Shaw's Final Words

I can barely remember the last thing I said yesterday. Yet I am obsessed with the last lines of movies that made a movie-going experience unforgettable. “I want, what they want, and every go who ever came over he wants, for our country to love us, as much as we love it.” Probably the longest piece of dialogue in a film filled with explosions and a preposterous plot, John Rambo’s plea for an unsympathetic world to embrace its fallen and mentally destroyed heroes made Rambo: First Blood, Part 1 an instant 80′s classic. Not quite the finale Rambo is, Shaw’s final words in Prometheus–”and I am still searching” none the less build our expectations for a more enticing second offering in the franchise. Shaw will undoubtedly search, and we can only shudder at she will find. Will she find a bio-engineered paradise of great civility, or will paradise look more like the fossilized corpses of the engineers that Shaw’s team finds on LV-426? The point being is that last lines of films have a way of defining our impression of them, and of informing what we may see in the next film of the series. Which is why I offer my own last line I would like to see in the next film. Let me set up the context for it. The old earth is near the final stages of the terraforming process. The oceans are now a black goo (the substance from the urns in the alter scene) and swimming with screeching, parasitic life. Prehistoric cobra facehuggers crash upon the surface of the earth like waves lashing the beach. The scene cuts to Shaw and David who have traveled to earth, pursued by a crew of engineers and their creator. Shaw carries a WMD she has “stolen” from the engineers lab that will reverse the terraforming process and return the planet to stasis. Shaw and David land their spaceship on the top of a Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world. By this time, every living human on the planet has been decimated, David informs Shaw, except for Shaw, who is humanity’s last hope. The screeching becomes louder, and a huge mutated species, half-human, half alien, begins pouring up the sides of the structure, obviously in pursuit of Shaw and David. As Shaw readies the detonating device, another ship appears out of the sky–the creator’s ship. Holding her finger over the button, Shaw asks the creator the question the engineer in the first film never answered: Why did the creator want to destroy us. Shaw: Will you tell me now…now when I hold the fate of your new creation in my hands? Will you tell me, she screams. Creator: Before you can create, you must destroy, he thunders! Shaw: Create what? What? What????? Creator: Your evolution… Shaw, stunned by the revelation, peers down at the evolved human species scaling the structure. The first creature arrives to the top, but instead of attacking her, stares deeply into her eyes. Seeing the face the new face of humanity, Shaw accepts what must be. Shaw: Humanity had its chance, she says, and failed. Perhaps a new version of ourselves will get it right. I hope they do. I really do. Shaw throws the device and we hear it crash into a million pieces below, rendering it ineffective. The scene cuts back to Shaw, whose arms outstretched, embrace the mutant arrivals.