Pondering Prometheus

I'm sure that you've heard of it.

Prometheus.

The latest creation of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator director, Ridley Scott.

Billed as something of a prequel to the 1979 film, Alien, many were waiting with bated breath concerning the history of the xenomorph, the space jockey and planetoid LV-426.

Much of the noise surrounding Prometheus a week after its release, is some confusion and consternation concerning the questions raised and left unanswered. Some have said that it is the result of bad writing. Some have said that it will bomb and will be forgotten quickly.

Others see it as a science fiction classic that may take a few years to gain the reputation it deserves. Much like its progenitor, Alien.

If you have not seen the movie and don't want plot points spoiled, stop reading.

Spoilers ahead

Much of the consternation that surrounds the film, at least that I've heard, is that there is no direct link between Prometheus and Alien. Unlike Alien, which was set on LV-426, Prometheus takes place on the moon LV-223. We don't see a xenomorph until the final frames of the film and even then its not the same as the xenomorph from Alien but rather a forefather.

We do meet the space jockey, now referred to as an Engineer, but the questions of creation and its purpose are only partially answered. We find out that their DNA is a match for human DNA, which we know from the opening sequence of the film, but the opportunity to ask our creators "why?" never happened.

Instead, we get a film that sets up the Engineers as the progenitors of humanity, who leave a star map among several early human civilizations. The discovery of this star map leads our crew of misfits into space under the auspices of the Weyland Corporation.

Running throughout the movie are several motivations.

For David, it is to serve his master the old man Weyland himself, who unbeknownst to the crew, has been with them aboard the Prometheus the whole time.

For Dr. Shaw and her beau, Dr. Holloway, it is to find the answers to humanity's origin and purpose.

For Peter Weyland himself, its to find the parents of humanity in hopes of avoiding death.

For Meredith Vickers, the daughter of Peter Weyland, its secure her right of ascension to the head of the trillion dollar Weyland Corporation.

For the geological and biological comedic relief, its money.

From early on we can see that its David that is pulling the strings from behind the scenes all in an effort to find a live Engineer, but when he is successful, when he finds an Engineer in chryostasis, discerns the operation of their ship along with their purpose and brings Peter Weyland to meet his maker, the sought after revelations are not forth coming.

We witnessed David, studying the languages of the early human civilizations that had documented the star maps that led our crew to the Engineers, early in the film with the purpose of being able to communicate with them if they were found.

So when confronted with their maker, a fully alive Engineer, they are at first met with a person who looks upon these humans with apparent confusion. When David is prompted to speak by Peter Weyland, David does so in a language that is unknown to the audience. The reaction though is very clear, as the Engineer rips off David's head and kills the remaining humans who are present except for Dr. Shaw who manages to escape and subsequently warn the Prometheus that the Engineer is set on returning to earth and that if he succeeds that it will mean the end of humanity.

The Prometheus' captain and crew decide to save humanity by ramming the Engineer's ship, causing it to crash back to the surface of the moon.

Surviving all of this is Dr. Shaw who manages to make it back to the life boat of Vickers only to find the first face hugger alive and gigantic trapped in the medical bay. Upon receiving a warning from the still functional David that the Engineer is on his way to get her, she releases the face hugger upon the Engineer and manages to escape. She then salvages David's body and severed head and convinces him to fly one of the remaining Engineer ships to the Engineer home world.

Returning to the life boat we witness the now dead Engineer's body begin to convulse as our first xenomorph bursts forth from the Engineer's abdomen.

But after all this, we are still left with questions.

Why did the Engineers create humanity?

Why were they travelling to earth to destroy humanity?

Given that the xenomorph witnessed at the end of the film is not the same xenomorph encountered by the crew of the Nostromo in Alien, how does this lone xenomorph evolve and subsequently get to the other planet?

The first question is what drives the first half of the movie, but is not answered.

The second question is what drives the second half of the movie, but it too is not answered.

The creation of the xenomorph is almost a side plot and not really necessary to the overall narrative of the movie. For the xenomorph is actually the product of the machinations of David, who infects Holloway, who has sex with and ultimately impregnates Shaw, who tries to abort and kill the fetus, which ultimately survives and grows to a very large size and is able to kill the Engineer by thrusting an appendage down the throat of the Engineer, which later 'births' the xenomorph. Ultimately though, this plot thread is not necessary to the overall narrative of Prometheus.

So as the movie ends, we have Shaw and David flying off to try and answer questions one and two and the audience left to wonder about the third question.

This has bothered some people and after having given it some thought, here is my attempt to answer questions one and two.

We know from the opening sequences of the film that the Engineers came to earth, leaving one of their own on the surface and then leaving as we watch the Engineer drink a strange black liquid which causes his body to disintegrate and fall into a raging river, which ultimately disperses his now altered genetic material. The product of this is humanity.

We then find out that several ancient human civilizations had been visited by the Engineers, the effect of which was that each of these civilizations that spanned continents and milennia left a star map that would point a scientific crew to the moon LV-223 in the year 2093. The motivations for our scientific protagonists is to find out if the Engineers created humanity and if so, why.

