Hex Picks: Most Recent Comic

I started writing this blog for a couple of reasons. The main thing is a general love of films, of course, but perhaps even more important is the fact that I really needed to blurt out my thoughts about Prometheus.

That need has never really gone away, so when the chance came up to write some more about it for Hex Dimension, I jumped all over it. The only problem is that I was supposed to be writing about comics. This week's recommendations are the most interesting and most numerous in a while - so to take a look (and to find out just how badly I went off-topic) click the link below.

The Riddle of Sir Ridley

While we're on this weird bad science kick of the last few weeks, I want to return to Prometheus one last time. Sorry, but I swear it will be the last one for a long while - and, frankly, every post about Prometheus gets much higher traffic than anything else I write. Apparently I'm not the only one who finds it so interesting!

A couple of minor spoilers follow.

Writing my post about Prometheus misconceptions, I realised something. While I maintain that the questions people seem determined to ask about the opening scene have no baring whatsoever on the rest of the movie, one of those questions does have a large impact on the universe of Prometheus and, therefore, the whole Alien franchise (by which I mean Alien to Alien 3 - the rest don't count). That question is whether or not the opening scene takes place on Earth.
As I wrote in my first post, the answer to this question is "Almost definitely." The entire film is about how the Engineers seeded Earth with DNA, and we see no evidence of any kind to suggest they ever seeded any other planets. So, when we see an Engineer seeding a planet, it's a pretty safe assumption that it's Earth. From all the evidence on hand, this is the most sensible conclusion.

But I vaguely remembered reading an interview with Sir Ridley Scott, the director of the film, where he had said that it didn't matter. I assumed he meant it didn't matter because, as I've said, it didn't affect the story of Prometheus. But then I looked the interview up. Does Sir Ridley think it's Earth?

"No, it doesn’t have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space."

Scott thinks it doesn't matter not because it doesn't affect the story, but because this "gardening" thing is just what the Engineers do, and that their seeding Earth is not unique or even special. This is backed up by the director's commentary, where he seems even more adamant that there's no reason to assume it's Earth - he himself actually seems to believe it's not.
And that's fine. Or rather, it would be fine, if the Engineers were only seeding these planets with DNA. But they're not. They're seeding these planets, very specifically, with human DNA. That one utterly stupid line about Engineer DNA being 100% identical to that of humans has, once again, reared its ugly head.

The Engineers have not simply dumped DNA on Earth and waited to see what kind of life appears. They have dumped DNA on Earth (which already seems to have some primitive plant-life, somehow) and knowingly waited for it to reform into 100% identical (but also somehow different) copies of themselves. It's a pretty impractical method of cloning, honestly - especially when the whole process seemed to get distracted by giant lizards for two-hundred-million years and it took an asteroid to course-correct. But whatever; the point is that evolution apparently had a target in mind all along.
If, as Scott suggests, Earth was not a special case, and the Engineers have done the same thing on other planets too, this implies that we are not the only humans out there. It implies that other planets were seeded with life that would also have evolved to be 100% identical (but also somehow different) to their creators.

This is the creator of Alien saying that, in the universe of Alien, there are multiple unconnected societies of humans, independent of ours, scattered throughout the stars. In the same way that this doesn't affect the story of Prometheus at all, it doesn't directly affect anything about the Alien films either - but the question is certainly an interesting thought exercise. And it spawns another, even more interesting question: does Ridley Scott actually realise that this is what he's suggesting?

Going back to that interview for a moment, immediately before the line about gardening, Scott says, "...the weight and the construction of the DNA of those aliens is way beyond what we can possibly imagine."
Except that we know that's not true. The DNA of those aliens is exactly the same as ours - the film is very clear on this. Is it possible he doesn't realise that's what his movie is saying? It would certainly explain his attitude to the "gardening" - rather than not realising what his interview answers imply, he doesn't realise what the film itself implies.
And anyway, what does that quote even mean? It's DNA - four bases paired off and chained together in a sequence. If the "construction" is different (or even the "weight") then it ceases to be DNA.

