Needle in a haystack invitation

I believe one of the characters mentioned that it was the only life supporting planet in the star system.

Well, they took a look and found a single planet that could harbor life, so they landed there, because life is what they were looking for...despite having absolutely no evidence beforehand that life would be on that planet, but WHATEVER. What confuses ME is how the ancient thingies were even made! The opening shows a white "human" drink some crap, then he falls dead, and his molecules evolve to humans I guess. (remember how this movie sucked?) And so it can be inferred that, since this doesn't seem intentional and, if it was, was a single "human" with no seen ship, then how and why did the "humans" come back? To say "hello?"

If I give you one piece of advice about this film it is this. Do not buy any of the easy conlusions, especially by the characters, because they are all "so, so, wrong" - with one exception the one who doesn't seem to draw any conclusions. But we'll leave that character for a different post. Now you assume that they found their intended destination. I would say that they did not. Did you notice a homing beacon to guide visitors in? Or did you see vast hardened domes with high walls around them, and giant gruesome skulls on the roof - the interstellar sign for 'no trespassing', in other words. You are right to start by questioning their methodology. "How did they pick it" . It seems they left the over confident Frat boy Dr. Holloway in charge of that. The first step he does correctly. Match the star pattern, find six stars. We only get a quick glimpse of the various cave drawings, but they seem to have no marking for planets or moons, no X marks the spot. So Holloway wings it. He picks the sun MOST LIKELY to be capable of supporting life. Then they check for planets around it. having found a planet, with two moons, they pick the moon with an atmosphere similar to ours. Then they plot a course, and go of to LV-223 at almost 15 times the speed of light. There's nothing astonishing about this needle in a haystack except how unscientific it is. The correct thing to do is to evaluate ALL of the stars into ones that CAN support life and those that can't. Check ALL of them for planets, and get spectral readings of atmospheres. There's no guarantee that in a system where 4 out of 6 stars could support life, that the life evolved orbiting the 'best' star, rather than on a planet orbiting an 'adequate star'. Holloway assumes that just because they found something it was THE place. "confirmation bias" eh? these are a race that can cross 40 light years. There may well be a colony or outpost around EACH of those stars which are not all that far from each other. But did Holloway check? Not according to his description of how the search went. You also ask how they managed to glide down, and find the spot. I believe there's two factors here. 1. As Dr. Forde pointed out there is a HUGE mountain, which makes for an excellent spot to navigate by, and the Space Jokeys probably did the same thing. Also, we could assume that they had to orbit the planet a few times, but that would take hours, and they didn't have the budget to add 3 hours of boring footage. Point is, they found SOMETHING, and assumed that it was what they were looking for, simply because they had ruled out the possibility of it being elsewhere. Say it with me "they chose to believe". [u]Scott took a lot of liberty with the fiction part of this science fiction film... At least this gave an early on hint that, despite the score and visuals, this was not a film to take seriously.[/u] It's not a film to TRUST. Do you not realise that he's been misleading you from the very first scene? @Alien King. I'm not even sure what you are saying. What do you mean "with no seen ship"? And why do you think it wasn't intentional?

They did a scan and mentioned a high concentration of metals just before breaking atmosphere. A reference to the whole planet's geological composition or to a specific location's attributes? I'm guessing they had instructed the computer to guide them on a search for anomalies before descending. Soft sci-fi, for sure, in the sense that none of this is tightly explained, but still "hard science fiction" in the sense that somebody uttered something somewhat scientific that could be construed as an explanation.