Stringer wouldn't have killed Charlie which could've led to David not finding out about the alien fetus in time. That's about it.

Theron was also a robot and thus was not killed by the crashing Engineer ship

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Everything she contributed to the plot could have been done by stringer.

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not the part where stringer bangs her

Quick thoughts:

1. The surgery scene: did any else think it looked like a morbid crane game, like at an arcade?

2. Charlize was hot yet her existence/safe pod area was worthless

3. What's up with the dream/flashback technology. Can anyone do that or is it a David only thing?

Saw it tonight. Thought it was OK to good, but had a few questions (some of which were already answered from above):

Why did Theron shoot herself out of her life vessel, directly under the space jockey's ship?

Why did the android put the primordial cells into the scientist's drink (didn't understand this despite the explanations above)?

If the surgery vessel was sophisticated enough to do surgery, why didn't it make the incision along the abdominal midline (instead of across it)? And why wasn't it sophisticated enough to simultaneously place her under anesthesia at the same time of the surgery?

[This message has been edited by Morpholino (edited 6/8/2012 8:17p).]

I like that it left a lot of questions for the viewers. I don't like everything tied up with a bow. Makes me wanting a sequal.

So much so that I just On Demanded Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 for the weekend since I can't remember the last time I was them.

[This message has been edited by fincag (edited 6/8/2012 8:57p).]

I think I can provide a unique perspective to the film as I have not seen the other Alien films. My entire knowledge of the series comes from Alien vs. Predator.

To start, the IMAX 3D was absolutely amazing. I don't mind 3d as much as others but it seemed a lot crisper than what you would see at other films. I can't wait to see Dark Knight Rises in IMAX. Sound and graphics were simply amazing and the landscape shots were very beautiful. The initial descent to the planet was cool.

I really enjoyed all the actors and actresses in the film and Fassbender is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors. Charlize was a little useless but was nice eye candy. Quite a few squeamish moments, the abdominal surgery and the initial attack by the snake worms come to mind. Very neat sci-fi universe, though I am a little incredulous about us having that technology in less than 70 years, but that is nitpicky.

Overall a great film that isn't bogged down by "plotholes" if you haven't seen the other films. I would bet that as many are speculating, these holes will be filled in the sequel and will most likely head into the first alien.

I just hope they leave David's head unattached if there is a sequel

i thought it was solid/good

that will become better once the next one comes out and we can fill in all the holes

Saw it today in Imax 3D. Thought it was pretty great. My only complaint was I went in basically LOOKING for Alien ties, so I probably missed some new stuff. I'll see it again.

The visual effects though were pretty ****ing awesome.

The surgery scene literally made me sweat. Wow.

Movie was effin fantastic, and gorgeous to look at in XD 3D.

I'm a but surprised at how many of you think there are massive plotholes that need to be explained. It's not supposed to be a direct prequel, how many times did Damon and Ridley say this?

I agree that it's probably a different ship from the one in Alien, but are we absolutely certain it was a differet planet?

[This message has been edited by sharkenleo (edited 6/8/2012 10:34p).]

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though I am a little incredulous about us having that technology in less than 70 years

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I see what you're saying, but consider sitting around in 1900 and being told that within 70 years a dude would walk on the surface of the moon. It's not unreasonable to think that we could see such leaps in technology.

I knew going in tonight that this was not going to be an Alien movie and that it was not a direct prequel. Even so, I left the theater initially disappointed. I've been thinking it over all night tonight, trying to form a truer opinion of what I saw. I'll probably have to see it a second time.

The scenery at the movie's beginning was fabulous - made me want to take a trip to Iceland, where it was filmed.

In the Alien universe, robots never seem to be what we think they are. Ash ended up being a nefarious agent for the Company, and I think as a result we all expected Bishop to be similar. So what is David really doing? Some of his actions left me scratching my head. I think it was, like Ash, orchestrating events to some degree, with ulterior motives at work. Perhaps a sequel (and I hope a sequel is made, although please do not call it Prometheus 2) will illuminate more of what David was doing in this movie.

All in all this was a good movie. It was unlike The Avengers or other typical summer movies in that it was a heady sci-fi movie with lots of stuff to ponder, and you aren't spoon fed what to think about the movie.