Elsewhere on his DVD commentary, Scott explains that the film's mysterious "galactic configuration" (which looks like a constellation, but apparently only contains one star) is made up of planets. Planets: those things around stars that by definition move around a lot. A fixed configuration of those. And if that's the case, why do they not call it a "planetary system" since, y'know, that's what those are called.
There's a bit later on where he talks, at a very basic level, about how life adapts to its environment, and it's clear he's already out of his depth. As well as not understanding what his movie says, it's beginning to look like Ridley Scott doesn't understand the basic science that his movie deals with.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with his lack of knowledge in general terms - not everyone needs to have an interest or familiarity with science - but the director of a science fiction film has a responsibility to at least understand the fundamentals of their film's scientific concepts. Especially when those concepts are as simple as these.

And then, finally, I found another interview in which Sir Ridley said this:

"...there are probably thousands of different lifeforms in this galaxy... It’s entirely ridiculous to believe that we are the only ones here. That’s why my first thought is that for us to be sitting here right now is actually mathematically impossible without a lot of assistance."

Let's break that logic down. Ridley Scott believes that life is common in the universe, not rare. And because life is common, he finds it unlikely ("impossible" even) that life could exist on this planet without help. It is common; therefore it is unlikely.
That's, um... That's pretty contradictory, Ridley.

I realise I'm coming across as mocking and insulting one of the world's top film-makers, but that's not my intention at all. I just want to figure this out.
I think what's happening here is not that Scott is crazy or stupid - though those were certainly among my first thoughts - but rather that he just doesn't think these things through. He believes life is common in the universe and he also believes that life on Earth is unlikely - he just hasn't looked very hard at how either one affects the other. Likewise, I'm sure Ridley Scott knows that planets move (because, d'uh) - he just hasn't applied that knowledge to his idea of the "galactic configuration".
Taken on its own, the idea that the Engineers are space gardeners makes sense - or, at least, it doesn't not make sense. Taken on its own, so does the idea that their DNA would be very similar to ours (though 100% identical is still too much of a stretch). It even makes sense, taken on its own, that the original Engineers would have more complex genetics than the copies that became humanity, depending on the meaning of "more complex". It's only if you think through the entire process, from start to finish, that you realise it leads to a place of craziness. I think it's clear Ridley Scott has not done this - that he has instead looked at each in isolation, nodded, and then moved onto the next.

Going back to his commentary, at the point where Dave the android finds a living Engineer in a stasis pod, Scott says that there's actually Engineers in all six (I think) of the pods in the room - then he suddenly backtracks, says they all died in their pods and he knows why but it's too complicated to get into right now. He's not a great liar.
He hasn't thought through the sentence he is saying, apparently, and he's certainly never thought through this aspect of the scene before. Again, "David finds an alien in a pod" and "there are six alien-filled pods in the room" both work fine as plot-points on their own, so Scott accepts both - but in combining them he discovers some uncomfortable questions, and hastily tries to patch them up. This is quite a minor problem compared with many of the others, but hearing it play out in real-time on the DVD is pretty illuminating.

We've seen this pattern before - things that work in isolation but do not work when examined together. It's a perfect description of Prometheus itself. The entire film is a chain of scenes that work beautifully well on their own, but make no sense when placed inside the overarching story. It's a collection of interesting but separate ideas that were never properly thought through.
Having an amazing holographic map of the alien structure is a great idea! Having people get lost in the creepy structure is also a great idea! But nobody seems to have thought through how one idea affects the other - just as Ridley Scott doesn't seem to think how one interview answer affects another.
I honestly think this is how Sir Ridley approached the film - maybe how he approaches all his films (though most of them are much more successful). If something works or makes sense on its own then it is assumed to have worked and made sense within the story, and it's never brought to mind again. This is the impression that these interviews and comments seem to paint, and it's an impression heavily supported by the movie itself.

But, in a sudden twist ending that you probably don't want to hear after reading sixteen-hundred words of pseudo-analysis, Scott's attitudes and opinions don't actually matter. Which, finally, brings us to a sixth common misconception about Prometheus:


6: Ridley Scott is Right

Scott says that there are dead aliens in the other five pods.
Frankly, I think he's wrong. I saw the film and, to me, it seemed pretty clear from David's actions that that was the only inhabited pod and that the other five were empty. I disagree with the director. The point being that there's no reason to assume his interpretation is any more valid than mine. Or yours.

