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WeylandSmithers
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:20 PMHI. I'm new here.
I watched Prometheus twice and generally think it is a great film. Some of the (smaller) issues I had after the first viewing didn't seem as bad the second time around (such as the foolish characters and lack of character development) but the bigger issues and theories left to the viewer to work out, however you frame them, do not adequately fit the motives of the engineers.
A friend of mine likes to believe that the sacrifice engineer at the beginning was on his home planet, not Earth and I when I thought of the film with this perspective it was easier to find motives for the Engineers - for a bit. (However, it was Earth. Ridley Scott has confirmed, and the majority agree (including me).
So after playing around with the Engineers motives - of not trying to destroy Earth - how about this:
The Engineers created life on Earth [i] in the beginning. [/i] Fast forward to 2000 years ago. The Engineers are seen escaping LV-223. What were they escaping from? A Xenomorph Alien (similar to the goblin one or the one on the mural inside the room with the giant head, makes sense. But how did they create it if it took a [i]human [/i] host to create the streamlined Alien beast?
My theory is that they seeded life on earth to create 'guinea pig' life - a race similar to themselves genetically - to experiment mixing the 'goo' and other gestating creatures with humans. They did this over hundreds of thousands of years. Earth was an experiment/laboratory based on their own DNA. Every so often, they would return - hence the cave drawings around the world - for new specimens to test. They got closer to creating the perfect Xenomorph 2000 years ago and may have wanted it for the same reasons that the Wayland-Yutani corp wants it.
However they could not contain it and it wiped them out. The last ships in the pyramid were set to go to Earth for further specimens 2000 years ago but never made it due to the Alien outbreak
Or,
The ship might have been programmed to go to Earth 2000 years as an escape route for themselves (as it sustained life) They may or may not have been going to destroy all of mankind. (they probably were)
At least one ship got away but was carrying an alien or facehugger on board (the one that crash landed on LV-426 - which was dormant for 2 millennia until the Nostromo came across it.
The classic 'Alien' we all know and love had probably already been one of many creations by the Engineers (some goo + some engineers + some human).
So when the Engineer meets the Peter Wayland and co, he thinks 'these things (humans) are just lab-rats. WTF are they doing here? kill, kill! this is the last thing I need.
Do this help explain any other parts of the plot?
10 Replies
WeylandSmithers
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:28 PMp.s. So when Shaw asks " Why do [the Engineers] want to destroy us." They don't necessarily want to but Earth is their last chance saloon for survival of the Engineer race.
Majestic_Lizard
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:35 PMMost of this was implied in the film, so I don't think you are really "fixing" plot holes. There are some open-ended areas so that interesting ideas can be explored in later films which have not been nailed down yet.
A lot of people do not appreciate Prometheus because everything isn't spelled out like in Star Wars: The Phanom Menace or some crap like that. We don't get an opening crawl that tells us exactly what is going on. We have to think and guess. A lot of people don't like that in a film.
For instance, I've read people complaining that the movie doesn't correspond to the Alien film because the Space Jockey dies and the ship is destroyed. Yet in Alien there is a space Jockey.
...as if there could only be one Space Jockey and one ship and it absolutely has to be the one that shows up in the movie Alien.
Majestic_Lizard
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:41 PMI think what it all boils down to is that the Engineers are NOT Gods. They are just a really old race of very arrogant beings that created humanity (and probably most life on Earth from the same matrix) for some unknown purpose, watched it develop, then decided to wipe it out (along with other worlds).
Because these are not Gods, but people who think they are Gods, they made a fatal miscalculation that likely wiped out most of the Engineer race. They could not control nature any more than humans can.
If anything, the Engineers may have been stagnant in their evolution and saw their own creations as a potential threat in the future.
WeylandSmithers
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 3:56 PMI agree with you that most of my comments are implied in the film, and rather than 'fix' the story I am trying to find a workable hypothesis - there are so many ideas floating around on these pages it would be nice if some general agreements could be made.
- The engineers are not Gods -
"Because these are not Gods, but people who think they are Gods, they made a fatal miscalculation that likely wiped out most of the Engineer race. They could not control nature any more than humans can
If anything, the Engineers may have been stagnant in their evolution and saw their own creations as a potential threat in the future. "
- Agreed
& Shaw definitely does not become the Jockey on LV-426!
loseyourname
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 4:48 PMThat doesn't make sense to me because of the time frame involved. Humans didn't evolve separately from everything else on the planet. We share the same DNA with everything else, and if that DNA has an extraterrestrial source, that source seeded everything at the very beginning. It didn't just come along 300,000 years ago when homo habilus was already romping about and create homo sapiens to replace it. The original sacrifice guy was here 3.5 billion years ago, before there was life at all. They didn't do that just to wait 3.5 billion years for a suitable host for their xenomorphs to evolve.
In fact, there was probably no coordination with or similarity in motives between the guy who made the original sacrifice and the engineers who tried to come to Earth to destroy us during Roman times, any more than there is coordination between the U.S. military and pagan sacrificial cults from thousands of years ago. Heck, there was 33,000 years between the engineers who visited Earth and inspired the cave paintings and the ones on LV-223. Even they could have been from completely different cultures and had completely different motives.
spiralpowered
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 5:34 PM[quote] The original sacrifice guy was here 3.5 billion years ago, before there was life at all. They didn't do that just to wait 3.5 billion years for a suitable host for their xenomorphs to evolve.[/quote]
I registered just to point out that there was definitely plant life in the opening shots of the movies. Leaving aside the question of whether they needed oxygen to breathe (which would have been by provided plants), this makes me wonder what the whole purpose of the sacrifice jockey was.
MostlyHarmless...Mostly
MemberOvomorphJun-09-2012 6:51 PMAgreed spiralpowered, minimum for that scene was after the great oxygenation event and the snowball Earth hypothesis around ...1.4 billion years ago? Which is still a ridiculous time frame but I think the purpose of the 'sacrifice jockey' ( love that term ) is in some way related to the Prometheus mythology, though I'm not certain how, but Sac. J. is dropped off by the mother ship and voluntarily disposes of himself to supposedly seed the planet with life of a form higher than plants.
Is that a sentence of long term suffering? Not sure, it's one thing I really like about the film, lots of interesting questions for discussion.
...still, 1.4 billion years is a little much for DNA that makes post coitus squids after 10 hours...
WeylandSmithers
MemberOvomorphJun-10-2012 6:50 AMSprialPowered:
"Quote:
The original sacrifice guy was here 3.5 billion years ago, before there was life at all. They didn't do that just to wait 3.5 billion years for a suitable host for their xenomorphs to evolve."
I am not suggesting that. Where did that quote come from?
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