One of the movies that I was most looking forward to seeing this summer was the Alien prequel Prometheus. I love the Alien movie series (well, at least the first two) and from watching the trailers and the fact that Damon Lindelof had a hand (If you don’t know, I’m a die-hard LOST junkie. And yes, I also loved the ending of LOST) in the writing, I was getting pretty stoked. I mean, it was shaping up like we were going to learn all about the history of the Xenomorphs and why they were so deadly and where they came from and how they ended up on the Space Jockey from the first Alien film. I was pumped about it and so were millions of other fans across the country.
Millions of us were dying to know how evolution led the xenomorphs to think they could take on Superman and win? That’s just crazy!
And then the movie came out… and it’s not so much that it was bad or unentertaining, it’s more that it didn’t really answer anything. All those burning questions that we were all so excited to find out the answers to, well, they didn’t get answered… like, hardly at all. So the movie was a pretty big letdown for most fans. Well, instead of writing out all the problems with the film, I’ll just include this video which sums it all up and is much funnier than my writing would be:
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Exactly.
But what many viewers of the movie don’t know is that there actually were subtle hints to the answers to many of these questions in the film, and the writers actually do have answers! But the problem is that to fully understand what happened in Prometheus, you have to treat it more like an ARG (augmented reality game: basically a multi-platform media scavenger hunt) than a movie. You have to spend a good amount of time finding theories on fan forums online. And this sucks because most people don’t care to spend hours reading through online forums to find the answers that should have been (they really should have been) answered in the film that they just paid $11-15 to go see.
And I think that’s Prometheus’s biggest problem. It’s not that the movie doesn’t have answers (although it does have some characters who make really stupid/strange decisions that raise other questions…) or isn’t entertaining, it’s that the writers DO have answers, but just don’t share them with movie viewers. You have to hunt for them in fan forums and debate them with other people who have seen the film. And you can actually read about all of the hidden answers here on this Reddit thread:
Reddit: Prometheus, everything explained and analysed
Or the Reader’s Digest version here, compliments of Mashable:
Mashable: The Secrets of Prometheus
It is worth noting here that, as any LOST fan will tell you, it is Lindelof’s trademark move to purposely not spell out the answers to all the important questions to his work’s mythos. I don’t know why, but he seems to think that’s what people want. I think he was shooting for something similar to the type of community that LOST built, where every Thursday morning my co-worker and I would debate for the first 60 minutes of work what the last episode meant and what that meant for the entire LOST mythos. But this is a two hour movie, not a 6-season TV series with 100+ episodes. If we didn’t get all our answers one week, we believed that they would come later down the line (but let’s not open up that can of worms…).
Something no LOST fan has ever said: “So that’s why Walt has special powers!”
But with Prometheus, we arean’t guaranteed answers in a follow-up film… or even a follow-up film at all. And not everyone wants to spend time digging for answers on internet forums with a bunch of nerds (but clearly I do). Heck, many fans of the original Alien probably don’t even know of what Reddit is. That’s why we were all pissed. Understanding a movie shouldn’t be this hard.
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