Jellyfish in the City: Creation, Wonder, and the Beauty of Details

Hey there cyberspace, it's me, Left Thumb. It’s been a long time. How about we sit back, have a root beer and reminisce about old times? You know, back when Right Thumb and I collaborated on great works of art and this blog was a bastion of culture, erudite witticisms, and insightful societal critique rather than a soapbox for RT’s supercilious cinematic pretentiousness and high-minded haughtiness? Remember way back then?

I know, it’s hard.

It may, in fact, seem like an eternity ago. Rest assured, that is a common feeling after reading a RT movie review (or about thirteen of them). And I know you’ve been hearing all kinds of claptrap about my lethargy, insubordination, perfidiousness, treachery, infidelity, buffoonery and all sorts of other nasty nouns of the RT variety. But please, do recognize that in my absence you’ve only been getting one side of the story.* Yes, I may have taken an extended leave. Yes, I may have abandoned you to the clutches of a pedantic Thumb desperate for a captive audience. And I apologize sincerely. Really I do. Please realize, however, that working conditions are not always the best around here.

Take our last post, just for starters. The so-called “editor’s note”? Hogwash. Utter hogwash. You could stick a bunch of pigs in a bathtub and dump soap all over them and the situation would not be nearly so hogwashy as that editor’s note. Imagine a situation where someone sends you a blog post that is essentially complete unto itself and asks you to write your half of it. Hard to do, for starters, because it’s already fully written and you weren’t there in the initial stages of the thought process. You also haven’t watched the TNG episode in question in years. But you do your best because you always do, and add as many charming jokes as you can in addition to some of your own thoughts about the topic. Then imagine that the original author takes a bunch of your bits out without telling you and changes a bunch of other bits, and then posts it with a snarky note about how you really did almost nothing. How would you feel? And that’s but the last of a long list of such incidents, folks.

Although, in the final analysis, I guess I should be fair. If I was under threat of death (If, say, Michael Bay angled a camera at my head.**) I would have to admit that this blog would be… well… dead if it had two Left Thumbs. Very, very dead. So I will stop railing about this and talk about something constructive and wholesome. You know, something totally unlike Ayn Rand’s birth.

I took a recent trip to a large city where Right Thumb is supposedly gainfully employed with one of those new-fangled things they call “fellowships”.*** This city happens to be home to some of the best museums in the world, containing some of the most marvelous art, artifacts, and artifice to be found this side of a Nicolas Cage historical action movie with a title vaguely similar to Country’s Bounty. (I wouldn’t want to name names.) Two in particular had great impact on me: the art gallery and the natural history museum.

The art gallery was home to some very well-known works, the kind to which tourists flock and take teen-ish photos in front of, complete with “rock on” gestures and can-all-of-you-out-there-on-Facebook-believe-I-was-actually-right-here smiles. These few superstar paintings tend to funnel all the museum traffic and detract attention from, well, everything else. It struck me that this is something of a tragedy. Don’t get me wrong – I am as impressed by the A-team of Western art as anyone else. I won’t deny there’s a particular sublimity to be found in the Alba Madonna that’s not found in just any paint thrown on a canvas. And truthfully I’m as much of a culprit as anyone. (Why yes, I will trample old ladies in motorized wheel chairs if it gets me a better view of Starry Night…) But the tragedy occurs when these highlights seem to edge out and reduce to irrelevance all other works in the museum. It would be like picking out the six or seven best episodes of Star Trek and then acting like none of the others are worth even one of Michael Dorn’s nosehairs. For example, there are a number of Renaissance statues in the portico on the way to the Alba Madonna, mostly by unknown artists, but each possessing a unique beauty as envisioned by its respective creator. How many people actually stop to look at these “lesser” works, and notice the care and dedication embodied within? I know I usually don’t. But this time, breaking my usual pattern of star-sighting, I focused on a particular statue tucked away in a corner, and reflected on the great complexity of its design. At some earlier date, its sculptor had to think about every last detail I was taking for granted as I observed it; every last fold of the drape, every curl in the hair. It all mattered. It all counted.

