Sorry for the double post but I just thought of this.
What if there were two groups of engineers. Let’s say they’re fighting a war. One group (I suspect the losing side) decides to seed Earth with DNA. The winning side decides “Fuck that.” and develops a bioweapon to destroy us. That would explain why the wanted to both create and destroy us.
I forgot that the franchise had already established a timeline.
So yeah, I guess they had no choice on this one. And it’s just a byproduct of earlier generations and the whole “We’ll have flying cars in 20 years!” thing.
But, iamthewalrus, uhm, are you talking about the universe this movie is set int, or reality, 'cause in reality, FTL won’t happen. Just so you know.
But then why would they leave their scribbles pointing to the weapons manufacturing plant?
Remember the weapons plant was only about 2000 years old so it didn’t exist when the pictographs were made.
How 'bout this. Two Factions. Faction A has it’s main base on LV-421 and from there seed Earth with DNA. Then leave a message on Earth at various times to drop in for a visit.
Faction B discovers the base on LV-421 and wipes them out. Then discovers the Earth project and from there decide to use the DNA mutagenic can be used as a bioweapon and manufactures it wholesale to wipe us out.
I didn’t get a good look but my husband says he saw an Alien-like being in the mural. Sounds like the extraterrestrial version of a MSDS sheet. 
I wish they hadn’t written such a rock-dumb cast. The geologist with map-bots gets lost. The biologist squees over an overtly hostile alien snake-thing without thinking about things like all the old dead bodies with round holes in them, or the chance of having an applicable anti-venom or a thin suit protecting from a bite. The scientists go unmasked when looking at an intact alien corpse’s head and decide the first move is to zap its brain and get it “running” again. The captain decides to pop open the outer cargo door to check out something mysterious outside. The captain asks the geologist and biologist where they are when their location is clear on the display. They assume sporadic life readings are glitches. The archaeologist dude sees a parasitic organism in his own eye and doesn’t say a thing. Shaw and Vickers run parallel to the path of the rolling ship rather than perpendicular. There are straight lines in nature!
I can believe the captain’s change in heart. He had a “I saw those canisters, this isn’t their home, it’s a military dev installation and they probably all died from that crap, I’m not bringing it back to Earth” talk with Shaw before the end. So when he sees her and she’s going “OMG ship full of canisters leaving for Earth - KILL IT!” it makes sense for him to say “fine, taking one for Team Humanity here.”
Saint Cad, I thought the body was 2,000 years old, not the facility. Still, that means it was functioning that short of a time ago at least.
I’m willing to accept that some aliens have cultural or superstitious ways to do things, but the Buff-Albino-Jockeys’ plan was so amazingly stupid it defies belief.
Okay, they made us. Cool. Then, at some point they decide we need to be removed. Okay. Their plan for this is to:
That’s the fucking plan to get rid of humanity that an advanced race came up with?
How about dropping a fucking asteroid on us or using super-smallpox?
At one point in Prometheus the ship’s captain (Idris Elba) declares that the moon they’re on is not the Big Bald Guys’ homeworld. It’s an outpost used for weapon production, since the black goo is dangerous enough that the BBGs wouldn’t have wanted it near where they really lived. We are apparently supposed to accept this as the truth, although it appears to be something the captain made up out of thin air. (My friend: “It was nice of Captain Exposition to explain all that to us, since the movie wasn’t going to.”) The robot also says that the BBGs planned to destroy us with the black goo, but again this seems to be nothing but a WAG.
There’s good reason to believe the BBGs had been planning to go back to Earth (holographic map) with the black goo (loaded into the BBG ship), but it’s not at all clear what they were hoping to accomplish. While the black goo is dangerous, this doesn’t mean it was intended for use as a weapon. Modern humans use plenty of potentially dangerous substances every day as fuel, for cleaning purposes, medicine, etc. As I mentioned above, the BBGs stored their canisters of black goo in a room that looked more like a temple or crypt than a military warehouse. The only time we see a BBG doing anything with the black goo is in that pointless opening scene, where he drinks it voluntarily. The BBG whose severed head they found had apparently been exposed to black goo, but we don’t know whether this was an accident, something he did deliberately, or something that was done to him. I don’t think there was any evidence presented in the movie to indicate that the BBGs planned to use the black goo to wipe out humanity.
To be clear here, I’m not saying it’s an incorrect interpretation of the film to say that the black goo was intended as a weapon and that the BBGs had been planning to use it against humans. I’m saying it’s a stupid movie that apparently expects us to believe these things based on nothing but the totally unsupported speculations of two characters, one of whom knows no more about the situation than the audience. Since the robot inexplicably seems to be able to read the BBGs’ writing he *could *have special information, but he doesn’t say he does, and even if he’d made this claim I’d be skeptical as he’s shown to be untrustworthy in his dealings with humans.
If you buy the pseudo-religious explanation that was linked earlier in the thread, the black goo may have been a life creating substance in the right hands, but that it reacted negatively to the presence of humans and became corrupted, creating creatures in our own psychotic image.
