[ManBeast]

Saw this today in 2D...

Spoiler:

Show

Was okay. Sort of glad I didn't spoil myself by reading previews and watching the trailers, would have probably been a different film if I did.

One thing that was lacking was the working class attitude of the crew which worked great in Alien. No-one really seemed to care about each other, especially when that space zombie guy came back to the ship and started killing random crew members...and no-one even discussed if afterwards wtf? Although near the start it seemed like the crew were all strangers but would have been nice to seen some interaction between them.

I look forward to seeing the story continue. I was sure the alien ship at the end was the derelict from the original films but obviously its not...

Also I didn't really feel any of the movie had any obvious 'jump out of the screen' 3D moments apart from maybe the space map stuff...how impressive was the 3D?

[wizardtop]

I went and watched the 3D version of Prometheus today at the cinema.
The acting especially from Michael Fassbender who played Dave was great.He sort of tried to put a human element onto his character even though some of the crew were slighty phased by him being a Android.

Guy Pearce has to be one of my favourite Australian actors after Russell Crowe.In this flim he was unrecognisable as the Billonare Backer Peter Wyland .I wont spoil anything here for those posters who havnt seen the film yet but lets say i was expecting a film that wasnt upto the same mark as the Previous two Alien Films had been but it totally lived up to it.

The special effects were amazing,the storyline was also great.I think the flim overall was much better than the previous 1979 "Alien" even though its set well before this 1979 film.
If i had to give it a score out of 10 i would give it a 8/10 overall.
I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes rather sci-fi films or who is like me avid fan of the alien films.I will defiantly be buying the Film on DVD or Blue Ray when ever its released.

[Apocalyptic Fish]

It was a fantastic film, loved every minute!

[kka25]

(Original post by James')
David was the most intriguing character, yet, the most confusing. Some of his actions I couldn't get my head around. I'm still pondering the following about him:

Spoiler:

Show

• Why did David originally spike that guys drink? (Was he trying to make him turn into one of the 'engineers'? Or was he hoping he'd knock her up and give birth to one? However, neither seemed to be his 'objective' as such.)
• Why was he so insistent on her having the squid-baby?
• Was his overall objective to help restore his "creator's" youth? Despite him saying everyone wishes their parents were dead?

Exactly.

Things that bug me about the film:

Spoiler:

Show

• Why do people run away from long objects that are falling, instead of simply taking a few steps to the side? Are they ****ing dumb?!
• How did a small rock in the landscape stop the billion tonne ship crushing her - what is this rock made of?!
• What were the 'engineers' originally running away from in all the holograms? If they were running away from the weird squid-things, why weren't there already 'aliens' in there - there were a lot of engineer bodies, surely they'd have laid an alien inside them?

This as well.

If I had to summarise Prometheus in two sentences, this would be it:

Spoiler:

Show

Old man funds £300 trillion pound space project only to get face-slapped by a ripped off robot head. Meanwhile, annoying woman has a killer squid trying to break out of her womb.

LOL

[Tommyjw]

http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1

It is very long, but a nice read if you liked the film, confused about things or not.

Reddit thread on it (includes people discussing it should there be any other questions)

I am no expert and some of it doesnt make sense to me but i have tried to condense it down a bit.

Turns out i havent actually cut out thaaat much, but oh well :P

Special part:
"The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him"
________________________________ _______

The opening sequence and its meanings

Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. 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.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. 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.

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.

The Engineers

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: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. . 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.

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. 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; Until something changed.

What caused them to turn against us

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.

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....
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.

The Slime

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'.

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.

Christianity and self sacrifice

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.)

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?

'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.'

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.

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 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).

Film Ending

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

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.

[Tommyjw]

Prometheus Explained

Just put it in its own thread rather than in here :P

Pretty interesting.

