why don't these c*nts have their helmets on
an exploration of narrative incredulity through my hatred of the movie Prometheus
My new novel is out next month, and I’m taking it on tour! I’d love to see you at one of these events. Tickets can be booked at the links here. I’m also part of a couple of launch events for Fierce Salvage, a new anthology of Scottish queer writing—and I’m thrilled to be introducing The Lighthouse at the Glasgow Film Theatre as part of this. See you there?
The human animal is a complex beast. It is known, and can be trusted, to act in nonsensical ways. You think you know a person, but they can truly surprise you. You would think that a mother could not harm her child. You would think a lifelong romantic would stay true to their love. You would think a man who made one of the most perfect space horror films of all time would understand the concept of storytelling. You would think.
To hate on Prometheus feels almost retro now, given that since then we—and by ‘we’ I mean people haunted by a deep love for the movie Alien—have been fed the laughably bad Covenant and the mercifully forgettable Romulus. But to understand the betrayal of Prometheus you have to appreciate the promises made by its excellent marketing, the slick portrayal of the android David that was dangled in front of our faces, the idea that this film could save us from the sour taste left by the clusterfuck that was Resurrection. 2012 was a different time—a dumber, more hopeful time. When this trailer was released, my boss, my coworker and I all gathered around the computer to watch, like kids getting access to footage of Santa:
For all subsequent Alien movies I have trotted to the cinema against my will, driven by peer pressure and masochism, certain that Ridley Scott would once again turn around and spit in my pathetic little face. But I ran to the cinema to see Prometheus, clutching my stupid heart and hoping for magic.
It starts off so well. The wide, opening shots are beautiful; no one can argue with Scott’s ability to frame a landscape. We see a large blue-white mannish creature drink some goo and come apart as he throws himself into a waterfall. We meet archaelogists on the Isle of Skye as they find an old painting of Slenderman pointing at six balls. Then we are whisked to the ship Prometheus, where the android David, seeing that the ship is rounding on its destination planet, wakes the ship’s crew up from two-year cryosleep. Almost none of them, it turns out, know why they are there.
Meredith Vickers, apparent head of the mission, introduces a hologram of Peter Weyland, of the Weyland corporation (later to become the infamous Weyland-Yutani corporation) and creator of David, who explains that he has ploughed a trillion dollars into this mission because the archaeologists (who are now astronauts as well) have convinced him that this six-ball sketch points specifically to a planet 35 light years away from Earth. Weyland believes this mission will somehow give godlike power to humans, just as the Titan Prometheus did.
Archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and her immediately unlikeable boyfriend Holloway explain that they’ve found this same ball sketch in artworks from six different ancient civilisations, and that in the whole universe there is only one galactic system that has the same number of balls in this incredibly vague configuration, and they can somehow scan so far that they can see that this system has a sun and a planet that has a moon that can sustain life. Shaw claims, with no explanation, that the map is in fact an ‘invitation’ from a race of beings that engineered us, implying that the theory of Darwinian evolution is wrong after all. Rafe Spall’s needlessly-American character asks, of this scientist who has convinced a man to spend a trillion dollars—a thousand billions of dollars—on this trip which attempts to undermine a few hundred years of accepted science, risking the lives of a dozen people and the existence of the most advanced android ever created, what evidence she has for this:
‘But how do you know?’
And Elizabeth Shaw says:
‘I don’t. But it’s what I choose to believe.’
And it is at this point, twenty-one minutes into the movie, that you realise that this is going to be one of the most lazily-written pieces of pseudophilosophical shit you’ve ever seen. And you are right.
There is no reason for Elizabeth Shaw to believe this hackneyed, terribly unconvincing reason for going two and a half years into space. She’s a scientist, in fact, so the entire basis of her body of work is that everything must be disbelieved until it is proven. But she’s also a Christian, as every laboured shot of the cross necklace she wears tells us, so actually the whole scientific method thing doesn’t matter. Humans are complex, the movie shrugs.
