# Prometheus discussion with open spoilers \[edited title\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 1, 2012, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755 "2012-06-01T09:40:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 20
**Author:** ![JMH125](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee59a6/32.png) [@JMH125](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JMH125)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/381 "2012-06-14T16:09:39Z")
> [@Omniscient](#): > > That’s enough for now. Was this movie just stupid or am I missing something. I want to think this Sci-Fi holds up under scrutiny since there wasn’t enough action or horror to stand on that alone. haha. that sums it up right there. If you aren’t going to have enough action or horror then everything else better be pretty damn good. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/382 "2012-06-14T16:18:29Z")
> [@ISiddiqui](#): > > You’ll note he steps into the goo and they start wiggling after he steps. Also the place where they were was sealed off for how many years. Just the addition of their presense in this seeming vaccuum may have done it. No, that’s before the goo starts leaking from the canisters. The soil in the room has got some earthworms in it. I’m not sure why that’s a problem for **Cal** , though. They’re hardly in a sterile environment, after all. I don’t see any particular problem with their being worms or bugs or other small animal life surviving in the place for a couple thousand years. > [@](#): > > I am pretty sure that’s why Scott and co. were so adamant that this isn’t a direct prequal to Alien. Because while it is in the same universe (they used that term IIRC), it isn’t the same planet. After all, the Space Jockey in Alien didn’t seem to have a xenomorph fully grown come out of him (look at the end of Prometheus, the Engineer is basically split neck to groin) but instead a chestburster - that ship may have had a different evolutionary path of their bio-weapons. Right, it’s very clearly an entirely different planet than the one the Nostromo found. [Here’s the world from Prometheus,](http://moviesblog.mtv.com//wp-content/uploads/movies/2012/03/prometheus2.jpg) and here’s [the one from _Alien_](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3GQyvsnJb6c/T5s-TFbiOsI/AAAAAAAADAk/LhwB-7s-9z8/s1600/Aliens-LV426-topography.png). Plus, circumstances of the ship are radically different (pilot not in the chair, pilot room filled with dead humans and a ruined android, no massive alien facility underneath the ship), and the alien that comes out of the Engineer, while similar to the classic alien, is clearly of a different sort. The ship found in _Alien_ may have originally come from this planet, but it’s clearly and unambiguously not the same ship. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/383 "2012-06-14T16:22:10Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#): > > Surely you’re looking forward to Scott’s next film, _Murder On Snollygoster Street_, where police investigate a brutal killing, but don’t bother finding out who did it or why. That’s actually more or less the plot to _Gosford Park_. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/384 "2012-06-14T16:28:30Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > No, that’s before the goo starts leaking from the canisters. The soil in the room has got some earthworms in it. I’m not sure why that’s a problem for **Cal** , though. They’re hardly in a sterile environment, after all. > > . Noty a sterile planet, huh? There was not a bit of life shown on that world – no plants of any sort. Not even a drop of water. And the “worms” were inside a sealed structure, away from even the sun. You gotta have energy input for something to live. Even cave life ultimately depends on growing stuff that gets into the cave. These worms are living in sa sealed, sunless enclosure on what appears to be a very dead world. ---
**Author:** ![JMH125](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee59a6/32.png) [@JMH125](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JMH125)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/385 "2012-06-14T16:30:30Z")
i don’t think Alien or Aliens have been so rigorously picked apart for their plot holes. Because they don’t have any. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/386 "2012-06-14T16:31:53Z")
I saw a helpful Prometheus breeding chart on Reddit the other day and thought I’d share. I wish I’d thought of making [this](http://www.dangerousminds.net/images/uploads/Prometheus_explained_Carlos_Poon.jpg) myself. ---
**Author:** ![Snowboarder\_Bo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowboarder_bo/32/229_2.png) [@Snowboarder\_Bo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snowboarder_Bo)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/387 "2012-06-14T16:32:57Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > That’s actually more or less the plot to _Gosford Park_. :dubious: Mrs. Wilson poisoned him (because of what he did to her and to the women he impregnated & to his illegitimate children). Parks stabbed his corpse (because he was one of those illegitimate children and he was kind of pissed off about it all). See, at the end of that movie, we know who did what and why. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/388 "2012-06-14T16:33:42Z")
> [@JMH125](#): > > i don’t think Alien or Aliens have been so rigorously picked apart for their plot holes. Because they don’t have any. Well I don’t know, Spoke has that head-scratcher about how a small, very mobile creature on a ship full of food managed to find something to eat. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/389 "2012-06-14T16:36:33Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Not a sterile planet, huh? There was not a bit of life shown on that world – no plants of any sort. Not even a drop of water. And the “worms” were inside a sealed structure, away from even the sun. There’s clouds in the sky in most of the exterior shots of the world, although those don’t necessarily have to be H20. But when they enter the structure and first remove their helmets, there’s water pouring down from the ceiling, and my impression was that it was coming from outside. > [@](#): > > You gotta have energy input for something to live. Even cave life ultimately depends on growing stuff that gets into the cave. These worms are living in sa sealed, sunless enclosure on what appears to be a very dead world. A sealed, sunless enclosure that used to be a a biological research (and possibly terraforming) facility, and which is still functioning. Something has to be powering that place, which means some form of energy input, right? ---
