Perhaps corporate greed/corruption? The consequences of a futuristic society where corporations dictate policy? Hmmmm...

So Kontakt5, I'm wondering if you are pointing at the irony of Scott getting burned by the Prometheus fire by trying too hard to be too deep?

Are you picturing Mr Weyland saying, "The private sector is still doing just fine?"

Ha. No, you're sharper than me for coming up with that.

I happen to get my kicks from mythology, adventure, and a good yarn, I always have. What scholars who studied the ancient stories usually point out is that these stories served more purpose than mere entertainment, as we know- they served as an explanation at the same time, philosophy, religion and science were all intertwined and complimented one another, adopted features from one or the other where one couldn't explain certain things- together evolved to form the body of man's knowledge in the ancient and medieval world.

The Odyssey and its later addition from the point of view of the Trojans in The Anneid explain where the Roman civilization comes from, that is, the defeated Trojans leave and go on to found the roots of the Latin race. This was all literature, important literature that started out told as myths and legends, hearsay, which circulated at the crossroads of civilization with fantastic stories about the gods intervening in human actions. What they're doing here, I think is re-telling a creation myth through adventure stories, like before. It's my understanding that film makers don't usually write things to a scene by accident, even the seemingly most mundane placement and relation of things and objects in a scene serve a purpose, just like the more obvious things such as camera placement, music, lighting (hence the often cartoonish depiction of film directors as eccentric artsy farts types wearing berets in a director's chair).

Just as with literature, there's always the mistake of the intentional fallacy- that is, presuming to know the intent of the source of the story, often the ideas we come up with and attribute to them aren't necessarily the intention of the people when they came up with them. All of what I'm saying is just my guess- I could be wrong, but I'm also taking into account of basic story telling techniques, making comparisons to past materials (because most filmmakers themselves from school have some kind of background into art, cultural symbolism, famous stories in history, etc.), presuming that many stories that you have told today draw on older themes which have been around for a while. It's always been that way in history.

This made me spill some black goo on my keyboard!...

...oh...never mind... that was just coffee.

David's role on Prometheus

LOL!! Good one.

You know, it's unavoidable to compare David to Ash but one difference that I find quite fascinating is how David seemed to act out of pure curiosity and even a child-like innocence but Ash you could tell knew exactly what he was doing and was so calculating and logical about everything he did.

Perhaps built-in by Wayland to further simulate a proxy son?

Finally saw it tonight and loved it!
I don't think the movie is made for you to read too much into it.
My main annoyance is that the ship crew was SO nonchalant about the mission. And that punk mohawk idiot just in it for the money was a waste of space and detracted from the movie IMO. It wasn't set THAT far in the future that you'd think that kind of space travel was commonplace. Later, not monitoring the team on the ground well, to go off and have a romp in the sack (the one guy on watch)...And why were the 2 guys that left the scene so early on...the ones RUNNING the drones mapping the place so easily lost and thereby stuck on the ship during the storm? I thought that was weak.
The rest of the movie I loved though. I hope there will be a follow up, I liked the ending. Alien universe, but an all new antagonist.


In the beginning, you see one of the engineers taking a shot of the bioweapon juice. Dies, falls in the water and some new DNA combines, presumably creating something like that guy Charlie turned into. Was he just some willing test subject on the WMD test planet, or was that supposed to be the start of what killed off the engineers 2000 years ago?

A lot of gaps, and it did fall just a bit short of explaining the similarities to what we're used to--like the capsules with the weapon juice vs. organic face hugger pods being so similar.

Hope they get on with another movie ASAP, preferably with Scott doing it so we get more story than action again.

The film is apparently implying that the suicide act is the Engineers creating the first life- that's what's controversial about all of this. Remember that human DNA and Engineer DNA match when they performed that test. The film seems to be saying the Engineer is the origin of life- they seeded life with their own DNA when they spilled it into the water. The theory of evolution holds that life on Earth began in the oceans, at some point, some distant creature had crawled out and evolved on land seperately. So therefore, the Engineer seems to be the source of life, the source of human life. That's what the DNA spilled into the water becomes- humanity.

Go forward into the film towards the end, when you have the proto-Alien creature that was born out of the female human. That seems to be saying that Aliens are actually born out of humans- it's a new species born from human DNA and the black goo. So, the chain of evolution is Engineer ---> Human ---> Alien.

If that is so, there's a problem. The film seems to be using evolution as the mechanism, yet at the same time attacks the theory of evolution. Evolution proposes that human beings are hundreds of millions of years in the making on a continuum- you had all kinds of creatures that came first and died out, such as the dinosaurs, finally, humans arrive late on the scene. This film however is speeding all of this up much faster. If humans and Engineer have matching DNA, then there's no intermediate lifeforms between the two, there's no process of evolution between the two. There's no hundreds of millions of years of selection pressures, extinctions and so on. The film's version of creation is actually closer to Genesis- spontaneous creation by first order.