A similar phenomenon takes place in nature, I think; or so it occurred to me at the natural history museum. Everybody loves elephants and dinosaurs. Everybody loves gigantic diamonds. These things are big, they are eminently noticeable, and they are exceptional. But what about deep ocean marine life? It’s buried under thousands of feet of water, largely unnoticed. And yet to my mind the comb jelly (pictured above) is as interesting and remarkable a creature as any. Much like Right Thumb’s heart whenever you put on something directed by the Coens, it actually lights up. It glows. It can eat ten times its weight in a day. There are untold scores of these creatures that are just down there, all the time, unnoticed, indifferent to the world – but no less astounding. Other marvels include the brittle star, the nautilus, or just any old coral for that matter. I would go so far as to venture that even grass becomes interesting if you actually look at it instead of just looking past it. When you take a step back to soak in the “whole” of nature, a splendid symphony will invariably reveal itself to you. But to witness this, you have to be willing to notice the humblest of creatures in addition to the celebrities. Velociraptors, woolly mammoths, and precious gems are a few singular sparks of interest in nature, admittedly sparks that burn particularly brightly; but if we focus exclusively on them, we miss the rest of the fireworks show.

This feeling of wonder followed me out of the museums. I couldn’t escape it! No longer could I look at a staircase and see a simple staircase; instead, it was a something that someone, somewhere, sometime had planned, preferred to other designs, and executed. Raphael shared the genius of nature; the Alba Madonna mirrors the comb jelly in its beauty, design, and sheer interestingness. But so too do we all share in the genius of Raphael every time we build something, plan something, decide on the look and make of something – even if it is a forgotten staircase in a dusty corner of a deserted cafeteria in the basement of a train station.**** One is given center stage at a premier art gallery; the other is tread upon but ignored. Does that negate its beauty? Indeed, upon inspection, it was a well-designed staircase with attractive rails and flowing contours. The fact that nobody ever notices that at a conscious level does nothing to change the effort poured into its creation.

In a city this effect is blown up to epic proportions. Now, Right Thumb may think himself a neat-necked city-slicker and look down his cold Roman nose at old-fashioned country bumpkins like myself, but I think that urban life may often have the regrettable side effect of inuring us to the beauty of the ordinary. When you encounter forty-five different staircases on the way to work, of course you aren’t going to stop and notice any of them. Heaven forbid you stop to notice a flower. But there is a particular grace that comes from the ordinary, the unnoticed – that which is made with care but is so little cared for, that which sprung from a form of creative love, but is so often unloved.

Many people acknowledge the rose is beautiful, although few enough actually stop to think about it, no matter how many times they may quote the trite truism about stopping to smell them. But even the rose is an exceptional case; it is the Alba Madonna of nature. We should not forget the simple blade of grass, the forgotten rock – or on the human level, the unnoticed sculpture in the corner of the gallery portico. The exceptionally beautiful is just that – exceptional. And if that’s the only place we can find beauty, love, and the work of God, then we are quite simply missing the forest for the tree.

Creation stems from love. God loved the world into being, loved the grass and the roses and even us into being. And in creating things we too participate in that love. What this means is that all we need to do is open our eyes and hearts to see it everywhere – not just in the usual hangouts.

> Left Thumb <

Final disclaimer: My taxonomic conscience is plaguing me, so I must confess, comb jellies are technically not jellyfish but instead belong to the clade Ctenophora. Totally different. But "Jellyfish in the City" just seemed like a better title than "Ctenophores in the City". I know. Bring out the torches and pitchforks.

* TTS only guarantees absolute truth when BOTH of us are around.

** Everything he does this to inevitably explodes.

*** I am somewhat suspicious as to what this word actually means. I think in Right Thumb’s case it may very well refer to a situation in which well-dressed men stand around in an office slapping each other on the shoulder and telling each other what “good fellows” they all are. Also prevalent is the use of the word “jolly”. Customary birthday songs only make the whole affair more jovial.

**** Why this cafeteria was deserted, I will never know. They had very very good chicken sandwiches.

In Defense of III

Every once in a while, I like to challenge myself. Normally, these challenges are simple, like getting an A+ in a pass/fail course, detecting the time dilation from moving sixty miles an hour, or staying continuously upright on a rollercoaster with six inversions. But today, I take on a writing challenge, and perhaps one more difficult than the previously mentioned baubles. I aim to defend Revenge of the Sith, which shall be affectionately referred to in this piece as ‘III’. It is a thankless task, and one that might end with me curled up in the fetal position in a dark corner of a room somewhere, whispering about CGI like it was the One Ring, or with a Montana-sized double chin where the alien parasite resides. Nevertheless, the task is at hand.


