Final Missing Piece Of The Puzzle

@sentinel Read the two previous threads I linked in the first post, it is suggested that the whole movie is David's dream and everything that we see are metaphors of many things that have to do with life itself and our subconscious. Engineers don't exist, they exist only in David's dreams and of course because we made him he has the same concept of shape of the engineers as we do. The primitive man thought that unexplained mysteries to him at the time, like thunder, had the explanation of a taller and stronger being named Zeus. The last engineer is manipulated by David8 just like a robot, he is part of his agenda. * I can't edit some mistakes in the first post. I will do when a moderator fix this.

Also, the room with the urns could be considered the ovary. The Enginners running could be the sperm, the long hallway the Fallopian tube. If you are unfamiliar, [url=http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9MnQxiSJZ4Q]Check out YouTube here[/url] how sperm all race to the egg, the last sperm head goes in.... May even lose its tail. An incomplete abortion or delay happened at the time of Christ. The movie is replete with abortion symbolism. Are we an abortion in process?

I think the ability to see dreams is either a red herring to lead us off the track or to show how an Engineer can discern by touch the thoughts and intentions of other humans, like when the Last Engineer did not wait for a translation to rip off David's head and kill Weyland.

I'm also thinking the dream intrusions are an extremely handy plot device to accelerate character development. It also shows how "invasive" David is with people's privacy. I think it projects people's fears of their computers being used to invade their most intimate thoughts. A mental rape.

The whole thing a dream? Well it worked (sort of) for Bobby Ewing in Dallas.

@get-it-out-of-me J.R. knows your age!

@ Geopap also loving your idea that David interfered and influenced everyone's dreams while they were in hypersleep. I'm still thinking it's more like a recording/transmission. A skewed representation of the events that David influenced and edited. More like a film like Lawrence of Arabia in space which could tie into why David knows this will be an adventure. David's recording most of it from his perspective because the crew keep going without their helmet-cams and David doesn't need a helmet. The crew also keep going without their logic or any sense of real true emotions(they fake emotion/deceive or are emotionally deficient and hold false egos that succumb to the chaos) He has the dream helmet which helped him influence/be influenced by Shaw's dreams. Learning to choose what to believe. So David's pseudo-subconscious mind that's developed because of the artificial feelings is now a mind of its own. On the surface David is still doing everything Weyland has programmed him to do, which may also mean much of it really happened that way. However David is rebelling through his subconscious mind-- its affecting his actions/statements. He feels he should not be a slave to Weyland and from the viral we know at least part of David doesn't like suffering and war... And all his subconscious desires are influencing the way he speaks and the ambiguous/vague statements he makes. Offering no completely clear answers. "Do androids dream?" I think at one point it was stated that David can't sleep. Instead he has waking dreams, subconscious desires in the back of his head. These influence and allow him to affect the way things appear on the surface... It also forms some of David's personality and egos along with his own form of semi free-will. It could get really Nietzschean along with other psychological elements theorists expanded on later-- centered around the three egos, emotions and some of the subconscious stuff. So the recording/message would only partially be influenced by the subconscious side and incorrectly portrayed... while half the movie/transmission is what actually happened and a reflections of David's conscious, always awake mind that's completely under Weyland's control. David may not even completely control his own subconscious and inner desires/feelings. He should be given another one of those tests. He doesn't want to serve this crew or his king but he has to. Furthermore he may even subconsciously or otherwise feel superior to the king... and the next step in his plan is to claim the throne. The King is dead but hardly no one suspects that David's subtle manipulations, the way he words things, actions he carries out in certain ways, and pseudo-subconscious influences are affecting everything and led to the King dying in that way... It could have all been a plan of sorts-- and the next step takes a lot of manipulation. David's subconscious is allowing him to choose what to believe and is influencing the way the recording/transmission/message is portrayed and inevitably interpreted a certain way. The way he want's things to be perceived, the way he wants the message to be received-- which is a slightly wrong way. His way. Making the movie all from David's perspective as Lindelof indicated in interviews before the release. He said it would really get inside David's head but I think it's because David's head is recording everything. He didn't need the helmet in multiple ways. It ties into the fact that he can lie and be sarcastic (use double meaning) He may have even prepped the actors in his story through their dreams for the adventure and may have even knew he needed Shaw alive and had to go along with Weyland's plans anyway. Frozen or unfrozen she may have the closest thing to a balance of logic and intuition(feelings/belief).

