It gets worse. If they were going to wipe out humanity with bio weapons, why would you go to earth to have ancient humans paint dots on the wall instead of either nuking the planet or infecting them with the bio weapon while you were there? Also, why would you make people in the first place if the goal was to then eradicate them? Also, why would you want to eradicate humanity by replacing them with a far more dangerous form of life? The Engineers are easily capable of killing the shit out of humans, but as we see at the end of the film, they are apparently no match for the resulting mini Lovecraft vagina tentacle monsters the bio weapon produces.
But you can rationalize this a bit: They're aliens so they don't think or act in ways that we'd find logical. They may have some kind of plan. Or maybe these guys are some kind of terrorist group that hates the fact that their kind are going around seeding life on other planets, so they set up a trap to kill off the races they've seeded with some kind of bio weapon. Whatever.
The problems I have with the movie revolve around David and the 'humans' on the ship. None of them are real characters.
The alien ship is taking off. We need to stop it. What's Plan A? Ram the only space ship we have into it, killing the three of us. Interesting. How about we try something else first? Or maybe we can cripple their ship by having our ship land on top of it, or by smashing the side of our ship into it's propulsion systems. As opposed to just ramming straight-on, cockpit-first into the thing. So that there might be some slight chance that we could possibly survive.
And let's not let this most important decision we've ever made in our lives have any sort of emotional impact on us. Just another day at the office, really. Well, the boss wants us to kamikaze into the side of an alien ship again. And they lowered our benefits last year, too. Buncha jerks. I might just hand in my letter of resignation after this trip. *crash*
Going back a bit further, we've got the revelation that the old guy is still on the ship. This is supposed to be a revelation, even though this is clearly what's going on due to the prior "David talking to some mystery figure in a hypersleep chamber. Which has it's own logic flaw of "how the fuck do you talk to someone in hypersleep", but they kinda wave their hands at that with the whole "i can see your dreams" bit, so fuck it. Anyway, Lisbeth walks into sick bay and there's the old guy and she's all "Oh, you're here too? Huh." I didn't get any sense that it was some kind of big deal. It didn't feel revelatory, possibly due to that scene, but just the way everyone is so blase about it in the room. How did no one else on the ship know about it besides Theron and David? And the medical guys? Like... No one noticed that they had a half dozen medical guys on a ship that otherwise had only a dozen other people on board? Doesn't seem weird at all?
The Engineer's ship just crashed. What's the first, most logical thing to do after your ship has crashed? Go kill the scientist bitch, right? Even though that guy had no clue where the fuck she was, and had no real reason to go try to kill her.
Further, how the fuck did he get there without some kind of breathing apparatus? If they need the keep their ships set up with an earth-like atmosphere and the humans - who share the same fucking DNA, apparently - can't go outside without helmets and breathing apparatus, how did he get to the ship? Better question, tho, is why the fuck didn't he go to one of the other alien ships that were all lined up and waiting for someone to just hop on board and fly it to earth?
You've got probes that go around picking up life-forms that apparently didn't pick up the life forms in the soil in the room as soon as they opened the door.
You've got David concocting some kind of scheme to have an alien baby put into hypersleep while still in the womb so it can be brought back to earth. Why? Did the old guy tell him to do that? WHY!? To make it a weapon or something? They don't know what the fuck it is! I can get why they'd want to do that in Aliens, and I can get kinda why they'd want to do that in the first film, although I kinda assumed that the droid just went fucking batshit in that movie. However, in this film, the thematic ideas presented kinda make you wonder if the androids aren't trying to do to humans what you assume the Engineers were going to do. They're sick of being second-class citizens and they want to use this alien species to kill off all humans. That kinda fits with the first movie's robot as well, and possibly MOTHER's motives, given that if this film is correct, then MOTHER must somehow figure out all of this. It's making me think about it too much and breaking things in the first movie and every subsequent movie where the robots aren't acting that way.
The old guy clearly just wanted answers, or to be fixed by these aliens or something, but the robot seemed to want to kill everyone on the ship for no particular reason. He also doesn't do a very good job of hiding the fact, given that he sticks the alien jar thing in the fridge with transparent doors.