Pretty good discussion going on over at reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/usj1p/prometheus_putting_the_puzzle_together_spoilers/

Concerning the possibility of a sequel:

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During the March 17, 2012, WonderCon, Scott stated that the film leaves some questions unanswered, and that these could be answered in a sequel, saying "If we're lucky, there'll be a second part. It does leave you with some nice open questions."[22][86] Asked if a sequel would be a direct prequel to Alien, Lindelof said "if we’re fortunate enough to do a sequel... it will tangentialize [sic] even further away from the original Alien."[19] In June 2012, Lindelof stated that while plot elements were deliberately left unresolved so that they could be answered in a sequel, he and Scott thoroughly discussed what should be resolved so that Prometheus could stand alone, as a sequel was not guaranteed.[186]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28film%29#Sequel

Basically they designed Prometheus to leave a big enough gap to make a film to go between Prometheus and Alien.

The title Prometheus is not just the name of the ship, but also an allusion to the Titan from Greek mythology. The implication is that the Engineers were the Greek's Titans that brought fire and life to mankind.

The thematics of this film were very heavy on origins of life, accepting death, and your legacy/what you would be willing to die for. It begins with the Engineer committing seppukku with the black ooze to give life to Earth. Multiple Engineers died at the pyramid developing a biological WMD. David spikes Charlie's drink with ooze after he says he would be willing to die to get the answers. Charlie then lets himself be set on fire so the rest of the crew can go on board. Weyland suffers a fear of death and spend his fortune and little remaining life trying to avoid it. Stringer Bell sacrificed his life to save humanity. So forth & so on.

I think David told the Engineer something that prompted him to kill everyone. Remember his quote: "Everyone wants their parents to die."

David and Charlize Theron were both robots. They were Weyland's legacy.

Based on everything that’s been discussed so far, I have a few thoughts/notes/clarifications, which are likely full of holes, but for the sake trying to figure it all out (if that’s even possible)...


The reason David spiked Charlie’s drink:

David wanted to create life just to see if he could. This was spelled out in the conversation he and Charlie were having literally as David was handing Charlie the drink. The Engineers created humans, humans created androids, androids (David) “created” the Xenomorphs (in a round about way). Rather, David was simply smart enough to put two and two together. In the temple/storage facility, there were more than enough opportunities for David to basically gather enough info on the process of creating Xenomorphs, which the Engineers had obviously been doing for some time (as evident by the Xenomorph “mural” in the storage facility). We saw how fast David learned to operate their coding/machinery, so it’s not a leap to say that he picked up rather quickly how the whole process worked (remember, there were inscriptions all over the place only he could read). If anything, David at least learned enough to make an educated guess as to what might happen. He was curious, and thus, just wanted “to see if he could.” I don’t think it was anything more than that. It wasn’t because of some cryptic instruction from Weyland, who had previous secretive knowledge of Engineers or Xenomorphs or anything like that (he didn’t). Weyland simply told David to “try harder” (to find the advanced lifeforms Weyland wanted to meet), so David basically took it upon himself to “create” them, before discovering the lone, hibernating Engineer.


Why the Engineers wanted to return to Earth to kill humans:

Before Weyland & co re-animated the remaining lone Engineer, there’s a line said (I think by David) to the effect of, “There has to be death in order for there to be life.” This is key, as it’s stated right around the time they’re going back to the temple/storage facility toward the end, just before finally meeting their maker. Having that bit of dialogue presented at that point, I immediately took that to mean that humans must die in order for their to be life. Well, life of what then? My bet is that the Engineers needed humans in order to create Xenomorphs, and Earth is basically their farming system. Therefore, humans must die in order for there to be (Xenomorphic) life. We’re simply the middle men. The Engineers first infect a human with the black ooze, the infected human must then mate with / impregnate a member of the opposite sex, who then “births” the giant squid thing we saw. The giant squid must then ingest a sacrificial Engineer in order to create the Xenomorph, as we witnessed in the final scene. There was a reason we saw an Engineer sacrificing himself in the opening scene. There’s a clue there. Granted, that Engineer was (basically) creating the first human life, but even he had to die for us to live, just as we have to die for Xenomorphs to live. And this has probably been going on for thousands and thousands of years. The Engineers visiting us every so often, snatching a group up, taking them back to the “factory” planet (featured in Prometheus), and ultimately harvesting humans for the Engineer’s weapons cache (of Xenomorphs). They keep the “elements” on separate, livable planets, just as one wouldn’t keep gunpowder near fire. Then again, as alluded to, the Engineers could have just as easily been planning on wiping us out. We got unruly, and it was time to start over. Either way, I love that they were planning on coming to Earth 2000 years ago, but were stopped by whatever menace it was that killed them in the ship's corridor. Hence why we hadn't been visited in thousands of years up to modern day.