Needlessly-American ship’s captain Idris Elba takes the Prometheus down to the planet and by complete coincidence they instantly come upon the structure they’re looking for. Having not checked the weather and with only six hours of daylight remaining, the archaeologist who has absolutely no authority tells the captain who has total authority that they must immediately go down on the planet because he ‘wants to open his Christmas presents.’ Shaw, the other archaeologist with no authority, who has been explicitly told that she has no authority by Vickers, stops a crew member from taking weapons onto the surface of the planet they know nothing about, because she doesn’t like the idea of being armed. Thus defanged, they all suit up and head out onto the planet and into the structure. Inside they find running water, and a lack of c02; outside, the levels are ‘completely toxic’—just metres away, the atmosphere is fatal for humans—but in here, this doesn’t appear to be the case. And with that, on a totally alien, hitherto unexplored planet many many light years away from Earth, on which they have landed less than an hour ago, where they didn’t even check the weather let alone run a single test on the environment or the air or the stability/airtightness of the structure they’re found by accident and are now inside, the male archaeologist Holloway—who is on the verge of making perhaps the single most important scientific discovery in human history, for which he assumedly would like to remain alive—for no clear reason other than proving a point, and against the wishes and demands of the entire rest of the crew including his captain and his romantic and scientific partner, because he doesn’t want to wear it any more, takes his fucking helmet off.
Science fiction by now is a well-trodden genre, and everyone understands its rules. Some sci fi takes us to new world for which their writers can invent whatever universal laws they like. But physics is physics, in this universe at least, and if you’re going to set your space exploration story here, in the reality that we all live in now, then your viewers or readers are going to apply the rules of this universe to whatever happens in that story. One of those rules—the top one, I’d say—being that almost no planets have an atmosphere that can support human life and it is incomprehensibly idiotic to assume it does when being wrong will immediately, or slowly, kill you.
Again: if your story is set on a planet where the air is breathable—that’s fine. That’s totally golden. It’s your planet, you can say what you want. But your characters—earth-bound, human, science-understanding characters—will know and apply the laws of the galaxy just as your viewers or readers do. This is a matter of life and death, after all! They’re the ones who are going to suffocate or become immediately riddled with a foreign disease or beset by malevolent microbes or evaporated by the heat or whatever other horrors await outside the thin and fragile confines that support human life. There are some lessons that are top of the curriculum for different professions, drilled into rookies time and time again. For therapists, it’s don’t fuck your clients. For writers, it’s never respond to Goodreads reviews. For astronauts, stepping out onto completely unknown and untested alien plants for the first time, it’s don’t take your fucking helmet off—especially if, just metres away from you, the actual atmosphere is ‘completely toxic’.
What happens here, then, is that the entire audience realises it knows better than a character who is supposedly a genius. Or, worse, it realises it knows better than the writer, who either doesn’t care about the rules of this world (and the characters) he’s created or thinks you, the audience, are too stupid to realise he’s dismissing them in order to advance the plot. This undermines either the character’s credibility or the writer’s credibility—or, more likely, both. If this character is too idiotic to take even the most basic steps to survive in a film that we already know will test his ability to do so, why should we care? We don’t. We no longer give a shit about these people, and we no longer trust in the writer of the story. We hope they’re going to die.
As a storyteller, you have to give your audience a reason to believe what you're telling them; to suspend their disbelief and buy into your fiction so that you can take them on some sort of journey. They have to allow themselves to feel safe in your hands as a storyteller, so that they will immerse themselves in the world you’ve created. When you show them not just once but multiple times that you are unconcerned or openly hostile to their needs as an audience, and unable to abide by the rules of the world and the characters you have created, they will rightly disconnect from the story. You have strained their credulity to breaking point. Immersion is impossible, the possibility of being really affected by the film is gone. The movie, in that moment, fails.
Prometheus is far from the only sci fi movie to suffer from the problem of glossing over the bounds of credibility too often and too quickly in order to simply move the narrative onto where the writer or director wants it to go; movies in all genres suffer from this. But the issues inherent in sci fi storytelling are greater, because if it was that easy to send people onto other planets we would be doing it already. There are so many questions asked by the theoretical possibility of space exploration, and these have to be answered in some way in these kinds of stories: as I’ve seen it put elsewhere, you simply have to have good science, or at least passable science. When you don’t, you undermine what everyone knows to be the case about the problems of space, and having your characters do dumb things just to move the plot forward ends up frustrating your audience to the point that they just don’t care about these idiots you’ve created. Very often this plays out by having apparently genius-level people undermining their own safety for next to no reason, at the very first possible point, just so something or someone can attack them. I call this the why don't these c*nts have their helmets on problem.
