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Ridley Scott's "Prometheus"

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brainhulk

Diamond Member
Sep 14, 2007
9,376
454
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yeah that's how i understood it. they showed someone stepping in the dirt between the containers disturbing mealworms.

i think that's the only one missing from this:
282hq9s.jpg

I don't think that's right. There was a huge bas relief of a mother alien on the wall behind the huge easter island head.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
9,811
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He was in constant communication with the ship and the captain was tracking the exact positions of every individual. They left about 10-15 minutes before the others. The others made it back. Those two guys did not.

Also: Why was it so damn important to get back to the Prometheus? The Engineer facility was clearly safe enough that the decapitated torso was undisturbed for 2,000+ years. It was producing oxygen inside. All they had to do was wait out the storm...as a group.

Good thing you weren't in charge of the expedition. Don't you remember how the temperature inside dropped way down and they were freezing cold? Also, aliens. The Prometheus was a known safe location. The structure/engineer ship was not known safe, and is proven to be unsafe when the snake thing kills the mapper guy and his friend.
 

Insomniator

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2002
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Haven't seen district 9 in a while but i know 100% for a fact that I wasn't laughing at the stupidity of the movie during it and just disappointed by the end of it like I was with Prometheus.
 

JimKiler

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 2002
3,561
206
106
You guys have to check out this video about Prometheus questions.

Red Letter Media talks about Prometheus - SPOILERS

"Why was the one engineer running towards the goo if others were running away, did he leave his wallet in there?"

Or even better

"Why would those two dumb broads run in a line when the circle ship crashed and was rolling toward them?"
 
Last edited:
May 11, 2008
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Well, I thought it was clearly stated to be fuel before the guy got exposed to it. It was for that smaller craft to reach the mothership. That's another unfirgivable plot hole: The mothership wasn't capable of leaving. It was stranded for weeks (months?) before people cut it open and found the starving prawns inside. They suddenly pretend the only thing preventing them from leaving the planet is that they can't reach the mothership...?!

You have triggered my curiosity. :)
I am going to watch the movie again.

Thinking about plot holes.
Humans infected by the black fluid virus in the x-files, where capable of producing a high energy burst of radiation. Enough to cause second to fourth degree burns all over the body of the victim. Amazing that the hosts themselves did not experience any side effects from such a violent burst of radiation emanating from their body (at least i assume that that was the case).

But the idea the virus can breakdown the host to create a prehistoric "grey" is quite amazing. After that, the prehistoric version evolves and grows into the more intelligent and less instinct steered "grey".

I read this article about why elephants can be pregnant for 2 years.
http://phys.org/news/2012-06-mystery-elephant-pregnancy.html

Mammals do have some amazing features during reproduction.
The way the zygote develops in the womb into an embryo. The corpus luteum which controls the hormonal levels of the mother to keep an optimum environment for the embryo. The placenta that hijacks the body of the mother in a way.

Mammals with a placenta are amazing creatures. Only one evolutionary step away from infecting a host and reproducing by taking control of the host and fully consuming it in the end. The only thing needed is a medium that can spread easy and carry enough information.
 

K1052

Elite Member
Aug 21, 2003
52,744
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Good thing you weren't in charge of the expedition. Don't you remember how the temperature inside dropped way down and they were freezing cold? Also, aliens. The Prometheus was a known safe location. The structure/engineer ship was not known safe, and is proven to be unsafe when the snake thing kills the mapper guy and his friend.

Also by opening the door they changed the room's atmosphere, presumably from a sealed inert one. Everything started to degrade rapidly and Shaw wanted to get the head back to the ship...which is also why she nearly got herself killed trying to hang on to it a short time later.
 

CZroe

Lifer
Jun 24, 2001
24,195
857
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Haven't seen district 9 in a while but i know 100% for a fact that I wasn't laughing at the stupidity of the movie during it and just disappointed by the end of it like I was with Prometheus.

*I* was laughing during District 9. My sister was too. We couldn't contain ourselves and asked scoffed at every stupid unexplained action the characters made. I couldn't believe others, like you, weren't laughing too and I judged them accordingly.
 

Magusigne

Golden Member
Nov 21, 2007
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So I watched the movie again in 3D yesterday- Many thoughts on the plot holes etc.

3D was not worth it. Not really anything too impressive there. I don't understand why the cave paintings would send us to a military installation..unless it was a purposeful trap. If it were a nice welcoming center that would be different. I stand by my first hypothesis is that once they had reached a space-faring capaiability they would then extinguish the race. Who knows why...