**Author:** ![Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/bc8723/32.png) [@Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unauthorized_Cinnamon)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/390 "2012-06-14T16:40:14Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Noty a sterile planet, huh? There was not a bit of life shown on that world – no plants of any sort. Not even a drop of water. And the “worms” were inside a sealed structure, away from even the sun. > You gotta have energy input for something to live. Even cave life ultimately depends on growing stuff that gets into the cave. These worms are living in sa sealed, sunless enclosure on what appears to be a very dead world. They also took great pains to demonstrate that the room in question had been hermetically sealed, such that mold, corrosion, and black goo didn’t grow over the 2,000 years. How did the worms survive during that time? ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/391 "2012-06-14T16:45:15Z")
> [@Unauthorized\_Cinnamon](#): > > They also took great pains to demonstrate that the room in question had been hermetically sealed, such that mold, corrosion, and black goo didn’t grow over the 2,000 years. How did the worms survive during that time? Those were obviously zombie worms, like the geologist and Nooni-Cheekbone’s boyfriend. So the goo made the worms into zombie worms, who then had sexy times with other worms and the product of those unions were the worm-facehuggers that turned the biologist into some nesting material. Remember the biologist had something like a worm-themed chestburster fly out of his mouth when they disturbed his body. Or something, the writing is a steaming pile of incoherent poop. ---
**Author:** ![JMH125](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee59a6/32.png) [@JMH125](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JMH125)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/392 "2012-06-14T16:46:23Z")
> [@Lobohan](#): > > Well I don’t know, Spoke has that head-scratcher about how a small, very mobile creature on a ship full of food managed to find something to eat. As far as i can tell, the xenomorphs don’t eat food as we know it. they just grow fast as hell somehow! 🙂 God knows how long the Queen was on the planet before the colonists arrived. Could have been hundreds of years with no food. ---
**Author:** ![JMH125](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee59a6/32.png) [@JMH125](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JMH125)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/393 "2012-06-14T16:48:16Z")
> [@Lobohan](#): > > Or something, the writing is a steaming pile of incoherent poop. It IS inconsistent, and the writers are probably kicking themselves after all us nerdfans pick apart their baby for from fairly serious plot holes that really, really should have been addressed. ---
**Author:** ![JMH125](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee59a6/32.png) [@JMH125](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JMH125)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/394 "2012-06-14T17:02:46Z")
> [@Martini\_Enfield](#): > > _Prometheus_ is full of things _which just don’t make sense_ without nearly pornographic levels of fanwankery. The problem people have isn’t FTL travel/Medipods/Dream-watching helmets, it’s that no-one observes basic quarantine measures, major incidents (like drugging someone and trying to stuff them into stasis) are almost immediately forgotten about and moved on from, half the crew just vanish, and at the end of the film the protagonist decides to fly to the Engineer’s home planet despite having no evidence it will achieve anything except get her (and possibly the rest of Earth) killed. Yeah, what does she REALLY hope to achieve? that they will give her the big backstory and then invite her to live peacefully with them? But i’m not worried about the potential sequels, i’m worried about some of the gaping logic holes in this one, and for i found for the most part a pretty uninteresting cast. Fassbender was amazing, if that android role had failed…the whole movie would have tumbled after it. But he did a worthy job, kudos. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/395 "2012-06-14T17:04:49Z")
The sequel could be done in 5 minutes. “WTF, a human coming home with one of our ships? I guess that mission we sent to wipe them out didn’t make it, and now they apparently can find our homeworld. Better go send your best unit to wipe out Earth” Death star blows up Earth. The end. