If you’ve seen Prometheus, the latest film in the mega-popular Alien saga, you know it’s about the origins of life on Earth, with some drama and extraterrestrial blood and guts thrown in. That means it deals with heavy philosophical questions about existence and humanity.
But there are a few things in this movie that just plain don’t make any sense.
So if you’re fired up with questions and opinions about what the stuff on screen actually meant, this article may be for you.
BUT….
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop reading, IMMEDIATELY, because there be spoilers ahead. BIG ONES!
Got it?
OK. You’ve been warned…
1. Is the planet the explorers go to in Prometheus the same one that Ripley’s crews go to in Alien and Aliens?
No, it’s not. The planet in Prometheus is LV-223, and the one in the other two movies is LV-426, so apparently, the Engineers did their let’s-destroy-humanity experiments in more than one place. Here’s a message board post with a theory on how the planets are connected, continuity-wise.
2. Why were so many characters in this movie so sure that those giant Engineer alien dudes would be all helpful and benign and stuff? Those mofos were KILLERS!
Yup, they sure were. In fact, as soon as that Engineer dude awakened from cryo-sleep (or hyper-sleep, or whatever it’s called), he started massacring those fools with Jason-frickin’-Voorhees-like efficiency. Even the damn ANDROID wasn’t safe.
Granted, the main characters in the movie didn’t know for sure what would happen once they met these aliens, but they made ridiculous assumptions, and you’d think they would’ve exercised a bit more caution.
In the beginning of the movie, Elizabeth Shaw and her boyfriend found those cave drawings of large beings, humans, and star maps. She instantly concluded the aliens wanted humans to come find them, which, I guess, is slightly believable, but after they get to the alien planet and find out everything’s sinister and deadly, that Weyland dude was all like, “I’m going to ask them to save my life, and OF COURSE they’ll help me. This toxic black goo and the dead crew members? Pfshaw! Let’s just pretend none of that happened, shall we?”
Made no sense. Yes, Weyland was in hibernation when all that evil stuff went down, but c’mon, like nobody briefed him on all that crap once he was awake? He SHOULD’VE brought some machine guns with him when he went to the Engineers’ ship, just for good measure.
And in the movie’s final scene, Elizabeth decides to fly to the Engineer homeworld to find out why they didn’t finish the job of eradicating the human race that they started thousands of years ago. She’s a gutsy chick, that Elizabeth, but isn’t she worried about being shot out of the sky when she reaches their orbit or something? And if she lands, how does she know she won’t be killed on sight? Sheeeesh!
3. What does that black soupy stuff actually do? It seems kinda random and chaotic.
Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?
When characters drank it, they painfully decomposed into particles and genetic material at varying speeds (Elizabeth’s boyfriend and that sacrificial Engineer dude at the very beginning), and we also saw the goo morph slugs into large, homicidal worm / cobra hybrid creatures (that thing that crushed that scientist dude’s arm in the cave before killing him) and turn that poor redheaded dude into some kind of superstrong, rage-filled zombie that killed like, five people. And once the goo had contaminated Elizabeth’s boyfriend, his mutated semen impregnated her with some strange octopus, face hugger beast, even though homegirl was sterile.
Now how the hell do you connect the dots? It’s a mystery to me, but at least one person on the Prometheus Movie forums has a theory. Check out the first message board post after this link and see what you think.
4. And speaking of that scientist dude in the cave… shouldn’t he have been a bit more cautious (i.e. not stupid) when he ran into that worm / cobra thing that wound up killing him?
Yeah, there was no excuse for that one, was there? That may have been the most unrealistic part of the whole movie. In real-life, dude would have booked it across the room the second that thing started hissing at him.
5. Why do those Engineer dudes dislike humans?
We’re never told, and neither were the characters in the movie. That’s why Elizabeth embarks on her (kamikaze) mission to find the answer at the end. We’ll most likely find out in the sequel, if there is one.
6. This movie was good, but… why wasn’t it better?
That’s between the filmmakers and the movie gods. I thought Prometheus was decent, but it wasn’t as great as I expected. It didn’t grip me like other films in the Alien saga did, and I’m still trying to figure out why. The movie had its good points, but the magic wasn’t there. Its box office weight may even be diminishing as we speak. The film opened last Friday (or Thursday night, if you count midnight showings), and yesterday, it was overtaken by Madagascar 3 in ticket sales.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked the movie, but not as much as I wanted to.
Will the sequel be worth it?
That remains to be seen, but I think it’s possible. In spite of my sarcasm and quasi-unhappiness, as I said, I did think the movie was worth seeing. I just felt that it could have been so much more than it was. Hopefully whoever directs and writes Prometheus 2 will strive for a more gripping plot the next time around.
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