1. The Medipod Sequence In Prometheus
The summer's dumbest moment comes from a film literally and figuratively aiming for the stars. Ridley Scott wasn't trying to replicate the simplicity of his masterpiece
Alien with
Prometheus. Instead, Scott had big ideas wrapped in a huge film that tackled the origins of man and their place in the universe. It's a bold offshoot from the
Alien universe. Too bad the whole film is painfully dumb. Much has been written about the various absurdities in the film (I already went off on the entire film once
right here). The script by Damon Lindelhof is an unmitigated disaster of poor plotting and his trademarked "unanswered questions leading nowhere" routine. The editing is also a mess. But for sheer stupidity, nothing beats the now-infamous Medipod sequence. Ripley-surrogate Elizabeth Shaw (played with fifteen different accents by Noomi Rapace) has just watched her husband burned alive right in front of her and she passes out. She awakens in the medical bay, only to be confronted by the ship's mysterious android David (Michael Fassbender). Unbeknownst to Shaw, David decided to slip her husband a mickey consisting of black alien ooze (for some reason) moments before the pair made love. The resulting ejaculate presumably contained alien DNA. David scans Shaw as she's coming out of unconsciousness. The scan reveals that
she has a fully-formed alien fetus in her womb. After just ten hours. Shaw immediately begins convulsing in agony, despite being totally unaware of anything in her abdomen. She begins demanding an abortion in the surgical Medipod clumsily introduced earlier in the film; David refuses. So Shaw RUNS from the room, and goes into the exclusive lifeboat of Vickers (Charlize Theron) to use the Medipod device. Vickers, who never seems to leave the lifeboat, is suddenly missing. Shaw undresses. We see she has the flat, toned stomach of an Olympic swimmer despite having an alien egg in her abdomen. When Shaw activates the Medipod, she is told by the machine that it is calibrated only for a male anatomy. She doesn't care, and orders a general appendectomy anyway. So the Medipod goes to work. First,
it slices her entire abdomen open with a laser. Then, a mechanical claw reaches in and effortlessly pulls an alien egg from her womb (which was cut open, I guess?). The alien egg bursts open, revealing a giant sperm/squid baby, the goo from the egg spilling into Shaw's open wound. As the alien sperm/squid wriggles inside the claw, the Medipod
staples Shaw's abdomen wound shut. Following this procedure, Shaw runs down corridors, screams, leaps dozens of feet through the air, and drags an android's body for miles WHILE HAVING HER ABDOMINAL MUSCLES COMPLETELY SEVERED. Is Shaw superhuman? I don't know about you, but I can barely walk from the living room to the bathroom when I have gas. This is the dumbest moment in a movie drowning in them. I could go on about the geological survey guy getting lost despite wearing the navigation system on his wrist, or how Shaw miraculously survives an enormous spacecraft falling on her, or David somehow knowing how to operate the mechanical systems on a newly-discovered alien spacecraft. It just goes on and on. While I fully understand that science fiction doesn't need to be realistic, it does need to play by the rules of physics or biology when it is clearly dealing with humans and their reality. What a terrible summer for movies! But what a great summer movie season for morons!