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/396 "2012-06-14T17:05:45Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > The worms are alive pre-goo. We see them in David’s footstep, before people get to the vases. > > It still seems too coincidental that we get a alkien chest-burster from an Engineer and a derelict ship i n this case. How many similar cases could there have been? Plus, the issue of the Navigator/Space Jockey as part of the chair vs. Humanoid helmet-wearing non-chair-bound navigators. It seems much more likely to me that thyey decided to simply ignore the differences because only real geeks would notice, or care. And then didn’t care about the number difference in the planets, the same way Arthur Conan Doyle frequently changed the names of characters, apparently without going back to check his original story. The ending of this film simply shouts out that it explains the situation at the beginning of **Alien**. Otherwise, why bother with all the folderol about the crashed ship and the chest-burster? Everything would;ve been wrapped up as tidily if the Prometheus simply destroyed the alien ship utterly – but no, it _has_ to be in exactly the same orientation we saw it in at the beginning of **Alien** I think this difficulty is easily fanwanked away. The alien chestburster catastrophe that wiped out the weapon installation did NOT prevent all ships from launching, one DID launch, but before it could get away aliens wiped out its crew and chestburst the pilot, who had just enough time to set off a warning beacon and steer the ship toward the “Alien” planet. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/397 "2012-06-14T17:15:09Z")
The more I think about this film, the more it annoys me. What the hell was it at the beginning, where you pan over an apparently dead world, and finally stop on the one big bald Mr. Clean engineer, who opens his container of DNA soup while flying rock saucer hovers overhead. He drinks it and immediately starts corrupting. On a molecular level, even his DNA goes bklack (how does a molecule turn black?), then starts falling apart and he falls into the waterfall. The DNA goes nice and shiny again. He has evidently seeded the world with his DNA. Which world? All the reviewers seem to agree it’s the Earth, and that would make the most sense, but it’s never made clear. Of course, if he wanted to seed the world with his DNA, he didn’t need to have such a dramatic exit. He coulda just stabbed himself and fallen into water. Or he could have just lived a normal life and expired there. You know, Alfred Bester’s _Adam and No Eve_ and all. But the Rule of Cool wins out – glitzy deaths play better on-screen. So the Engineers gave us the starting DNA. But that wouldn’t gurantee that people with essentially the same DNA would eventually result. With the accidents of evolution, you could get anything. Intelligent dinosaurs, maybe, if not for that asteroid. Snouters. In fact, since you can’t make a virtually 100% match unless you had something similar every step of the way, you gotta figure that they were guiding evolution all the time. If not in person, maybe they had nanobots or something. But then they’d still be here. What the hell, it’s fanwankingh. If you really want a colony of people just like you on a world the easiest way is to just leave people there. Why they didn’t do this is a mystery. But the Engineers had to come back again, because the drawings and carvings show Giants who gave us the Star Map. So, besides the initial Crreation and maybe lots of visits (or, more likely, a constant presence) during our evolution, they were here in historic times, as well. You gotta wonder why they gave us all these mysterious clues, then just left. Why not stay? So they leave us a Star Map that, in the fullness of time, we learn enough astronomy to figure out. It leads us to – what? Not their Homeworld. Not a storehouse of information. Not another habitable world. No, it leads to their Highly Toxic Bioweapons Storehouse. The only way I can figure it is that these guys are the Meanest Fuckers in the Universe, and this is the payoff to a 3 billion year-old practical joke. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/398 "2012-06-14T17:25:15Z")
> [@Lobohan](#): > > Well I don’t know, Spoke has that head-scratcher about how a small, very mobile creature on a ship full of food managed to find something to eat. **Spoke** has lots of other plot holes he could mention. Reams of them. But if he told us what they were, we’d discuss them with him. So he’s obviously not going to do _that_. ---
**Author:** ![JMH125](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee59a6/32.png) [@JMH125](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JMH125)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/399 "2012-06-14T17:25:36Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > The more I think about this film, the more it annoys me. > > \ > The only way I can figure it is that these guys are the Meanest Fuckers in the Universe, and this is the payoff to a 3 billion year-old practical joke. hahah! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2012, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755/400 "2012-06-14T17:30:48Z")
Oh, yes - the ending. Having awoken from his Long Sleep, the last remaining Mr. Clean alien doesn’t try to find out what happened, but simply offs all the humans and their android, because – I don’t know. You’d think, seeing that the android could talk his language, he’d want to find out what happened while he was out. But, no, he strikes out. Maybe he woke up in a grumpy mood. Maybe the appearance of the humans here on his world reminded him that he and his crew failed to wipe out all life on earth so that they could create somrething new, and he _really_ wants to get on with his work. So he offs everyone he can and takes off to strafe the earth , belatedly, with biohazard bioweapons. Ummmm – why? Considering that the stuff is so unbelievably unpredictable and toxic that it killed most of his crew, and they restrict its storage to this one barren planet, why give it all a fecund world to take over, therefore creating even MORE bioweapon life? What’s the point? You can’t recolonize a world with killer goop things, or seed it with new life – the killer goop octopoid tentacled awfulness will just kill the new stuff you’re trying to introduce. If your plan is to scrub the world of all the killer goop life, why bother with the killer goop? Just use your plasma torch/nova bomb/ radioactive plague/whatever to kill the people directly. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755.md?page=19) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prometheus-discussion-with-open-spoilers-edited-title/623755.md?page=21)