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This post goes way in depth to Prometheus and explains some of the deeper themes of the film as well as some stuff I completely overlooked while watching the film.
NOTE: I did NOT write this post, I just found it on the web.
Link: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1
Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.
Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)
Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.
The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.
Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.
Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'
Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.
And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'
So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.
Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.
The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.
And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'
Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.
From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.
If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:
Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?
Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.
Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.
So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.
So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.
The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.
Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.
Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.
Reading all of these comments made me look this up: LV-223 = Leviticus 22:3 "Say to them: 'For the generations to come, if any of your descendants is ceremonially unclean and yet comes near the sacred offerings that the Israelites consecrate to the LORD, that person must be cut off from my presence. I am the LORD."
there is no way that I am the first person to comment on this
Wow upvotes.. Great find man
That's sick bro... Leviticus is everywhere as allusions.
Now think about Aliens(2).. the planet 426.. or Leviticus 4:26 "He shall burn all the fat on the altar as he burned the fat of the fellowship offering. In this way the priest will make atonement for the man’s sin, and he will be forgiven." Ripley burning the eggs will unknowingly make atonement for the sins of creating and bringing the android to the presence of the engineer? Or killing space Jesus? It doesn't make sense till we see and understand the Promethius movie.
I found this particularly insightful.
From http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9109641
If I followed the ideas of the film correctly, this wasn't a "new" Alien ship, but one they were using at least 35,000 years ago. Is it just me, or would (SHOULD) we all expect the "engineers" to have evolved physiologically in the intervening time? The "Original" Engineer" is a dead spit of the one in the stasis pod - so either the've halted their evolution (why??) or this is another example of poorly thought our cinematography.
35,000 years is extremely short in terms of evolution. Horseshoe Crabs have existed for 445 million years with little to no evolutionary change.
This is very late to the party, but please give it a read. My analysis of the slime:
The black slime is meant to deconstruct DNA. It takes it apart in order to create opportunities for new life. When it breaks DNA, that DNA can take on new forms (that's important). The first Engineer seen drinks the slime in order to spread his DNA throughout the planet, and be a gardener of life. Once the DNA is spread, it begins to form new life in a rapidly adapting state. Those forms are able to adapt so rapidly to ensure the successful spread of life, and can do so in the same way shown in the beginning of the movie.
The black slime kept in containers on LV-223 is a "weaponized" form of the slime; a quantity large enough to destroy a world's worth of DNA. It is used to erase creations that go awry. It is launched at a world and destroys all of the DNA contained on that world.
Holloway, upon infection, begins to break apart as the Engineer did, albeit slowly due to the tiny dose. As his DNA breaks down, he spreads it via insemination to Shaw. The broken-down DNA begins to rapidly adapt to its environment -- Shaw's womb.
This is why the slime reacts differently to different "host DNA". It is simply disassembled DNA being reconstructed. The mealworms become extremely strong snake-like creatures; Fifield doesn't ingest it, but its contact with him changes him drastically.
The slime that occupies Shaw's womb is simply the progenitor to the Xenomorph. The lifeform that is created by the slime's reaction with Holloway's DNA is one that is near the pinnacle of life's many forms -- in Ash's words, "The perfect organism." It is a form that can reproduce using a host to evolve rapidly, absorbing traits in the host DNA.
TL;DR: the slime deconstructs DNA so it can reconstruct new lifeforms, and Shaw is impregnated with the result of one of these breakdowns. This resulting lifeform is the progenitor of the Xenomorph.
My analysis of why the Engineers had meant to destroy Earth's life and how it led to the events in Prometheus:
The Engineers spread and monitored life. They wished to spread life, for whatever reason. Once that life was spread, they watched the lifeform and attempted to guide their development.
On Earth, an Engineer sacrificed himself to sow his DNA as a seed throughout the "gardens" of the galaxies. This DNA eventually took the form of humans.
Throughout our development, they visited Earth to guide us. On those visits, they directed primitive man to a solar system where we might contact the Engineers.
In that solar system, the Engineers terraformed a moon for us to travel to. Once there, we might contact them.
Around 2000 years ago, human civilization became much less civilized. Ridley Scott chose not to use the crucifixion of Jesus as the catalyst, but something more like the rise of Rome and other empires/violent civilizations like it spurred the Engineers to decide that we were not fit to exist any longer. The human experiment was to be terminated -- the garden had too many weeds.
To eliminate us, they created a biological weapon using the DNA-destroying black slime that they used for gardening. They created this stockpile on a forward base as they knew it was dangerous and even threatened them as a species. They used the planet they had directed us to; I think this was because that base was the one assigned to monitor Earth and humankind.
They planned to drop this stockpile onto Earth to destroy mankind, but allow life to continue. The garden would be uprooted and new seeds would be sown.
