Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (13 page)

The Fire Must Be Kept Burning

A
n Appreciation of Scott’s
Prometheus

Last Saturday, I spent my morning on the couch with a debilitating migraine, wondering what karmic injustice I’d committed in order to deserve being so miserable on my weekend off. But like the glass-half-full seeker of silver linings that I am, I whipped out the 
Prometheus
 4-Disc Collector’s Edition Blu-ray I’d gotten as a gift this past Christmas, and set to work watching . . . well, 
all
 of the included special features. Something like seven hours’ worth of making-of documentaries, featurettes, and commentaries.

I’m left feeling—
even after a week’s worth of reflection—that those hours were not, in fact, ill-spent. Even after almost a year since the film’s theatrical release, I can’t help but maintain that Ridley Scott’s science-fictional reprise is, if flawed, also criminally underappreciated.

For my money, science fiction is little more than fantasy with an eye toward the future.

That’s why it’s so tremendously important in our culture, despite the various stigmas that still cling to its otherworldly exterior: it’s a myth for tomorrow. Quite often the difference between so-called “soft” and “hard” science fiction seems to be the difference between who’s willing to admit they’re faking it and who’s not.

That’s not to say there’s no
 
value
 in scientific rigor within the literature of science fiction—just that the air of intellectual elitism on the part of certain hard SF advocates is a tad misplaced in its priorities, I’d argue.

In the realm of fantasy, set pieces like magic spells and secondary-world kingdoms, hobgoblins and dragons, are utterly taken for granted. The standard by which a fantasy novel’s judged is not the scope of known scientific fact but rather the degree to which the author crafts a sense of verisimilitude; it’s about not breaking the story’s individual “rules,” and just generally
 
smoothing out the edges
.

But what makes
 
Prometheus
 worth a second look, in my opinion, is the way it comes together as a cohesive thematic and aesthetic whole after repeated viewings, and especially after you’ve seen the amount of work that went into crafting the audiovisual experience of the film’s faraway world.

Sure, the script
 
is
 shaky. The characters aren’t particularly believable a good deal of the time; Scott made a handful of decidedly bad calls in the editing room, like keeping Fifield’s transformation subtle rather than super-scary and cutting down on the final confrontation with the surviving Engineer; and the “purpose” behind much of the alien biology throughout the film has been diluted, likely as a result of Fox having too many hands in the pot: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof . . . not to mention Scott’s own colossal ego.

According to what we’re shown in the pre-production and storytelling portions of the special features, the film began life as a straight-up prequel titled
 
Alien: Genesis
, which Spaihts wrote with a handful of broad suggestions from Scott. From this, the idea of the Space Jockey as the seeders of sentient life on Earth—even the specific term “Engineers”—emerged as a dominant plot concern for the film.

For practical reasons as well as philosophic ones, apparently, the Space Jockey was given an all-too-human face beneath its alien exoskeleton. And as a result, we’re led to question the motivations and history behind the biological weaponry that wreaks such unholy havoc on the crew of the
 
Prometheus
.

So of course there’s an element of disappointment, of being ultimately underwhelmed, in pretty much every review of the film you read. People want to understand everything; it’s why we have the literature of SF.

That’s why Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 
2001: A Space Odyssey
, while considered by many to be the greatest science-fiction motion picture of all time, still feels inferior alongside its companion novelization by the late, great Arthur C. Clarke, who offers more explicit gestures toward the monoliths’ intended purpose, as well as painting a very striking portrait of their alien creators in the space of a few paragraphs.

If we’re being far-sighted in our assessment, however, it’s worth noting that
 
Blade Runner
was upon in its initial release a massive financial flop, earning at the box office merely
half its budget
; and yet Scott reputedly regards the film as his most personal, most artful achievement—especially if we’re narrowing the sample to only his science fiction pictures. And its popularity as both a cult classic and filmmaking achievement continues to grow with every passing decade.

Scott mentions in the Blu-ray commentary that he intends to direct a sequel, which news and fan sites have referred to as
 
Paradise
 (one of the post-
Alien: Genesis
 working titles for 
Prometheus
, if I recall correctly). This leads me to another key point: Without the context of a larger implied universe, without a sequel or two to bring closure about the Engineers’ true goals and beliefs, 
Prometheus
 will always feel like a promise unfulfilled.

Imagine, for a moment, if George Lucas’s 1977 version of
 
Star Wars
 had earned little money in its first theatrical run. Would Darth Vader be the chilling, mythic character we see him as today if he hadn’t shone so brightly at the undeniable height of his complexity in 
The Empire Strikes Back
? And furthermore, would the first 
Star Wars
 film feel like such a “classic” without the benefit of retrospect and its implications for the later, arguably more interesting installments in the trilogy? I’m not so sure.

Take the so-called
 “Special Edition” scene in Scott’s 
Alien
 (’79), for instance: We glimpse the goopy, horrific hive-making habits of the Xenomorph on display with Captain Dallas strung up, helpless and begging for a merciful death courtesy of Lieutenant Ripley’s flamethrower—but this scene is unnecessary and meaningless without the larger context provided by Cameron’s highly competent sequel, 
Aliens
 (’86).

