Yes, it’s very, very clear. First we see David with the drop on his index fingertip (one of the coolest shots in the movie by the way, showing the little Weyland Corp emblem incorporated into David’s fingerprint). Then he enters the billiard room and grabs a glass very deliberately with his thumb and middle finger. Throughout the scene he holds his index finger out and away, until as mentioned, he decides to dose Holloway, and he dips his fingertip into the drink as he hands it to him.
I saw the movie at the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin and they payed the ‘TED’ talk right before the movie started. I assumed it was part of the movie. I was mystified by everyone’s confusion over why there was an overly made-up Guy Pierce in this movie.
Overall, I liked the flick. I did have more than one eye-roll moments for many of the scenes already mentioned in this thread but was still entertained and will be seeing the sequels.
So there are two potential theories about the Engineers that makes sense to me:
- They knowingly created humans on Earth for some purpose. Possibly related to some war being fought between factions of Engineers, or as a host population for experiments involving the black goo.
2 The creation of humanity was an unexpected result of the earthbound Engineer swallowing the goo. The Engineers discover the existence of their “children” on a later visit to Earth and make contact with them. They may have even brought humans to LV-223. Some faction of Engineers is later bent on destroying life on Earth, either in revenge (because we killed Jesus, or some other Engineer), or because it’s learned that human + goo = xenomorph.
In hindsight, I’d say claiming that human and Engineer DNA “matched” was particularly inexplicable in that it adds so much confusion. Clearly we are not 100% DNA matches with the Engineers, so maybe they were referring to a core loci type of match, where we match in terms of basic traits (bipedal, ten fingers, two eyes, etc).
I think a lot of the criticisms of this movie are pretty valid, but some things I think a lot of people are overlooking which may help “frame” the story a bit more, and make some things a bit more understandable.
- This is NOT Star Trek. It has been previouslky established in the other movies of the franchise that human civilization is dominated by huge “Trans-National” (or perhaps even “Trans-Stellar” by the time Alien and Aliens come along) corporations, and that doing what you are told by “The Company” is pretty standard.
Consider Capt. Dallas in Alien; he pretty much says straight-out, “I do what The Company tells me to do” when Ripley questions him about his deferring to Ash’s judgement to keep the dead facehugger and take it back to Earth for examination.
- These mega-corporations are NOT above using dumb mooks to do their dirty work, probably to save money. In Alien, Weyland-Yutani knew about the alien signal, and quite probably knew it was a warning, not a distress beacon. So instead of getting (what passes for) The Government involved, and specially trained and equipped Xeno Contact Teams and expensive, specially-designed and outfitted Scientific Research Vessels out to LV-426, they reroute one of their tugs, the Nostromo, and slip a specially programmed synthetic on board with specific instructions to do whatever is necessary to infect the crew and get them back to Earth (or into The Company’s hands, at least).
From their point-of-view, it’s a win-win: they get the xenomorph for cheap, they get their tug and refinery back on auto-pilot (“Mother,” the computer, probably runs the ship 99% of the time), no government inteference, no expensive xeno-contact teams are necessary, so “Q2 profits look great! We all get our bonuses!”
Ripley threw the wrench in that plan, probably because some lower- or mid-level executive didn’t read her psych profile well enough; it probably cost too much money to have a company psychologist do an in-depth work-up, and he didn’t want the inter-company billing hitting his botton line.
- By the time of Aliens, we see that the “Trans-Stellars” now have the power to reach into the government/military and monkey around with personnel assignments, in furtherance of their own agendas (or even just the agendas of certain individuals, if not The Company’s). That’s not entirely the reason the Marine Expedition went testicular, but it was a significant contributing factor.
If a more intelligent & experienced officer had been assigned, Apone and Co. maybe wouldn’t have strolled into that processor station/meat grinder so blithely confident.
But Burke wanted a yes-man he could manipulate and dominate.
So circle back now to Prometheus.
Shaw and Holloway are probably not world-renowned scientists heading off on the U.S.S. Enterprise to “boldly go.” They’re most likely considered fringe crackpots that an aging, desperate Peter Weyland bought “on the cheap” with a promise to fund their research with an expedition, hoping that they’d turn up something that would prolong his life, maybe even make him young again. Think of the profit potential in that.
Fifield (Geo-dunce) and Millburn (Bio-dunce) are likewise generally shown (albeit briefly) to not be “all that and a bag of chips;” Fifield is shown to be almost anti-social, and more concerned with being paid than actually being a “team member.” Millburn is shown initially as a genial fellow. He may have been kind of doe-eyed/inexperienced with xeno contact; hell, at this early point in the Alien franchise, no one may be experienced with xeno contact. It would certainly go a ways towards explaining why he was so friendly curious towards the xeno-snake instead of cautious.
