100 things - Biology and Prometheus

[herumtreiber]

I just hate the way certain TV shows and movies butcher biology. Case in point, Prometheus.

Granted, the movie is visually stunning. Great panoramic shots, awesome landscapes, cool spaceships and tech gadgets. However, science fiction ought to be so much more. The script has so many inconsistencies you could send a small moon through them.

I'll concentrate on biology because modern scriptwriters seem to lack an elemental knowledge of it (I'm talking about you, Hawaii 5-0; come on, McGarret is stabbed on the abdomen and then runs like he was in the Olympics?).

The central premise of the movie is that some alien life form (the engineers or space-jockeys) created life on earth - or humankind - by imbibing a dark liquid and jumping down the cliff like Bella Swan, whereupon his body instantly decomposes and becomes DNA!

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All hail the almighty DNA!  This is utter rubbish. DNA by itself is capable of nothing. It's like I throw microchips on the desk and expect to use them to edit a video. DNA requires RNA, enzymes, proteins, fatty acids, etc., to be able to express itself.

All of this needed to evolve together in a haphazard process, a delicate selection that took more than 2 billion years to produce humans. The fossil record attests to that. By the way, we share that DNA with most life on this planet, so it isn't feasible that some aliens created just humans in their image. 

In a gruesome scene, a woman programs a lifeboat medical computer (which is apparently designed to only recognize men?) to perform a cesarean. Afterwards, her abdomen is stapled together and she is able to run everywhere à la McGarrett. Color me impressed! Couldn't they mention, you know, awesome medical techniques that act like nanomachines and fix her instantly?

And the head of the space jockey, after being dead for 2,000 years, reacts to electrical stimuli and does nifty things before exploding! Well, better that old head than mine :)

I think that if the writer had taken the time to research biology and cleave to it, the script would've been neater… well, not really; but I can hope, can't I?

By the way, tissue needs time to grow, it also needs food. The laws of conservation of mass and energy apply. A tadpole can't become the Giant Squid in a matter of hours, imbibing only oxygen. Science fiction should be plausible, this isn't.

There's a scene where android Fassbender watches a multicolor depiction of the stars and a flute is revealed as the means with which the spaceship is steered. Really! The scene reminded me of a Stephen King novel, The Tommyknockers. The difference is that King masterfully blended horror and science fiction in a riveting tale; which this ain't.

Regarding an inspiring take on humanity's origin, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke did it so much better in 2001: A space odyssey. They posited an alien intervention in which the monolith descended upon the African savannah and manipulated the brains of the hominids there, which were dying of hunger. The monolith prodded them to fashion weapons out of the bones of the animals they hunted; this allowed the hominids to become stronger and survive. The monolith taught and watched.

 A hominid yells in triumph after killing his enemy and throws his tool, a long white bone, up to the sky. The white bone twirls as it climbs, and then the shot changes and it becomes the silhouette of a satellite orbiting Earth. Humanity's tools have evolved. 2001 was good science fiction. Prometheus is a clownery.

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Comments

[vanashta.livejournal.com]

Though I haven't seen Prometheus,I must agree with you that this kind of thing happens a lot in movies/tv shows,and it's a pitty to see what might have been a relativly good movie ,turn in to a disapointment because of it!
And honnestly ,I don't have the knowledge that you obviously do about biology and chemistry,but I do know enough about it to realize that certain thing are just not possible!

Just like the "bad guy" that always stands up at least one more time at the end of a movie, no matter what they've done to get rid of him(stabbed or shot him with a machine gun mutiple times),he just doesn't die!

The Tommyknockers!!!Don't remind me,saw the movie and I found it rather gruesome!!!

[herumtreiber.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Certain things can't happen, no matter how accurate the other things are. McGarrett running after being stabbed, who does that? I know I couldn't move a muscle and would probably die unless someone took me to the hospital.

No matter how advanced the civilization, if they do that, they have to explain how come that happened.

The bad guy coming back again and again might have been fun the first time they did it, not the 500th time! They should be plausible!

Prometheus is gruesome squared! But all those implausibilities :(

The Tommyknockers is gruesome too, the book even more so! Still, it had some good science fiction thing going on with the old spaceship and the way the aliens behaved :)