When Shaw the science team first enter the pyramid complex they find a decapitated Engineer. They secure the head and take it back to the ship for testing. They are forced to race back to the ship due to a massive electrical storm, which we are told would fry the suits of the science team if they were caught in it. Back on the Prometheus Drs. Shaw and Ford try to "trick the central nervous system into thinking its alive" by introducing a current to the Engineers brain. The current though causes the Engineers head to explode.

While this is happening we follow a bumbling geologist and biologist who come upon a pile of bodies who have wounds on them that looks like something within them exploded. They make their way to the room where the decapitated Engineer was found which by this time is filled with streams of black goo that was triggered by the environmental change of the chamber triggered by opening the door. We see that this black goo has mutated two worms into aggressive and dangerous creatures that manage to kill the two men.

The black goo that we see here is similar to the black liquid we see the first Engineer drink upon ancient earth.

The geologist falls face first into the goo and later shows up as a mutated, violent and uncontrollable creature. All as a consequence of contact with the goo.

So it would seem that this stuff is actually some biological agent that is meant to identify, attack and mutate the DNA of a host organism in order to turn it into a mindless killing machine. This is later confirmed when the captain of the Prometheus theorizes that what they found was a weapons factory as the Engineers were too smart to create something so dangerous on their own planet.

So what was the purpose of humanity's creation?

Its my thinking that there was no purpose. That what we witness at the beginning of the movie is a biological experiment. The Engineers go to an uninhabited planet, leave one of their own to ingest the new weapon and then remove themselves to monitor from a safe distance. However, rather than simply mutating the engineers DNA, the engineer falls into the river and has the weapon and his deconstructed DNA diluted and spread throughout the environment. This produced us, but that was not the intent.

It would seem that they had been monitoring earth for some time as the civilizations that were said to have the star charts all predated the death of the engineer on the ship 2000 years ago. So the engineers had contact with early human civilizations, hence the cave paintings and carvings, and decide to use us as so many guinea pigs in a planetary test lab.

The Engineers decide to go back to earth, not to destroy the earth but to run another experiment. What happens when we infect this new life form with our bio weapon. Hence all the canisters of goo stockpiled on the ship. This was meant to happen during the early years of the Roman Empire.

When they find the decapitated Engineer, Shaw uses a bit of tech to carbon date the corpse and says that it had been dead for roughly 2000 years. Given this, as we watch the movie and find out how the Engineers were actually on their way to earth in order to destroy or at least infect humanity, it is obvious that they had attempted to do this in what would be the first century AD, when the Roman Empire was reeling from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The problem being that the Engineer crew that was sent to retrieve the biological weapon from their weapons factory was caught in a massive electrical storm. Unprotected, many died having parts of their body explode as did the Engineer's head in the lab when subjected to a current, leaving a pile of corpses that was found by the geologist and biologist.

We see scenes in the movie of the Engineers running, it is thought away from something, but it is my conjecture that they were instead running towards a place of safety inside their ship but didn't make it except the lone Engineer whom we meet towards the end of the film who was protected from the electricity of the storm within his ship and kept alive in chryostasis.

This prevented the intended launch and saved mankind. So when the engineer on the ship is awoken, he is a bit baffled by what he sees. It is when David begins to speak the ancient human dialect that the engineer realizes that who they are, assumes that they have come to destroy him before he can destroy them and so lashes out, killing everyone present, minus Shaw.

He then sets course for earth determined to finish his mission convinced that while we may have been lab rats in the past, we are now a threat to be dealt with and eliminated.

Winter is coming

I'm not the most economically literate person in the world, but even I understand that government services aren't free. Apparently though the Greeks did.

Greece, like other countries in Europe, had given up its own currency in exchange for the euro, so it did not have the option of printing more money or devaluing the currency to pull itself out of the mess created in part by politicians who gave voters what they wanted without troubling to bring up the unpleasant fact that someone, sooner or later, would have to pay. 

Today, the Greek people are enduring economic pain that makes America look like a paradise of prosperity. Unemployment stands at 21%, wages are collapsing for both government and private sector workers. 

A series of new taxes have been imposed, including a "solidarity" tax, new property taxes and higher self-employment taxes. The VAT, a national sales tax on all transactions, has jumped from 13% to 23%. The minimum wage has been been sharply cut. Poverty has increased dramatically. 

After all that, Greece is still required by European rules to cut another 4.7% of gross domestic product from its budget, equivalent to the United States suddenly cutting more than $700 billion. 

Even if it achieves those goals, or rather because it will enact such draconian cuts, the Greek economy is expected to sink deeper.

I think what gets lost in such discussions is the historical reality that made the societies we live in possible. After WW2, much of continental Europe and Japan were devastated. Canada and more so the US, became rich as a result of coming out of the war with our industry and infrastructure intact. We were able to make astronomical amounts of money by being the suppliers for the reconstruction of Europe and other parts of the world. 