Still, some exposition on their character would have made for a better movie. Consider how Scott briefly yet concisely summed up Parker and Brett in Alien: contrast and compare.
David is completely Peter Weyland’s creature; his programming and instruction is to do anything to advance Weyland’s agenda (get young/healthy again, make $$$ moneys).
We see through his actions what his motives are, but in the “bigger picture” we still don’t know what/why he’s doing this, because we don’t know, aren’t told or shown, what Weyland’s motives truly are.
Vickers is kind of on-board with Weyland’s plan, but has her own agenda: get Daddy out of the way so she can be the big cheese. She most likely initially thinks the expedition is so much foolishness. But she’s also the one to act fairly rationally once she sees the danger. This may only be simple self-preservation rather than more altruistic motives, but the net result is the same.
Still, some more expostion on her motives could have made for a better movie.
Janek is a Company Man. He and his crew are just the taxi drivers for this expedition, so he’s not emotionally attached to their goings-on, and really couldn’t give a shit if the two scientists get lost and have to spend a night in the pyramid; that’s scientist-stuff, not ship-stuff, and not his concern until The Boss says it’s his concern.
But he flip-flops between caring and not-caring, duty and slackness, too inconsistently; it’s plot-driven, not character-driven. TV Tropes has a name for this, something along the lines of “Plot Stupid,” but I’m not going to TV tropes and falling into that trap!
Scott may have made a fairly intelligent movie (if only in his own mind) and thought he’d rely more on the “show, don’t tell” school of plot narrative, and we’re the ones “just not getting it.”
Then again, he may have deliberately obfuscated motives and actions in order to set up for something else coming along in the next movie.
Or maybe some stuff, some important bits, hit the cutting room floor.
Or maybe he was just too high concept in his own mind, and didn’t translate it very well for the rest of us.
The best explanation for that to me is that there might be other genetic markers other than DNA that we haven’t discovered yet. Perhaps the potion the engineer drinks at the beginning doesn’t allow him to pass these on, or they deliberately chose not to pass these on for some reason.
>Why does the old guy go through all the trouble of pretending to be dead?
Did he pretend to be dead, or just on his deathbed? I think he needed to stay in stasis as long as possible because he really is near the end of his life. And he created the ruse because he needed people to carry out his mission without knowing that it was really all about his quest for immortality.
>Why does the android infect what’s his name?
We saw David talk about being asked to take bigger risks to achieve his goals. He theorized that the black goo might have some sort of healing powers, and possibly be useful to help Weyland, but he needed a guinea pig to test it on to see if he was right. He wasn’t.
>How does the android know that doing what he does will infect him?
He didn’t. It was an experiment.
>In fact, how does the android know so much about the aliens and their planet?
He didn’t know what the black goo would do. But the things he did know were from reading the heiroglyphs, watching the holovids, seeing the schematics/mission plans, and hearing the aliens speak.
>Why does the big bashing alien get so angry when he wakes up?
I’m guessing either he’s annoyed humans are there for whatever reason his race decided they had to be extinguished, or David said something really naughty to him.
>Why does the big bashing alien want to kill scientist girl so badly?
Because she crashed his ship? This didn’t make sense to me either. He should have made a run for one of the other ships.
>Why do the aliens want us to find them?
I don’t get that either, especially why they sent us to their bioweapons lab. Maybe those cave paintings were put up before we pissed them off.
>And, (since the whole movie seemed to rest on this) why did the Aliens create us and why did they want to subsequently kill us?
That one link has some weird theories, but the one that seems supported by statements from the writers is that Jesus was an alien and we crucified him. This does match up with the 2000 years ago mentioned.
Or maybe a Lost writer was prominently involved.
I’m on board with everything you said, especially on Janek. He goes from ambivalent working stiff to “I have to sacrifice myself to save humanity” seemingly in an instant. Like I said, Idris Elba was wasted.
OK, here’s my fanwank, which I like better than Ridley Scott’s:
The earth is seeded with regular DNA in the distant past by engineers of some kind. We don’t know who. Later it’s discovered by a race that decides some of the primates have great promise as bioweapons. They use their DNA to engineer the BBGs as shock-troop super soldiers who could probably tear a Predator in half in hand to hand combat. Really, those guys are built like gorillas, but have fine hand control. They set up the planet the movie takes place on as a bioweapons lab. Then they discover something on earth that scares the pee out of them and they decide to scrag the place, using gray goo (in written SF it’s a term that describes nanotech that reduces all living organisms to gray goo, sometimes sentient, sometimes not. Undoubtedly not, in this case.)