Characters in all kinds of fiction, like people in real life, behave in erratic ways. You can’t pin all human behaviour down to logic; sometimes people just do things and even they don’t really know why. But in a story, reactions and choices and behaviours do have to have some reasoning behind them—usually emotional, sometimes physical, always rooted in what we understand about them and the world around them. Their reactions don’t have to be logical but they do have to be congruent. In Alien, Dallas attempts to override Ripley’s order not to bring the likely-infected Kane back onto the Nostromo, a choice that is illogical and would risk the safety of the crew—but this decision makes sense in the context of his character. He is the captain of a tug ship, more used to dealing with interpersonal conflicts than alien threats, worn down by the tensions amongst his crew and the grunt nature of his mission, and he is wholly unprepared to be suddenly diverted to an exploratory space mission that erupts into unforeseen danger. In the moment he is overwhelmed with a real, very human concern for his crew member which overrides his ability to think coldly and logically. Ripley stops him from making this error, but the android Ash undermines Ripley and lets them in anyway because he is secretly in the service of The Company. Now, we have two seemingly illogical choices, but both make perfect sense in the context of both character and story. In Prometheus, Holloway and Shaw have been preparing for this exploratory mission for years, perhaps decades, knowing at every moment that they may—in fact, that they wish—to come across alien life that could be dangerous, whether that’s an Engineer or a parasite or an infectious disease. What they’re looking for is evidence of life and that could come in any form. They’re not commercial pilots but scientists. And Holloway doesn’t even take his helmet off in an excited moment of stupidity or fear; he takes it off because he’s being a prick.
This piss-poor characterisation is not even limited to one character. At least half of them are this stupid and thoughtless, and the other half are just nonsensical; at one point Vickers, who has previously been nothing but cold and hostile, suddenly decides to fuck Idris Elba. When the crew return to the ship with the Engineer’s head that they’ve taken from the planet—a humanoid alien creature, a biological entity with all the inherent threats therein, the first discovery of an actual alien creature in all of history—they for some reason decide to attempt to reanimate it by way of electrical currents. As if this wasn’t idiotic enough, they do this without any physical barrier between this alien organic matter and themselves, and not even bothering to cover their mouths and noses with the medical face masks that they have AROUND THEIR NECKS. They only throw this miraculous discovery behind glass when it becomes clear that their actions are going to make it explode, which it then does. The most important discovery potentially in the history of mankind, destroyed. By scientists. For what possible reason would you shock this thing with electricity? Who are these fucking people?
Worst, though, is the situation with the punk geologist and the insufferable biologist, who despite having gone by choice into the deepest reaches of space because they ‘love rocks’ / wish to discover new life forms, become cripplingly terrified by the very possibility of discovering said life forms—so terrified that they immediately abandon the rest of the crew to go back to the ship. Except they don’t make it back to the ship, because these two guys—one of whom actually mapped the entire structure, whose job it was to navigate the place—incomprehensibly get lost. Neither of them attempts to communicate this to the ship, which has the very map they created and could surely guide them home. And then, the biologist, who has thus far been horror-stricken at the possibility of anything actually existing in the caves of the planet, comes across a totally new alien snake-like creature which is visibly, audibly hostile, behaving in a manner that’s very obviously aggressive, hissing and rising up and showing its weird alien mouth—and in response to this very real and present danger to his life, attempts to pet it. Mercifully, he is soon killed. Even children know not to hold their hands out to strange dogs. How are all these geniuses also at the same time the most idiotic humans alive?
