The Movie Prometheus And Its Wondrous Ironies...

The Movie Prometheus And Its Wondrous Ironies…

I will come to wondrous ironies momentarily, but even if I were void of thumbs, I would grow them to give the movie Prometheus two thumbs nose-bleed-way-up. In watching the Prometheus movie, it becomes obvious that Director Ridley Scott has not lost any of his mojo from the days when he helmed such Science fiction epics like Alien and Blade Runner and even though those movies are now decades old… they still hold their own along side the modern epics like Christopher Nolan’s take on the Dark Knight and Joss Whedon’s recent Avengers’ opus. And just how it is a given that a John Woo movie will have scenes replete with doves or pigeons… so too will a Ridley Scott science fiction movie will be rife with wondrous ironies.

The movie starts in earnest with two scientists, a married couple, discovering frescoes/paintings supposedly mirroring the same drawings from different cultures spread across the world - coincidence, like the scientists believe, its not. The scientists believed that the drawings on the cave walls were made by those who made Human Beings and infused us with DNA, and, apparently, a decade are so later, the couple has convinced a corporation to fund a trillion dollar trek to meet our supposed makers. One of the first ironies in Prometheus is that the female scientist - notwithstanding operating on Darwin’s secular principles, which to most scientists are Rosetta Stones to life’s origins - believes in Christ Jesus… even maintaining her Christian faith farther along in the movie when she is confronted with empirical evidence.

One would think that Prometheus is a Charlize Theron’s movie, but the female scientist, played by Noomi Rapace, steals the show… here, we see the female scientist character’s arc highlighted in the beginning of the opus of her being a pacifist and who then morphed into a kick-butt version of the pre-Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s character) from the Alien movie. There is a classic scene of watching Rapace performing what is tantamount to a self abortion to save human kind; we all have seen in movies or imagined performing an amputation without anesthetics, but even with the modern amenities, the surgery done in Prometheus is viscerally painful.

Speaking of Charlize Theron - she is so ‘cold’ in Prometheus that you are going to have a hard time figuring out if she is indeed human or a robot... ironically there is a robot, which manned the ship and took care of the crew while they were in stasis for over two years for the journey to the alien planet. Later in the movie, you will realize why Theron is a Tundra... due to daddy issues. Idris Elba also stands out as the ship’s captain - this is the same Elba whose brilliant work on HBO’s, The Wire, has garnered the Johnny-Come-Latelies critics kudos and fans. Elba along with his crew in Prometheus… makes the ultimate sacrifice for all of earth’s billions of souls. Director Scott too lost his normal bravado to the real life issue of America’s negative view of having top Hollywood White starlets having romantic interracial relationships on screen by having the love scene between Theron and Idris happen, apparently, off screen.

In Prometheus, the cadence of the action sequences and the musical score work in tandem to bring on the willies and what is so brilliant about this movie is that one knows that the scares are coming... yet one is still caught off guard with the terror. We also get to see the origin of the alien species from Director Scott’s original Alien movie, starring Sigourney Weaver and without giving too much away, think of Oppenheimer, father of the Atom bomb… realizing that the Atom/Nuclear weapons were organic, sentient creatures and Oppenheimer then doing all he can to destroy them. I save the last irony because it is rather obvious to Traditional Christians, like myself. Twice in Prometheus, when some of the characters were scared out of their wits… they invoked the phrase, Jesus! I often wondered if this ‘cry’ for help is written in the script or is borne out of ad libbing by the actors as something someone would naturally say when in trouble, even in a movie exploring the origins of life outside of Christ’s creation in the Garden of Eden.