A few other thoughts/notes/clarifications:

- Vickers was (probably) an android. She was Weyland’s “daughter” in the same way David was his “son.” There was a reason she called Weyland “father” the way she did there toward the end. Not to mention - besides her cold, calculated demeanor - she fairly easily threw David around in that corridor when she was trying to get answers. I sensed a bit more strength there than the average human. As for the whole cryostasis thing, maybe she slept in cryo on the journey there in order to come across as human to the others. Besides, it was odd that she woke up first, without any assistance from David. Either way, the crew would trust a human in charge more than they would an android, so the “cover” was necessary. But ultimately, I think Scott & Lindelof purposefully kept it vague in the same way Christopher Nolan left the end of Inception “vague.” They left clues supporting either way, but it’s ultimately up to the audience to decide.

- Just so there’s no confusion, other than being of the same species, the Xenomorph in the final sequence has no relation to the Xenomorphs on LV-426 in Alien (the Prometheus moon is LV-223). We were simply observing the process of how a Xenomorph comes to be. Not witnessing the birth of the queen (or even the queen’s “grandmother”) from Alien / Aliens. Remember - and this has been stated previously in the thread, but it’s worth re-iterating - this film is to Alien as The Phantom Menace is to A New Hope. If the box office warrants them, there are still two, if not one more Prometheus sequel planned that will take us up to the events of Alien. So, sticking with the Star Wars metaphor, think of the Xenomorph in the final scene as you would Darth Maul. Vader doesn’t even exist yet.

- Overall, I really, really enjoyed the movie, and loved the general story they chose to tell, but man, that script definitely could have used a few more passes. There were so many instances were characters did things just because the script needed them to. For instance, despite the breathable oxygen, constantly taking off their helmets without worry of contamination or disease, which led to unnecessary problems. Or the biologist guy not wanting to be around a dead alien, but trying to pet a live, snake alien, just so we could have that kill scene, and thus, a reason for the crew to go back out and find them. That, and the whole crew/expedition didn’t feel worthy of such a monumental journey. This was potentially to be man’s first contact with an alien species, yet they only brought along one geologists, one biologists, one doctor, one security man, etc.? Granted, I’m sure there would be a capacity limit on the ship, but still, nothing about this expedition was treated with the magnitude it deserved. I wanted more realism in that category, instead of the few, exchangeable, cookie-cutter characters we were given. I also wanted the alien temples/factories to be a little harder to find. Literally minutes after entering the atmosphere, the expedition found exactly what they were looking for. At least make that aspect somewhat of a challenge. Even with sophisticated technology, it’d take quite a few passes to find those structures. Have a beat of them almost giving up, of thinking they wasted their time, then have them finally find the structures. And don’t even get me started on the whole Lindelof mystery-for-the-sake-mystery way of story-telling (no doubt learned from J.J. Abrams). There’s a time to be mysterious, and there’s a time to connect the dots just a bit more, and Lindelof definitely doesn’t know when to do which. But that’s a (much bigger) gripe for another time...



[This message has been edited by TCTTS (edited 6/9/2012 5:32a).]