I can’t help but feel the writers are going to spend the next few months trolling the intertubes to find ideas to hash out their story for the next movie. In which case, any theory we come up with might be correct. (When you think about, it’s never been easier to write sci-fi. You just need a foundational work to whip the nerds up into a frenzy. Then all you have to do is distill their best ideas).
Why’s that?
Both posts were too long to quote, but thanks Locrian and Lamia for the replies; I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed anything and that this notion that the Xenomorphs are a weapon of some sort was nothing but a WAG, unsupported by anything that actually was learned or known in the movies.
Let’s hope the not-infinite-but-still-huge-number of monkeys on the intarwebz write that sic-fi Shakespeare then, because it’s painfully obvious that Damon Lindelof isn’t capable of doing it.
I want very much to like this movie and think well of it. As I’ve said, I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott, and I love good science fiction. But the more I read about the movie, the more fanwanking I read, the more I read people trying to come up with explanations for what happens in the movie, and the more I think about it all only convinces me that this is one huge craptacular stinker of a film. I already rated it a 5 over at IMDb; I may have to reduce that.
And to muddle the waters even further, there’s more viral stuff at http://www.whatis101112.com/ , featuring a young Peter Weyland, and Nietzche/2001 quotes.
Apparently, later this year a director’s cut should come out with 20 minutes of extra footage, that should suddenly make the movie better somehow.
Like this guy said:
*If you ask me, this is the movie equivalent of where DLC is in games right now: Release the product and then get your loyal customers to pay more for the “complete” version. *
Both?
I’m saying that it doesn’t strike me as so absurd that it pulls me out of the movie to accept the premise. But I tend to believe in an impending technological singularity, which could maybe explain all sorts of seemingly impossible tech. I don’t necessarily think it’ll happen in 50 years, but I think it could. We’re probably straying pretty far afield from the topic of this thread. There have been several threads where we’ve discussed the possibility of accelerating advances in tech. I’ve posted in some of them.
You say FTL travel is impossible in the real world. I certainly have no evidence otherwise. Nor the background in physics to meaningfully analyze the evidence there is. The only argument I have is that maybe we don’t understand physics as well as we think we do, and maybe some machine in the future will be able to learn much more than we are capable of.
Personally, the lack of conservation of mass that’s regularly present in the Alien franchise bothers me more than the FTL. What the hell was Noomi’s squid-baby eating while it was trapped in the med-bay to cause it to grow by a factor of 20?
Yeah, I was going to complain about that but realized it’s a known problem with the series. Did we miss a crew member death along the way somewhere? Maybe someone wandered in there offscreen and got eaten.
Maybe the squid thing got in the ktichen and cooked and ate a lot of spaghetti! Flying spaghetti monster, yo!
So how long until BBG Vs Predator?
And at least that’s an explanation for the film taking on a religious tone. :smack:
I mean seriously, Scott has repeatedly said that his only intent for the original Alien was to scare the hell out of people. No feminist/sexual/military/social commentary. Just a scary movie. Now we’re doing a prequel-ish film and it’s all “oh, humans are creations of aliens/our creators are pissed/haven’t you rejected religion yet*/oh yeah, who made them?!” arguments. Meanwhile the science of the story is reduced to Excel bar graph animations on a smartphone showing that “the DNA match,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. Plus it’s hardly an original idea these days.
*Hey, why would Shaw know that David still had her cross necklace on his person when they were in the Engineer ship? He had put it in a sample bottle in case it was contaminated.
Oh yeah, was there any consequence of her violently attacking her fellow crew members to avoid going to decontamination and take a side trip to the medi-pod for some emergency surgery? I mean, yeah, she had an alien growing in her, but I would recommend explaining this to your colleagues and asking them to help with the procedure, rather than playing possum until they show up and then beating the shit out of them.
I didn’t even think of that. There were no repercussions for that at all. I can’t remember… did we see either of them again? If not, did Shaw straight up murder some people?
Wait, we do see them again. The very severe-looking scientist gets killed by the BBA. So… I guess she doesn’t hold a grudge against Shaw, even though Shaw never (on screen) explains what the deal was to anyone.
Yeah, that was another thing that pulled me out of the movie somewhat. Shaw shows up with an abdominal scar, shaking and soaked with blood, and everyone is just kind of like, “Oh hey, where’ve you been? So anyway, as I was saying…”
I can see Shaw not feeling very trusting at that moment, since when she told the robot she wanted the alien fetus removed he refused and sedated her. What’s strange is that she seemed to trust everyone again as soon as the baby squid was removed, and that no one else seemed remotely concerned about any of this. Does David, who refused to remove the fetus and seemed interested in bringing it back to earth, know or care that Shaw did manage to remove it? Do the two people she knocked out care that they were attacked for, as far as they knew, no reason at all? When a bloody, nearly nude woman staggers into the room are Papa Weyland and his attendants at all worried about either her or their own safety?
Apparently not.
I think one of them was the woman with a Scottish accent, and I think she’s around later in the movie, but I don’t remember now.