There is a theory called "Death of the Author" which claims that when interpreting a text of any kind (book, film, comic, music, painting, sculpture, long-winded blog post, etc.) one must approach it from the position that the author died the moment the project was complete and never explained it to anyone, even if you know full well that they are alive and talking about it constantly. If the author is dead, this means the only source of information about the text is the text itself.
How this applies to Prometheus is that if Ridley Scott tells us in an interview that the Engineers' DNA is "beyond our imagination", it doesn't matter because he is dead so he can't have said that. If he tells us in his director's commentary that we are looking at a galactic configuration of planets, it's irrelevant because he is dead so he never said that. Oh, you still read or heard the comments, but they were the comments of some random guy, not the director - because the director is dead - and, as such, they are no more or less "correct" than the thoughts of any other random guy.
Scott says they are planets. That's fine - that's his opinion - but it's not law. I can continue to believe that they are stars, because that makes more sense to me based on what I saw in the film. Scott says the planet in the opening is probably not Earth - I maintain that it almost certainly has to be, based on what I saw in the movie. Scott (to very quickly mention a different film) has said many times that Deckard in Blade Runner is definitely, undoubtedly, a replicant - and yet the debate rages on, regardless of what the director thinks. The film has to speak for itself - the original intent is effectively irrelevant.

That seems counterintuitive in a lot of ways, but it's really the only way interpretation can work. Otherwise a film (or book, or any text) could make no sense at all, but the director (author) could explain away any problems and we would have to accept those explanations - even though the text itself still makes no sense.
It's the same reason that “it makes sense in the book” is no excuse when things aren't adequately explained in the film version (think Patronuses in the Harry Potter films). It's the same reason that articles like this one, which analyse an entire movie based upon hearsay information that isn't actually in the movie, aren't a fair assessment. It's the same reason people can come up with conspiracy theories about the ambiguous endings of The Dark Knight Rises or Mass Effect 3, even though the creators never intended those endings to be ambiguous. And, more positively, it's the same reason that songs or art can come to represent social causes or cultural ideas that have nothing to do with the people who created the works originally.

Ridley Scott is free to say whatever he wants, to interpret his film in any way he wants, and to think those interpretations through as little as he wants. He's allowed to contradict himself and to contradict his movie, and it's not a problem because, once the film is out in the open, his opinion holds no authority and becomes just one more possible view. Death of the Author liberates us from the idea that the director's opinion is the correct one - or that there is only one "correct" opinion at all - and gives us the freedom to interpret a film on its own terms.
In this case, though, it's a bit of a moot point because, sadly, the film itself isn't very well thought out either.

5 Weird Misconceptions about Prometheus

I'm currently searching for a new film podcast to listen to at work. A lot of audio libraries like SoundCloud and Libsyn were recently blocked, so I can no longer access the Empire and SlashFilm podcasts that I normally use to avoid Jeremy Vine's radio show.
In searching for a replacement, I've begun to use Prometheus as a kind of litmus test. Prometheus is, if nothing else, incredibly interesting, and generates a high level of discussion in a podcast. It's a good indicator of what a show is generally like - bringing out everyone's personalities and ideas and causing fun arguments.
But I've been noticing some recurring ideas about Prometheus that are just plain wrong. Obviously, stupidly wrong. I've listed a few common ones below, and hopefully debunked them. In this case "common" means that the same mistake appeared on at least two different professional podcasts, and is dumb enough that it shouldn't have.

Spoilers follow.

(As a random aside, the other outcome of my podcast binge, and of Prometheus' infamous caesarian scene, is that I've now sat through several surreal experiences of Americans talking about abortion. It's not helped by the fact that these podcasts are all predominantly male, but the country's attitude as a whole makes the subject feel very odd anyway. They don't just seem afraid to talk about it, they seem afraid of the process itself - even the "pro-choice" guys - and hearing them treading on eggshells around the "issues" is weird and uncomfortable. But I digress.)


