Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ and the “idiot plot”
One of the most frequent complaints I hear about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is the film’s reliance upon a storytelling device known as an ‘idiot plot.’ An idiot plot takes place when characters make consistently stupid decisions, allowing the plot to move forward in places where an intelligent decision would end the conflict of the film prematurely. It is often applied where characters are presumed to be reasonably intelligent — in Prometheus, for example, many of the characters are scientists — and this can be problematic because it becomes all too obvious to the audience that a writer has contrived the plot.
In other words, when a film relies too heavily on an idiot plot, we can no longer suspend our disbelief in the story and our experience of the entertainment is tarnished. It is this which separates believable mistakes from an idiot plot; dramatic irony resulting from a character’s shortcomings creates tension in a story, but tip the balance over the edge and the audience will find themselves unable to invest in the story or its characters at all.
The unusual thing about Prometheus is that it doesn’t really have an idiot plot, despite how consistently it comes up as a criticism of the film. Such complaints, I believe, stem from unfulfilled expectations, rather than the film itself being of poor quality. The connection to Alien, for example, while largely irrelevant to the story itself, ought to bring viewers back to the scene in which Ash made the disastrous decision to break quarantine for the infected Kane and allow him onto the ship — only to be later revealed as an android under orders to return a xenomorph specimen to Earth, in spite of the danger it poses to the crew.
Similarly, in Prometheus, those instances where characters do make stupid decisions are not simply contrived to push the plot forward; the prevalence of human arrogance, naivety and aggression and its detriment to us as a species is one of the film’s key themes. Those aspects of human behaviour should be uncomfortable to witness because the film can be viewed as a critique of these behaviours. In that aspect, disregarding Prometheus on account of the idiotic behaviour of the characters makes about as much sense as complaining that the titular character of Dr Faustus should have known better than to trust a demon, or criticising The Godfather because Michael Corleone isn’t very nice. Some of the most frequent criticisms incorrectly associated with an idiot plot are as follows.
1. The crew remove their helmets when they discover the air in the Engineers’ complex is breathable
It should be noted first and foremost that there are no consequences for this decision, negative or otherwise, which automatically disqualifies it from being classed as part of an ‘idiot plot.’ It isn’t even part of the plot at all: nobody gets infected by any alien parasites (as in the later Alien: Covenant) and all of the horrific things that happen subsequently in the film are totally unrelated to whether anyone’s helmet remained on or off.
Even so, I have been subjected to several painful arguments about why this was a frustrating, immersion-breaking scene. The rationale is usually that most people wouldn’t remove their helmets so this makes it difficult to believe that anyone would — and I believe that the expectation that disaster would follow this scene (as is so often the case with horror films) made critics of the film pre-emptively judge this scene as ludicrous, rather than looking for an explanation as to why the scene exists.
Consider who the characters (in particular, Shaw and Holloway) actually are: essentially quasi-religious fanatics who have come all the way across the galaxy because of a pattern they found in some cave paintings. They fully expect to meet the Engineers during this mission and believe their arrival will be expected, and they want so badly for these beliefs to be correct that they are willing to take leaps of faith that other people might not. Consider also that the crew knows the planet’s atmosphere itself is not breathable, but that something inside the complex is generating breathable air — it’s actually quite rational that Shaw and Holloway would interpret this development as a confirmation of their beliefs in intelligent, benign life on the planet.
With Shaw and Holloway covered, there is only the issue of why the rest of the crew follows suit — but remember that this is science fiction set in the future and, presumably, the Prometheus is not the first space exploration mission that has resulted in its crew removing their helmets on a foreign world. It has to be done at some point — historical and contemporary off-world exploration operates on a philosophy of acceptable risk — so it is ridiculous to assert that the film would be improved by demonstrating hundreds of tests being run to make absolutely sure it’s safe, rather than heading forward with the plot.
2. Millburn, the biologist, is a moron who apparently knows very little about potentially dangerous extraterrestrials — or biology in general
This one is true — but again, it’s entirely the point. Millburn presents himself as the class clown — so his lack of sensibility or knowledge ought to be expected. He runs in terror at the sight of a hologram depicting humanoid figures running in terror from an unseen hazard—not because the hologram itself scares him, but because of the unseen danger it implies — but later he is so fascinated by a serpentine creature that he unwittingly allows it to snap his arm in two. His ignorance is certainly exaggerated to an extreme, but this aspect of his personality explores an important plot point about Weyland and serves the aforementioned theme about the vices of humanity.
Millburn isn’t the only member of the Prometheus who could be labelled an idiot — even the ship’s captain (Idris Elba) is first introduced blithely decorating a Christmas tree hours after waking from a deep sleep, much to the chagrin of Vickers, (Charlize Theron) the only character stoic enough to meet critics’ definitions of sensible.
A better question might not be ‘Why do the crew act like morons?’ but instead ‘Why did Weyland hire morons?’ Weyland already spent trillions of dollars on the mission, why not spend a few more on a competent crew? The easy answer to that question is that Weyland doesn’t care a bit about the scientific mission or any of the scientists on it. That aspect of the mission is all a facade — he’s there solely to find a cure to his impending death. He reasons that if the Engineers made humans, as Shaw and Holloway claim, they might be able to fix them even at the point of death. The only members of the crew he cares about are himself, his creation David, and the ruthless military personnel protecting him.