No particular order on my gripes)

1) Guy Pearce sucks as an old man..it almost looked comical
2) Why not bring droids with you that have some combat capability..you spent 1 trillion dollars and you can't afford more than a single shot pistol/shotgun thing..no automatics in the future? WTF?
3) David doesn't have insane reflexes or strength to combat alien engineer? He had a full second or two to react as the engineer ripped his head off.
4) Why the hell is the a full grown evolved alien on the mural..when we clearly see a "Proto-Alien" at the end
5) Run side-ways
6)Advanced alien race doesn't have a better containment system?
7) How the hell did proto-facehugger get so big with nothing to eat?
8) Biologist scared of dead alien but F's with cobra
9) Geologist/Mapping guy gets lost..of all people to get lost...pup data? He can read it..

Did the engineers have contact with humans in the past?
If they just created the human race why would we draw cave paintings of the installation? What was the green crystal thing?
Was that a door where the alien mural was on inside the vase room?

Alien goo on the controls initially? WTF?!?!

Movie worse the second time for sure. First time I liked it..now the plot-holes don't make any sense at all.
 

brainhulk

Diamond Member
Sep 14, 2007
9,376
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Maybe there were "good" engineers that wanted to populate the earth

And then there were a different set of Nazi engineers tat were evil and wished to exterminate everything
 

Magusigne

Golden Member
Nov 21, 2007
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Maybe there were "good" engineers that wanted to populate the earth

And then there were a different set of Nazi engineers tat were evil and wished to exterminate everything

I considered this. The ship design is different (although many years past) in the begining scene vs the evil aliens.

This still doesn't make sense though. Because..say one of them is a rogue group..either the one creating planets or the one destroying..doesn't matter. Then why would the creating group leave a message to come to the evil alien home base? (the paintings).

I liked to think that one was a rogue splinter..but it still seems like this is just bad writing.
 

Daverino

Platinum Member
Mar 15, 2007
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I'm late to the party and I haven't read all 26 pages. So forgive me if what I write was handled on page 5 or so.

I think the explanation for the movie is much simpler than what people are trying to make it out to be. I interpret the film in light of the other Alien films and the motivations of the characters in those films as well. In the Aliens movies, the premise was always the same: Take a group of unwitting humans and place them in proximity of the Alien for the purpose of 'research.' The motivations are greedy and unethical, but consistent. In Alien, the Nostromo is sent to the alien spaceship with the understanding that the crew members would get infected by the Alien species and it was Ash's responsibility to get the specimen back to Earth. Riply ends up foiling the efforts however. In Aliens, the ante is upped to building a whole colony on the planet, again, for the express purpose of getting the inhabitants infected by the Aliens to see what happens. Then the Marines are sent in to, unwittingly, get a sample back. Again, thanks to Riply and an underestimation of the Aliens things go wrong. I believe the third movie is not canon and I haven't seen the fourth, so I'll stop there.

My point is that humans were interested in the xenomorph for the whole purpose of studying how it interacted with humans. There's an idea that it's for weaponization.

Now let's go to Prometheus. The Engineers find a life sustaining but otherwise uninhabited planet and seed it with their own DNA. That takes root and, over the course of millennia, humans evolve. Humans are, genetically speaking, identical to the Engineers. For what purpose would they do such a thing? For the same basic motivations in the other Aliens movies. They were creating a petri dish upon which they could safely test on copies of themselves. People seem to be stuck on the premise that the Engineers were intent on destroying mankind. I don't think that's the case at all. If they wanted to simply kill us, there were easier ways. Rather they wanted to experiment on us. We, being genetic copies of themselves, would give them the answers to what their mutagenic substance was capable of.

Now this didn't go as planned. Somehow the substance got loose on planet LV223, creating monsters which killed the inhabitants. This happened 2,000 years ago, and I think people are making too much of that number. It corresponds (roughly) with the blossoming of civilization across the Earth, but remember that the Aliens work on a glacial pace. Think of how long it took for man to evolve from the initial seeding and 2,000 years is about a minute's worth of time.

Everyone assumes that the Engineer was hell-bent to get to Earth and destroy it. Why? Could it simply be that he just wanted to get the hell out of dodge? Impossible to say. Especially because we do not know what David told him.

