The black goo

That ship was LOADED with goo canisters, all seemingly the same shape/size/design. Given OUR world's collective IQ, Scott would have designed the canisters differently if there were two or more kinds of goo. But as for david: he sure seemed to know EXACTLY what he was doing on that planet -- and he didn't garner that info from Peter O'Toole movies. For example, how did he know there were more spaceships; how does he know how to fly them -- and how does he know how to get to the Engineers home planet!? One can lose their chronological clock mind with this movie!

The black goo is inert until it is in the presence of living beings that could act as host for the parasitic stage of the bio-weapon (xenomorph.) When it become activated, it causes rapid cell growth and directed mutation to guide percursor organisms toward an weaponized evolution. This is how the worms in the dirt were transformed into the snake-like creatures that were later observed within a matter of about 1 day.

Red Wolf - heh yeah I agree about the uniformity of the urns in the film! Re David - he spent over 2 years deconstructing languages aboard Prometheus (with superior AI IQ) before landing on the planet, apparently ready to rock with the aliens if need be. He knew how to pilot the ship because of the sequence shown via hologram in the gaint chamber where the SJ sat (even though half the time he wasn't even paying attention to the start up sequence). He does seem to know an awful lot very quickly...maybe he was just of vastly superior intellect, unbeknown to us. MikeLowry - Yeah i totally agree with the worm transformation, that makes sense, but why was it on the ceiling? I still don't get how it got there...

i agree. The black goo was a living organism within itself, which evolved into a virus if infected with it., which makes it a bio-weapon (thus zombie like symptoms, Squid babies, alien drone, etc.) And at the end when the alien drone hatches out of the engineers chest, it made since that it would look like the typical xenomorph that we are familiar with, tho not quite evolved. Great movie btw.

ooooops, i meant to say sense instead of since. lol sorry

There's no QUESTION David is a superior intellect (sorta makes one wonder how they "reverted" to Ash, if Pro is pre-Alien), but David can't know what he DOESN'T know (or what humans don't know). In other words, I can't study the Engineers' language, ship, etc. unless I HAVE their language & ship. David opens the goo chamber by climibing a ladder and punching in the correct code on what, his second try? It clearly seems that he's been briefed, completely briefed, on what to expect and how to proceed...

BrandBrand - thank you, I hadn't thought of the goo as a living organism within itself, capable of evolving. That would explain its change in properties and new found desire to create evil species out to maim and destroy ;) Red Wolf - David does seem to have insider intel - I too was surprised when he started pushing all the right buttons in the first corridor they were in to activate the holographic sequence. And now that you mentioned it...he was talking on the woozy-helmet device to somebody, from whom he was taking orders (he then tells Charlize Theron that he was told to 'try harder'). Although that could have been Weyland, David wouldn't need a special device to communicate with him - he can just pop over to the next room. Something is definitely afoot here....

I believe there is one type of black goo in three circumstances revealed in the film: 1) In the beginning of the movie, an Engineer imbibes some of the black goo on a primitive earth, and living up to the oft-noted line in the movie, "Sometimes you have to destroy in order to create!", the Engineer perishes and his genetic material becomes the basis for the life they - the Engineers - are creating on Earth (i.e., human beings). To me, this represents the purest purpose of the black goo - it is a mutagen that cleanses existing biological contaminates (toils the ground) before it recombines DNA (plants the seed) to create life in the image of its creator. 2) Later on in the movie we are exposed to the black goo inside the chamber, on the surface of the mural and the containment jars. This black goo - I believe - leaked from one of the vials and contaminated the ship. This would explain A. what led to the thing that frightened and killed the Engineers in the mound, B. the earthworms in the chamber prior to the goo reacting to the human biology in the room, and perhaps most-telling, C. the eventual result of the 'escaped' black goo contaminating the ground where the worms were; they evolved into proto-Facehuggers (they have the tails of facehuggers, acid for blood, their head is the shape of a facehugger sans fingers (which they hadn't evolved yet), and they enter a host's body via the mouth and burst out the chest later as a proto-Alien, as seen at the end of the film). 3) Lastly, we have stored black goo, which is still sealed in its vial. This was released by the robot and a sample given to one of the scientists. The resulting process was the same as the beginning of the film - the black goo was killing the scientist and attempting to eradicate existing biological contaminates before recombining DNA to create new life. This led to two abominations: A. The black goo's process was not able to complete itself, as intended, with regard to the scientist due to the scientist being killed before it could complete. The DNA the black goo was attempting to break down and recombine into new life perished mid-transformation, so the black goo simply reanimated what it had left - creating the zombie scientist that went crazy at the loading platform of the Prometheus, and B. the second abomination was when the scientist impregnated his girlfriend while he was infected. Her womb was incapable to bearing life, as she pointed out that very evening. Yet, as an unintended side effect of goo-infected sperm - the black goo restored her womb and created life in it.... that life, we find out later, hosts the proto-Facehugger and injects it into the mouth of the Engineer at the end of the film, which then plants the seed and becomes a proto-Alien that bursts out of the Engineer's chest. In summary, I believe the black goo's primary purpose was to breakdown existing biological contaminates and recombine DNA; creating new life in the image of its creator. It could have been utilized for pure purposes - such as creating life in their image on distant worlds - or as a weapon intended to thwart creations from evolving to a point where they'd be a threat to the Engineers that created them, but that's another topic of discussion.

@Mikness, Weyland was in stasis, as I recall him mentioning he only had about a day left to live (how they're that precise, who knows). It makes sense that Weyland would be in some sort of suspended animation, but still be cognative, so that he could communicate with David via that neural visor (the same technology he used to observe Shaw's Dreams at the beginning of the film). Regarding the goo - I think it's some form of mutagen that breaks down organic material into its basic DNA components and then combines them in new ways to seed life. The motives behind their doing so, and their motives for wanting to wipe the slate clean on earth are ambiguous (indeed Shaw states she's flying off in the second stolen Engineer ship to seek answers). I like to think the Engineer we saw in the beginning wasn't the happy-go-lucky do-gooder, sacrificing himself to create life. I like to think he was marooned there and given the cup of black goo in place of the pistol with a single round - to commit suicide rather than face a slow death on a dead planet. That would make all of humanity the bastard child of an exile, and a potential threat to the engineers. That solemn final look at the ascending spaceship was not one of peace but of sorrow. Just a thought - but I dont think thats the way they were going.