3. Why did Weyland pretend to be dead?
If anyone can think of a decent answer why a dying multi-trillionaire would disclose to his (probably quite cheap) mercenary scientist crew that he was only seeking the Engineers to ask them for a renewed life (perhaps even immortality), I’ll concede this one too. Shaw certainly wouldn’t have thought much of the idea. Perhaps some of the other crew members would have thought the idea was pretty good — maybe even good enough to hijack the idea themselves. Of course, it all ends up being pretty inconsequential anyway, but why take these extra risks when it was easier to just pretend to be dead?
As for why they cast Guy Pearce as a chronically elderly man, I don’t know.
4. How did Millburn and Fifield get lost, especially since Fifield is the one who made the map in the first place?
Alright, I concede. I don’t have a single excuse for this one. We found it. We found the idiot plot. It’s not even like it was a complicated labyrinth or anything — it was literally just a couple of tunnels.
5. Why did David infect Holloway with the black goo? Was it to find out what it did to a human?
This one comes verbatim from Red Letter Media, to whom I am especially grateful for answering their own question. (I’m also grateful to them for providing some competition for CinemaSins in the ‘Most Infuriatingly Brain-dead Film Criticisms’ race.)
It actually comes as part of a wider criticism: that nothing David does seems to make sense or have any kind of reason behind it. I think the explanation for why Scott chose to make David so unpredictable and senseless is more or less ‘because he could.’ The trope of Androids or AI in general acting on strict rationality is pretty overdone by now after all, and there are plenty of other great films and books that explore Androids as either near-human or sophont/super-human in terms of emotional range, intelligence, and reasoning.
Not every AI needs to be Hal, or Ava, or Roy Batty. There is no evidence to say that human-created artificial intelligence must succeed in being our likeness or in superseding it. David just flatly doesn’t make sense to human beholders, and this is the entire beauty of his character. He’s irrational but dispassionate. He has emotions, albeit ones we can barely understand, but he doesn’t have anything like a human moral compass. He’s vain enough, in his own way, to dye his hair to mimic T. E. Lawrence. He’s inquisitive, jealous, and flawed. We can only understand him or sympathise with him in snippets that are lost in a sea of cynicism and nonsensicality. He’s just alien enough to be intriguing, without spoiling it all by laying his entire character bare for us to dissect at will.
In short, he’s a little bit like the Engineers. We understand the gist of their separate strands of misanthropy, but we (hopefully) don’t relate at all to the ways this informs their actions. David’s acts of murder for the sake of curiosity may be disproportionate to his dislike of humanity, but he certainly isn’t given any reasons to like his creators during the film’s entire two hour run time. In addition to weathering the slew of snide insults from Holloway, David’s various conversations with Holloway and Shaw reveal his immense disappointment at the reasoning behind his existence (‘We made you because we could’) and his utter bewilderment at the concept of faith, especially blind faith in a nondescript ‘something better.’
The crux of this link between grandfathers and grandson comes when Vickers burns Holloway alive to prevent any spread of his ‘infection’ without a moment’s thought. It would be reasonable to assume that David learned from this kind of behaviour, once upon a time, but the scene’s greater purpose is in showing us a pretty good reason why the Engineers would want to wipe us out. Humans are barbaric, selfish, and cruel. Consider many people’s attitudes to other life forms on Earth and our environment, and it’s hard to find a leg to stand on in protesting the Engineers’ decision to wipe out their mistake. Consider also David, and what our reaction would be to a race of Androids that were exactly like him, and try and find a good reason to convince a better species to let us live with them. Let’s face it, none of us would want to live with David, go on a spaceship with him, or probably even allow him to exist in the same universe as us if we could avoid it.
6. So why did the Engineers want to kill us if they were the ones who created us?
I’ve more or less explained this is parts already, but I’ll recap: the first hour and 40 minutes of this film more or less serve as a demonstration of the flaws of humanity. The crew of the Prometheus are sloppy, Shaw is naive, Holloway is an insensitive asshole, Vickers is cruel, and Weyland is callous and selfish. The question remains of why the Engineers would create us to be so flawed, and the answer is that they didn’t — or at the least, they didn’t intend to.
It’s never really explained in detail, but the opening scene of the film appears to show one of the Engineers’ experiments gone wrong. We see its DNA corrupt and break apart, but whether we are witnessing anything to do with the creation of humanity — or the creation of the biological weapon — is irrelevant. It’s possible the scene was intended to be interpreted as both, as it’s hard to read whether the Engineer knows he’s committing an act of martyrdom one way or the other by drinking the black substance. But the biggest thing to take away from the scene is that the Engineers aren’t perfect themselves. Hence our creation is by no means meant to be taken as a deliberate, meticulous act — and on the flip-side, their decision to destroy us shouldn’t blindly be taken as the correct one, in spite of the flaws of humanity.
Part of Prometheus’ curse is that it borders between sci-fi and horror, two of the trickiest genres when it comes to logic holes and idiot plots. On the one hand, horror more or less relies upon the audience willing the characters not to act as they do. With the benefit of knowing one is watching a horror film, we can perceive stupidity in a character’s actions where they see none. On the other hand, while the keyword of science fiction is fiction, any shortcuts that may need to be taken (in order for the writers to tell the story they want to tell within the setting they want to use) tend to stick out like sore thumbs if the audience is neither willing to ignore them nor think up solutions of their own. Prometheus does tend to take a lot of shortcuts — or rather it refuses to explain every little detail, or to babysit viewers through the film’s themes as the plot unfolds — but it’s really on the audience to fill in the gaps. If they do, they are rewarded, not with an idiot plot but with an existential experience that is as philosophical as it is horrifying.
Alien: Covenant, though… well, we don’t talk about Alien: Covenant…