[Ape Gone Insane]

It fits in a lot with what Ridley Scott has been saying in interviews about what happened 2000 years ago and various religious connections (this is a film deliberately made for speculation) and it does make sense overall though there are a few holes: why/how did the Black Goo turn on the Engineers if we did kill 'Space Jesus'? How could we, so far away and being one of many created species no doubt, taint the nature of the goo so it turned against the Engineers into whatever chased them down? If the Engineers are all about embracing death, why were they all running away from whatever was chasing them? This is very similar to the plot of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness too, with aliens creating life and a creature they couldn't control. It was probably heavily inspired it.

I know there were a lot of religious undertones in the film but didn't think they would be this prominent in the plot. Interesting analysis anyway.

[kka25]

(Original post by Tommyjw)
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1

It is very long, but a nice read if you liked the film, confused about things or not.

Reddit thread on it (includes people discussing it should there be any other questions)

I am no expert and some of it doesnt make sense to me but i have tried to condense it down a bit.

Turns out i havent actually cut out thaaat much, but oh well :P

Special part:
"The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him"
________________________________ _______

The opening sequence and its meanings

Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. 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.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. 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.

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.

The Engineers

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: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. . 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.

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. 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; Until something changed.

What caused them to turn against us

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.

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....
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.

The Slime

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'.

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.

Christianity and self sacrifice

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.)

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?

'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.'

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.

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 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).

Film Ending

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

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.

I read the whole thing!!

[Rancorous]

NO answers were given to the questions raised by this film. Clearly the director believed he was being thought provoking by leaving the audience to work out what the film meant. Further it's another cash cow for the sequel which will provide the answers. My thoughts: as a movie, it's incomplete. It doesn't make sense. In the world of horror science-fiction, I think we can all overlook the glaring plotholes (oh let's all take off our space helmets, oh you two just go off by yourselves on this alien world we've just arrived on) and even the unashamed plagiarism from just about every space movie there's ever been (think The Abyss, Event Horizon, Mission to Mars, every Star Trek film...for starters). To sum up, this is just one of those films. You know, the films which promise the world - 'where did humans come from? was it God? was it aliens? watch this film it'll all become clear'. Then you have an hour setting these questions up, 'this is the MOST SIGNIFICANT discovery EVER', then the rest of it having everyone die for stupid reasons, ending on a sort of smug, conceited note: 'wasn't that interesting, children? what do you think happened children? go talk about it on your internet forums and have a discussion about it at dinner after the movie'. It's all bull**** quite frankly. I would recommend you see something else rather than lining the pockets of people who can't be bothered to write proper movies which make sense. Spending your lives debating over deliberately poor movies (oh was Jesus really a spaceman that we haven't been told about? oh was it just warring factions of this Engineer species - cos the first spaceship was shaped like a disk, but the later one was a horseshoe? did humanity displease them? oh was the goop a weapon? did the worms start it?) is a waste of your time.

[Axion]

(Original post by Rancorous)
NO answers were given to the questions raised by this film. Clearly the director believed he was being thought provoking by leaving the audience to work out what the film meant. Further it's another cash cow for the sequel which will provide the answers. My thoughts: as a movie, it's incomplete. It doesn't make sense. In the world of horror science-fiction, I think we can all overlook the glaring plotholes (oh let's all take off our space helmets, oh you two just go off by yourselves on this alien world we've just arrived on) and even the unashamed plagiarism from just about every space movie there's ever been (think The Abyss, Event Horizon, Mission to Mars, every Star Trek film...for starters). To sum up, this is just one of those films. You know, the films which promise the world - 'where did humans come from? was it God? was it aliens? watch this film it'll all become clear'. Then you have an hour setting these questions up, 'this is the MOST SIGNIFICANT discovery EVER', then the rest of it having everyone die for stupid reasons, ending on a sort of smug, conceited note: 'wasn't that interesting, children? what do you think happened children? go talk about it on your internet forums and have a discussion about it at dinner after the movie'. It's all bull**** quite frankly. I would recommend you see something else rather than lining the pockets of people who can't be bothered to write proper movies which make sense. Spending your lives debating over deliberately poor movies (oh was Jesus really a spaceman that we haven't been told about? oh was it just warring factions of this Engineer species - cos the first spaceship was shaped like a disk, but the later one was a horseshoe? did humanity displease them? oh was the goop a weapon? did the worms start it?) is a waste of your time.