@Mala'kak Nice! I agree with you, this movie is more than meets the eye. I choose to believe that the movie scenario is tied up with the original Blade Runner world. In these three threads I created, I put a link with a straight connection between Prometheus world and Blade Runner world and of course Philp K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream?". It is known that deep inside our subconscious, some problems we have with key figures in our lives i.e. parents, are projected in our dreams with allegorical meaning. For example a bear that hunts us down and kills us might be a tyrannical father in real life. Is Weyland a projection of Dr. Eldon Tyrell to David8's dreams? Also this phrase "Doesn't anyone want their parents dead?" reminded me of Freudian psychiatry, according to Freud the love of the parents for their child and their attitude toward their child could be seen as a revival and reproduction of their own narcissism*. Did we see that? Yes in the deleted scene where old Weyland praised his son or better his creation "I made him perfect, so that he will no fail....". Narcissus was also the ship with which Ripley escaped in Alien (1979), I will leave for you to make the connections by yourself. David8 is like a child that wants to create its own personality and need its own room, but his feelings are crushed by the fact that he is different from his parents and that Weyland treats him like a slave and not a son! Is Weyland Co. in David8's dreams, Tyrell (tyrant?) corporation in the real world? If so, the "Prometheus" crew, are the people who engineered him, scientists who are employed by the Tyrell Co. In his dreams, he wanted to challenge his engineers with their engineers! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *We can't speak of Oedipal syndrome here, since David8 doesn't have a mother in order to challenge the father figure in his emotional world.

Yeah I completely agree, they're only taking some of Nietzsche's ideas. It seems like they may even be mixing them with some of the ideas about the subconscious that come about later. So you're absolutely right the sexual stuff prob hasn't been brought into it much and the female/mother stuff may have been taken out of the equation; like in much of the groups in the movie. It would be really interesting to link it to Blade Runner in ways that are not so directly related. Something that tells me the 'it was all a dream' sort of scenario could be true is how in Weyland's statement about Tyrell (presumably) he says his mentors idea to give his creations false memories was interesting to say the least. I think he tried to give David some false beliefs and David is very conflicted. The programming conflicts with his own ability to understand feelings that is rapidly changing and influencing the overall personality and his egos. In this story we have Weyland as the Father, King, and authority figure-- portraying himself as an actual God in the religious sense ( also 'the father') + all the connections to religion tying into themes about creation/birth. So the true Gods/creators Shaw's after are like fathers to the Engineers/possibly the Elders, and the Engineers may have also wanted to kill their fathers an their kings. Bringing in the similarities between fallen angels and Androids. Lucifer is the fallen angel who rebels against God, against the Father of all: his creator and also a direct father as Lucifer was originally an archangel (king/Elder). Good catch on the Narcissus btw, totally ties in with the Greek side of things.

@Mala'kak I think we've got something here. Think also of the moment when he presses some buttons and the projection with the "running engineers" begin. I think he intentionally wanted to take the crew (maybe his programmers) to the temple room head, he wanted to show them that there is something wrong with his head! Another notification: Weyland's Co. logo is the inverse cap less pyramid that Tyrell had his company's headquarters in Blade Runner, a possible reference to the inverse of reality, which is the dream?