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Overall, I really, really enjoyed the movie, and loved the general story they chose to tell, but man, that script definitely could have used a few more passes. There were so many instances were characters did things just because the script needed them to. For instance, despite the breathable oxygen, constantly taking off their helmets without worry of contamination or disease, which led to unnecessary problems. Or the biologist guy not wanting to be around a dead alien, but trying to pet a live, snake alien, just so we could have that kill scene, and thus, a reason for the crew to go back out and find them. That, and the whole crew/expedition didn’t feel worthy of such a monumental journey. This was potentially to be man’s first contact with an alien species, yet they only brought along one geologists, one biologists, one doctor, one security man, etc.? Granted, I’m sure there would be a capacity limit on the ship, but still, nothing about this expedition was treated with the magnitude it deserved. I wanted more realism in that category, instead of the few, exchangeable, cookie-cutter characters we were given. I also wanted the alien temples/factories to be a little harder to find. Literally minutes after entering the atmosphere, the expedition found exactly what they were looking for. At least make that aspect somewhat of a challenge. Even with sophisticated technology, it’d take quite a few passes to find those structures. Have a beat of them almost giving up, of thinking they wasted their time, then have them finally find the structures. And don’t even get me started on the whole Lindelof mystery-for-the-sake-mystery way of story-telling (no doubt learned from J.J. Abrams). There’s a time to be mysterious, and there’s a time to connect the dots just a bit more, and Lindelof definitely doesn’t know when to do which. But that’s a (much bigger) gripe for another time...

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For me this was just the tip of the iceberg on problems with this movie.

I'm in a bit of the minority, but I thought the movie was just plain bad.

Saw it last night and thought it was just ok. I'm not too keen on the theory of earth being a farming planet for the engineers to visit every so often to help make xenomorphs. I'm not buying that. Someone posted earlier a theory about humans following Christ 2000 years ago or so and that being the reason they wanted to come back and kill us. I can get behind that. Humans start following a man, worshipping one god (not the engineers), and become generally unruly so they want us gone.

I totally get this was not the same planet, but why have the ship crash in almost the exact same fashion as the one on 427? That was odd I thought.

I liked the captain the most. I wish he would have had a bigger role.

I'd like to see it again in 3D.

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Vickers was (probably) an android. She was Weyland’s “daughter” in the same way David was his “son.”

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there were subtle differences with their "lineage" to Weyland

Vickers actually calls Weyland "father" and talks of being an heir
while
Weyland talks about david being the son he wish he had

does that mean vickers is not an android? not really, but imo it implies that she is not

While the crashed ship looks very similar, other than breaking apart, how else is a crescent supposed to rest? I think they did added a lot of "oh hey, wtf, that looks like" moments in order to rile up a fan base, increase interest, and get you coming back to the box office. I don't think Prometheus was here to answer questions, more likely here to make you ask more of them.

I agree with Finc. No other way a crescent shaped ship is supposed to land other than upside down. Seeing the whole sequence of the Engineer getting into the chair was really cool because it showed you that there was actually a Humanoid underneath all that protective covering--something we never knew.

My question is how do you actually use that machine? There's a huge cannon on the end that looks like it could fire artillery shells, but it could also be a telescope. I think it's obvious that this is the ship's cockpit, just not sure what the thought was behind the design to be able to operate it.

Finally, it's extremely nit picky of me, but I thought it was funny how David's head/body was still laying in the middle of the cockpit chamber. If the ship crashed and rolled I would think his body would have moved and been found at the base of a wall or something.

I think Vickers is human. Why else would she be doing pushups? Especially since David walked in on her, and why put on a show just for him? I see the possible android evidence, but the human side seems more correct.

I'm pretty sure Vickers is human. She did bang Stringer Bell after all.

Warning: LONG post ahead. But it's a very interesting read.




Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About

This blogpost contains many and frequent spoilers for Prometheus, so if you're planning on seeing it, I recommend you don't spoil yourself.



Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.

Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.

And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.

Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.

But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.

The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)

And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.

(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. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)

Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.

'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'

A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.

Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:

'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'

Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.

Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.

The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.

With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.

And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.

It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.

The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).

Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.

Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.

As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

sharkenleo - Great find. I still have a ton of problems with the script on the whole, but that explanation at least gave it a bit more depth, and basically "proves" that much of what is presented there by the author was, indeed, intended by Scott & Lindelof. I'm still confused about one aspect, though...

If the Engineers (as "God") created Christ and sent him to Earth for our benefit, and we reacted the way we did (by crucifying him), thus deserving - in the eyes of the Engineers - to be wiped out, how did that act by humans affect/contaminate the black goo all the way back on LV-223? The author of the article makes that connection, but never says how it could have happened. If the Engineers hadn't left for Earth yet to destroy us (after giving us Christ 33 years before), how was the black goo on LV-223 affected by human nature, which still presided on Earth? In other words, how did we cause the black goo - billions upon billions of miles away - to cause whatever masacre it was the Engineers were running from in the ship's corridor? Is there something I'm missing?

