In a recent column for the Huffington Post, Richard Stearns wrote about a kind of diversity pop culture hasn’t integrated particularly well into its characters and storylines. “The vast majority of television and film characters seem to have no faith,” he explained. “People rarely attend church, pray, or make decisions based on religious beliefs. It is hard to find any Christians on popular television shows who are not belittled. There are virtually no television characters who I can fully identify with.” But one of the things that’s been striking this summer at the movie is how many characters have faith, and how often it’s implied to be Judeo-Christian.

In The Avengers, when Black Widow explains to Captain America that Thor and Loki are basically God, Cap’s response is a nod to his religious belief as part of what makes him an avatar of a certain kind of American traditionalism. “There’s only one God, m’am,” he tells her. “And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The movie doesn’t spell out whether he’s a professing Christian, in part because there isn’t another really opportune moment to discuss theology, but the trail is there for people who want to follow it. In Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart’s Snow White says the Lord’s Prayer in captivity. When she lies in a near-death state, the Huntsman’s (Chris Hemsworth) response is prayer, an attempt to speed her into heaven and to find solace for himself. And Elizabeth Shaw, the hero of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, is a Christian whose scientific exploration is directly motivated by her faith. The symbol of her Christianity, the cross she wears around her neck, becomes something that’s traded back and forth, a totem of trust between characters who have little other reason to see each other as sympathetic.

Whatever the virtues and failings of the first two movie, the careful integration of the characters’ beliefs into moments of emotional strain or the world opening up, is very smart. This is the way that a lot of people live their faith: it informs their decision-making as they make their way in the secular world. These aren’t niche movies, meant only to speak to a very faithful minority who view themselves as embattled by the secular world. They’re meant for hugely mass audiences, and their characters’ Christianity is self-confident, both in that they don’t have crises of faith, and that it doesn’t have to be the only element that defines the characters’ personalities. It stands on its own. This strikes me as a smart way forward for people outside of Hollywood who’d like to see more Christian characters in mass entertainment, and for people in Hollywood who’d like to give their characters religion without writing solely religious stories.

Part of the reason Prometheus doesn’t work as well is that Shaw’s religion is the only thing we know is her motivation, but the movie doesn’t flesh out the relationship between her belief and her work as a scientist, and doesn’t bother to establish any consistency in her worldview. If a character’s going to be faithful, what we see of that faith should be consistent in and of itself, and consistent with the other things a character uses to make decisions and to evaluate the world. People of all religions should want to see smart depictions of faith, whether it’s a minor part of a character or their main motivation. And folks who want to create good religious characters need to spend time thinking through theology. Belief is a complicated thing, and getting it right is an essential part of worldbuilding.

This doesn’t surprise me at all, but apparently, the scene in Prometheus we discussed at length yesterday freaked out a lot of people before it scared the audience:

Even the monsters in Scott’s world were real — including the baby alien that Rapace’s Shaw rips out of her belly with help of a high-tech, robotic surgery machine — the kind every space ship without a doctor aboard should carry. The climatic scene in the middle of the film was shot over four days, a period that Rapace says she’ll always remember as the most stressful of the entire shoot.

The scene, according to Scott, is the one that tipped the film’s rating from a PG-13 to an R. The director said the only way to land the more family-friendly rating would have been to remove the scene entirely. “They didn’t even want the scene,” Scott said. “It wasn’t about just cutting it down, they didn’t want the scene.” And that was something neither Scott nor studio chief Tom Rothman wanted considering the importance of the sequence and the toll it took on the Rapace.

Given that both the themes and the plot of the movie are both totally dependent on that scene, I have a hard time imagining what the movie raters would have preferred as a substitute? Would they have wanted the snaky thing that killed members of the crew to come back for Shaw, even though it would have had no connection to her whatsoever? Could the movie have had a PG-13 rating if the alien had burst out of Shaw, and the medpod had healed the damage afterwards? It’s funny, how we have a tendency to treat damage done to women by other people as less threatening than women asserting their own autonomy over their bodies.

As should be obvious, there are massive spoilers for Prometheus in this post.

