Monday 4 June 2012

Prometheus

Well my thoughts on Prometheus are a little varied. As a stand alone film I love it, as part of the Alien franchise, I struggle to reconcile it.

The following contains spoilers... you have been warned!

Ok lets start with a quick run down of the creation of the alien, and the involvement of the "Engineers".

In the opening scene we see a lone Engineer performing some form of ritual on earth... by ingesting the black goo the engineer de-constructs (at a DNA level we are shown) with the result that he kick starts the creation of life on earth (we'll overlook the fact he fell into water as splitting ovum, and just accept that proto-life evolved from there).

This sets up the fact that (big leap of faith here) the Engineers consider themselves some sort of life creating gods, and perform self sacrifice in there "holy mission" to create life on different planets (self sacrifice is necessary to fulfil the law of conservation of energy).

Later when the crew discover the cannisters of black goo we note that there are worms in the ground. When the cannisters leak their DNA is what gives rise to the "white worm" aliens.

When Shaw is impregnated by her infected husband the squid like alien takes its DNA from a gamete, hence it's requirement to impregnate a host.

However this is where I struggle to reconcile the remainder of the film.

  • Why does the impregnated alien take on the "alien" form?
  • Why do the white worms attack and essentially zombiefy it's prey?
  • Why do they have acid for blood?
  • Why were the Engineers running away? (I don't buy the bio-weapon theory)?
  • Why did the Engineers direct us to the planet?    

So in summary my theory behind the film is that it's all an accident caused by these Engineers being over complacent in their "holy mission" to seed the universe, which accidentally created monsters by using the wrong DNA.