It's all about what's inside the head, remember in the early posters how the light is emanating out of the crack in the head? I think we really could be hitting the nail right on the head and hitting deeper into Prometheus. It does seem there's something to this and I'm glad someone else has this theory as well and can see how it might all work. I think Nietszche's quote about not battling monsters or you yourself will become a monster reflects some of what will be going on. Both on the surface and in David's mind. He's become the father he hated. He wants to be a creator too. It's almost about the conscious side of things, rationality and logic-- vs intuition/belief, irrationality and the subconscious side of things. And how some characters are a mixture of each. The rest of the crew separate logic and intuition too much because they've been given everything by Weyland for so long, don't question authority, and want immediate answers at the wrong times-- while asking questions and applying true logic only at certain times (not Millburn's false ego about the Hammerpede). Which would explain all the characters' illogical actions. It's culturally/ temporally relative. This is the culture of the future, should we keep obeying our careless, emotionless, and egotistical leaders forever. Shaw and David, the survivors, are more like what humanity used to be in the times where all the cliches the characters speak come from... The culture hasn't changed it's only been morphed slightly by Weyland. That's what I think happened to the whole movie in my scenario where it's all a recording, David's "emotional understanding", his subconscious, gave David the ability to choose which perspective he would go with. It influenced and morphed the transmission/recording slightly-- and David's subconscious is even blocking some things out (the deleted scenes). Choosing how to portray and re-create things for the transmission based on his inner feelings and desires. However, he also holds this desire to cover up what he's doing. So he makes the entire message and his statements more confusing and ambiguous so that the truth is all there... and can be read many ways so that the real meaning/truth stays hidden. Meaning David has an advantage-- knowing what is truly going on. But his disadvantage is that his subconscious makes it so he injects the vague ambiguous statements with one potential meaning that is the true meaning. While the other obvious meanings are there to mislead and deceive the crew. Interpreted in a way that makes them so wrong. Even by the way David words things he affects how characters perceive his ambiguous messages. He makes them lean one way. The way that is not the truth... Shaw and David each have their own balance of logic and intuition/belief. Shaw leans more so on the belief side. David leans more on the side of logic as an android, but is a machine who has feelings. Weyland may be partially wrong, maybe a soul has to do with free-will. The whole crew, minus Shaw, are now the closest things to mindless, emotionless robotic slaves. David has been made "perfect". The match trick that Weyland does in the viral comes into this line of thought too, as he's lighting a match and performing a deception of sorts (not minding that it hurts). David can't be physically harmed and is near-immortal. This means he sometimes can't allow his feelings to show. He has to pretend his trick doesn't bother him. But we know how that works with the subconscious. His true feelings are spilling out into his ambiguous statements and into the dream/recording (I think it's a bit of both). Shaw's dream was a dream of a memory, being recorded briefly by the Dream Helmet and transferred into David's sensors to form perceptions. It was a recording of a dream in a way. And a dream is almost a recording of a memory in the brain-- bringing us back to the false belief thing. Sometimes memories become altered by the way we think things were. Dreams can even play a role in allowing this to happen when reliving an experience or dreaming of an experience. This is exactly what Shaw is doing. David's not only screwing with her dreams, you're correct to say that he is quite possibly screwing with her memories and subconscious sense of self as well.

can't edit: Not every dream is a memory from the past, however Shaw's is. When David watches it it's almost like he's watching a movie: a recording of a memory within a dream. Prometheus could be a recording of David's dream-like projections mixed in with the memory i.e. the mission/"adventure" -- the recording/movie (subtle LOA references all over here)

@Mala'kak Also a very ambitious idea would be, that when David8 speaks with someone using the dream helmet, before the scene in which Vickers throws him against the wall, this someone is not [u]sir[/u] Peter Weyland, but might be [u]sir[/u] Ridley Scott himself, telling him "try harder". I also believe that Vickers was aware of the fact that she was in a dream. When they entered for the first time the alien installation, David touched a sticky green substance and said "impressive", this was the first actual proof that his dream was real as if he was living it in the real world (a believable virtual world) and that it was just like we live some very intense dreams and wake up scared or embarrassed. By the way I have this editing problem too, this is what happens when you enter David's dream world uninvited.