I’ve been thinking about many aspects of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien movies, but the one that’s stuck with me most is the clearest continuation of the Alien franchise’s themes: the movie’s exploration of bodily invasion and specifically women’s bodily autonomy. In New York Magazine, David Edelstein describes one of the movie‘s most harrowing and original sequences “a bit of grisly self-surgery that should inspire the pro-choice movement for millennia to come.” Livejournal user cavalorn, in a long and much-circulated analysis of the movie that’s the closest I’ve seen for a compelling argument for the coherence of some, but not all, of its ideas, writes: “I’m not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don’t think they’re clear, and I’m not entirely comfortable doing so.” I’m still considering this element of the movie, and suspect I will be for some time to come. But for the moment, I feel like Prometheus is a movie that attempts to describe the quest for bodily autonomy as a sign of extreme toughness that ends up reaffirming the persistence of patriarchy and rape culture, even in the future, even as we travel beyond all we know.

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about the android David’s (Michael Fassbender) motivations for dosing Holloway, the colleague and lover of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the movie’s main character: does he know that it will result in her pregnancy? Is he experimenting for his own purposes or at the behest of Peter Weyland, the father he also wants dead? To a certain extent, his motivations and reasoning are irrelevant. The end result of David’s actions is that Shaw ends up with a metaphorical pregnancy against her plans and will, and when she expresses a wish to end the invasion of her body, David forcibly prevents her from doing so.

The scene of Shaw’s—abortion isn’t really the right word for it, because she isn’t pregnant, but rather infected, and the result of the surgery isn’t the termination of her pregnancy but a premature birth—seizing control of her body is undeniably, viscerally powerful, even as it’s sacrificed in small ways to the movie’s other needs. The surgery would have been urgent enough even without the medpod’s initial warning that it isn’t programmed to treat women, a nonsensical restriction on its programming that causes a slight delay in the midst of great urgency but really exists as another clue that Peter Weyland is still alive. Similarly, the revelation that Shaw has been unable to conceive a child with Holloway ends up functioning as foreshadowing, rather than as nuance. Her instant reaction to David’s diagnosis of her pregnancy is to want to terminate it. The movie isn’t interested in the possibility that, given her profound upset over her inability to have a child with Holloway, she might have some sort of connection to the thing growing rapidly inside her. Those emotions might have been uncomfortable given how that creature came to be inside her, but it would have been a fascinating, uncomfortable conversation for the movie to engage in.
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Note: it’s impossible to discuss Prometheus in the depth it demands without massive spoilers, so I’ll revisit the movie on Monday. This review contains some basic plot details, most of which can be gleaned from the movie’s promotional materials, but if you want to go in blind, please defer your reading.

“How do you know it’s beautiful?” one character asks another at the beginning of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his science fiction landmark Alien, about futuristic truckers who find themselves burdened with a uniquely lethal cargo. “It’s what I choose to believe,” she responds. So have we, lured into theaters by the astonishingly gorgeous marketing campaign for the dark, futuristic blockbuster about religious scientists hoping to reconcile science and faith in one daring exploratory mission. But like those scientists, who followed a recurring set of pictographs across the galaxy only to find their expectations grievously disappointed, Prometheus is not the miracle we’ve been lead—or lead ourselves—to expect.

In place of the Alien movie’s scathing portrait of a corporation that’s willing to see a crew of humans butchered to capture the potential basis for a weapon, to talk a woman traumatized in its employ into facing the same thing that nearly killed her, to abandon a colony to its death, Prometheus has a nearly-bloodness corporate dynastic struggle. David (a terrific Michael Fassbender), the android who is maintaining the crew of the spaceship Prometheus while they are in hypersleep on their voyage to a distant star cluster, turns out to have been a surrogate son to industrialist Peter Weyland. Weyland’s affection for him is limited, though, shot through with a kind of species superiority complex. In a hologram recorded before his death and played for the crew upon their arrival, he explains that “He is unable to appreciate his remarkable gifts because that would require the one thing David lacks: a soul.” But whatever Weyland believes about David’s capacity for wonder, his casual contempt appears to have registered with the android. “I was designed like this because you people are more comfortable interacting with your own kind,” he informs the crew, a slight edge emerging from bland, uptipped lips. Later, he asks with that same lack of affect, “Doesn’t everyone want their parents dead?”

Weyland-Yutani’s willingness to betray its human employees to keep the Alien alive and exploitable set the company terrifyingly apart from the human race—in this universe, corporations aren’t people, they’re a predator species of their own. But in Prometheus, Weyland’s toxic relationship with his children is both more personal and more antiseptic than the grime of the Alien movies. The venom is contained to their cursed circle, the mission a pet project of Weyland’s rather than a corporate priority. Prometheus is willing to judge Weyland’s character, but not his company.