The geologist guy, when he first goes into the alien structure, acts like he's about to have a claustrophobic breakdown or something. When that happened in the movie I was like "Well, you were stuck on a space ship for a couple years, so that's kinda weird." Then he blatantly says "I'm a geologist". At this point I was like "You're a fucking geologist? Do you do that in between playing bass with your punk rock band?" The guy doesn't act like a geologist, and makes his weird nervousness about being IN that place even weirder. You're a geologist and you're not used to dealing with enclosed spaces? Wait, you're a geologist and you've not once said something like "huh, these rocks are kinda cool" or ANYTHING!?
The biologist guy finds an alien life form on another planet and immediately tries to interact with it without knowing a single thing about it other than the fact that it looks like a penis with a vagina face. How does he interact with it? He sticks his finger in front of it's... vagina? Mouth? What the fuck am I looking at, here? Is he about to get his finger bit off, or is he about to sexually molest a worm? What the fuck, creature designers?
David gives that guy some contaminated booze. Guy drinks it, then fucks his wife, implanting her with some kind of creature. Had she not cut the creature out of her, one can assume it would have bursted out, yeah? Out of her womb? Not out of her chest, tho. Anyway, following that logic a bit, let's say that some Engineer drinks a little bit of that stuff. Did he then get his cock sucked by the Engineer in Alien that we see dead with a chest burster type damage to his... suit (no exoskeleton... ok...)? So that his... throat or stomach or whatever is impregnated? Wait, if the aliens take their shape from the things they replicate from, how the fuck do they have exoskeletons? Or acid blood? I guess the acid blood could be from the stomach acid? Cock sucking is the only thing that makes sense, here. The Engineers apparently swallow. Maybe the alien next impregnated a lobster or something and got the exoskeleton that way.
"That's because I'm a human being and you're a robot." Worst line in the movie.
Lindelof's method of writing seems to be to come up with a bunch of scenes that would be cool and cryptic, and then write scenes in between those scenes that serve as an excuse as to why the last scene makes sense or why the next scene is about to happen.
Cool scene where they're running from a cloud of silicon ... rocks... that, OK, why the fuck was that scene there? They pilot dude was like "oh shit bros, get back to the ship or y'all gonna die in this dust cloud thing" and then you're all "oh shit I hope they don't die in the dust cloud thing" and then they get caught in the dust cloud and nothing happens, and then those two guys are still in the thing and nothing happens to them... So why the fuck is that dust cloud thing an issue? Lose communication? They keep communicating with the guys all fucking night, telling them about the life form and where to go and all that shit. I would understand if they had to move the ship or something and thus stranded them all there for a while. I could understand if those silicon chunks had been like little flying razor blades and cut them all to bits. But it was just a chunky version of a dust storm with strong wind.
In the first couple alien movies, that would have crippled the ship, killed one of them, doused communications and created a sense of being trapped and isolated. In this movie it just kept the two stupidest guys trapped in a structure where they then flip-flopped from being completely idiotic to flying into hysterics for the slightest reason.
"I believe in things because that's how science works. I'm a scientist."
The real reason this pisses me off so much is because you could SO EASILY have made a bad-ass movie out of this. I had like a dozen different possible ideas in my head before watching this. Things they could have done. Aliens made us was one of the things. The aliens being a doomsday weapon to use against humans was one of the things. You could make that work logically and have an actual reason for that to be the case. Or you could have had these guys entire home world be destroyed by the alien creatures after having discovered them during their explorations. Our future destruction would have been preceded by their previous destruction. An advanced race whose goal is to push their boundaries and explore succumbs to a horrifyingly primitive one whose only instinct is survival and multiplication. The ship they find is crashed and maybe there's a survivor or something living in cryostasis. Give one of the intelligent aliens the same sort of backstory that Ripley had in Alien 3. Just pick it up without the prior movies to give it some mystery.
But this movie fails in just about every conceivable way. The dialogue is unbelievably bad, the characters are either completely flat archetypes or fucking bipolar, none of them act like scientists to the point where when you are blatantly told that they are scientists you say "what the fuck? those dudes are scientists?", the questions it poses aren't thought-provoking questions about humanity or life or religion or science, they're cryptic guessing-game questions where any answer that seems to be correct is totally illogical or nonsensical.
I haven't seen Lawrence of Arabia, tho. Maybe the movie makes complete sense if you've seen that flick?