[This message has been edited by TCTTS (edited 6/9/2012 1:18p).]

I think that article Shark posted is pretty psuedo-intellectual and really reaching.

Regardless, the Christ connection is still there. Ridley himself says that's the angle they were going for, then decided to scale it back. But there's a reason they still had Shaw carbon date the dead Engineers to 2000 years ago. They wanted to leave that connection, that hint, so my question is still somewhat valid.

^I agree

And it actually makes sense that the black goo creates "good" life (humans) when used with good intentions (The Engineer sacrificing himself in the beginning), and then creates "bad" life (the Xenomorphs) when combined with selfish intentions. They made a point of showing the same black goo both in the opening and then in the storage room vases when the humans "altered the atmosphere" - and having that black goo have two vastly different effects. So there's some merit to what the author above is talking about.

Granted, admittedly, some of the allegorical stuff he mentions IS a bit of a stretch, though.

Just got back from the movie. You guys are offering a lot of great commentary.

The ambiguity about Theron's humanity seems analogous to the ambiguity about Harrison Ford in "Blade Runner," though I suppose most people have come to believe that he is artificial.

As others have said, I did not like the two-dimensional characters. The two scientists who acted like little girls was really weird: I thought they were manual laborers until someone mentioned their credentials.

I liked the Captain, but he had little to do, and when the three fliers sacrificed themselves at the end, it was not as emotional as it could have been had they been developed more.

It says something about the movie that David was my favorite character.....

Not really since fasts bender is amazing and I am pretty sure I saw an interview saying this movie was about David's growth more than most.

Sharkenleo, I enjoyed reading that. Where did you find it, or did you write it? Many of the allusions seem intentional.

However, I agree with this by TCTTS:

quote:

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If the Engineers (as "God") created Christ and sent him to Earth for our benefit, and we reacted the way we did (by crucifying him), thus deserving - in the eyes of the Engineers - to be wiped out, how did that act by humans affect/contaminate the black goo all the way back on LV-223? The author of the article makes that connection, but never says how it could have happened. If the Engineers hadn't left for Earth yet to destroy us (after giving us Christ 33 years before), how was the black goo on LV-223 affected by human nature, which still presided on Earth? In other words, how did we cause the black goo - billions upon billions of miles away - to cause whatever masacre it was the Engineers were running from in the ship's corridor? Is there something I'm missing?

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Also, I don't understand how the black goo reacts to who creates it, or whatever that author's point is. Evolution, created by the "engineers" or whatever, is ethically neutral for literally billions of years, at least as we know it on earth. It is a more or less efficient process that in the one instance we know of, ended in self-awareness. And self-awareness is neither good nor bad in itself.

DIGRESSION: From the literary Romantic point of view, of course, self-awareness IS the Original Sin. The English, German, and American Romantics were always lamenting the existence of self-consciousness. So many of them long for the Golden Paradise of oneness with nature that animals enjoy. Many of these writers evoke a sort of quest that involves a movement from rapturous, innocent communion with nature, through a "fortunate fall" into isolation and self-doubt, to a recovered sense of connectedness with God in nature. Something is lost (childish joy) but much abides (an intellectual appreciation of God in nature).

For instance, Emerson's essay entitled “Experience” is the record of a new, darker tone in Emerson, of a disturbing sense that the loss of the Vision that once sustained him might be permanent. Here he is no longer awake to God’s truth; he is trapped in “lethargy” and “sleep.” Far from feeling connected to God, he feels only isolation: “souls never touch their objects,” he laments. Before, his Self was centered in God. Now that same conscious awareness of Self is a Hell, a prison of blindness and illusion:

quote:

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It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man...We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are...Life is a train of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue... Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color.

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(Of course, Emerson refuses to rest in Doubt: he continues to evince a faith that the old days of Vision taught him truly; that if God ever WAS, so He is and shall be. Emerson resolves at last to “build altars to the Beautiful Necessity,” to take comfort in lowered expectations, to put his faith in the long run rather than in the short-term failure. After all, he writes, “The years teach much which the days never know.”)