Regardless, it seems clear to me that the goal of the Engineers was to experiment on Earth, not destroy it. We were an artificial life form created by their scientists that could be used 'ethically' for testing purposes. At around 2,000 years ago, we had evolved sufficiently for them to conduct their tests and therefore, they prepared the mutagenic goo for transport to Earth. I think this makes much more sense than this highly evolved race just being bitter and angry about killing Jesus, or some such nonsense. If that was the case, they would have just killed us all off and started over. In my opinion, the Engineers had exactly the same motivations in Prometheus as the Corporation does in the later Alien movies.
 

Gibsons

Lifer
Aug 14, 2001
12,530
35
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Especially because we do not know what David told him.
http://movieline.com/2012/06/20/prometheus-secrets-revealed-what-did-david-say-to-the-engineer/
The line that David speaks to the Engineer (which is from a longer sequence that didn’t make the final edit) is as follows:

/ida hmanəm aɪ kja namṛtuh zdɛ:taha/…/ghʷɪvah-pjorn-ɪttham sas da:tṛ kredah/

A serviceable translation into English is:

‘This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life’.
 

GTaudiophile

Lifer
Oct 24, 2000
29,767
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I saw it a second time and the parallels between Engineers:Humans and Humans:David were even more apparent. Meaning, the story behind the relationship of Engineers and Humans is the same as Humans and David.

What did we make you?

Because we could.
 

SSSnail

Lifer
Nov 29, 2006
17,458
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Actually, I thought of another plot hole: is GoPro bankrupt in the future? Because all of a sudden, helmet video quality became shitty again 70 years into the future. I mean, we have HD TODAY bitches!
 

ImpulsE69

Lifer
Jan 8, 2010
14,946
1,077
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I notice people keep saying "why did the star map lead to lv-223?" which appeared to be a warehouse.

I don't think it did exactly. Firstly, we have no idea if that was the only thing on that moon, there very well could have been cities elsewhere on the moon. It was a star map for a system, and that was the one place they found that seemed Earth-like so they went there. For all we/they know, there was a completely different planet/moon in the area that could have been a home planet or at least held more engineers that wasn't a warehouse environment.
 

Jeeebus

Diamond Member
Aug 29, 2006
9,181
901
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Just getting back from seeing it. Will read through some of this thread now, but i wanted to give the detailed Jeeebus review while it's fresh.

And here it is: "the fuck?"
 

-Slacker-

Golden Member
Feb 24, 2010
1,563
0
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Ok I got one:

So if the "engineers" wanted to wipe out for 2000 years, then why .... um .... why didn't they?... I mean they had 2 millennia to cut their losses from the LV233 ... er ... infestastion, or whatever, and, I dunno, regroup and try again? What, did they just change their minds in the mean time - like they figured out that mass genocide could fall a bit on the douchebag side and then decided they'd just visit us for a barbeque instead, when the time was right?
 

Braznor

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 2005
4,767
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My theory is that the Engineers created human beings as a biological weapon, a product of the black ooze and themselves.

The Engineer tries to destroy Earth because he believed that another of their bio weapons had broken loose to contaminate the universe just like the events on the moon.

Earth may well have been another WMD testing world.
 

K1052

Elite Member
Aug 21, 2003
52,744
46,512
136
My theory is that the Engineers created human beings as a biological weapon, a product of the black ooze and themselves.

The Engineer tries to destroy Earth because he believed that another of their bio weapons had broken loose to contaminate the universe just like the events on the moon.

Earth may well have been another WMD testing world.

The substance ingested by the engineer at the beginning is different from the black ooze at the facility. The black ooze seems to cause rapid mutation into something decidedly hostile in every species it infects, everything from an engineer to tiny mealworms. Whatever the guy in the beginning drank it was clear that the intention was to seed a planet with new life based on their genetic structure. They clearly kept an eye on earth as well by checking in on various civilizations over time.
 

K1052

Elite Member
Aug 21, 2003
52,744
46,512
136
Ok I got one:

So if the "engineers" wanted to wipe out for 2000 years, then why .... um .... why didn't they?... I mean they had 2 millennia to cut their losses from the LV233 ... er ... infestastion, or whatever, and, I dunno, regroup and try again? What, did they just change their minds in the mean time - like they figured out that mass genocide could fall a bit on the douchebag side and then decided they'd just visit us for a barbeque instead, when the time was right?

It is possible that whatever caused the Engineers on LV_223 to decide to wipe out humanity wasn't communicated back to wherever they came from before the accident killed the rest of the Engineers at the facility (except the one in the hypersleep pod). Since they were clearly working on some super nasty shit there the rest of the Engineers elsewhere might have assumed something went way wrong and that investigating would be too hazardous...which turned out to be the case.