hasn't.
Not only that, passing off the origin of life
here to something over
there doesn't actually answer the question of how life started, it just passes it off to something else. As Holloway himself asks, "Who made them?". If the answer is "Engineer Engineers", it's bullshit. If the answer is "Presumably the same way life in reality started -- no f**kin' clue", then what was the point in the Engineers in the first place?
But I admit I have missed what
Prometheus clearly considers its
biggest question -- not who, but
why. Why make us?
Except the film never answers this. Nor does it give the audience the tools it needs to answer this. It doesn't even give the audience enough to begin justifying their own beliefs. All they can do is form an opinion and scrounge the film for scraps of information to tentatively support what amounts to musing. It throws the question out, dangling it in front of the audience, looking so God-damned pleased with itself because of it, and then tears it away and says "Nope, horror movie ending now, see you for part 2 when we get around to answering what is, ostensibly, the question that
justifies this film's existence in the first place."
There's nothing smart or clever or deep or intellectual about posing a question in a vacuum. The film hardly seems bothered to make us interested in the question anyway. It's dropped in a handful of dialogue, but every time something comes up the movie throws another tentacle monster at us.
tl;dr "Did aliens do it?" is a boring horseshit non-answer to a legitimately intellectually stimulating question and saying "Why did aliens do it?" isn't actually profound or meaningful unless you
actually give the audience something to mull on.