This vast wealth provided these nations with the resources to move forward in terms of societal and social infrastructure begun in the New Deal by Roosevelt. The problem is that the New Deal was economically untenable in normal times but because of war and the massive economic boom that followed the economic realities were blurred. 

So we had a whole generation, the largest in the history of North America, grow up with false economic ideologies and believing that government can and should provide for everyone. A noble aim to be sure, but then the rest of the world caught up by the 70s and the traditional sources of NA wealth began to fail and so you see the decline in manufacturing and the rise of the service and banking sectors over the course of the 80s and 90s. 

People were struggling to maintain the wealth that created the society they wanted, at relatively little cost to the average citizen and were doing anything they could to see it done. Now even these sectors have begun to fail but generations of people have been raised with the notion that this is how a society should function (not saying that its not) but they came to this conclusion in the midst of vast economic prosperity that made such a society possible. 

As the economic reality changes so too will the ability for these societies to continue to meet the demands of the people. An unfortunate thing is that the ruling political class has created a system in which they promise the moon, provide a sandwich and are rewarded for it because they've ensured that money is the prime component of political power. 

As such people having been raised to think that the government should provide will be faced with the reality that it can't. This disillusionment will lead to frustration and anger that will tax the system of control that the political elite have created over the past few decades to protect themselves from what they knew was coming. 

Hence you see the empowering of state controlled systems of control such as police and surveillance and the reduction of civil liberties and the abandonment of principles that once defined a nation but are now no longer politically tenable. This of course will lead to further civil unrest and can be seen in current movements such as Occupy and the recent warning from Anonymous to world leaders. A cycle has begun that, while in its early stages and possible to curtail, is one that pits the powerful against the powerless and as the economic realities continue to decline the pressure will increase. 

Games of Thrones' hollow empty heart

So Game of Thrones season two will be starting up soon and I'm sure that there are many fans waiting with great anticipation.

I have to admit to my indifference.

I watched the first episode of season one when it came out of it not wanting to see any more. I'm a big fantasy and science fiction fan. I had been anticipating this show for a while, and had purposefully not read the books because of the TV show. I was left disappointed.

So after many many people told me how great it was and how I should give it another shot, I watched the first season and was left no great passion for the show.

My indifference stems from the same place that births such passion for the show in others. Its supposed realism.

Well, speaking of realism concerning a fictional world seems a bit much, but I understand where they are coming from. The show (and obviously the novels) dispense with what many consider to be the tired cliche of black and white, good guys and bad guys, hero and villain and instead brings to life a world of grey, where concepts of right and wrong are subject to context and perspective. A world where might makes right and the ends do justify the means.

Many see this as a reflection of our current world and enjoy that sense of realism. It left me searching for a reason to care for characters and the show in general.

The one character it seemed that most closely resembled the 'tired cliche' of yesteryear fantasy fiction was Ned Stark. Not a perfect man to be sure but one that tried hard to live by a code of conduct that many would see as positive. He tried to be good to his friends and straight forward with his enemies. He was a man in a position of power to took responsibility rather than trying to abuse that position.

So when Ned was killed by the new young king, I'm sure that it was meant to be a shocking moment. Here was the person who for the most part served as the main character lying headless. I'm sure that as an audience we were meant to be rooting for that last minute save. That moment of leniency from the king that would see Ned's life spared, even if it meant imprisonment.

But it wasn't shocking or meaningful to me because I didn't care.

It was meant to be a moment that drove home for the viewer that this world was not a world where good wins and evil is defeated. It was meant to drive home to the viewer that such notions are antiquated and that ideas of rigid or even semi-rigid codes of right and wrong are not to be found here.

But this was one of the things that propelled Martin's books to prominence, so it came as no real surprise when the world functioned as it was constructed and engineered to function.

I didn't invest myself in any of the characters because they had nothing worth investing myself in and as such my lack of personal investment provided no emotional impact on an event that was meant to be a very emotional moment.

The story is interesting and I'll probably watch the second season once its finished, but when a character dies I won't care because I'm indifferent to their struggles, their desires, their intrigues and passions. I'm indifferent because I don't feel that I can relate to them and if I can't relate to them. If I can't find some piece of myself in them then there is no connection, no connection means no resonance or power.

Its a story, a fairly well told story so far, but its excesses of narcissism, violence, incest and frivolous nudity will always keep me at arms length from the story's heart; its characters and so long as that is the case then it will simply lack the power that would make it great.

For greatness comes in over coming something not in wallowing in the filth. So while many may feel that The Lord of the Rings is a tired tome, it holds more meaning for many because they can identify with the struggle, they can relate to pressure to give up or give in, and they can see the power that resonates from those that are able to fight on, to push through and overcome and are able to find meaning in their lives beyond the shit an filth of daily life. Its in the struggle to carve out for yourself beauty and meaning that resonates with characters such as Sam and Frodo in a way that one can't with Ned or Jamie, because to give up, to give in is not heroic and as much as some say that they don't want or need heroes, the power of humanity is found in those moments of heroism that many may not see but others cling to in a grey grey world.