The Father Figure and where Prometheus 2: Paradise should take it...

Can I say how much I LOVE the movie Prometheus? I love all the Alien films, and Prometheus was excellent way to prequel it and start its own mythos different from it. It's brilliant. But I basically think it's all about one thing: Dysfunctional relationships with your parents. In that sense, I guess, it's a great throw-back to the golden era of Freudian Film-Making. I think it accomplishes this theme on many levels with many overlapping metaphors. The most obvious of which is the whole God complex. But there's also Shaw's relationship to her father, and how the relates to God and the Engineers. There's Weyland's god-complex and how he abandoned his daughter Vickers and created his android-son David. David also shows a much more childish and stoic view to his creates since he is well aware of their hubris and lack of intent in his creation. And that's just scratching the surface. I think two scenes really encapsulate this film perfectly, the scene where David poisons Holloway at the pool table, and the final scene where Shaw and David's head are talking. The pool-table scene is great. Pool has traditionally been a metaphor for causality, how a chain of events is related from one cause to another. This is perfect since David starts the chain of events by infecting Holloway who in turn impregnates the sterile Shaw who rips out the Cthulu face-hugger thing that then in turn implants the Deacon alien into the Engineer through its ovipositor. That whole chain of creation events parallels the creation sequences that the Engineers (being GENETIC ENGINEERS) started by their viral reprogramming which set up humanity in the introductory Promethean event, and also in the biogenesis in the urn-room. More pointedly, however, in the pool-table scene is the discussion between David and Holloway. David asks Holloway why his species created him, to which Holloway dumbly answers, "Because we could." To which David rightly assesses how disappointing that would be for Holloway to hear from his makers. Holloway laughs in a dismissing way then inadvertently gives David permission to infect him by saying he'd do anything to get the answers. This theme is re-iterated when David and Shaw are talking at the end. Shaw wants to go to the Engineer's home world. She says she wants to know why it was the Engineers became disappointed with humanity. David CORRECTLY answers that it's irrelevant. Shaw says it's not. She hasn't learned at all from this whole event - her hubris and insecurity in her own self worth and the worth of humanity led her and the crew to this whole mess. She was the one that convinced Weyland that the Engineers had answers to life's most important questions, and she's directly and indirectly responsible for the whole mess that erupts. It's her pride and lack of belief IN HERSELF that is the downfall of everyone. It is her childish need to find meaning in something external to herself that is her undoing. And yet she never learns (thus, setting us up for a potentially AMAZING sequel in which she will finally learn - the movie was rightly criticized for its lack of resolution so it's hoped that the sequel or the trilogy will eventually resolve this by having her realize that what matters is inside and that we create our own meaning). The purpose of life is to live without appeal. To stop seeking the answers outside ourselves and to BECOME the solution. To create our lives as a self-evidently worthy. Shaw cannot get over the pain of losing her father before she felt was the right time - so she cannot realize her own self-worth. BRILLIANT psycho-analysis built into this film. SO good. While the film makes obvious allusions to the Abrahamic eschatology, it is more so based around the Greek (and Mayan) myths of a creator-God that creates through self-annhilation or a giving up of one's self. In the ancient Babylonian myths, the gods create the world and humanity out of the primal divinities that come before them. But in Mayan mythology Father-God creates the world and humanity by sacrificing himself thus letting his own body be the womb of creation. The introduction mirrors this perfectly. I think that this film is trying to reflect the journey of humanity from these ancient myths to the post-modern age by recreating the ancient myths. By focusing on the myth that, as has been said, "Self-creation is annihilation of self," the message of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and the Existentialists who stole all their ideas from those three (lol, sorry, I just think that Existentialism is pathetic and NOTHING compared to those three thinkers, even though people who don't know anything tend to group those three into the Existentialists when they obviously and self-admittedly [in the case of Camus] are NOT Existentialists). Kierkegaard called for the necessity of the "Leap of Faith", Nietzsche likewise called for the "Re-evaluation of all values", the "Twilight of the Idols", and the over-coming of everything that has made you. Camus, for his part, beckoned us to "live without appeal" and to accept the Absurdity of life - that our search for meaning will NEVER find concrete meaning in the outside world. Take all these perfect truths together and you see the need for humanity to rise above the ignorance and insecurity of our heritage and embrace the fact that we will NEVER have an APPEAL to meaning, and that, in spite of that, we can and should still live a happy and fulfilling life. One can only do that by embracing the Absurd, re-evaluating all values, taking the leap of faith, and over-coming our selfhood and recreating ourselves in a state of eternal becoming. The process of life and recreation is shown in a physical form with the Chain of Creation we mentioned early. This is proof that attempts at eugenics are wrong. The process of creation is an INTERNAL process. Most people don't realize that Nietzsche was the absolute antithesis of Hitler and that Hitler got EVERYTHING wrong about Nietzsche. The movie makes this point very poetically. Although the Engineers judged us as failures, we MUST judged THEM as failures! They went about things the wrong way. Shaw never realizes this, but WE can. Self-creation is annihilation of self. We must over-come OURSELVES. This is a spiritual process. Not a physical process. SPIRITUAL. It is an INTERNAL process of mastery over OURSELVES not an external process of mastery of the world or society or the Other or any other bullshit. We must wage war on ourselves. We must destroy ourselves. We must recreate ourselves. For in the end - WE are our own Gods. God was created in OUR image. And we must overcome even God. Maybe I'm reading too far into this, maybe not. But I hope that the next film and the third film if there is one, take this into account and head in this direction. There is meaning and purpose in life. We are here for a reason. But that meaning, that purpose, that reason, is not an external fact to be discovered and known. It is an internal truth to be realized and manifested. And we have the potential to do it. The question is - do we have the will?