It should first be noted that, unlike my other movie reviews, this one will not be in a segmented style where I make note of those aspects of a film which possessed a particular interest regarding cinema, morality, pop culture, or me. III demands more of a narrative, because to understand my defense of III, you have to understand how we got there.


Before the first dollar was spent, III was perhaps the most thematically constrained movie of all time (this seems like hyperbole, but I challenge you to come up with a better example). It was neither the end nor the beginning of the story, it was not a happy ending, everyone knew what was going to happen, and everyone knew what had already happened. In general, I am of the opinion that the middle movie of a trilogy has the greatest narrative advantages. It doesn’t have to wrap anything up, and it doesn’t have to get anything going because all the characters were already established in the first movie. But in III’s case, the movie had both the disadvantages of being in the middle—you can’t really wrap things up, and you didn’t really get a chance to start them—with none of the advantages. III couldn’t leave you hanging like Empire Strikes Back, because there was no more movie coming. The creative loop was closing. At the same time, thanks to the putridity of what had come before it, III couldn’t really rely on the characters having been already set up. They weren’t. III had to be the first, second and third part of a trilogy almost entirely on its own, and it had to do it even while we already knew the ending.


Yet I would suggest that this last point is the saving grace of III, indeed, the whole reason I can’t just throw it in the trash-heap with II or the basically-pointless-heap with I. I do not believe that George Lucas really had his story planned out all that well back in 1976, when they were creating the first Star Wars. In fact, if you have read The Book, you know that he did not. Yet, looking back on it, if you had to tell this story again, this is how you would tell it. You would start in the middle, get to the end, and then work your way back to the beginning.


The Original Trilogy is a salvation story. It is a triumph. It is a bringing back from the dead. Particularly in V, the stark reality of Good vs. Evil, love vs. hate, sacrifice vs. selfishness, Rebellion vs. Empire comes alive. You know the stakes and you meet the characters and by the end of the trilogy, Luke converting Vader is the Right Thing. But you can’t, and were never going to be able to, truly love Vader/Anakin. You love Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, etc. And you cry when Anakin saves Luke and then dies, not so much because you know anything about him but because you know what it took the heroes to bring this about. They sacrificed, they lost arms, they got frozen, they got shot in the arm (conveniently, with the weakest blaster of all time…), they got cut in half by lightsabers, died in their old age practically alone on distant Dagobah, and their sacrifice brought down the Evil Empire.


The Prequel Trilogy, by contrast, is obviously the tragedy. And tragedies are always more tragic when you see what’s coming. You want to reach through the screen and twist somebody’s arm until they recognize what is so plainly obvious to you, the viewer. And in this case, Anakin’s eventual fall into evil is obvious because we, the viewers, already know it is going to happen. And this is where III shines.


Anakin’s descent into darkness, and the tragedy which follows, is easily the highpoint of the film. Aided by John Williams’ haunting score (say what you will about him copying other composers and even himself, his Star Wars music is always fantastic, and it is best in V and III), Anakin marches into the Jedi Temple and starts killing people left and right, and thousands of Jedi meet their deaths in a montage with more fatalities than your average Godfather sequence, you cannot possibly feel okay about this. You have seen this coming, and now it is happening, and you couldn’t stop it. The Jedi all die. The Republic dies. Anakin walks into a room full of children and turns his lightsaber on.

III accomplishes this feat of tragedy despite the fact that the set-up was unmitigatedly terrible. Though often castigated for the wrong reasons, I does basically nothing to shepherd the Anakin story along. The only important part of the story is that he loves his mother. Surely, that could have been accomplished in less time than an entire movie. II, although it gives Anakin his love interest, makes him such a whiny brat, and completely aloof from Obi-Wan, that III had to spend an hour artificially—and, of course, badly—attempting to brainwash us into believing that Anakin and Obi-Wan like each other. Sure. Suuuure they do.

