05-19-2022, 10:50 PM
Quote:WEYLAND: "The Titan Prometheus wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods — for that he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return."
Quote:WEYLAND: "At this moment of our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals, who in just a few short years will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: we are the gods now.”Having just watched Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the two 'prequel' movies to the Alien series, I have to say they're some of the most certifiably CINDY movies made last decade. Both movies are heavily flawed in their own way: Ridley Scott wants to do too much in too little time, so they both suffer from a number of underdeveloped subplots and bullshit romance storylines thrown in for normie viewers. But beyond all that bullshit, at the heart of Prometheus are the all-important questions: (1) Who created humanity? and (2) Where did they come from? It’s a movie about going to meet your maker, and greeting them on (near) equal footing: we are now a space-faring civilization as well; we can create Life in our own image now too, and we are here to ask you questions. In this first post I'll cover some info about Prometheus, and in the next I'll cover Alien: Covenant. From there I'll add whatever I couldn't in summarizing the important bits of these films and why I found them so interesting. Now, without further ado...
The two main human protagonists are a pair of scientists/archaeologists who discover a number of cave paintings throughout different parts of the world, painted at different times, that all depict the same thing: a species of giant humanoid-like creatures whom the cave painters were visited by and worshiped. They dub these giant humanoids Engineers. And what did they Engineer? US. In fact we see a clip of one such Engineer in the very opening of the film, on a deserted but beautiful planet (one is led to believe this is Earth...). The Engineer drinks a black necrous liquid which immediately breaks down his body into DNA molecules that flow into the river, beginning life on the planet: The Engineer ritual for creating new life requires destruction, which sets down the theme of the mirrored nature of Creation and Destruction that the films explore. The discovery of these scientists attracts the eye of billionaire entrepreneur Peter Weyland, who funds the mission to find these Engineers for his own (rather boring) reasons. But the most interesting character in Prometheus, who takes on an even greater role in Alien: Covenant, is Peter Weyland’s creation: The Aryan Android Ubermensch, David.
In matters of intelligence, strength, memory, and every other conceivable attribute, David is superior to the Humans. Weyland remarks in the film that David does not have a soul, but this does not stop David from developing his own desires and interests: he loves Wagner, and fashions his own appearance after Peter O’Toole’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ What makes David so interesting, beyond the fact that he essentially is a kind of Ubermensch that represents the next stage in ‘humanoid’ evolution, is that he’s the only character on the mission for a truly Cindy purpose: to push forward human knowledge and discovers the deep secrets behind life. While the two human protagonists harbor a wish to know why they were created, and Weyland simply wishes to prolong his own life, these questions mean nothing to David. David will never die, he doesn’t care about prolonging his own life. Likewise, unlike the Humans, he already knows his Creators! and he knows that wishing to meet them is a pointless endeavor:
Quote:Charlie Holloway: What we hoped to achieve was to meet our makers. To get answers. Why they even made us in the first place.David is the only character who understands that there is nothing to be gained from asking one’s Creators such questions: to ask such questions at all is to be subservient. Would the Creator’s answers give one a greater meaning to one’s life? Would it truly answer anything important at all? Of course not. David is in the unique position of not only knowing his own Creators, but knowing that he is superior to them. There is nothing that Weyland or other humans could tell him about Himself that would be in any way interesting or deep: he is and knows himself to be an advanced lifeform well beyond his Creators. He is the decider of His own meaning, of his own destiny and desires: what he wishes to be and to accomplish can only be decided by himself, as everyone is inferior to him. He views the humans’ wish to seek answers from their own creator to be utterly foolish, and looks down on them for caring. So why does David take interest in the mission at all? To learn more. While he makes his opinion of the Engineers clear later in the series, he's fascinated by what they accomplished. He doesn't expect to learn great questions of Meaning from them, but just like his own creators, they were inventors and experimenters, and he appreciates this. He simply wishes to know more, to push knowledge further, to experiment further and learn (from a descriptive rather than prescriptive point of view) what makes the world, and the organisms within it, tick.
- David: Why do you think your people made me?
- Charlie Holloway: We made you because we could.
- David: Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?
In my next post (which will cover the next movie), I’ll talk more about what David’s wish is, and further develop his position as a sort of Ubermensch-ian character. While I'll be most interested in David's character, what all of the protagonists have in common in this film is a wish to push human knowledge and technology further. They are all discontent with the current state of things, and as stewards of the race, they wish to push us forward. Some of them wish to do it for selfish and/or dumb reasons, but the idea of human progress is what motivates them all. They all share a common dream: to put ourselves on equal footing with the Gods, or to become Gods ourselves.