Blade Runner
 got away without the sequel treatment for so many years, sure, but that’s because it feels so utterly complete. The ending—Scott’s 
Director’s Cut
 ending, in particular—is poignant, puzzling, and appropriate. The script ignored elements of Dick’s novel, like Mercerism, World War Terminus, and the titular electric sheep . . . so we’re left with a film that fulfills every inch of its promise, and reveals something poetic and unexpected each time we revisit it. It’s a compelling visual story, for one, but it’s also thematically timeless.

Don’t you think
 
Prometheus
 will be a hell of a lot better once some of these quibbles get explained? A director’s cut release is 
all but inevitable
.

It would have been nice, I think, to see a younger Guy Pierce living out his wildest fantasies at age ninety-six, granted eternal youth through the interplay between cryonics and Scott’s notion of “cyber-sleep,” which didn’t ultimately make it into the film. It would have been perhaps more satisfying to know the purpose of the Engineers’ light-years-spanning biochemical warfare campaign, and the role Earth was to play in all of that mess. . . .

Still. The original 
Alien
, for all its dramatic brilliance and classic atmosphere, got away with its fair share of hand-waving. 
Blade Runner
 went underrated for years. Given enough time, I foresee that 
Prometheus
 will stand alongside some of the great works of SF cinema as a troubling but artful achievement in the realm of cosmic nightmares.

Kubrick’s
2001
Vis-à-vis Clarke’s
2001

Space Odysseys, Silent Simulacrums, and the Advent of Posthuman Intelligence

Almost four years ago,
from the time of this writing, I read a book that changed my life: Arthur C. Clarke’s 
2001: Space Odyssey
. Up until that point, I’d read a handful of SF classics, like 
Dune
, 
The War of the Worlds
, and so forth—but mostly I was a reader of, well . . . arguably lesser books. Things like 
Star Wars
 tie-ins (more than I can count, but most of them entirely forgettable), ho-hum film novelizations, and what have you.

I also read a lot of mid- to late-career Stephen King, like
 
The Green Mile
, 
Different Seasons
, et cetera. No criticism there; I still read and love King shamelessly. He’s a master of the craft, whom growing storytellers should study with earnest. And, of course, there was that sparse, strange,
holy-shit-this-is-fucking-awesome
 book called 
Fight Club
. Ahem.

But my freshman year of community college, long before I transferred to my present alma mater in my hometown of Monmouth, Illinois, I was assigned a Composition II paper in which I was to examine a novel of my choosing, from a list provided by the professor. There was one science fiction novel on the list, so I went with that one.

Clarke’s 
2001
 is nothing short of a treasure. It doesn’t get quite the level of acclaim that
Rama
 or 
Childhood’s End
 gets, but I think it’s a damn fine read. The kind of book you never forget, and to which you always sort of aspire. As long as I’m alive, writing science fiction and pushing myself to get better at it, I think 
2001
 will be the book whose level of wonder, stimulation, and adventure I inevitably compare my work to. That’s not to say that there aren’t better-written, or more interesting books, but simply that the impression of that first transformative read will be hard to beat.

It’s like the maybe-arguable-fact that Kubrick’s
 
2001: A Space Odyssey
and Steven Spielberg’s
Minority Report
 are better films from a technical standpoint than 
The Empire Strikes Back
 and Ridley Scott’s 
Alien
: Though it may be true, or have at least partial merit, my early experiences at the ages of seven (
Empire
) and, I think, eight years old (
Alien
) will remain forever crystallized as defining moments in my upbringing.

Which is why, perhaps unfairly, it’s always been hard for me to consider the possibility that Kubrick’s
 
2001
 is even worth my time. I almost universally prefer original books to their film adaptations—Fincher’s brilliant but inferior 
Fight Club
 adaptation among them, admittedly—and so with a book like Clarke’s beloved novel, I thought that disappointment with the film was guaranteed.

(Final sidebar: I wrote this particular essay in 2012, making it the oldest chapter in the book. In the two years since I’ve come to suspect that Kubrick’s film—and Fincher’s
Fight Club
—are at least as good as their source material. Let this be a reminder to the reader that it’s okay to change your mind about things. The world would be a much better place if everyone realized this.)

Recently, though, I read a Facebook discussion led by author Robert J. Sawyer, who argues that the differences between the film and the novel are sufficient to view them as two entirely separate works, each with its own set of thematic concerns and moral subtext. More specifically, he views the Kubrick film as dealing with the evolution of humankind from its present, organic state to the lev
el of artificial intelligence—therefore concluding that HAL-9000, or “Hal,” is the most important component of the mission.

This deviates significantly from the novel, I think, which seems to concern itself more so with the evolution of humankind from the level of sapience to, well,
 
omnipotence
. A level of intellect and influence unknowable, and incomprehensible, to the reader. (I watched the film 
2010
 several years after reading Clarke’s 
2001
, but have never read the three sequel novels. Perhaps Bowman’s transformation is explained differently than in the two film adaptations; I can’t say whether it is or not.)

Anyway, I finally took the time to watch the Ku
brick film from start to finish—this morning, in fact—and found it enormously awesome. A stunning, enthralling work of cinema, with at least two or three 
killer
 scenes: the arrival of Heywood Floyd and the discovery of the lunar monolith; Hal’s death sequence, which I thought had some chilling dialogue; and certainly the haunting, almost silent simulacrum in which Bowman becomes the enigmatic Star-Child. It was solid enough to stand on its own, but ambiguous enough to demand that after four years of literary infidelity, I finally make a return to the fiction of Clarke, to whom I owe my appreciation of the genre as I know it today.