While the crapitude of II was entirely George Lucas’ fault, if we take II’s crapitude as a given, I’m not sure what else he could have done to save III, then what he did: throw away the first half of the movie trying to pretend I and II never happened, and then hit us with the big emotional guns, bring in the swelling music, and roll curtains. In some sense, Order 66 was the prequels. The Prequel Trilogy was the Fall to the Original’s Salvation, and Order 66 was the Fall in a nutshell. Everything goes wrong at once. Anakin lets everyone down at once. Vader’s selfishness tears a galaxy asunder, and it does so not only with the score haunting us, but with the memory of the Original Trilogy crystallizing in front of us. The Vader/Anakin pain and suffering which will be released in VI's emotional finale looms large over everything.

In a reversal of the Original Trilogy, Anakin does exactly what Luke did not do. In V, Luke, against the wishes of his betters, runs off to Cloud City to save his friends, and there confronts a more powerful Sith Lord. Luke gets in over his head, and finds himself down an arm. But he doesn’t take that last step toward Hell; he would rather die than do that. Similarly, Anakin, against the wishes of his betters, runs off to the Chancellor’s office in an attempt to save his wife, and there confronts a more powerful Sith Lord. He gets in over his head, but instead of refusing that final step toward evil, he chooses himself over others, and Mace Windu ends up down a hand. Order 66 follows, and the tragedy ensues.

The weaknesses of III are copious, but I think they all stem from elsewhere. Anakin’s sudden reversal is often criticized as being too quick, and unbelievable. I think this is not the result of Anakin being too quick to change, but too slow. The transformation seems weird because it is an odd time to do something so dumb. Oh, now you decide to turn on the Jedi? Now you decide that they’re all evil? I and II spent so much time trying to make Anakin a fear-ridden, angsty, wreck of a human being that his “Fall” ends up seeming too much in character. A fall should be a FALL, all caps. The strangely crappy personal interactions between Anakin and Obi-Wan, Anakin and Palpatine—these are also products of the fact that III is too late to be doing this. The first two movies should have been making Anakin out to be the Wonder Boy who can do no wrong, feared by bad guys, admired by good guys, and lusted after by Palpatine. Instead, the first two movies did… none of that.

The signature awful moment of III, Vader’s comical “NOOOOOO!!!” near the end, is also a product of bad preparation. We never believed in Anakin and Padme’s love for each other, because it was, for lack of a better term, stupid. How could Padme be surprised by anything this guy does? She knows him better than us and even we know he’s a puerile loose cannon who would just as well wipe out a camp of sentient beings if he felt like it or if the script called for it. And she’s surprised when he goes Sith crazy…? Meanwhile, Anakin’s “love” for Padme is completely disingenuous. He even uses words like “intoxicating” to describe his attitude towards her. Padme to him is a drug to quench his appetite for companionship, and a spectator for his braggadocio. After killing Jedi kids, it seems like “finding a new muse” wouldn’t be that big a deal to him. So, to make us think that Vader really cares about her, we get the gratuitous scream. Notice how Leia didn’t need to scream when Han got frozen because… ummm… we believed that she loved him?

Again, though, these faults are faults that III was saddled with, and did not entirely overcome. They aren’t of III’s own making. Even then, for at least a few minutes, during Order 66, III did overcome them. Darth Vader is a tragedy. The horrors that the Original heroes will one day sacrifice life and limb for are the result of a deep, dark shadow cast by this terrible moment. If III can do that, even with all its failings, and even while having to make up for all the failings of I and II, it is doing something right. I think it does. I think the helplessness and inevitability (and did I mention the score?) make the purge of the Jedi about as well done as it could have been.

Of course, III did a lot wrong. A non-exhaustive list: Natalie Portman’s "acting." That ridiculous lightsaber duel between Yoda and Sidious. General Greivous. That ridiculous lightsaber duel between Palpatine and Mace Windu. The completely pointless Kashyyk battle. That ridiculous scene where Palpatine kills three Jedi without any of them so much as bothering to resist. (I think the moral here is: don’t give Palpatine a lightsaber).

