Saw “Prometheus” at last…Now I wish I had seen it on the big screen. People complained of its lack of ideas–It had many ideas, most that it merely hinted at. Language and meaning; man vs. machine; man vs. microbe; man vs. woman; woman vs. offspring–at least when inseminated by an unknowing host; time vs. stasis; and so on.
The big idea–man vs. his creator? That’s a no brainer from a cosmic viewpoint. It would really only be a matter of logic to decide man is the biggest nastiest despoiler of the planet. The next question: Is the entire planet (or universe–we breed like rabbits) worth this one invasive species? Hell–The old testament god committed genocide when there were probably not even 1 million people on the planet and the writer of that myth couldn’t have conceived of not more than a few thousand.
Naturally, just because some vastly superior humanoids made us and then decided to off us is rather meaningless. In the beginning–the one we can imagine–God made god and then some other gods and then angels in some reductive Darwin world-universe…HE…THEY…IT…made us…But, somebody made THEM–and truly the final choice in the movie (I won’t ruin the end) is what makes us different than a machine.
Some odd note in the human genetic melody sounds a “why?”–in a deeper pitch than a “how” (reptiles through mammals share that cause-effect capability) to get to a certain end. Man isn’t an ant or a microbe with 5 or so reactions to all situations. Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Saint Francis say more to me about human oddness and our place in the world than any other examples. More than, say, a rat with access to a button (via perversely humanly placed electrodes) who will press it and stimulate its pleasure center to the exclusion of all else until it starves to death….
If there is a takeaway from the movie–mine is that at least we asked the big “WHY?”
Marc Songini 