One of the BBGs figures rebels and drinks some gray goo himself near a big river, falling into it and seeding the gray goo throughout the bioweapons planet, killing all the other BBGs except the one that got to the hypersleep chamber in time (that we know of, we know there are many other ships on the planet) preventing the BBGs from ending all life on earth about 2000 years ago. (Call him Prometheus, call him Jesus, call him Ishmael for all I care.) He’s the BBG we see in the opening scene.
This explains why there are all the chest-burst BBG corpses, and why the BBGs in the recorded holovids are running about, and why the BBG that’s revived almost immediately kills the humans and gets his ship launched … he’s planning on finishing the mission. It also explains why Shaw says there will be no Earth if his ship gets there (though not how she knows this). Of course, attacking the home planet of a race that has achieved interstellar flight might not succeed in wiping them out … one of many dumbnesses in the movie.
Now what made the aliens want to kill the Earth? I still like them finding a remnant of Lovecraftian Old Ones on Earth and deciding that that kind of threat is not worth the minimal gain to be had from future Earth-based bioweapons, which could eventually tie in nicely to the Hellboy franchise. But it could also have been … Keyser Soze!
I think the 2000 year date telegraphs where Scott is headed with that, but I am thinking it belongs in the “Greedo shot first” category of paying attention to directorial whims. And yes, the movie is filled with stupid bits: FTL by 2089, taking your helmet off on a biologically active alien planet, not reconning from a distance for a long time before landing, much less going out. A lot of stuff that made the movie seem dumber and could easily have been fixed without much loss of time onscreen. But it’s still a fun, fine movie.
Shaw’s decision to look for the engineers’ home planet is exactly the right one … for a sequel … and I’m down with that!
From a health perspective it would be safer for him to remain in stasis on Earth and wait to find out if the mission was successful. But if he wanted to come along then there’s no apparent reason why he needed to be in stasis secretly.
The crew could be under whatever impression he wanted him to be under, since he’s funding the mission and his representative (and daughter) is the one giving orders. Vickers didn’t even tell them it was supposed to be hands-off until they were about to go down to the surface, and the scientists weren’t happy about this. I don’t see how openly telling them that the rich old man hopes to see aliens before he dies is any more suspicious than the Weyland Corp putting trillions of dollars into this expedition but being secretive and vague about what the purpose actually is.
Or maybe it’s just a stupid script that is full of things that don’t make sense. We’re explicitly told and shown that their DNA matches ours, not that it’s merely similar or partially the same, and from what little we see of the BBGs I don’t think it is clear that they’re not genetically human. There are human albinos, and humans can grow to unusually large size for hormonal rather than genetic reasons. People with their level of technology could also have all kinds of medical and cosmetic treatments that could alter their appearances in ways that would seem strange to us.
He said in his hologram that he was dead, “may I rest in peace”. He’s the one paying for the whole operation. He doesn’t need any ruse as to why they’re going. He’s the one hiring people and giving orders.
Interesting idea; but I certainly didn’t get that from the movie. And what about some slimy black goo that he finds in a weapons lab would give him the idea that it could have healing powers? Seems pretty far fetched to me.
It’s almost as if they just felt the need to throw in the evil android Alien cliche, even though it didn’t make sense in this one.
That is what we are led to believe; it just comes across as unbelievable that he is so knowledgeable about them from so little information.
This is a very important plot point; we shouldn’t have to guess here. And why would David say something that results in his master being killed?
But she didn’t crash his ship.
And assuming they wanted to kill us for some reason, why do they need some difficult to contain Alien bioweapon to do so? They had spaceships capable of interstellar travel while we were hacking at each other with bronze weapons. Not to mention they are 10 feet tall and strong as an ox. Surely they could wipe us out easily without resorting to some ridiculous, complicated, and dangerous bioweapon scheme. It’s like some James Bond movie where instead of just shooting Bond, the villain has to build some pool filled with mutated sharks with laser beams to dunk them in.
^^ And if the old guy just needed to mask the true purpose of his mission, then just make up something else. No need to play dead.
Maybe they didn’t set in motion a plan to destroy us until we were capable of interspace travel, which might mean that interstellar travel is only centuries away. And then, rather than nuking us from orbit just to be sure, they decided to unleash a bioweapon on us in order to mutate us.
