[Movie] Prometheus - Page 28

I'm not very well versed in DNA so this may be worded incorrectly, but here's what I saw: The lone engineer is on Earth, in prehistoric times. He looks up and sees his fellow engineers leaving the planet in their ship. He then drinks that strange stuff, which appears to break down/disintegrate his DNA. As his body breaks down, a strand of DNA which touches the water has some sort of reaction which appears to stop the disintegration process, and then repairs the strand, forming the basis of human life.

And this is my analysis of that scene: The way the scene showed the engineers body breaking down made it look like his DNA would have completely disintegrated if it weren't for the reaction with water. I believe he was left behind for whatever reason (I suspect perhaps he was outcast) and he was simply trying to kill himself, rather than purposefully create the human race. It just does not make sense that an effort to create a new form of life would involve a sole engineer destroying himself as he watches his peers fly off. Wouldn't the leadership of the engineers want to oversee the beginning of the process? Instead, he did not know that a reaction would occur with the water, and rather than just killing himself, he accidently created the human race. That may explain why the engineers wanted to destroy us. Maybe they considered our race an inferior version of them and therefore an abomination? Maybe they were worried we might be dangerous one day and planned a pre-emptive strike?

I feel like the film didn't explain David's motivations at all, beyond the conversation we hear his side of with Weyland.He clearly has more information than the viewer but how he gained that knowledge is incredibly unclear. For example he knows exactly how to get to the bridge, learns engineerspeak (just because he broke down a lot of languages doesn't in any way indicate that he could put them back together in a specific order - I can buy that he could comprehend their language, but being able to formulate new sentences makes no sense) and is even familiar with the fact that what appears to be writing is in fact a computer terminal (in the scene when he starts the first holographic thing). If Weyland has more information than a map from cave paintings then the leading male and female had no actual contribution to the team, and if Weyland did not then David acts in incedibly inconsistent ways.

Additionally, randomly testing weapons on members of your team, really? There are 17 people on board the ship, presumably every one of them plays an important part - the mission cost a trillion dollars, cutting down expenses must have been a priority. If David can be sure that randomly infecting him will not impact the mission at all then why was he there in the first place?

Also,for all their skill at genetic engineering, the engineers have designed the WORST biological weapon on the face of the planet. Have a think about the actual process that needs to occur at every stage. First someone has to ingest black goo, not particularly likely, they then have to have sex with someone else who then cant notice it for an extended period of time, at which point it is born, grows and then needs to attach to someone else who then has the final stage implanted in them. Their biological weapon with which they are hoping to destroy earth needs no less than 3 separate people to make incredibly stupid decisions. Admittedly, the zombies are probably pretty useful (if entirely unnecessary to the plot) but why not do that instead of engineering a new animal with an incredibly complex life cycle that isn't even a particularly good weapon?

Furthermore, the role that the engineers initially played is unclear and not in a mysterious way. People have commented that the guy at the start needed to kill himself to start life on earth, this CANNOT be the case, for several reasons. Firstly humans and engineers have similar DNA, that's unlikely to be chance because in this model of the plot, evolution still occurred. Secondly, in order for cave paintings to exist mapping a star system that is invisible to the naked eye the engineers would have had to be present with humans in their civilisation and more importantly they must have done so recently. One of the pictures is mentioned as being Babylonian - a city that is only a few thousand years old. It can also be seen that another sample is Hittite - a culture who date from around the 18th century BC (Tangentally, the line "they had no contact with each other" is evidently false as the Hittite and Babylonian empires fought wars). That the oldest painting was 35000 years old, and others date to about 1800BC implies that the engineers had extended contact with humans. I'd argue that that can be explained as "Ridley Scott needs to read a history book" rather than "there were engineers on Earth for 33 thousand years" , but regardless the Engineers played more of a part than simply seeding life.

To continue, I find the film/s treatment of female characters questionable. The two major female characters of Vickers and Shaw play up madonna/whore stereotypes to a T. This is particularly irksome in that they both have a sex scene at the same time. Vickers - cast as the villain - has casual sex with a black guy (the fact that it is the villain who Ridley Scott decides engages in that kind of sexual behaviour is at issue, not the acts themselves), while Shaw - the heroine - has sex as a means to calm her down (she was angry about babies at the time, to make things even worse) and then later gets pregnant because of it. Sex in this film is either transgressive or for procreation.

The film gives us no insight into the thought processes of the engineers, this is done intentionally but leaves me emotionally disconnected from the film, and makes it harder to overlook plot holes. For example, the ship is undoubtably a military vessel and it is implied that the whole area is a military base of some kind, we can assume that the people who were worshipped as gods by several different cultures were at the very least not the same people as in the base - it seems reasonable to assume that they were probably not military personel in any sense. Given that, why would they give directions to a military base that was in no way connected to their culture as a whole? If I met aliens, I would direct them to the White house, not the Pentagon. The earlier sections of the film only hold together if you assume the engineers want us to come visit and without that much of the film seems to collapse.

It IS a very pretty film though....

Also @Shawty, people have gotten taller and look different because of dietary and lifestyle differences, you could take a caveman and raise him as a modern child and he would appear exactly the same as his classmates. Any differences there ARE between him and other kids would be genetic, which kinda undermines your point. That said, the film only says that the DNA matches, not that its an 100% match, so overall I agree with you that looking a bit differences isn't a reasonable critique.

I don't think he was an outcast. I think he was there specifically to sacrifice himself and to seed the planet with engineer DNA. Ridley Scott has been talking a bunch about human sacrifice in various human cultures, and drawn parallels to that scene. There's also a lot of hieroglyphic elements in the engineer architecture, which also references Egyptian/pre-colonization South American architecture - cultures that engaged in human sacrifice