As a science journalist, I receive few professional perks. The press rooms at some scientific meetings offer free food and drinks. I get to see science papers in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science a few days ahead of publication. Occasionally, publishers send me advance copies of books in the hope that I'll review them.
On Tuesday, however, I enjoyed a real perk: I was invited to a press screening of Ridley Scott's new science fiction movie, Prometheus , three days before its general release in the US.
Prometheus inhabits the same fictional universe as Ridley Scott's second movie, Alien (1979), with which it shares some themes: the greed and recklessness of corporations, the hubris and vulnerability of humans, the humanity and inhumanity of androids, and the fearsome destructive power of malevolent, advanced aliens. To that mix, Prometheus adds another theme: the origin of humankind.
The movie is already out in Europe. British reviewers, like the
Guardian's
Peter Bradshaw, were sparing in their
praise:
It is a muddled, intricate, spectacular film, but more or less in control of all its craziness and is very watchable. It lacks the central killer punch of Alien: it doesn't have its satirical brilliance and its tough, rationalist attack on human agency and guilt. But there's a driving narrative impulse, and, however silly, a kind of idealism, a sense that it's exciting to make contact with whatever's out there.
Rather than add another review of the movie itself, I'll share my thoughts on how the movie portrays science. Most science fiction requires suspending one's disbelief in what is scientifically or technologically impossible. By the early 2090s, when the action in Prometheus takes place, humans have figured out how to travel to Earth's nearest stars, though not so speedily that human astronauts can avoid being kept in suspended animation.
Prometheus-era technology also includes the ability to make artificial humans, or androids, whose mental and physical abilities exceed those of their creators. The picture shows an android called David (played with scene-stealing élan by Michael Fassbender) amid a three-dimensional star chart that he activated from the bridge of a mothballed alien spaceship.
Technology as we know it
Spaceships and androids are so commonplace in science fiction that one barely questions their feasibility. What's harder to accept in a movie set decades in Earth's future is the absence of technologies that already exist on Earth. Instruments aboard spacecraft built and flown by NASA, the European Space Agency, and other space-faring organizations can determine a planet's topography, gravity distribution, and atmospheric composition without leaving orbit.
But in Prometheus, the humans rely on their own eyes to find things of interest on the surface of their destination planet. And they wait until they're in the planet's lower atmosphere to assess whether its composition is safe for humans to breathe or their spacecraft to fly through.
At points in the movie, the humans use visualization technology that looks suitably and plausibly advanced. On the other hand, the movie's opening scene includes an animated sequence that's meant to depict genetic events at the molecular level. The DNA and other molecules are cartoonish and stiff. A molecular dynamics simulation from 2012 would be more convincing—at least to me.
Genetics, both human and alien, play a role in the movie, but to discuss it would risk disclosing some of the plot. I can, however, divulge (because it's been scientifically established on 21st-century Earth) that humans share 99.7% of their DNA with Neanderthals and 94% of their DNA with chimpanzees. It matters, therefore, how precisely two genomes match.
For me, the movie's biggest scientific failing concerns neither knowledge nor technology, but ideas. The implications of what the humans discover when they arrive at their distant destination are profound, yet the characters barely discuss them. Granted, talking humans are less compelling on screen than fighting humans. Even so, the writers of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Caprica, and other dramas successfully and repeatedly explored what it means to be human, alien, android, or robot.
Fortunately, there's an opportunity for Prometheus to make amends for its scientific flaws: The movie's closing scene strongly suggests a possible sequel.