1: This is a New Idea

"At the dawn of time, life on our planet was seeded by aliens and now, aeons later, they are returning to destroy us."
That's a plot summary of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Or it's a summary of the comics, at least - I've mostly forgotten the film.
The point is that we don't even have to mention Arthur C. Clarke to find examples of aliens dabbling in Earth evolution. Chariots of the Gods is neither recent nor particularly original. Science fiction is full of this stuff, and scientology even preaches it as fact!
So, when one podcaster loudly proclaimed that Ridley Scott will be revered as a visionary if it turns out aliens did have a hand in human evolution, he was loudly being stupid, and he was loudly being wrong.


2: The Beginning is Interesting

Some people don't understand what is happening in the first scene of the movie. In this scene an alien (an Engineer) is beside a river on a primitive planet, with a spaceship hovering over him. He drinks some mercury-like gunk, starts spasming, and then his body dissolves into the stream. We see his DNA breaking apart in the water, shrivelling and dying - but then it begins to link together, reforming into new shapes.
Now ok, fine, maybe that seems abstract and confusing. Except that two scenes later some humans explain that aliens long ago seeded our planet with DNA. The connection isn't hard to make.
But, even allowing for that still being confusing somehow, it doesn't explain how some people seem to have their mind blown when this is explained to them. "Oh my God," said one, "that's amazing!" and he upped his rating from 3-out-of-5 to 4.
Why? What exactly has changed? This scene offers no information that isn't already spelled out in the rest of the movie. Realising that you saw something that you knew happened but didn't know you'd seen is an "Oh, right!" moment, but it's hardly a revelation. And it's certainly not worth an extra star.
Also not revelatory is making that first scene artificially interesting by asking irrelevant questions. Does he dissolve himself on purpose? Sure looks like it. Does that affect anything at all about the rest of the movie? No. Is this Earth? Almost definitely. Does that affect anything at all about the rest of the movie? No. Why is there a spaceship? That's probably how he got there. Does that affect anything at all about the rest of the movie? No.
Maybe these questions are interesting in regards to the scene itself, but in regards to the rest of Prometheus they mean absolutely nothing.


3: Charlize Theron is an Android

At the beginning of the film, Peter Weyland introduces android David as "the closest thing I'll ever have to a son". Later on Theron's character Vickers, who pretty clearly despises both David and Weyland, calls Weyland "Father".
This gives us two options. Either the film is making a point of how Weyland values his boy robot over his lady robot, even though the lady robot is so much more advanced than the boy robot that it can easily pass as human and even has fully working sex organs... or it's making a point of how Weyland values his robot son over his actual flesh-and-blood daughter. Even in a film as confused as this one, which seems more likely?
There is a moment that Vickers arguably displays more strength than a human should have (she slams David into a wall) - but, don't forget, there's also a moment where someone longjumps, sprints and abseils ten minutes after crippling surgery. Realistic portrayal of human strength is not this movie's strong point.


4: "But Who Made Them?" is a Compelling Theological Argument

"Well," says a christian on three different podcasts, "at least they put in an argument for God."
They're referring to the moment that Holloway asks why Shaw still wears her cross now that they've found humanity's creators. Shaw's answer, which the film itself and believers watching it seem to think supports her, is, "And who made them?"
Are you kidding? Really? That question is the oldest, simplest, and most convincing argument in history against the existence of gods. "Who created the creator?" is a self-defeating paradox for people who don't believe life can spring from nothing. If your worldview requires complex organisms to have been designed by something alive and complex, where did that something come from? Either it sprang from nothing (i.e. your worldview is wrong) or it was designed by something else. If the latter, where did that designer come from? Rinse and repeat...
If the film was doing something clever - if it was subverting the question somehow - this would be fine. But to just stick this line in the script and intend it to mean the opposite of what it actually means is not subversion; it's just dumb.
In this case the fault lies with the film, not with the viewer, but it's on this list because it just kept getting brought up. That and it really bugs me.