The movie doesn’t do justice to most of its other, more high-flying ideas, either. There are monsters and body-horror-inducing substances a-plenty, but for a movie that’s meant to answer an awfully specific biological question—Damon Lindelof told io9 he wanted to know “Where did that thing come from? It’s not really a practical organism if it needs a human to gestate. Was it invented by someone?”—Prometheus‘s science is designed more to provide a steady stream of horrific images than a satisfying evolutionary or bioengineering narrative.

Similarly, the characters make decisions so stupidly self-destructive and draw conclusions so counterintuitive that it becomes difficult to root for them. The more logical and plausible horror is, the more effective it is because it suggests that the monstrous could grown organically from the everyday. By contrast, I’m not particularly concerned about a pot-smoking geologist making spectacularly poor decisions that lead to the death of half of my colleagues. Prometheus‘s shocks may be sharp, but they generally fade quickly.

The exception is a sequence that transmute normal anxieties about rape, unwanted pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and birth into a powerful and lingering nightmare, and an opportunity for Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) to demonstrate her unstoppability: sucker punches have nothing on a blow to the cesarean section incision. If Ridley Scott can be said to be a feminist, it’s less for his advocacy of a world beyond patriarchy, and more for his conviction that women have the will to survive the unimaginable. Ellen Ripley was a response to the horror trope of the Final Girl long before Buffy Summers’ arrival in Sunnydale, and here, Idris Elba’s ship’s captain defies the death order preordained for horror-movie black men.

“Big things have small beginnings,” David assesses coldly midway through Prometheus. But for all its visual splendor and strong performances, Prometheus is a reminder that brilliant, low-budget beginnings can be more compelling than their monstrous offspring.

io9′s Charlie Jane Anders has a typically intriguing interview with Jon Spaihts, the screenwriter who did the first drafts of Prometheus, and part of the discussion came down to the difference between rendering worlds and telling stories in video games and movies:

Storytelling in games has matured tremendously in the past decade. Some really great work has been done. But the design requirements are totally different, almost the opposite of filmic storytelling. The central character of a game is most often a cipher – an avatar into which the player projects himself or herself. The story has to have a looseness to accommodate the player’s choices. This choose-your-own adventure quality is a challenge for storytellers and, I fear, militates against art.

A filmmaker is trying to make you look at something a certain way – almost to force an experience on you. Think of the legendary directors, whose perspective is the soul of their art. It’s the opposite of a sandbox world. It’s a mind-meld with a particular visionary.

I’m actually curious if this, as well as production costs, are part of why it’s been so hard to adapt major video games into major motion pictures. There’s always uproar in fan communities about how true an adaptation is or isn’t to source material, and if the main character’s mostly a vehicle for a player, to project themselves into the game, it will be awfully hard to reconcile all of those private universes into a coherent whole that’s mostly satisfying to a majority of people. I know we all agree what Chell looks like, but I don’t know if anyone shares my idea of who Chell is.

The bridge is yours.

-You should read Mere Smith’s diary of approaching pilot staffing season, and everything she’s done to her looks this year in an experiment to see if it matters.

-Law & Order: Special Victims Unit should totally give Fin a backstory.

-Rats. Prometheus may have been the reason we didn’t get At the Mountains of Madness.

-FX might give us a series about a lady serial killer.

-Tom Hiddleston is just ridiculously attractive. Er, I mean, good at Shakespeare:

In preparation for Prometheus, which looks just ridiculously awesome, I’ve been watching the movies in the Alien franchise I hadn’t seen before. And in the course of that, and related futzing around the web, I realized how striking the per-movie numbers were as an illustration of how the economics of blockbusters have changed:

Alien (1979)
Budget: $11 million ($34.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $104,931,801 ($331.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: Approximately $33,333 ($105,321 in 2012 dollars)

Aliens (1986)
Budget: $18.5 million ($38.72 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $131,060,248 ($274.3 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $1 million ($2.1 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien 3 (1992)
Budget: $50 million ($81.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $159,773,545 ($261.2 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $4 million plus a share of box office ($6.5 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien Resurrection (1997)
Budget: $70 million ($100 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $161,295,658 ($230.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $11 million ($15.7 million in 2012 dollars)