I think my defense of III, then, is that it has the soul of what the Prequels were supposed to be, even in spite of all the multitudinous failings. The grandeur, the epic catastrophe, the horrible pit that develops in your stomach—ever so briefly, this all happens. It could very well be a testament to the Original Trilogy’s greatness. Maybe it is our leftover sense of wonder at what we know comes next that imbues III with tragedy. Maybe it is really a faint shadow of what III could have been that makes what III was worth watching. I’m not sure I would argue with that.

Until he turns his lightsaber on. Then I am utterly convinced that for at least twenty minutes, the alien parasite in his chin fell asleep, and George Lucas remembered how to make a movie.

~Right Thumb~

Picard, Augustine, Q, and God

Editors Note: Left Thumb actually wrote about three sentences in this one. It's not much, but it's a start. Of course, at the same time, he demanded that we changed all of the "I"s into "We"s, and that the post be credited to both of us. Three sentences and he thinks it becomes "we." I haven't seen this blatant of a credit-snatch since that time I talked to that British guy and he claimed that England played a role in WWII. Shameless.

Tapestry is not only one of the great Next Generation episodes, it is one of the great science-fiction stories. The premise is not outlandish or particularly original, but it is a compelling tale of the Fall, grace, redemption, and the great irony of mankind’s relationship to the Almighty. Not bad for 45 minutes.
For those who don’t recall the episode, Captain Picard is dying. After a plasma-something-or-other hits him in the chest, his artificial heart gives out, and Picard meets his maker—or, in this case, the next best thing. He meets Q. After an amusing conversation, Q drags from Picard a sense of regret at some of the things Johnny-Boy did in his youth. See, it turns out that even slightly stuffy Shakespearean sixty-somethings can have a past that is... colorful. As much as we’d like to envision boyish Picard curled up by the fire reading King Lear at the family estate in the Pyrenees, this was far from the reality. Jean-Luc apparently has some regrets, and that’s not counting the hair situation. Among these regrets was a gratuitous bar fight, in which he was stabbed and lost his real heart. Thirty years later, absent that altercation, Picard would have survived the plasma-something-or-other. Picard decries his youth as one full of arrogance and very little sense. Q decides to send Picard back in time to right the wrongs.

Picard does so, avoiding the fight while alienating his friends. Yet his life turns out quite a bit different this time. Instead of command of the Enterprise, Lieutenant Picard finds himself stuck in a rote scientific role, more becoming of a young pup than a grizzled Starfleet veteran. When Jean-Luc asks Riker and Troi about his career, they bluntly relate all of his failings to him: he never set himself apart, he never took any risks, he never did anything. He wasn’t command material, he was “…punctual.” As Jean-Luc sums it up to Q a moment later: that man is devoid of passion and imagination. And I would rather die the man I was than live life out like that. Q gives JLP another chance; this time the future Captain of the Enterprise takes no prisoners, the bar fight ensues, and the knife goes through his chest. Yet he wakes up, barely alive, on the Enterprise, apparently with a functioning artificial heart.

As we re-tell the story, we can’t possibly convey the awesomeness of the episode. Patrick Stewart was born for this type of story, and John de Lancie is, of course, perfect as Q—mischievous and a little sadistic but with a core of goodness you can’t deny. The story itself explains so much about Picard, that we think it is hard to remember at the end that we didn’t already know all of this about Picard.* It feels more like a friend retelling a story than a script dreamed up by a TNG writer.

But for now, we’ll leave out the general accolades and focus on how universal of a story this is—and how much it tells us about us. It hearkens back to all the great Saints. All the great Saints did stupid things in their youth. Paul killed people, Francis went off to war, Peter denied Jesus for crying out loud. But in particular it’s reminiscent of Saint Augustine, who went through a veritable theological bar fight in his youth, falling into agnosticism and Manichaeism before flourishing as one of the greatest theologians, philosophers and defenders that the Church has ever known. Somewhat fittingly, Augustine is one of the Big Two along with Aquinas, much like Picard is one of the Big Two along with Kirk. (For more on this parallel, be on the watch for Left Thumb’s upcoming book Summa Trekkologiae: An Introduction to Star Trek and Scholasticism.)**

Imagine, though, Saint Augustine, without his early experiences. Without personal experience, how could he have written the Confessions? How could he have poured forth the deeply personal yet universally applicable truths that he did, regarding original sin, free will, the grace of God, and so forth? He wouldn’t have; he couldn’t have. In the same way, Captain Picard, without having come close to death, and without having become so aware of the preciousness of each moment, how could he have led others into battle or commanded the starship which has been affectionately referred to as a Flying Fortress of Goodness, Bringing Happiness Wherever She Goes? Of course, he couldn’t. The most happiness he could legitimately hope to bring to others would be if he stood in the park and handed children free Happy Meals. (But given Picard’s feelings towards children, this seems unlikely. And slightly creepy. But we digress.)