5: Sci-Fi Doesn't Need to Make Sense

This is the big one. Bigger than Prometheus; bigger than any one film; bigger than Film itself. I've witnessed it on Facebook, on forums, in real life and, again, on several podcasts that ought to know better. Unlike the rest of my petty whinings, this one actually matters.
The thinking goes like this: in sci-fi you can go faster than light, or make solid holograms - things which are impossible and make no sense - so it is foolish to then be bothered by other things that make no sense, and doing so makes you a hypocrite. This is usually accompanied by the words "suspension of disbelief".
This is a complete fallacy for a number of reasons. I could talk about consistent world-building, rules of the universe, or about the difference between hard and soft science fiction, but the fundamental point is that there's a reason we call it suspension of disbelief and not, say, destruction of disbelief, or abandonment of disbelief. The amount of nonsense we're willing to believe is lifted, raised and, yes, suspended, but it's still not infinite. The line has moved, but it is not gone - it will take more than usual, but a sufficient amount of nonsense will still be able to cross it.
We accept that the good ship Prometheus can travel faster than light (but not that much faster, because they still need stasis pods) and we accept the magic hat that lets you watch people's dreams. We accept that David learns an alien language just by learning some other languages, that everyone signed up for this with no knowledge of what "this" actually was, and that Weyland funded it all based on the flimsiest of non-evidence. We even accept the aforementioned post-surgery acrobatics. This nonsense is all on the right side of the line - we accept it and believe it despite its silliness. But if the Engineer they eventually wake up had started singing and dancing (SpaceBalls style), or had spoken English with a thick southern drawl, would it be hypocritical to claim that that made no sense? If the awful Geologist had developed superpowers and called himself I-Love-Rocks-Man? If Vickers had sprouted wings and revealed she was an angel all along? The fact that we suspend our disbelief does not mean we should accept anything the film then throws at us. There is always something that can go too far.
When Holloway and Shaw point at what looks like a constellation of six stars and call it a "galactic configuration", which is not just inaccurate but totally meaningless, that is an acceptable level of nonsense; but when they then say that the galactic configuration contains "a star" (meaning that this is a configuration of six what, exactly?) they have crossed over into absurdity. To claim that the Engineers have "human DNA" would have been acceptable; but to specify a 100% match turns it into utter nonsense. The fact that we accept the dream-hat does not make this any less true.
The idea that fantasy and sci-fi get a free pass to do whatever, just because we accept a base-level of nonsense as part of the concept, is not just wrong but actually dangerous. Giant transforming robots don't really make sense, but does that mean all the other things that don't make sense in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen should be ignored? Of course it doesn't (though some people honestly think it does)! That film has awful problems and they deserve to be pointed out. If they don't get pointed out - if we just say, "It's sci-fi so none of this matters," - then the industry will continue to make films of that quality. By which I mean bad films.
If we let sci-fi and fantasy off when they are badly written and badly thought out, then why should anyone bother to write them well in the first place? This "hypocrite" line of thinking essentially removes all quality-control from these movies. That's a very unhealthy direction to go in. To hear this particular misconception being thrown around as much as it is, by actual film journalists in some cases, is a disturbing trend. And, regardless of suspension of disbelief, it makes no sense.

NerdTech's Most Interesting Film of 2012

There are three main things I learned from writing my Film of the Year series:
1 - Word processing apps on phones are brilliant. They mean I can use my spare moments to do something productive and creative, rather than just checking Facebook for the fortieth time.
2 - Don't expect constructive criticism from family. The only comment I received was, "No-one's impressed."
3 - Writing these things is fun! I really enjoyed it, and I'd really like to keep doing it. Hopefully I'll manage to review some films in the coming year, but for now I'll have to write about something from last year. But what?

As fantastic as The Avengers is, there's not much to talk about beyond heaping it with adoring praise and discussing which Hulk moment is the best. So which film of 2012 gives the best opportunity for conversation and discussion?
Is it the enjoyable but flawed John Carter (formerly of Mars)? The genre-bending exposé that is The Cabin in the Woods? The wibbly wobbly, timey wimey (totally broken) plot of Looper? Or could it be the confused and uneven The Dark Knight Rises?
Actually, the one film that I've kept mulling over and arguing about, with myself and with others, is the film that began the year as possibly my most anticipated. I've been thinking about it so much, in fact, that what follows is not a review so much as an analytical essay. I'm sorry, but I'm really into this writing thing now! Let's do this!


Prometheus - Ridley Scott

Prometheus might be the most well-made bad movie of all time.

The story, such as it is, follows Elizabeth Shaw - a scientist who, along with her archaeologist boyfriend Charlie Holloway, have found evidence that life on Earth was originally seeded by aliens they call "Engineers". With funding from the Weyland corporation, a team of experts heads out (on a ship called Prometheus) to find the planet Shaw and Holloway think is the likely source of the Engineers. Things do not go well.

