Everything was in the minds of the crew or ours?

Interesting-- Lindelof has said the movie is from the robot's perspective and it's about getting inside the robot's head. If u do this and understand what you understand-- that David secretly has more emotion than he's letting on and truly hates humanity, and Weyland then versions of this idea begin to take shape. David does hate being forced to work for Weyland corp and wants to see his father die of his own free-will. If u get that then you have a good base to go on for why something like this might work. The biggest clue is David's purposely half assed deception "I didn't know you had it in you" while he means something else. She knew that he knew the alien was inside her so that's not at all what he's really talking about. He may have wanted to let Shaw know he could lie... Or the filmmakers just needed a clear example of him lying... When u start to understand that he is almost surprised that Shaw is escaping the plan he's forced to carry out but does not like-- it makes more sense as a movie in general... I think it's more so about the video medium... Everyone had a helmet on their camera to document the mission. David wears a helmet at the beginning. But what if he's still "recording" at the end?? Think about how much the movie/video idea comes up. David begins the movie by watching a movie. A movie he's practically attempting to live out by using the quotes from that movie throughout Prometheus to refer to things... He's living within a movie-- there are way too similarities between David and the Lawrence character in LOA. It was done for a reason... in a general way David's story will follow Lawrence's story. The kicker is David seems to know this already, and it's why he watches the movie/ has lines from the movie prepped to be used in Prometheus like "big things have small beginning" his main line... which is directly taken from Lawrence of Arabia. Telling you just how BIG a part of it that film is. He views Shaw's dreams in such a way that it's almost as if he's just watching a movie/video directly... The whole Prometheus movie is a shot at humanity in a way-- through David's perspective. He think humans are chaotic and illogical which the film shows. David and Shaw are the only somewhat competent ones aboard that crew in the beginning and that's how it stays. David hates humans, but Holloway secretly hates androids. David and Holloway both hope that androids have not been made too real... David's account of the events of Prometheus would then be Prometheus and the movie only reflects David's perspective. Indicating David does not like humans very much He feels androids are becoming superior to them, and laments his own artificial emotional understanding, because it might be making him too human. David 8 has an emotional understanding that has been developing. His fake feelings allow him to choose what to believe-- and reshape the entire message/movie/recording in the way he chooses. This is Prometheus. Showing David's perspective mainly, and he was able to choose and alter somethings to make it more ambiguous. So that the company doesn't find out what he's really up to and some of the stuff that happened/knowledge that David is unwilling to reveal. We may get to see some back and forth later of what really happened... What David is covering up. And we learn that being human in this time period, under an egotistical and power hungry King who's much more of a dictator proto-Emperor, is not such a great thing. I've thought about how this all might work. I think it's more like David can record memories because he doesn't sleep or dream truly. Instead he has subconscious desires that interfere with what he's doing/perceiving. What if everything had been recorded through David's head... He didn't need the helmet to breathe or the helmet cam to record.. it just made the humans feel like he was human. This would then make the taking of off the helmets hold a double meaning-- once the crew takes off their hemets-- it is only David recording things with his android mind that never sleeps or dreams. But do Androids have subconscious desires for the sheep of this story? And what we're witnessing is actually David's projection, and subconscious projections playing with the message, interpreting things his own way, and only displaying certain things. Choosing what to believe and what to show-- accounting for the chopped up, ambiguous nature of the movie so far. Think about the way Weyland's dream yacht world was being planned-- that might have given too much away about the subconscious nature of this film. When David disconnects from the dream viewer we actually see a brief image of David standing there that flashes across the screen. It's almost a projection of himself into the dream world for a second, but we don't see him present in Shaw's dream. It disconnects and we see real David standing there after viewing the dream. Think the unicorn in blade runner, only this has been cleverly hidden as hint that David is projecting himself into the recording of the recording... placed in between two fantasy narratives. Was David accessing a memory or a dream in Shaw? It seems like something that actually happened-- thus it's a memory. However it's also a dream that David is watching of a memory. Therein lies the clue of how this all could work. Prometheus is not really a dream or a memory, it's kind of like a mixture of David's memory and his subconscious projections. Making it like a dream and a memory. It actually happened, although David is doing much more than simply choosing what to believe when he tells his lies. He's manipulating things and his emotions/subconscious impulses and desires are running his logic and affecting his ability to tell the truth and convey a correct straight-forward message, on multiple levels.. Another main clue would be that he does have the ability to be present in Weyland's dream world. Or would have had that ability if that scene had gone forward. As it stands he only communicates with Weyland in cryo. But this means he's able to make sense of and interpret what is going on in dreams. If it were completely a dream then certain things wouldn't work or make sense. Instead it's a deceptive message he's recording. Think of the entire movie as David's transmission to Weyland corp and Yutani corp. Those who were watching his progress/actions Weyland by direct connection, Yutani with the quiet eye. Yutani are like a police force of the world if Weyland is the king. The other power on Earth. David also can't let them know exactly what happened if he wants to continue his plans and deceive both companies to combine them and overthrow the humans and both companies...

Wow way too drunk tonight!! Half of that didn't even flow or make complete sense.

