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Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 2:28 PMWhen the engineer woke up near the end of the movie, he didn't understand the language of the humans and he seemed rather intrigued by them. I think that if they had a different approach he would have been nice to the humans.
An important clue about this is when the old man's daughter tells him that every living creature must die and that it's the natural course of things. That quote wasn't there for nothing
The engineer, being so much smarter, knows that immortality would only destroy everything. All living creatures must return to the soil one day to contribute for other life forms and let the natural cycle continue.
As soon as the robot talked to the engineer in his language, the engineer realized how corrupted these humans were (he associated them all together) because of the intentions of the old man, so he immediately judged them dangerous for all life.
These engineers were rather the bringer of life than the bringer of death.
The planet you see in the first scene of the movie is Earth not inhabited by any animal life form.
The engineer drank a different kind of goo that destroyed him and created various life forms into the water. Many years later when those life forms evolved and created a complete ecosystem the Ancients returned to Earth to colonize and the humans are their direct descendants.
I think they acted this way to escape a war. In the holograms inside the engineer's spaceship, you see them running away and they're scared. Their home planet was probably invaded by the predators or something else and they've been colonizing other planets in hope that their species doesn't die.
When they examine the head, they see that it's been dead for about 2000 years. 2000 years before would be the birth of Jesus. That ship we see in the movie didn't make it but maybe another one did. They clearly had something to do on Earth and I doubt that this was the only ship headed there.
Now putting everything religious aside, Jesus was a very knowledgeable person who'd tell people not to drink water in a river that has dead animals inside and other stuff that today is obvious for us but that wasn't back then.
That 2000 years number isn't there for nothing in the movie so that's why I think that the Ancients actually had a peaceful mission on Earth. Having a refuge and bringing wisdom to its own people who lost all knowledge of their origins over time.
The sculptures the humans found are testimonies of where they actually come from rather than where they should go.
The plan to destroy humans was only a bad interpretation of what happened by the main character.
What do you guys think?
48 Replies
Jv8r
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:03 PMOr is it- dead in chair: Space Jockey. Dead anywhere else: Engineer.
eomfd
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 11:41 PMI think that its possible that these engineers created us to test there weapon (Alien) To truley see if it will wipe a whole planet.
Jdax8
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 2:40 PMI think you need to get on board with the rest of the group and stop calling them Ancients and start calling them engineers like the rest of us
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 2:47 PMBut nothing suggests that they really are the engineers. If they have human DNA, searching for the engineers of the humans means searching for the engineers of the engineers.
Jv8r
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 2:56 PMThis is what they were referred to in the script. As creators of all this stuff, we have to yield to Scott, Fox, et al.
Jv8r
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 2:59 PMOn that note...
If it's alive: Engineer. Dead: Space Jockey.
Anyone have any insight on this?
avgvstvs
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:24 PMNada on the Jesus front. 2089 - 2000 = year 89. Almost 100 years after his birth.
More likely: The creator's weapon gets out and turns against them. the pile of bodies found by the geologist/biologist pair all had outwardly-exploded chests. Not a problem of the predators, there.
I think, judging by the title, that the alien at the beginning was Prometheus, and that the creators used this technology to colonize worlds. (Prometheus gave his life just to bring us fire.)
Later... they figured they couldn't control this technology, and they decided they needed to destroy it wherever they found it. Only... it overtook them before they could finish it.
capital
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:28 PMThe symbolic thing for me is that the SJ looks at Shaw, as she is shouting (who knows if it understood?) then sees the violence of the guy hitting her (what a way to act when we are meeting a new species) then David talks to the SJ, and its as if, to me, he finds it offensive that we came all that way and didn't bother to attempt the language ourselves. Its symbolic that he rips off Davids head and hits Weyland with it. It seems to me that he is offended by the artificial life-form. He dispenses pretty quickly with the others but makes no attempt to go after Shaw.
For me that final scene is like the whole film - each of the characters shows a different side to the Human condition. Arrogance, Stupidity, etc.
blongal
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:52 PMwhen david speaks their language how do we know hes talking about weyland and immortality, he could be saying anything. Its obvious that david doesnt like humanity from the conversation with shaws BF and he might be provoking the SJ to destroy humanity.
purplest33l
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:53 PMre: Capital
It could be simply that the engineer needs half a minute to get its bearings after being asleep for so long.