The legend goes that Sir Ridley Scott originally developed this film to explore the origin of the "Space Jockey" from his horror sci-fi masterpiece, Alien. That's the big dead guy in the chair with a face like an elephant and a hole in his chest. He, as you may have guessed, is an Engineer. But, as development progressed, Scott grew less interested in the origin of the Jockey, and of the Alien, and instead began to focus on loftier themes of life, death, gods, and creation. But, because of its inception as a prequel, the script remained tangentially tied to Alien - and there the problems begin to arise.

In many ways, Alien is a B-movie. A nasty little horror film with a heroine who ends up running and screaming in her underwear. But it's a very good B-movie. The best, in fact.
Alien pulls this off by embracing exactly what it is. It knows it's a simple film appealing to simple emotions - namely fear and more fear. With no other aspirations to worry about, Alien is free to be the best damn version of that simple B-movie that it can be.

Prometheus, on the other hand, is definitely an A-movie. And it's probably the worst damn version of that A-movie it can possibly be.
Where Alien knew exactly what it was, Prometheus can't make up its mind. It has no idea what it is or what it's trying to achieve. Is it a horror film, or is it a philosophical sci-fi? Is it simple or complex? Is it intellectual or visceral? Is it plain and obvious or mysterious and withholding? Does it want answers or not? Answers to Alien's questions or its own unrelated ones?
Is it a prequel? Even that simple question is one Scott refused to conclusively answer before release. When you see the film you realise this is because he doesn't know. The film itself doesn't know!

Prometheus wants to answer each of these questions with "both". It always tries to service both camps and, as a result, the actual answer is "neither". Scary bits do happen, but because they don't have anything to do with the central questions of life and creation they are promptly dropped and forgotten about. Likewise deep meaningful questions are asked, but before the film can explore them in any detail they are abandoned in favour of running around and screaming.
This schizophrenic nature of Prometheus results in the feel of a series of sketches. It's as though the individual scenes have been included because of how well they work on their own, without looking at their effect on the overall story. Sometimes films are constructed this way - with setpieces written first and the story built around them - but here the story has been vaguely draped across the individual sequences, with little to no attempt to integrate them effectively.

However, if Prometheus is a sketch-show, it is an incredibly well-made one. Each individual sketch is a lovingly made piece of art. The cinematography is absolutely stunning. Set design, gorgeous. The actors are actually very good in each given moment - filling their scenes with emotion and power (though we'll come to their overall performances later). The atmosphere of each scene is heavy and immersive, sucking you deep into the moment. Sir Ridley's direction is great and his composition even better, filling the frame with strong visuals and finding beauty in even the nastiest moments. The film was shot in true 3D and Scott naturally knows what to do with it - it adds texture and depth to the shot, but never distracts.
When the film is playing horror, everything on screen comes together to create something horrific. When it's playing tension, it's claustrophobic and fearful. When it's going for grand and philosophical, it becomes huge and powerful and inspires a sense of awe. The individual sketches are better in places than entire films that reach for the same results.
Prometheus is probably, with apologies to The Hobbit, the best looking and best made film I saw in 2012. It really is a gorgeous piece of work, so far as each individual scene is concerned. The problems only arise when looked at as a whole.

The fact that it is so well-made essentially serves to hide the problems. A film so pretty, so clearly high-quality, cannot possibly have a script as incompetent as this one seems. A film this good must surely be clever. It certainly thinks it is, and acts as though it is, so there must be more to it. And so theories and lengthy extrapolations crop up on the internet seeking to explain the confusion. I, like many others, somehow convinced myself that it must have been good, and that seeing it again would clear up my niggling doubts. I just needed to think about it longer.
This is the usual line from Prometheus' defenders, too. There's nothing wrong with the film not explaining everything, they say, and those who don't like it are at fault for wanting it all spelled out. It's open to interpretation - just think about it longer.
Thinking about it more may help you come to conclusions about the "big questions", but it will never help you to explain why this scene followed that unrelated scene, why these characters did this thing after learning that contradictory thing, or why people's motivations literally U-turn from moment to moment. In focusing on unanswered questions the defenders overlook that the well-constructed sequences which contain those questions are held in place with chewing-gum and rusty paperclips.