Kinda interesting theory, but this seems to be the trend with a lot of movies lately- everyone claims that they are just dreams. I've heard or read similar theories about all kinds of movies (Ferris Bueller, for instance). Not to say it is not possible, but it seems to be the flavor of the month.

@Mala'kak I think we are in a way in the same path of thinking although you believe that these events actually took place and we see them again through David's eyes, on the contrary I think the whole story was a dream controlled by David with the Prometheu's crew playing in it as actors. I started thinking that the whole mission was a social engineering experiment and had nothing to do with finding our creators, something like the Milligram experiments. Did the Weyland Co., actually try to test the faithfulness of its employees under extreme and rare circumstances, with David8 prototype being in the center of the experiment? Anyway, if this is a valid thread and the writers had something like this in mind, then they want to show to us that the answers are not out there, but inside us recorded in our DNA, like a genetic memory of millions of years of evolution! If the black goo (found in the head room) is a metaphor for brain's grey matter, which is responsible for our intellectual capabilities, then it is a virus indeed, but not for us, a killing virus for nature. We are the only species with logical thinking, something unique in the universe. We even made nature itself commit suicide, if we see the truth encoded in the ancient Oedipus tragedy. The Sphinx (metaphor for nature) asked us what we were and we replied back through Oedipus character "You say man" and then nature killed itself! Another idea that struck my mind, is the name of the planets LV-223 LV-426, they might well be code names for a number of experiments conducted by Weyland Co. on studying human behavior manipulation and the study of the inner depths of the human mind, like Kubrick used the code name CRM (Dr. Strangelove and in Clockwork Orange). In Alien (1979), we actually witnessed a number of our deeper fears like birth trauma and womb security. Once more I will say that Alien (1979) and Prometheus directed by R. Scott have nothing to do with the other movies and that these two movies go much deeper than the other flat alien sequels. LV might also be an acronym for Low Voltage, a straight reference to REM dreaming, read the first paragraph [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep]here[/url].

Not sure how the following quote ties in with this but I found it rather interesting and I believe it has a deeper meaning to Prometheus and or David. ''The trick William Potter, it's not minding that it hurts''

@Apex_Predator Everything fits in if we accept the fact that they are all part of a dream. Even the blue tone of the pictures in the beginning suggest so. Before the Prometheus crew woke up (in the dream?), we see David8 watching classic movies and making his hair as if he was going to participate in a stage as an actor. Someone said in another thread, "Why wouldn't he just download all this info in his head instead of learning it?He was a robot after all", this is a crucial question! What if he was just preparing himself for the big play? Such acts and information cannot be downloaded, they need part of the ego! I feel as if David8 was Ridley Scott and the Prometheus crew are us, full of ignorance and easily manipulative to believe only what our eyes see, being trapped in hyper-sleep chambers with him looking at our dreams.

David quotes, "There is nothing in the desert & no man needs nothing." Are the writers are telling us there is more in this desert that we need to know?

If this is all a dream, why are Shaw & crew with David at all? Why does David have access to them in the first place? Why is this group of supremely qualified bug hunters, ship's crew & motivated Weyland bigwigs even together on a ship in space if not to perform the tasks they anticipate and, ultimately, encounter (though not in the way previously expected; ie. looking for and finding engineers)?

@Lujor Read the book by Philip K. Dick "Do Androids Dream", I think that Scott got many things from there, just as he did with "Blade Runner". Maybe David8 took advantage of the fact that they were in hyper-sleep, started understanding his individuality and wanted to study his creators by interfering with their deepest fears, expectations, dreams, beliefs etc to learn what a soul is, something which he didn't posses because he was told so, is this right though? His "human" curiosity wanted to find out, just like Eve accepted the apple from Lucifer, because she thought that the Creator hold secrets from her. David8 might have thought that humans, his creators, told him he was soulless because they didn't want him to become one of them, just like Adam and Eve.

[b]Here is an explanation of the first scene.[/b] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The first scene is a dream of David8, we know that dreams use symbolic imagery to tell us something that cannot be told straightforward. So, I believe that the robot's subconscious used the images of Gods as described in ancient civilizations to represent human kind. The Elder who gave the sacrificial engineer the metal container of the black goo, was the old Weyland its father and the other ones who were watching the scene were the "Prometheus" crew with the sacrificial engineer being David8 the outcast. David8 wanted to be like us and felt depressed (robot with feelings?), but its subconscious wanted to bring it to reality. In order to protect the conscious of the robot, its subconscious gave to it a symbolic scene as a dream, that no matter how hard it tried to become like its creators, the penalty would be death. Death is symbolic here too, remember David8's responses to remarks made by the crew when they reminded it that it was a robot i.e. the scene where Holloway told it not to wear a suit since it was a robot, the scene where it didn't drink alcohol because it would go wasted etc. @Cerulean Blue And at last here is where this quote fits in. David8 would want this quote from Lawrence of Arabia to be true for it too! In the desert it would survive because it had no biological needs. It was struggling to become more human than human, but its involuntary dilation of the iris gave David8 model away! (hmmmm this last one is from another movie LOL!)