Going one step further, Augustine and Picard seem to mirror human history. On Easter, we sing “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which has won for us so Great a Redeemer.” Now, this concept is a great mystery not only to us, but to the Church in general. How it is that God brought, out of our disobedience, greater good than imaginable is beyond our capacity to understand. But He did. Before the Fall, humans were created in God’s Image, of course, but after Jesus, God is one of us; this is the most stunning thing there is in the cosmos, anywhere. Nothing else even comes close. Through God’s condescension, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and our participation in the Eucharist, we become united with the Almighty in a way that even the angels do not know.

Augustine himself (conveniently enough) talks about how we fell from grace because our minds were turned from the eternal to the finite. Yet, oddly enough, it was our finitude that saved us—had we been pure spirit, as the angels, our sin would have been eternal as well, brooking no savior, and leaving us in perdition with Lucifer and his ilk. Of course, the irony is that had we not been temporal beings, perhaps we would never have drifted from the eternal. Yet because we were, God used our weakness to bring forth an Act so mighty that our temporal faults were taken on by His Son, and we are able to join the eternal in a way we never could have before.

We might not be articulating it well, but the point we’re trying to get across is nuts. Through our fault, through our limited nature, and through our weakness, God worked a miracle that gave us more than we had in the Garden of Eden.

Of course, none of this is to say that we should sin that grace might abound. But it is salvation history, and it resembles the personal history of so many (all?) of the Saints that one has to think God likes this story.

One of the great parts of Tapestry is that nowhere does Picard deny the fact that he made mistakes in his youth. Even at the end, Picard is a 56-year-old, seasoned, responsible captain who would no longer get into a bar fight with a Nausicaan. His youth was full of mistakes and he knows it. But to go back and wipe them out is to wipe out a lot of who he was.
Without this particular mistake, Picard never experiences real suffering, never comes to the conclusion that certain things are worth dying for, and that living is more important than just staying alive, and all those clichés which we repeat to ourselves but have trouble actually believing.*** That Picard could never lead an away team, could never face down Romulans, argue with Klingons, survive the Borg, and save the galaxy from multitudinous and multifarious dangers.

A Saint Augustine who had never known the pit of despair and lack of God that comes in the wilderness could never have so brilliantly and genuinely defended the Church against that wilderness. A Saint Augustine who had not known such suffering would not have had the same impetus to keep others from falling into that pit of despair.

Picard, in the alternate Tapestry reality, still makes mistakes, of course. He fools around with one of his best friends, basically ruining their relationship for all time. This is what makes the whole point: we are going to make mistakes. The question is, are we going to make mistakes in the pursuit of greatness, or in an attempt to avoid dying to self? In the lowest circle of Hell, nothing moves, save the wings of Satan, freezing all below. To get there, all we have to do is nothing.

If we aim High, we can’t help but reach God. We will falter and we will fail, and we might even get a knife stuck through us, but that very suffering draws us closer to God than we previously thought possible. That’s what Jesus did for mankind, that’s how Augustine became Saint Augustine, and that’s how Jean-Luc Picard became Captain of the Enterprise.


~Two Thumbs Sideways~




*And yes, you picayune, pointy-eared perfectionists, we know that his artificial heart and the bar fight is mentioned before, in “Samaritan Snare”. But the point remains. The full story is only unveiled here and it feels like we always knew.

**Note: No, do not be on the watch for this book. Let’s face it, LT can’t even get a stinking blog post on the web. A multi-volume tractate on the similarities of Starfleet command structure and Thomistic metaphysics? Talk about a one-way trip to Development Gehenna. Maybe he'll meet the Carthusians there.