I don't think he's offended by David. There is nothing to evidence that.
There is nothing to evidence the engineer knew David was an artificial, so I think he must have been reacting in anger/fear.
There may have been some shock for him to woken up by the same species they originally were ready to destroy before the mishap at their "military base".
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 4:18 PMWell about the 2000 years thing. The number they have is not accurate is it? I thought it was "around 2000 years old". The engineers seem strong enough to fight the aliens bare hand. I don't think they would have simply fallen like that.
I think the engineer didn't bother to run after Shaw because it was useless. He's super intelligent so it's only natural that an emotion would not cause him to lose sight of his goal which was to go to Earth.
A possible reason for becoming hostile might also be because of the humans' welcome. First contact with the race and they don't even bother to say hello nice to meet you, let's start on good terms, we come in peace. Imagine some aliens come to you and they fight each other and one asks how to become immortal. "We beat each other up and I want immortal life"
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 4:20 PMAbout what Blongal said, it's very probable that it could be true. After all, we've seen him say a quote from a movie "he liked". So he has the concept of liking-disliking inside of him.
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 4:37 PMI also want to point out that I find many similarities about this movie with modern theories that aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago.
Archaeologists supposedly found a giant human skeleton in Peru.
Also a part of the bible in Genesis talks about giants: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV
"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."
That's why I think 2000 years is an important number relating to an important part of the bible.
Some modern alien theories say that Jesus might have been an alien or simply affiliated with them with his superior knowledge.
So looking at these similarities between the stories, we might have some sort of a timeline of events that took place in the story.
MostlyHarmless...Mostly
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 4:45 PMYeah, what David said is pretty open to me, and he's extremely devious when fulfilling his own agenda previously.
Also, it's Shaw that called them Engineers, call them Crapa Pelada if you like...
Szabi
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 4:56 PMRayved, the engineers can't have human DNA for 2 reasons.
First, human body can't grow that big, our skeleton and circulatory system couldn't support it - the engineers must have slightly different genetic make-up in order to achieve such a huge body.
Second, the movie makes it quite clear, the engineers are our creators, and they show it to us as one engineer drinks the black goo, and in result his body is decomposing and "fertilising" Earth. The date of this event is unclear, but had to happen quite a long time ago, as we have a line of predecessors going back millions of years. Actually, the only logical option is, the engineer brought life to Earth in the first place, otherwise the already present lifeforms would consume his decayed body. Now, if we talking about millions (or billions) of years of evolution, we can't develop the same DNA which was decomposed such a long time ago, as evolution is controlled by random events - not to mention, in this timeframe the engineer's own evolution was going on too.
MostlyHarmless...Mostly
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 5:05 PMSzabo. didn't Shaw expressly say they shared the same DNA?
xbar16
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 5:21 PMI posted a similiar reply in the spoilers sections in a discussion about Shaws crucifex. I think we have to accept that the engineers were planning a strike on earth. We have to go with what is in the movie.
We also need to accept that while the engineers may have crreated life on earth (and resumably other worlds) they also were prepared to destroy it. The engineer installation which they directed us to appears to be a bio weapons ship garage. Any life form that can follow the map/invitation finds itself in a very nasty place. We must accept that the engineers have a mean streak and maybe will destroy any life form that is advanced enough to find it.
So then, why did the engineers decide to do a preemptive strike on earth? More theorizing on that in the other post.
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 5:29 PMSzabi, if we look at the evolution of most species on Earth, evidence suggests that a lot of animals were a lot bigger years ago than they are now. Dinosaurs evolved into smaller lizards and so could have humans. They found the skeleton of a giant wombat which might date from 50 000 years ago.
What we see in the movie in the beginning is an engineer's DNA being completely rewritten. It is very unlikely that evolution could have made it back close to the original because DNA is some sort of a history of the species. That's why some branches seem to be completely useless. While some part of the DNA serves to tell the body of the human what it should become, and another part serves for transmitting instincts and natural behavior, some parts are just information about the past that can't be accessed yet.