Lets go back to Alien for a second. Think on John Hurt's ultimate fate - the Chestburster scene. Think how that event changes everything about the film from that point on. The film becomes a different thing entirely, for both the characters and the audience.
Now imagine that it had happened to Hurt alone, in his bunk perhaps, and that somehow (work with me here) he survived. Imagine that Hurt stumbled - wild eyes, covered in blood - into the room where the others were gathered. They look up in shock and, rather than warn them of the thing on the ship, rather than tell them about what surely must be the worst ordeal of his life, he just says something vague like, "This planet is bad!"
This is what happens in Prometheus. The scene is a clear analogue to the infamous chestburst, and the aftermath essentially plays out exactly as above. But wait, it gets better!
The crew, faced with this man who is covered in blood and possibly raving, just turn back to what they were doing without a word. Then one casually says, "We're going back down to the planet. Wanna come?"
And John Hurt, seconds after saying how the planet is bad, minutes after a monster literally crawled out from inside him, replies, "Yeah, ok."

This is what I mean when I say the scenes are essentially sketches. The chestburst-alike is the best sketch in the film. That sequence is tense, claustrophobic, nailbiting and immediate. But the connective tissue tying it to the next sketch (returning to the planet - notably a "big question" moment) is utter nonsense. As a way of effectively leading one scene into another the scenario above is impossibly stupid. Yet the whole film is made up of moments like this.
The scene is connected so weakly, in fact, that other than one specific moment later in the film it has no effect on the narrative at all. In terms of immediate impact it matches its Alien equivalent. In terms of lasting story impact it does no such thing.

The real casualty of the scene above, and others like it, is not actually the plot. The plot suffers - it suffers a lot - but it might have been salvageable were it not for the damage to the characters. Looking at the scene again, it's clear that Hurt is not acting like a human being. The other characters perhaps even less so. They are acting as the plot requires to get them into position - consistent characterisation be damned!
But of course, it's not actually John Hurt. In Alien he was the ship's officer - intelligent, sure, but by no means a genius. In Prometheus, the character in this scene is a scientist. Most of the characters are scientists and, we can assume, they're the best scientists that the Weyland corporation can afford. It's an important mission - they wouldn't have sent amateurs. Yet, in order to get them into position for the next sketch, whatever that may be, the script constantly has them act like amateurs. Worse, in fact - these characters are frequently outright stupid. They are terrible scientists.

The first obvious blunder is that, upon learning that the atmosphere within an alien structure is breathable, they waste no time taking off their helmets. "Breathable" is not the same as "safe", people! So there's oxygen - there could also be all kinds of bugs and microbes in there. Maybe you scanned for that sort of thing, but this is an alien planet - you'd have no idea what you were looking for! That might seem a minor error, and it kind of is, but it opens the floodgates.

Mild spoilers follow.