There was huge flaw, but visually spectacular

It was that she said she was infertile (or words to that effect) and then boom, pregnant.

[Rancorous]

(Original post by Axion)
There was huge flaw, but visually spectacular

It was that she said she was infertile (or words to that effect) and then boom, pregnant.

That's intended; it's not a natural pregnancy, it's a result of the raping alien creatures (transmitted to her through sex like a really bad STD).

But yes, it's full of plotholes/implausibility, i.e. why go on a 3 year trip not knowing where/why you are going? Makes sense.

It reminds me of The Village or Signs - two movies which go nowhere and say virtually nothing.

[kka25]

(Original post by hogso)

Spoiler:

Show

It simply grew. We don't know how the Xenomorphs sustain themselves, it's something that has never been explained. They've been described as the perfect organism more than once in the series, so maybe they simply do not need to eat? We assume that they do not eat what they kill (or dont kill, as the case may be), from the past films.

So, yeh. It just got bigger. The chest burster in Alien got bigger without any food, for example. That went from a cute lil thing which emerged from John Hurt's chest to that big ol' mother which killed most of the crew of the Nostromo without food (unless you count any nutrients, etc. which it may have absorbed whilst growing inside it's host...which you might). So the fact that the uber face hugger squiddy majig grew for no apparent reason is not unusual in regards to the rest of the series. And obviously promoetheus should be considered canon

Cute? Not really

[Idle]

I was actually rather disappointed, the film didn't answer the questions it was based around and just threw in a load more.

[latasauce]

(Original post by Tommyjw)
They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over

Why would they 'invite us' specifically to LV-223 - essentially a barren storage facility?

[Scienceisgood]

Saw it last Wednesday. Not impressed but not overly disappointed.

I give it 3 (3.5 if generous) out of 5.

[cl_steele]

(Original post by Tommyjw)
http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1

It is very long, but a nice read if you liked the film, confused about things or not.

Reddit thread on it (includes people discussing it should there be any other questions)

I am no expert and some of it doesnt make sense to me but i have tried to condense it down a bit.

Turns out i havent actually cut out thaaat much, but oh well :P

Special part:
"The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him"
________________________________ _______

The opening sequence and its meanings

Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. 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.

Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. 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.

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.

The Engineers

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: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. . 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.

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. 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; Until something changed.

What caused them to turn against us

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.

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....
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.

The Slime

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'.

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.

Christianity and self sacrifice

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.)

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?

'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.'

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.

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 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).

Film Ending

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

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.

Very good explanation there cheers, makes the film make a lot more sense
it was a good film just for a bit of fun to see but imho it pales in comparison to the actual alien films, they were amazing! that being said i do hope theres a sequal to this ... could prove interesting?

[JMB92]

Really need to see this film

[silverbolt]

(Original post by Tommyjw)
likely.

everything you just said i missed completely watching the film, seriously i walked out that movie very confused. I enjoyed it just really didnt get it. I thought the guy at the start was destroying the planet for whatever reason, and the black slime was a bio weapon similar to a life eater virus from warhammer 40000, the idea of self sacrifice was completely lost on me, the mural lost. The symbolism of the giving birth to the tentacled vagina monster - lost on me (aside from thinking wow she recovered awfully quickly from having that thing tearing apart her womb and then having it surgically removed) It just went completely over my head

[Rancorous]

(Original post by silverbolt)
everything you just said i missed completely watching the film, seriously i walked out that movie very confused. I enjoyed it just really didnt get it. I thought the guy at the start was destroying the planet for whatever reason, and the black slime was a bio weapon similar to a life eater virus from warhammer 40000, the idea of self sacrifice was completely lost on me, the mural lost. The symbolism of the giving birth to the tentacled vagina monster - lost on me (aside from thinking wow she recovered awfully quickly from having that thing tearing apart her womb and then having it surgically removed) It just went completely over my head

More likely it went under your head because it was so inane.

[silverbolt]

(Original post by danielhere)
Nostradamus crew .

Think you mean the Nostromo