Any kind of gene modification destroys that information the same way data is lost forever on a hard drive if you write over it. We clearly see the DNA being completely destroyed in the beginning and the reconstructed from almost nothing. In other words everything about the original species is lost.
So either humans looking like engineers is the most ridiculous coincidence ever or the humans are direct descendants which have evolved into a smaller size like all species on earth tend to do.
Many factors could explain the difference in size with the engineers. The most important one is the different planets. The gravity influences the way creatures walk and live. If the outer body is very big and strong, it is likely that the internal organs will be big and heavy, but if the gravity is too strong, everything holding the organs needs to be stronger. On the other hand, creatures with smaller organs will have less physical troubles. So in the end, the smaller and weaker might have a better chance to survive and multiply, which would lead the population to shorten over time on a different planet.
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 5:48 PMxbar16, their black goo is both the essence of life and destruction. all we know from the movie is that they were planning to go to Earth. Why would the whole mission be compromised if only one spaceship didn't make it? If the theory that an accident happened in their own ship which caused the panic is true, that doesn't explain why the mission wasn't carried out by the others.
We have to keep in mind that David is a backstabber. He purposely put some black goo in the drink. I think he had some kind of a pleasure in seeing his creators suffer after all the degrading things they told him. In the end David tells Shaw about another spaceship that could get her back to Earth. That spaceship was probably filled with black goo too. So I think what he wanted was to destroy the human race.
He's the only one who understands the engineer's language so all information that comes from him might be false. The planned strike on Earth was only an interpretation of Shaw about why they had a course set on Earth. In the end, the only fact that we know from this movie is that the engineers might not be engineers and they had an involvement with Earth, either peaceful or not.
HugoGuzman
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 6:02 PMAs for the black goo episode and how it relates to life on Earth- I don't think the Engineer seeded life on Earth at all, but co-opted it.
Most of the bio-weapons (xeno-morphs, zombie!Fiefield, Holloway Jr.) are not self-enclosed biological systems. They require either a host, or pre-existing genetic material. This shows that the Engineer biotech is designed to "hijack" biological processes of other creatures (which is an extremely clever and efficient way to reproduce). Now what if the black goo does this on an even smaller and grander scale?
If we look at history, there was a huge technological jump about 12 000 years ago, when we suddenly figured out city-states, agriculture and metal-working. What if the black goo took DNA already here (homo erectus, probably, although the date is way off), and simply changed it to be more like Engineers? By the time of 2089 AD, human genetic make-up is almost identical to Engineer DNA.
Mohwak
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 6:15 PMCould the Engineers created life on earth just to test the bio-weapons?
The captain told the doc that this was a testing ground and the Engineers knew better than to test this stuff on their home planet. There are multiple ships there that could possibly be for different worlds that they have seeded with DNA. So I think when we show up proving that we have the technical know how it is their signal to go to the planet from who ever shows up and unleash the bio-weapon to see how well it works.
We were just guinea pigs.
and the reason they do not come sooner is because whoever they are in battle with (maybe predator type species) is technologically advanced and to unleash such a weapon on the primitive human would be a waste.
Any thoughts?
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 6:25 PMHugoGuzman, it might have happened like that, the goo did seem to have a different effect in the beginning than the goo through the rest of the movie. But if there really was animal life on the planet already and micro organisms in the water, the engineer from the beginning wouldn't have had to sacrifice himself.
The goo doesn't merge DNA of 2 different species, it modifies the first one it encounters, or at least that's what I think. The result afterwards seems random. After all, a tentacle monster with absolutely nothing in common with the host emerged from a human.
There are things that don't make sense at all in this movie anyway. You can't create matter out of nothing. A 3 month old fetus would need nutriments to grow, so unless Shaw ate like a pig in a scene that got cut, she would've been eaten from the inside for a creature that big to be born. That's not the only problem. The tentacle monster grew enormous with absolutely nothing to eat in a confined space. Matter just created itself magically out of nowhere and I think that's just plain stupid Hollywood crap.
Szabi
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 6:49 PMMostlyHarmless: they did, but it's impossible by logic. Plothole in other words.