Once you notice the laziness in this movie, it is everywhere. In Alien, the intra-personal conflicts within the crew are a result of pressures, of class and power differentials. They antagonise each other because there are differences between them, often unfair. In Prometheus, the crew are twats to each other because the movie needs to have some point of tension. Because conflict is required for narrative, so they have invented it. Why is the ginger one such a knobhead? Because they needed a knobhead character. Why is Holloway so horrible to David despite no provocation? Because they need to show some android/human tension. It would be so easy to invent even thin reasons for this; you can have the ginger idiot say that he hates the scientists because no one takes geology seriously, or he always gets overruled on these trips, or anything else based in professional ego. Even Romulus bothers to have the wildly cliched and frankly embarrassing ‘an android killed my mother’ line to explain the human disliking the android character. Prometheus can’t even bring itself to do that. In Prometheus, things in the film are as they are because the film needs them to be that way. Because the plot is going to advance in a certain direction and everything will be bent towards that, regardless of how little sense it makes. Everything is in the service of the film’s ability to make unoriginal statements about the nature of belief and religion because the writer has read a book entitled My First Philosophy. The story doesn’t matter, making sense doesn’t matter, consistent characterisation doesn’t matter. Giving the viewer reason to believe doesn’t matter.
Everything about this film suggests that writer nor director really care what the overall effect of the film is; for Scott, it was a vehicle for his admittedly gorgeous set-pieces (specifically the scene where David discovers the projection map which he then interacts with, a palpable sense of wonder on his face) and for Lindelof, it was in service of his reputation as a writer who deals with ‘big ideas’ (the ‘big idea’ here being something uninteresting about the nature of religious belief). The entire point of the movie is to force grand questions on its viewers, only to show itself completely unable to not only answer those questions but to have anything even vaguely interesting to say about them. The main takeaway from Prometheus, as far as I can tell as a masochistic repeat viewer, is sometimes some people believe things. Great. Thanks!
I have watched Prometheus maybe 20 times in my life. My partner, my partner’s twin and I used to do an annual Christmas hatewatch. I have seen this film more than many genuine fans have. And yet there are still so many things in it that make no sense at all, that aren’t explained or can’t be the case or defy all the rules of the world it’s set in. For instance:
David putting something in Holloway’s drink when it is literally in front of his face rather than, for instance, any other fucking time.
Idris Elba, the captain, going to bed and leaving the bridge unmanned when two of his crew are off-ship, lost and freaking out.
This trillion-dollar mission happening off the back of a handful of vague scribbles showing six circles in a configuration that surely occur thousands and thousands of times throughout the known universe given that almost unfathomable amount of stars and the many angles you can look at them from.
A geologist, on a spaceflight on which he has been in cryosleep for 99% of the time, somehow having time to rig his supposedly perfectly engineered spacesuit to somehow achieve combustion within the contained area of said suit and then blow weed smoke into his helmet.
A geologist somehow being able to sneak weed onto a trillion-dollar space mission and then thinking to take it with him as it goes into an alien planet for the first time. And then having it fill his helmet which is otherwise filled with the oxygen he needs to survive.
A woman making one of the most significant scientific discoveries in the history of humanity and then getting upset because she can’t have children, which is not new information to her or relevant to their discovery, and then immediately having sex.
The single medical pod on a ship of mixed sex humans on a trip of multiple years which not only can’t perform a caesarian or an abortion but which is specifically calibrated ‘to male persons only’. Which then also proceeds to perform a surgery which is, in fact, exactly a caesarian, including stapling the patient up afterwards, despite saying it can’t.
A woman who has just had a not-caesarian performed, to remove a three-month-old alien foetus from her uterus without anaesthetic, immediately getting up and running around the ship in her bandage underwear.
Humans being an ‘exact genetic match’ for the Engineers who look completely different to humans.
The idea that the best way for a hyper-intelligent species to seed a very specific life on another planet (if that is indeed what is supposed to be happening) is by having one single member of that species eating some black goo and throwing himself into a waterfall.
The Engineers seeding all human life only to leave all these vague-ass star maps to eventually send humans to a military installation where they will then just kill all the humans and then try to send a ship to destroy earth.
Holloway despising David for no apparent reason.
David poisoning Holloway with black goo for no apparent reason.