Prometheus
Budget: Estimated at $100-$150 million

I don’t think there’s a direct relationship between expensiveness and badness—The Avengers cost $220 million, which doesn’t count the expensive advertising campaign around it, and is just jaw-droppingly great (it is killing me not to be able to talk to you guys about it yet. Friday cannot be here soon enough). But at the same time, you can afford to do weirder things if there’s less money sunk into them. The Avengers kind of earns back some of that freedom—and I think Prometheus does, too—to be funny and weird and interesting and frightening because it’s guaranteed to make all of the money even if it was wretched. But a lot of the time when someone like, say, Michael Bay is in that position, they take precisely zero advantage of it. It’s one thing to be creative because you have to be to have a prayer of getting noticed and loved. It’s another to be creative because you have the luxury to be. On bad days, it seems like everyone else is just checking boxes. But this year feels to me like a time when the movies are new and exciting. I could be proven wrong. But it’s been fun so far.

Given some of the sillier elements that crept into the later movies in the Matrix trilogy; given the semi-disaster that was their adaptation of beloved cartoon Speed Racer; given the lurid way the media portrayed Lana Wachowski’s gender transition in the press; given the way the Wachowskis were treated for trying to make a hard-R love story that would have depicted a gay American soldier and an Iraqi man (I’d be curious how the trade press would have treated someone else trying to get a similar project into production); given that The Matrix itself is thirteen years old, it’s easy to forget how amazing it was to see that movie for the first time, how visionary the Wachowskis seemed all the way back in 1999. And maybe The Matrix will never register to a generation the same way it did to mine, those of us who grew up without the Internet and then had it open up before us. But if anything, we’re still living in the world they laid out for us, and grappling with the questions they posed before us. There may be less black leather and fewer mechanical nasties, but we still haven’t figured out how closely we can be tied to our technology and still stay healthy, and hackers still have cachet and the power to poke hard at our government and businesses.

All of which is a long way of saying that whatever has happened to them creatively and personally in the years since The Matrix was released, I want the Wachowskis to have a hit again, and I’m willing to give them a lot of credit and leeway as they try. I’m glad they got a shot at adapting Cloud Atlas. And I’m pretty excited to hear that they’ve signed up Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum to star in their next original movie, a science fiction project about which little is known called Jupiter Ascending. They did a nice job of working with Keanu Reeves’ blankness in the Matrix trilogy, and while I think Tatum’s proved that he’s more than a slab of beef, this might be an opportunity for him to convince those who are unmoved by A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints or 21 Jump Street.

The news of Jupiter Ascending also makes me feel like, despite my grumbling about the SyFy network yesterday, we might be entering a nice little moment for original sci-fi. Prometheus looks downright incredible, visually gorgeous and scary, and a reminder of the risks of our drive for exploration. I hadn’t even realized that Guy Pearce’s latest, Lockout, was a science fiction thriller until I saw a trailer for it in front of The Hunger Games this weekend. But I’m always down for a nasty, industrial view of space, where instead of the final frontier, it’s a place of exile and danger, in this case, for criminals and a few innocents. The Wachowskis found transcendence in metal, and wire, and castoff clothes once. I have such hopes for them taking us somewhere new, and frightening, and beautiful again.

The bridge is yours.

-I would totally watch a block of shows about middle-aged comedians.

-Why the 21 Jump Street adaptation worked.

-How Playboy pitched itself to advertisers back in the day.

-It’s possible to condemn Mike Daisey’s lies and believe that Apple—and all electronics and consumer goods companies—can do better.

-How does a robot become a real boy?

I’m a bit late to this bit of brilliant viral marketing for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, in which Peter Weyland, the founder of the franchise’s fictional Weyland-Yutani Corporation, gives a talk at a futuristic version of TED:

I think what I like about this is not just that the clip gives me a sense of what the movie is going to be like, but that it’s a bit of connective tissue between this world and our own. For me, a lot of what’s fun about near-future science fiction is a sense of what will survive from one era into the next, whether it’s jazz on Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, eighties pop culture in Ready Player One, or a version of TED that kind of looks like it got mashed up with the Old Republic’s Senate Chambers. The future has to evolve from something. And while it can be interesting to just jump thousands of years away from where we are now, I’m actually more excited to see what I might have to look forward. We’re evolving fast, and I expect the world will change a great deal while I’m still around to see it.