Rayved: I didn't say that a humanoid can't grow big - I'm saying, the current human genetic make-up can't support such a huge body. You could grow big, but you need some changes in your DNA. All of the human giants are suffering from problems related to their size. In the movies, the engineers didn't seem to suffer any hindrance in terms of mobility either on their lab-planet or proto-Earth, and similarly, the expedition team was moving on the lab-planet normally, not like on the Moon for example. So your low gravity theory is busted :)
HugoGuzman
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 7:12 PMRayved:
>But if there really was animal life on the planet already and micro organisms in the water, the engineer from the beginning wouldn't have had to sacrifice himself.
If the goal wasn't to created new life, but modify existing life to be more in-line with Engineer biology, then a sacrifice my well have been needed. I'm thinking the sacrifice was targeted directly at mankind- so the Engineers didn't create all life, just modern human life.
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 7:20 PMSzabi, the human giants we know are giants mostly because of physical problems that have to do with growth. I never said engineers got bigger, I said they got smaller.
Another thing, we know that this planet was not their home planet, theirs might be different. If they are there only temporarily for some missions, it doesn't contradict my theory. What I meant to say was that shrinking might be some sort of adaptation. Maybe my example of physical problems is not good but it was just an example.
Somewhere (I forgot where exactly) on our planet there are mice of different colors but from the same species. They have the exact same size and everything. The darker mice live in darker rocks and are hard to see by their predators (birds mostly) and in sandy areas, the mice are paler, much like the color of the sand.
People wondered for a while how this coincidence could be so fitting for them, but the actual answer to this is that the darker mice got less attacked in dark rocks so it was these ones who would multiply the most in those region and same for the paler mice in sandy areas. In the end there are 2 distinct colors but everything else is the same just for the sake of natural selection for the most fitting to survive.
So maybe over time for some other reason than physical problems that have to do with gravity, the smallest engineers had more chance to survive. It might be that they were harder to spot for hungry dinosaurs or something. And in all those years (we don't know how many in the movie) the engineers shrank over time and became the humans. They have the same DNA but since only the smaller ones multiplied, the species has become short.
And since the species' genes has changed for the size, a giant issued from small parents is an exception and physical problem because his body wasn't meant to be that way naturally.
MostlyHarmless...Mostly
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 7:27 PMSzabi, that doesn't wash with me, humans share roughly 94% relative to Chimps and 60% relative to fruit flies. Sharing a predominance of DNA with the Engineers is a significant factor no matter the difference in height and circulatory systems, like you said, they've their own evolutionary path that would explain the differences but the similarities [i]in the story[/i] cannot be dismissed that easily as a plot hole.
What the heck do you mean by proto-Earth?
TheEgg
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 7:32 PM@Szabi They ran a test in the movie and said our DNA was identical to theirs. The paleness of their skin, their height, their build could explain lots of things, or maybe not. Same as people growing up on different climates and parts of the world in which their DNA eventually adapts to the situation. Africans develop more melanin to compensate for extended sun and hot climates, Aleutian people develop tighter eyes and lighter skin to deal with the reflection of the sun against the harsh snows and cold climates. We don't know what the Engineer homeworld is like, why they've evolved the way that they have, or anything.
Rayved
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 7:37 PMHugoGuzman, well in that case, the goo we saw in the beginning of the movie would really be a different kind of goo than we saw for the rest of the movie. Because from what we saw, reptile/octopus like creatures emerged from humans rather than a different kind of humanoid creature.
I don't think the DNA of the octopus monster would match that of a human. There are 2 theories that would make sense to me now.
1: They used the same goo (even if it acted differently) we see during the whole movie to create all other life forms except humans so engineers could colonize later.
2: They used a special goo that creates a life form that will eventually evolve into something similar to the host many years later. Humans don't breath underwater so the result would've just died after the engineer's body fell. I don't think they wanted a river of drowned babies.
Szabi
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 7:42 PMRayved, you just described the evolution with those mice - they already have some differences in their genetic code, but as long as they are able to interbreed, they count as same species. If the process goes a bit further, they wont be able to interbreed, they will be count as two different species (or subspecies).
However in theory it would be possible, the engineers got smaller and eventually became human, but actually the human evolution points to growth in size - our predecessors were gradually smaller as we going back in time.
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