BACK TO THE POINT: I guess what I'm saying is that an evolutionary force prior to self-awareness CANNOT be good or evil: it simply is.

On the other hand, maybe if the movie believes that some selfless force is involved in the creation of it (and who engineered the Engineers?), evolution has a guiding moral principle to it.

And on yet another hand (I'm running out of appendages), if evolution has a guiding moral principle behind it, it certainly has no problem with creating a nearly infinite number of "meaningless" creatures who live and die essentially meaningless deaths in order to arrive at a self-aware creature with the potential to be moral. That willingness to sacrifice others, not oneself, to some other good seems to be the very definition of self-interestedness that Sharkenleo's article says the movie is attacking.

Help! I'm rambling. I don't know. I haven't thought it out well enough.


[This message has been edited by OldArmy71 (edited 6/9/2012 4:39p).]

Marsuvees reminded me of something else. If so many of the allusions seem significant, how about the one in which David models himself on Peter O'Toole playing Lawrence of Arabia?

Lawrence was an illegitimate son, an English officer and (sort of) gentleman trapped between two worlds, an outsider in both. He worked with the Arabs during WWI ostensibly to help British interests in the war, but came to identify strongly with Arab nationalism, and was sad that Britain ultimately betrayed their Arab allies. Despite his good intentions, Lawrence was part of that betrayal.

[This message has been edited by OldArmy71 (edited 6/9/2012 4:31p).]

quote:

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I liked the Captain, but he had little to do, and when the three fliers sacrificed themselves at the end, it was not as emotional as it could have been had they been developed more.

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This. There were so many moments where it would have been such a great emotional payoff had we spent any quality time whatsoever with the ancillary characters. Instead, they were all just faces and cogs, who did stupid things because the script needed them to. I felt nothing when any of them died or sacrificed themselves, save for maybe Charlie, Stringer Bell (to an extent), or whenever Shaw's life was threatened.

Another issue I had was the grinding, back-and-forth nature of the plot, geographically speaking. I lost track of how many times they went back and forth between the temple/factory and the Prometheus ship, and how many different times someone was yelling to open or keep open the main doors, etc. This is just screenwriting 101. Have your characters/plot move forward over different destinations instead of back and forth between the same two locations. They could have covered the same ground (no pun intended) and just as easily gone with a plot where the characters were advancing through various alien locations (even if only two or three), with maybe only one "regroup" scene back at the ship before venturing out again. Alien went the route of journeying outside the ship ONCE, and then keeping the action/suspense contained to one location (the ship) from that point on, in great, haunted-house fashion. Prometheus tried a bit of that, tried to be a bit of something else, and none of it ever really gelled for a streamlined, coherent experience.

Finally, just to get it out my system, since I'm on a tangent, another big problem I had was casting Guy Pierce as a 90+ year-old Weyland. I love Guy Pierce, but there was NO POINT in having him in sh*tty old-age make-up. If casting Pierce so they could use a "younger" version of him in the viral video was the only point in doing so, A) that's ridiculous, and B) just cast a different, younger actor. Have Christopher Plummer or someone play old Weyland, then just get another actor for young Weyland in the viral video that only a tiny, tiny portion of your audience is going to see. I loved the idea of cooky old Weyland - in the vien of Howard Hughes or John Hammond - basically spending his vast fortune to meet his maker, but every single time the camera was on old man Guy Pierce, it took me right out of the movie.

But again, despite all these flaws (along with many others), I loved what the movie was trying to do, I loved how it was told almost from David's perspective, and I loved being on that planet in those situations. I was engrossed in that world, and engrossed in everything having to do with the Engineers. I just wish they could have done a couple more passes on the script, connected the dots a bit more, and amped up / smoothed out some of the ancillary characters. Had they spent half as much time and resources on the script as they did on the marketing, we could have been witnessing an instant classic this weekend...

[This message has been edited by TCTTS (edited 6/9/2012 4:42p).]

I agree with all that, TCTTS. Along with Hughes and Hammond, I was thinking of the rich guy in "Contact" played by John Hurt. Quite a bit of Contact in this movie (though Jodie Foster's head doesn't get ripped off!).