Time line

ahh...it'll be all good...

i also thought that it would be a story with no humans, if it were to be a prequal story about the sj. like thier own story

No humans? Really? That would be tough film to make commercially. Though I agree the whole archeology. / origin of man thing is a bit worrying. The original Alien successfully conveys a sense of an 'abundance of mystery in a vast unknowable universe. If Prometheus is just an exercise in 'defining and limiting' it will go the same way as the star wars prequels.

Hey Yru - it's not a memory thing. The debate in the flick was if it was meant to be "distress" or "stay away". It'd be interesting to see a movie dealing with opposite perspective - Eastwood did that with "Letters" - but you are spot on, it never was clear and the potential sequel could deal with their take. Love to see a crew flick, followed by an SJ flick to get both point of view.

True, part of the appeal for Alien was that the SJ was there and no explanation was provided. Anomalies can be good in film. The incident happened and the viewer was a fly on the wall which that contributed to the realism. Prometheus is different. If you're gonna go "big picture", you have to really deliver in a different kind of way. Ash's directive was to, I believe he said, "bring back life form". That was the primary objective. All other objectives were subordinate, or some such language. Ash knew the score from the start.

Good point, pol. Forgot that Ash was dicking around the ship for awhile and definitely had an agenda. Forgot about that. With the bigger picture - we were [i]observing[/i] in that film, and now in this, pretty sure we have an[i] active[/i] role. Solid job - oh, and Ash always was a bastard.

@yrufsok If it helps you: I do not recall the exact words, but Dallas' observation on that which is now referred to as the "Space Jockey", is that it "looked like", or, "almost" was, or,"seemed" to be - fossilized. He had no clue what he was looking at and the poor man made an approximation of what that was, based on the experience available to him. You could interpret it as license or latitude as you please, but because Dallas interpreted the Space Jockey as "looking fossilized", does not necessarily make it so, on our terms? Who knows how an alien decays, at what rate it decays and what characteristic that decay exhibits? On Earth, fossilization normally only occurs after the deceased is covered for a long time with sedimentary deposit. Perhaps a dead alien, exposed to perhaps an equally alien, primordial, atmosphere, is prone to petrification in a matter of weeks? Or days? Or hours?.. On Mother: As I recall, Mother was declared as being programmed to respond to any signal it determined was of intelligent design - I don't believe it ever suggested or assumed that it was a distress call, (as they obviously could not have recognised it as such if it was), they were just obliged to investigate it. It was only after their arrival that it was part-decoded as "sounding like" a warning.

So true, if you recall, Dallas was a very compartmentalized type of guy, a delagator of tasks mostly. He tells Ripley when confronted, "I don't know Ash runs the science department" etc etc...he really is flippant about it and does not really care because the science thing is "not his bag".

Suggestion from one of the "leaks" - it all takes place on EARTH at the time it was terraformed, meaning Prometheus traveled not just through space but through TIME (which Lindeloff would be an expert on considering the mess we had to figure out in LOST's time travel season)

I've said this many times... but I can't stand the idea that this has time travel....I also see no evidence of this anywhere that we can TRUST....and that, to me, is the giveaway..

@Spartacus - yer right, forgot how pragmatic Dallas was during this, because it didn't pertain to the daily gig of running the ship. Hell - gotta go watch it again, just to see how it plays out.