Perhaps the bioweapon causes rapid, unknown yet still viable mututions. This would also explain the inconsistent types of creatures throughout the series. Perhaps they wanted to kill two birds with one stone: killing us before we became a threat, and causing further mutation for them to come back and study later. So a batch of Engineers comes with the mission to create the pots of goo on a remote planet, and something goes wrong, the last remaining guy makes it into statis, and there we are.
Or, if it turns out that they had been shown to have started this scheme for thousands of years, perhaps they had been planning on mutating us as my previous post, but then something bad happened. And when the last Engineer woke up he discovered that we are capable of interstellar travel and cyborgs and so reacts accordingly because he recognizes that we are now a threat. As opposed to tiny earthbound humans that they can talk down to and get worshipped by. Perhaps they created the drawings as a honey pot so that they would not have to actively monitor us – when humans find them, they’d know it’s time to reevolve them.
For all we know, the Engineers might not see this as an evil act since they are capable of voluntarily dying in order to propel evolution.
For all my problems with this movie, I really don’t mind the whole “why did they change their minds” issue. Why do humans bring mice into existence and carefully rear them, only to turn around and torture them in amazingly inventive ways? It seems perfectly consistent with what we’re shown that the BBGs are doing some kind of experimentation, which of course doesn’t necessarily entail loving kindness toward their creations. (Other explanations could also work of course, but I’m just saying it’s not like there’s a big mystery with no possible answer when we have analogous relationships with a lot of animals on Earth.) As **Ludovic **says, that also jibes with the goo having various effects.
Maybe humans were just created to be breeding stock for experimentation. That’s why we’re so small and relatively harmless to them. We just had to be able to host more deadly creatures. The BBG at the end got pissed when Fassbot revealed our origin. He realized that some of the monkeys had escaped the holding pen so he began to exterminate them.
Ok, here’s my beef with the whole Alien and (and by extension the Alien vs Predator) film series.
The “xenomorph” alien is basically a giant space cockroach. It’s big, sneaky, and scary dangerous if you are trapped with one and have nothing to fight it with but a bunch of welding torches converted into flamethowers. And a colony of a hundred of them can even be a handful for a platoon of Space Marines armed with independently targeting particle beam phalanx (Vwap!), tactical smart missiles, phase-plasma pulse rifles, RPGs, electronic ball breakers, nukes, knives, sharp sticks and whathaveyou.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a giant space cockroach.
Why is Wayland-Yutani so interested in them? They are the worst weapon of mass destruction you can imagine in terms of practicality. You do what with them? Use them to displace the indiginous population of an area with a population of creatures that are orders of magnitude more dangerous and impossible to control? As opposed to say, bombarding the same area with lethal levels of radiation or nuking it from orbit?
And even if there was some comercially viable reason to spend a trillion dollars to send a team on an interplanetery voyage to retrieve these things. Why the fuck would you spend all that money and send a bunch of unprepared mooks with no idea of what the fuck they are in for? The only expedition that ever made sense was at the end of Alien3 when W-Y showed up at the end with a bunch of well equiped scientists and armed soldiers in power armor.
Agreed. the xenomorphs make a lot more sense as a Predator hunting beast, than as a weapon of mass destruction.
They didn’t want a experienced team, they wanted either the ‘bugs’ or hosts for them. People who are fundamentally expendable, make really great hosts. Experienced people ask questions and don’t open airlocks, send teams into unknown areas and ignore the advice of the one person known to survive an alien.
I think by Alien3, ‘the company’ finally realized that even unprepared mooks don’t want to die and will up screw up the plans trying to stay alive.
That’s why they sent in a team to actually capture one of them without killing it…and still watched it ‘die’, because they couldn’t control Ripley and never would be able to.
Yeah, this is basically my feeling about the later movies in the series, although I don’t feel it’s really a problem with the first one. (Nor with Prometheus, as Weyland Corp isn’t after the xenomorphs yet.) It’s not clear in Alien how much the company knows about the xenomorphs, and I can’t remember if it’s even explained why they want to get ahold of a live one until the second movie. Since the blood of the xenomorphs is a powerful acid, it could be that the company wanted to study that and use it in weapons and/or for industrial purposes. But certainly by the end of the first movie it seems like these critters are more trouble than they could possibly be worth.
The whole “FTL by 2089” thing is a necessary conceit. Without it the idea of an interstellar archaeological expedition is even more absurd than it already is. And it’s already been established that FTL is both possible in the Alien universe and it was common enough by 2122 for there to be a mulitude of extrasolar colonies and interstellar commerce. Space opera is very hard to do without some form of FTL and the timeline was already established in this franchise.