***Although a large part of our culture today pretty much denies that there are things worth dying for. This is unfortunate. At the very least, deep space exploration and the invention of a blueberry pie/cookie dough extravaganza are worth dying for.

Prometheus, Alien, and the Wonder of Not Knowing

Spoiler Warning: If you have not yet seen Prometheus (or, for that matter, Alien, Aliens, Dark City or Contact) and desire to view it at some point in the future, I probably would not read this.



Prometheus is grand science fiction in the strain of Blade Runner, Alien, Solaris, Dark City, etc. It just isn’t as good. It is a worthwhile viewing experience, however, if for no other reason than the fact that Prometheus, in being not-great-but-merely-very-good, casts into sharp view those qualities which made the previous greats, Greats. Prometheus wants to ask grand questions, but it answers too many of its own questions. It wants to be fulfilling, but in satiating too much of our curiosity, it leaves one just a bit empty. And while the 70’s sci-fi look of the film—a science fiction mise-en-scene which no one has improved upon in the decades since—makes you feel like you are watching great science fiction, I came to the end with one overarching though: I want to watch Alien again, because, wow, Alien was amazing.

Prometheus starts off on completely the wrong foot. Even while watching the opening scene, I was horrified by its brutal opacity. As an alien spacecraft leaves the atmosphere, some humanoid creature, on a planet that looks very much like Earth, dissolves himself into the water using some strange liquid, and we see his DNA shred itself to pieces, leading to the inescapable conclusions that life on Earth was begun by an alien race. Mind you, this is the first scene. Already, I know more than I want to know. Already, I know that the crew of the Prometheus will find some origin point of this alien race, and that they will discover that they did, indeed, create humanity. At this point, the entire movie was practically ruined, in the first scene. The only thing that kept my interest piqued was the belief that Ridley Scott must have something up his sleeve. Surely he would not show us that, and then simply follow through with it? Surely, there is something about this scene that we do not understand?

There wasn’t. The twist was that, in fact, that the Engineers—the human scientists’ term for this proto-human race—are now trying to kill us. Thankfully, the movie refrains from telling us why this proto-human species is now determined to undo that which they started, but this is about the only thing the movie refrains from answering for us. The movie ends with the following things basically known: this species created us, they then wanted to destroy us, and to do so they engineered a black goo which mutates living things into horrendous monsters, and eventually one of these mutations will turn into the Alien we were all frightened by 33 years ago. The only thing left to the imagination is why this race of beings wants to kill us.

Now, for a moment, I will ignore the damage that this movie does to Alien’s original ideas. The fact that the Alien was actually bread to destroy us, specifically, is quite a let-down. It smacks of the same Everything-Is-About-Us science fiction that I normally ascribe to lesser sci-fi artists than Ridley Scott. Much more frightening was the idea that the Alien race was simply out there. It evolved, much like we did, except that it was a nearly perfect killing machine, and we just happened to run into it, and we just happened killed in the process, unless we happened to be Sigourney Weaver. Numerous other such mysteries and concepts were ruined as well.

But I ignore these because Prometheus can stand on its own terms, and it is its own terms which I believe are continually weakened by its lack of restraint. Think of the climactic suicide crash between the Prometheus and the alien vessel. In the film, this is a triumphant moment of good triumphing over evil—or at the very least, of humanity triumphing over someone else. It is also bland and predictable. Imagine, if you will, if we really were not sure what the proto-humans’ plans were, if we were not sure that this was a weapon meant to destroy us, and if we really were not sure what “this” was in the first place. The dramatic tension and existential questions involved in that hypothetical scene would have dwarfed the actual scene. Should we ram it? Should we not? Is it our business? Can we take it upon ourselves to assume evil intentions when they are not manifestly proved? Do we want to die for a pointless cause?

As another example, we turn to the tomb/sanctuary/giant head room. One of the panels on the wall very much—very much—resembled the Alien from the original Alien. Maybe I just saw something that wasn’t there. But it certainly seemed to share many characteristics. When I first saw this, I thought it was awesome. What was the proto-human species’ experience with the Alien? Why did they have a panel devoted to it? Had they been wiped out by this Alien species? Where did the Alien come from and how did it sneak up on such an advanced civilization? Where were they now? Or maybe the proto-humans created the Alien, and it got out of control? Or maybe the Alien was actually a more ancient species, and it created proto-humans before evolving—or devolving—into a more primal, vicious form?

