Zombie + Goo = Lindelhof

Haha... great vid. And yup, a real team would train together for years before leaving Earth.

Funnily enough, twice in the last week I've come across a scene where the air is discovered to be breathable but the characters don't take off their helmets - saying 'let's not, to be safe'. The first of these was in Sphere, which looks like it has a PhD in science when you compare it to Prometheus. The other was in an episode of Starcom (Caverns of Mars).

Also, doesn't Halloway later give his girl shit for recklessly going out into the approaching storm after the alien head she just dropped?

There's some very bad writing in Prometheus, but there are other times it feels like it's been rather savagely hacked apart and restitched, by persons so wrapped up in the story they could no longer think of it from a new viewer's perspective.

The reason that Shaw wanted a termination is that (a) it wasn't really hers as it was alien DNA (b) she conceived without informed consent (c) she had other shit to deal with at that time.

The reason why Engineers changed their mind (if that's what actually happened) had to be different to Shaw's. Our DNA 'matches' - whatever that means. The Engineers deliberately set events in motion. Are they crappy engineers? The engineer's response upon waking up was rather....err.... inarticulate. It doesn't appear Scott or Lindelhof actually care.

Usually in SF, the most common reason given for advanced civilisations wanting to terminate us is that we've entered the nuclear & space age, but still have the moral temperament of cavemen, and so can't be trusted to be good galactic citizens. Kinda like how we view Iran now. Atomic bombs and ancient superstitions don't mix. The second most common reason is one of colonialism - they want Earth's land, resources, etc.

If you can solve the problem of interstellar space flight, you've already reached the level of technological sophistication to solve environmental/resource problems, so reason #2 doesn't actually make sense.

In the end, no answer is given. And if the film-makers don't care, I don't see why audiences should care.

More to the point, we'd have gotten farther with space exploration if we were more willing to just give the environment a big middle finger. Space probes would be better with nuclear reactors on them, for example, and then there's the proposed spaceship that launches from Earth by throwing nukes out the back. Being environmentally sound takes quite a lot of effort (which is why no industry starts off that way).

I couldn't agree with you more in regards to the points you make about her "child" being forced upon her(for lack of a better word) ........
However, the point I wanted to bring up was more the theme of the creators not being happy with their creations, and deciding to destroy them.
Now, I'm sure there are many who would make the point that I(among many others) am reading/seeing too much into this film. But, I think it's pretty interesting that it's there. I, personally, don't think it's much of a stretch to see this strange connection between Shaw and the Engineers.

I want this movie.

I did the right thing by skipping this movie, huh?

Or if a species was labeled as evil and wicked according to the rules of a superior being, who then decided to exterminate them all via flood.  (Except for a very few who were deemed worthy, and were put to work saving all the other species.)

A lot of people believe an enlightened being did the above...

The trope that advanced technology = niceness is seriously entrenched in sci-fi, but disproven time and again by our own history, right up to the present day.   I got no problem with the idea that the Engineers apparently gave us everything and then for whatever reasons of their own, one day decided to kill us instead.    There's a lab rat in a cage right now asking that same question.     Even if you tried to explain it to the rat, he's not capable of understanding.   

And as I've said, the movie works fine for me on THAT level.   Sure, go ask your Creator some questions.  Good luck with that.    Just be prepared for a potentially unpleasant answer.   In the case of Prometheus, the answer seems to be something along the lines of "Holy snot, the lab rats got loose and are all over my damn control room, wtf?"

It's not cynicism, just a less anthropocentric worldview.  We're prejudiced to think we're awesome just because we're the ones who are doing the comparison, and there's no other species (so far) to tell us otherwise.   

Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it pretty well...

The idea that was presented in the article posted in one of the two Prometheus threads was that the Engineers created life on this planet via an act of self sacrifice. Their race is totally comfortable with death. The idea of cheating death or not wanting to die disgusts them. When they bring the head to life it's horrified and destroys itself (lol?). When the live alien is asked for more life, it is disgusted and enraged and tries to kill everyone. It's not hostile until David (apparently) asks him to prevent raisin-man from dying. That's pretty much the only logical explanation that makes any semblance of sense. That ties into Space Jesus, in that the act of us killing one of them was the motivation for them to say "uh...  wait a minute... we need a reboot down there..." The flood may have been a similar period where they said to themselves "yeah, we need to rethink the process a bit...  maybe next time we should send one of us down there to supervise?"

However, We are talking about a period of time in the hundreds of millions of years, if not billions, from the point at which they created life on this planet to the point where we finally showed up at their Life Goo Storage And Distribution Facility. Since this is true, then everything about that previous theory is totally believable when compared to the notion that in the hundreds of millions of years since they started creating life, their civilization never apparently changed. They upgraded their spaceship design from a saucer to a wishbone. That's the result of 100 million years of technological development. Apparently. Their culture and philosophy apparently made no change in that time.

@ Trey: The cool thing about humans is that we are totally capable at looking at our own species and saying "wow...  we are really fucked up..." and we do that quite a lot. Even when we acknowledge how fucked up we are, we are convinced that that acknowledgement makes us awesome.

EDIT: OK, I have to get this off my chest. The reply to Trey was originally just the first sentence. I wasn't sure if the point of the first sentence would be clear, so I added a second sentence that's basically the exact same sentence, but in reverse and a bit more obvious. I don't think even I would have gotten the first sentence's meaning, but I feel like I just broke that rule where you don't underestimate your audience. I feel dirty, but I dunno if I should. Should I feel dirty about that second sentence, or do you think it was necessary?

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2012-06-27 03:58:31)

About the thesis that advanced Enlightened beings = nicer, I would recommend Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of our Nature, that compares and contrasts the rate of violence in primitive societies with modern advanced civilisations. The likelihood that a one of us living in today's western society will die a violent death is much lower than in the past. Even including WWI & WWII, the percentage of deaths was lower than hunter-gatherer societies because the world's overall population was so much larger. Crime rates have fallen. Only the USA still has the death penalty, and only in some states, for only a small number of crimes. In the past, you could get executed by the state for being a witch, for minor property theft, for blaspheming, etc. In Scandinavian societies, crimes rates are very low.
And the 'expanding circle of inclusiveness' is starting to embrace animals. Most western societies no longer consider it very enlightened to hunt big game for pleasure or to have animals in circuses or to conduct frivolous experiments on animals, particularly our closest cousins. There are now extremely stringent rules for primate vivisection, and in Europe the practice is largely a thing of the past.
This evolving morality over the last few hundred years has coincided with the advance of science & secularism. You could even rank the countries along this path: NW Europe, Europe & Canada, Australia/NZ, American Blue States, American Red States, developing world, Congo & Somalia & Sudan, etc bringing up the rear.
Steven Pinker's full argument is here...

So yes I do think that an advanced species many millions of years ahead of us would NOT behave like the Engineer did when being woken up - like a WWF Wrestler with a full lobotomy. To give Scott the benefit of the doubt, there is rumoured to be more to the conversation that was cut and might be restored.