Aliens as superweapon

Oh! This also, preserves (and even heightens?) a lot of the themes of sexual violence and horror of pregnancy from the "Ripley" movies. This reading would recontextualize all of that -- not only are humans being "raped" by these aliens, in effect our whole existence is little more than "wombs" for them. It casts all of those existential questions Weyland asks into a totally absurd light too, in a way that's similar to some of the criticism of sociobiology. We're all like David, but even worse off!

good thought process here...Yes to humans playing apart in bringing forth the ALIEN as we know it.

I don't see how the Deacon could possibly have been intended as a super weapon, but the Xenomorph I can understand. The Xenomorph eggs on LV-426 were in some kind of statis and ready to be deployed. The Deacon was created purely out of coincidence and circumstance. David takes some material out of the ampule (what could just be a mutagenic virus!), infects Charlie, he passes on this genetic material through his sperm and impregnates Shaw, who gives birth to some new organism that must find a host. If you look at the people (and worms) who were only [i]exposed[/i] to the black goo (or ampule material), they only mutated or became hostile. There was no other recognizable effects. This leads me to believe that the 'Aliens' from LV-426 were bio-weapons, but the goo from LV-223 was meant only as a fast spreading virus that would infect and kill on a biological level. It would be absurd to think that David would know exactly what would happen after infecting Charlie, I think it was merely curiosity, and what transpired afterwards was chance. We know that the egg and sperm creates life using the DNA from its parent cells, but if the DNA of the sperm is mutated, then the lifeform created from this process would be entirely different altogether. Something that comes to mind is the bio-weapons research of Umbrella Corp. Umbrella decided to use experimental viruses on other lifeforms which created mutated versions of these lifeforms. They didn't expect that the creations would spiral out of control. Genetic mutations can't be controlled. This is why I think the Engineers chose to lock away this black goo, it was unstable.

Nobody is patient enough to seed a planet, wait 3 billion years, and hope something develops for the sole purpose of using it as an incubator for something else. Imagine some nation's head of state going before the legislature to ask for the funding to send an expedition 35 light years into space, so we can have a breeding ground for superweapons by the year 3,000,002,012. Assuming they were at war and had some imminent need for more weapons, what good would it do them to wait that long? It would make a lot more sense to just terraform, drop off whatever fully formed breeding creatures they had available, and let them multiply.

loseyourname -- I pretty much agree. I don't think the Engineers created all life on Earth or were specifically interested in humanity (as some have argued). The point is to find a planet with life, then nudge it towards a form that can interact with the xeno. The specific features of that resulting organism are irrelevant (that's why dogs & humans can both incubate the alien). Human intelligence is just an unanticipated outcome in this view, one that actively makes the Engineers panic.

Oh and as for the black goo. I think it depends on who you're using the weapon on. You're right that it's a great weapon against humans, but the Engineers clearly felt comfortable enough that they would leave gallons of the stuff in multiple locations all over their ship (and who knows how much was in the rest of the ships). It's very unlikely that the black goo is a particularly strong weapon against [i]other Engineers[/i]. My view is that black goo + mammals = xenomorphs, which ARE very effective weapons against Engineers. All of that said, admittedly, I don't know how the Fitfield situation fits here. Maybe the weapon was designed to be sexually implanted (consistent with mammalian biology, the other movies, all of Giger's work, and arguably some of the imagery in the mural), so that topical exposure to the black goo just results in crazy unpredictable results?

I don't suppose you have a link to the longer version of your explanation, do you?