Within no time, the one biologist on the crew - the guy brought specifically to examine lifeforms - sees an alien corpse, finds it too creepy and immediately wants to go back to the ship. The guy should be freaking out with excitement, if anything, but instead he wants to leave. And they let him. They actually perform an autopsy on this corpse later and the crew's expert biologist isn't present!
The geologist is (far more forgivably) creeped out too, and goes with him. Then they both get lost.
Most people point out at this point that the geologist is the guy who made the map. That's silly. The geologist simply started up the automated map-making process. He doesn't have a copy of that map - it's being created holographically back at basecamp. The same basecamp that is tracking all of the away-team within that map, monitoring their lifesigns, and in constant radio-contact. Yet somehow they get lost.
You've probably guessed what happens to these two morons. You guessed it because the only reason they would act so stupid and against their actual roles is if the script needed to isolate them for some reason. It doesn't care how or why or if it makes sense - just get these two alone for the next horror sketch.
So, naturally, these two end up trapped in the structure that night. Their first move is to head back to the room with the alien corpse they were both so desperate to get away from. Which makes a certain kind of sense, but isn't really in character. What's totally against character, though, is how the biologist reacts when faced with a live alien specimen. Where the corpse freaked him out, the very alive, hissing, snake-thing makes him go all goo-goo-eyed and want to stroke it. This would be stupid anyway, but given his jumpy, fearful nature earlier it makes no sense at all.
When those two die, as they were clearly always going to, no-one knows it. This is because the guy on watch at basecamp - the one with radio-contact, location-tracking and, most importantly, lifesign displays - is off having sex. That sounds as dumb as it is and it's never mentioned again. It's just an easy (stupid) way to get him out of the room.
That same night (this is the last one I'll list, because it's my favourite) Holloway, Shaw's archaeologist boyfriend, gets very depressed and very drunk. Why? He just had all his theories validated; he discovered an alien civilisation; he found what is likely the cradle of human existance; he should be drinking champagne! So why is he drinking whiskey? And why is he drinking it alone?
Holloway is sad because the aliens are all dead. Specifically because he can't talk to them - can't ask them those big questions. Ignoring the fact that they only looked for a couple of hours in one area of one structure in one valley of this planet, HE'S AN ARCHAEOLOGIST! Dead civilisations are what he does! They are his thing! If he's depressed, after discovering everything they have on just their first day, about Engineer history and about our own, then he is the worst archaeologist in the history of the universe!
It makes him look like a whiny, self-entitled arsehole. Remember, this is our secondary protagonist I'm talking about. This is not good characterisation. Like everything listed here, his actions are dictated by the things they need to set up. Later on he does something pretty selfless, which clashes with the spoilt, selfish brat he's established to be in this scene. Not in a "he learnt his lesson and changed" kind of way, either, just that he's now a different character entirely because the script doesn't actually care.

Spoilers end.

Because the script doesn't care, neither do we. There's no characters to care for - just actors who appear in sketches as different characters. Even Shaw and company representative Meredith Vickers, the only two who remain consistent from scene to scene, aren't so much characters as lists of attributes. Very short lists of attributes (they are "a bit religious" and "corporate ice-queen" respectively). Neither of them have an arc, and both end the movie in the same place, character-wise, that they began.
The only character getting any critical attention (from both critics and audiences) is Michael Fassbender's portrayal of David, the ship's android. He plays the part fantastically, with an understated menace. I agree that it's a great performance but, at the script level, David is no different to any other player in the sketch-show. He does whatever the scene requires to set up the next scene, with no clear motivation driving him to do it. But because Alien taught us that androids are devious schemers with ulterior motives, and because Fassbender wisely plays into that, David escapes the terrible characterisation of everyone else. The script doesn't make the android interesting - it's Fassbender that elevates him beyond the script.

This is true of the entire film. Anything that works works in spite of the script, not because of it. It feels like a first draft. All the important story beats are present; all the setpiece moments (or sketches) are in place; the characters are beginning to come into their own; the themes are beginning to rise to the surface. But it's not fully formed - it needs a few more passes.
The ridiculous part being, of course, that an early draft has since surfaced (entitled Alien: Engineers) which is less ambitious but so much more complete and polished than this one.

Prometheus is a mess. It does the vast majority of things perfectly - Ridley Scott certainly knows how to make a stunning film - but it gets a few core things monumentally wrong. The script undermines everything the film does right. It's very pretty, has strong performances, is atmospheric and paced well (it's certainly never dull), but none of that matters if the characters' choices never make a lick of sense.
It's a bad film; it's just a phenomenally well made one.

That's the end of this extended review-cum-essay, but I could easily have written more.
For one thing, I described the bad scientists but I never mentioned the bad science. The Engineers' DNA is apparently a 100% match with humans, for instance. These are nine-foot-tall hairless blue aliens we're talking about. And a match with which humans specifically? My DNA isn't even a 100% match with my immediate family!
Oh, and I didn't mention that line. The great "twist" from Vickers that is so obvious, yet treated as so revelatory, that it had me howling with laughter.
There's also my own theory, which I think explains everything.
Yes, I could write a lot more about Prometheus. This crazy contradiction of a movie is such a fertile topic. The story contains a number of "big questions" worth a conversation on their own, but the biggest question is how such a well-crafted, beautiful film reached the screen with such a painfully inadequate script. I've had and will continue to have discussions and arguments about almost every aspect of the film, making Prometheus my Most Interesting Film of 2012.