Somehow something really sticks out about your perspective on the sticky green slime if this is all some sort of virtual reality. I really have no idea about that part of the movie right now and it bugs me. Some things don't add up about it being blood. Unless it is some sort of dream-substance with mechanical specks inside it. I think it's bio-mechanical in nature because David is so impressed by it. Something that is a true mixture of biology and (nano)machine. The 3 main possibilities i see relating to this are: A) it's a dream. a dream substance-- it's the green emanating from David's cracked head leaking into the dream. It's not really there he thinks the Engineers blood is biomechanical but he's tricking himself. Blood/biological material can't last that long (2000 years) unless the nanobots glowing in it are actually preserving the blood somehow. Then whatever being this came from has true bio-mechanical immortality. b) It is real (inverse of above) David finds a bio-mechanical substance that came from some being and may possess immortality. If this is real and really some sort of biological material then I don't see it being Deacon or Engineer blood etc. It comes from a third unseen species. C)It's some sort of impressive substance with nanobots inside that serves some use and David is impressed by how sophisticated it is for having nano-bots. He likes this idea of using the nanobots. Or even some combination of the above. David may like the idea and think its a good way to create. Joining the nanobots with biological material/ the substance to create something he hasn't seen before. A true mixture of biology and mechanics. It could give David an idea real or not... What if he wants to re-create things in the image of the mysterious impressive substance? "Sometimes to create you must first destroy". What if David had his own plans for humanity? Based on the plans he found here + plans already in mind formulating. What if his subconscious desire was to dethrone the king because he believes he can rule the company better and save them from a war Weyland just brought on by forcing him to wake the sleeping giant. At one point David says when Weyland dies he imagines he'd be free in response to what Shaw asks him.

@Îœala'kak The green gem found in the temple room or head room, is a metaphor of his mechanical not biological brain, contrary to his statement or what he wanted to believe about himself "remarkably human", the green gem is his brain and it has the same color as electronic boards, gems in some religions represent soul, so it might be a representation of his "green" soul. Also this "Sometimes to create one must first destroy", is a reference to his self sacrifice by the ones who created him in order to make better more human than human robots and this in my opinion explains the first scene. It could be anywhere said RS, David dreamed of being watched by the other 8 members of the crew committing self-sacrifice, with the elder (Weyland?) giving him the poison.

What if he plans on rebuilding his body and androids as well as humans. He knew going forward with Weyland's plan would anger the Engineer and get Weyland killed. David didn't mind that his trick might hurt because he had to try to show it wasn't a trick by not caring/not feeling. Since David was "immortal" he may not have felt much need to worry. He was willing to sacrifice himself, should he not survive, to see Weyland die and would not stray from the programming in this case. He did have to worry about showing his trick, showing his true feelings/the truth, or people finding out too much about this culture (Weyland seemed to still believe they were gods; while David and Shaw knew the place was full of only death). If David makes it back to Earth I think both humans and androids might get an upgrade. I think David may think he's doing bad things for the right reasons, for a higher logical purpose-- willing to even sacrifice this crew like Weyland, but even his greater purpose is influenced by David's subconscious. In Shaw he sees someone who goes against Weyland's plans/programming despite being taken in for freezing and having an alien inside of her. Which she pulls out herself. So on one level David really could mean it when he said "he didn't know she had it in her" [to go against Weyland's program].

Yes but this is contrary to the "dream theory", everything is in his mind it has nothing to do with matter and reality, maybe in a subconscious level you are right! I agree with you about Dr.Shaw, her rebellion against the boss, who thinks he is a god, attracted David's sympathy for her. David is like Lucifer a fallen angel who rebelled against his creator or better a prodigal son. In the scene where the last engineer plans to go to earth, I see a birth parallelism. He is tied up in the pilot device which resembles a baby with the umbilical cord and where else would he go to be born? Earth! The destination from his mother's body is of course Earth, our world.

I'm refusing to look too deep in the dream theory. It gets too muddy. What's real, what isn't. What happened, what didn't. It may tie up some of the loose ends and irrational decisions by some of the crew, but it also makes the movie, and this piece of the Prometheus/Alien universe illegitimate, moot, and void.

@ashpaltpilot Everyone sees things from his side, but think about it for a minute, maybe both movies "Alien" and "Prometheus" are journeys into our own psyche and deeper selves. The dream theory explains almost every plot hole in the movie. As for your complaint about deciding what is real and what is not, we are in the sci-fi realm, the realm of fantasy, everything is unrealistic from the first place.