further thoughts on Prometheus (SPOILER ALERT!)
This section is really for people who have seen the movie...these are the sorts of things I'd discuss with them. If you're reading this and you've seen the movie and have responses, feel free to send them to me.
(these thoughts were written down just a few hours after I saw the movie, and I haven't slept in over 24 hours, so bear with me)
Okay. The first thing I want to talk about is the "origin of human species" element. So this alien race goes to other worlds without life yet, and seeds its DNA there so that eventually, a similar species will evolve. I didn't realize this is what the opening segment was all about until I'd thought about the movie for a while. This could inspire some heated debate, I suppose, but that's what happened. What I don't understand (and what Dr. Shaw sets out to learn at the end of the movie) is why the alien race would later want to destroy the life it had created so long ago.
Second thing: the "weapon" angle. So the alien race left behind huge buried cargo ships, each containing thousands of containers, each of which contains a slime that mixes with life forms to mutate them in creepy ways. I didn't pick up on this at first, until I remembered that there were worms in the urn chamber, so the black ooze spilled on them and changed them into the larger, more aggressive worm-like things that attacked. Ditto for the guy who fell face-first into the stuff and came back later as a crazed, super-strong, homicidal zombie-like being. And again with Holloway, who unknowingly ingests some of the weapon/substance and begins changing (and impregnates his sterile girlfriend.)
Speaking of that impregnation: so she got it out of her (and just in time) but wouldn't her entire body be contaminated, at a cellular or DNA level? This, too, will demand a more thorough explanation (which we didn't get.)
And speaking of unknowing ingestion, the android David not only served a hidden agenda of other humans (like the elder Weyland) but in addition, he had his own agenda, and it was sometimes vague. At first, he was helping to accelerate the course of things, as far as infecting some of his crewmates, supposedly toward the goal he was given by Weyland. Then later, he seems to just want all the humans to die, as part of some weird robotic joke that only he understands. And still later, he gets remorseful and states the need to prevent the aliens from infecting Earth. I guess this makes sense, but I'd like to watch the movie again and solidify my thoughts on the android.
Last thoughts on the weapon (the ooze/slime in all the urn-like containers)...so early in the movie, I actually deduced on my own that the urn room was a weapon cache. I was wrong about its nature - I theorized that each urn held a _different_ sort of weapon/organism. As it turns out, they're all the same, containing the mutation-causing substance; that substance just has a different effect depending on the organism that it infects.
My final thoughts have to do with how this movie's events lead into the events of Alien (set 29 years after this movie.) Since it's mentioned early on that this planet is NOT the same as in Alien, the crashed derelict here is then NOT the same one from that movie. It would have been cool if it had been, but it's not. Similarly, the slain final engineer here is NOT the same being as the space jockey from Alien. Oh well.
back to the main Prometheus review page