Vickers running directly forward away from a rolling crashed ship instead of to the side which would have undeniably saved her life.
The film’s premise being all about belief, but then having the main narrative drive being the believer’s desperation to prove what she believes, which is the opposite of belief. That’s science.
As an audience we can, of course, come up with our own reasons for why any of these things happened. But why would we bother? Lindelof and Scott can’t be bothered to trace logical paths through this story, so I am not going to waste my time doing so. Audiences love to solve a mystery, to answer a question—but there has to be something for them to go on, some breadcrumbs for them to follow. There’s a difference between not spelling things out completely for your audience and creating multiple situations so vague and with so little to suggest any reasoning that you leave your audience having to invent explanations out of thin air. The latter is simply unsatisfying.
The most frustrating thing about all this is that, according to many sources, including this one, some of the questions above, at least those concerning the overarching plot and the tedious obsession with the creator/creation theme, were in fact answered in earlier versions of the script, and in some cases in scenes which were filmed and then deleted from the finished product. There is a conversation between Weyland and the surviving Engineer that explains that they were attempting to seed life on Earth and humans resulted, and they weren’t happy with humans, so they kidnapped a human and sent him down to Earth to try and warn humans how badly they’d gone off track, but they killed him anyway; yes, the Engineers created Jesus. Then when Weyland presents David as proof that he, like the Engineers, is god-like and can create humanoid life, the Engineer becomes enraged and attacks David. Literally none of that is in the movie—and not just in a ‘they didn’t say that outright’ way, in the ‘there is no evidence by which anyone could have ever known any of that’ way. All we see of the aforementioned conversation is the Engineer waking up, a slight plea from Weyland and then the Engineer ripping David’s head off and trying to kill everyone. Ridley Scott removed the already-bad explanation from the film entirely.
This leaves a film which is already wildly unnecessary from the perspective of the Alien series, but then goes on to ram a bunch of philosophy 101 questions down your throat, using poor, nonsensical characterisation, incoherent action and terribly clichéd dialogue, glossing over clear plot holes to do so, and then goes out of its way to remove your ability to answer those questions. Some of these changes were made to dangle issues that would be resolved in a sequel, sacrificing a coherent story for the sake of future money. What this means is that the only way you can understand Prometheus’ plot is to get hold of a load of deleted scenes or previous versions of the script which are not meant to be public, to come upon an interview with the director or cast where they explain things that aren’t even hinted in the film, to look up scenes that have incomprehensibly been relegated to YouTube (see below)—or to watch a future film that may or may not be made (and was not). This, my friends, is evidence of either a failed story or a complete and overwhelming contempt for the audience. And any writer, director or consumer of stories could tell you that.
You could say, and I have heard people do so, that Prometheus is about faith, and so it makes sense that the characters depart from reason or logical at every turn. I would say that actually, it is evidence that neither its writer nor its director understand what made the original Alien movie so good and simply don’t care about the experience of their audiences. They are more concerned with creating a flimsy narrative to do what their egos want to do: to create certain scenes and pose certain pseudophilosophical questions. You cannot completely undermine your audience’s credulity so early on, and repeatedly, and expect them to willingly suspend their disbelief for long enough for you to make your banal and pompous point. You might disagree, and I know many people do. But to me, who came to this movie with so much hope in her heart, this makes it is simply one of the most frustrating, rage-inducing and tedious movies ever made. That’s what I choose to believe.
My next novel Carrion Crow—a dark, physical book that ‘deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender from the pages of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’—is forthcoming in Feb 27th 2024. You can support me, and this substack, by pre-ordering it here:
I am so grateful to find someone in this fallen world who hates this film with the burning, gem-like flame of hate I have felt since paying a babysitter and full freight for evening tickets to watch this god-cursed abomination in an actual theater.
Prometheus and Covenant are perfect examples of The Idiot Plot. (A story that otherwise wouldn’t happen or would resolve immediately if every character involved wasn’t a complete idiot.)
At least with Prometheus Ridley did it on purpose for some failed attempt at the symbolism of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t an oversight that the cartographer gets lost and the biologist gets attacked by a wild animal, it just didn’t work. At all.