The questions were endless, and the imaginative possibilities seemed boundless. The holograms showing the proto-humans running from… something… were haunting, terrifying, awe-inspiring, and so forth. Was it the Alien they were running from? If so, why? How did it get there? What in the blazes were they doing here? What was going on?!

Prometheus releases the vast majority of this tension by explicitly telling you 95% of what happened. In the end, we have a banal and uninteresting history of a biological weapon gone wrong. That is nothing new, and that is nothing particularly interesting. The original Alien was not such a success because of all the answers it provided. It was a success because of all the answers it did not provide.

Indeed, the original Alien’s success can entirely be chalked up to what we did not know, what we did not see, and what we could only guess about. This is true both in the high-minded, existential, What is our place in the universe? sense, and it was also true in the “Sweet mother of all things holy what is around the corner?!?!” sense. Alien was scary because you didn’t often see the Alien. It was meaningful because it didn’t answer the questions. They found a crashed extraterrestrial ship, with some sort of “Space Jockey” on board, whose stomach seemed to have exploded. You never discover who the ship belonged to, who the space jockey was, or, later on, what the Alien was doing there, how it survived, where it came from, etc. The universe seemed huge. It seemed nearly infinite. It seemed like there might have been a trillion possible answers because, in a universe as big as that, there were a trillion different possible answers.

The best science fiction has always understood this. Dark City, for instance, leaves you guessing for much of the movie. When you finally discover the truth about the city, you are still left wondering—why? Why this space-city? Why did they do it here? And what exactly were the Strangers doing? We are given hints, but never answers. Where did they come from? Why choose us?

Even the action oriented science fiction films understand this, on a more tactile level. Aliens, otherwise known as James Cameron’s original Ode To Stuff Getting Blown Up (Because of Evil Corporations), was an ultra-intense, paranoid movie where you never feel comfortable and the action means much more than simply numbing one’s mind. And it accomplishes this not through a blunt, “How many bad guys can we kill at once” attitude, but rather through a lot of sleight-of-hand artistry. Think of the scene where the auto-machine guns are defending the installation. We know they have a limited amount of ammo. We know they are tearing the aliens to pieces, for at least a bit. But we see nothing. We only hear. We hear the rapid fire bangs of the guns, for minutes on end, and then, all at once, the noise stops. And then we are terrified. It was not guns firing and aliens dying that was scary. It was silence. Because the guns are down, and our time was up.

Contact, a science fiction film that could have been so much more, suffers from the same problem Prometheus does. It wants to answer questions. So instead of a thoughtful, novel story about communicating with an alien race that is light years away, the movie develops a deus ex machina, Time-Space Portal Machine whereby Jodie Foster can meet the alien, who explains everything to her. What. A. Letdown.
Now, I know why movies do this. I think back to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which a lot of people really didn’t like. They didn’t like it because they didn’t think the aliens made any sense, they didn’t like it because their purpose was never explained, they didn’t like it because the ending came out of nowhere. But it was superb. It was superb because it didn’t just answer every trivial, or non-trivial, question we could throw at it. It hinted at possible explanations, as science fiction will often do, but it never drew us an outline. That lets you ponder. That lets you cogitate. That lets you sink into images and possibilities. In short, that is great science fiction.

Prometheus could have been great. Perhaps most sadly, it could have been great with very little change. Remove the first scene. Remove the needless explication regarding The Purpose of the goo, and the intentions of the proto-humans. Maybe add a scene or two with a little more wonder and a little less analysis. It would not have been hard to maintain the beautiful look, capable action scenes and decent characters with a narrative that did more wondering and less talking. It would not have been hard, in other words, to create a movie that understood Alien’s strengths, and was faithful to its science-fiction wonder. This is probably the main reason Prometheus was disappointing. Despite its grand attempt, and despite being fifty times as intelligent as most summer movies—while still being eminently watchable—and despite its superlative effects and sets, the movie could have had the depth and solemnity of the original Alien, and the many great science fiction works before and after. It could have been poetry, and instead it was a physics equation.