Something triggered the stockpile -- perhaps something happened to an Engineer in the manufacturing process. Remember, all of the hologram Engineers were running out of the stockpile room. At the entrance to that room were multiple suits. I think that, upon entering the room, they would don their suits to avoid exposure to the slime. Something triggered the stockpile to rupture or overwhelm their suits.
The rupture caused the Engineers to run. None of them were able to escape the slime. As shown in the hologram, one made it fairly far away, but died. When he died, he collapsed onto the ground. When Shaw removed his helmet, it was clear that he had the DNA-destroying slime in his veins.
The lone surviving Engineer lived because he was in cryostasis. He was in that state in preparation for the journey to Earth. The stockpile ruptured as they made preparations to leave. Hence the Engineers running from the ship in full flight gear.
When Weyland wakes the Engineer, he awakens to find the creation he had set out to destroy. That creation asks him to preserve his already unnaturally long life. It was this hubris that had necessitated humanity's destruction, so he tries to complete his mission.
He first looks and smiles at David, seems to caress him, and then destroys him. I believe this is because he recognized David as humanity's feeble attempt to create life -- they could only manage an imitation. This seems almost touching to the Engineer. The apple, it would seem, does not fall far from the tree; humanity unwittingly followed in the Engineers' footsteps.
The Engineer kills the present crew and begins to set out for Earth. Not only was his mission 2000 years delayed, but the problem had compounded itself immensely. Not only had humans become self-centered and full of hubris, but they had actually sought out their creators to ask them for more than the life they had been given.
TL;DR: mankind was created as an experiment, but humanity became prideful and undeserving of the life they had been granted. The Engineers developed a weaponized form of their DNA-seeding material, and meant to use it to "reseed" Earth. In their effort, something went wrong and they were themselves affected by the weapon.
EDIT: Upon further investigation, I think this picture is extremely important. It depicts the Xenomorph's life cycle, from H.R. Giger. It seems to depict Engineers, in their exosuits, overseeing the birth of a facehugger and its subsequent infection of an Engineer as a host.
They may not be overseeing the birth cycle; instead, they might be happening upon the Xenomorph and recording the life cycle as they encountered it.
Either way, it proves that the Engineers had contact with the Xenomorph prior to the events in Prometheus. They knew about it and how it was born. I think the mural was made as a warning to anyone who encountered the Xenomorph, which was one of the clear and present dangers when the black slime was involved. I detailed that in a child comment below.
I like your ideas.
One thing about the David and Engineer interaction I thought: The Engineer seems impressed or maybe awestruck that a human has learned their language. He then touches him and finds out he is an android. This makes the Engineer go from being happy to killdozer mode.
Yeah, that's possible. I think that's what makes him angry. He thinks a human learned their language, but he then realizes that it isn't human. It is the humans' own attempt to create life, but it is an abomination in his eyes -- a bastardization and cheap imitation of life. I think it reminds the Engineer of why the humans were going to be eliminated.
I thought Scott could have done a much better job with the Engineer, though. He was the most interesting part of the movie, but he turns into a murderous simpleton. I thought it would have been a much better story if he had sided with Shaw, realizing that she was not with Weyland. That is, he sees that humanity has fallen from grace, but there are those on Earth worth saving. But no, he's a silent, homicidal alien.
I read a comment somewhere that notes that the Engineer only goes into "killdozer" mode after he sees Shaw get knocked in the stomach by the guy with the gun. Up until that point he is simply amused. But that human violence serves as a quick reminder of his mission.
Just another interpretation. I really like the other interpretation as well though. Perhaps it is a coupling of the two.
While I get where you're coming from, I think having him side with Shaw would have taken away from the total and irreversible judgement placed on us by the engineers. We are supposed to be terrified of the Gods in this movie, having him side with Shaw would have lessened the impact of their condemnation of us.
Right, right. I agree. I just mean to say that he could have done a lot more with this single living (that is known of) alien than turn him into Michael Myers 2.0 Pale Edition.
Thanks so much for taking the time to write out your analysis as well. Seeing as youve clearly taken the time to do some serious analysis I wanted to ask your interpretation on an issue.
You mention:
The only thing that bugs me about this is the engraving of the alien in the throne room (not sure what to call it, but the room with the big Engineer head). The engraving clearly depicts the alien xenomorph (in my opinion anyway).
Just curious on your interpretation of where that engraving came from. And on a sidenote, now that i think about it, any thoughts on the green crystal? They make a point to show it, but I cant think of any real significance. Thanks again for your analysis :) Im loving the amount of discussion this movie spawned.
The green crystal left me mystified. I imagine it will be explained in a sequel.
As to why the Xenomorph appears in the mural, I can only guess. It's also not explained. I think that the Engineers pretty clearly depicted themselves as creators in the mural, and the Xenomorph represents the destroyer. They recognized that creation is simply the opposite of destruction, and both are natural forces. The Destroyer is simply something they want to avoid at all costs.
I do not think the Xenomorph that we see in Prometheus is the first of its kind. I believe the Engineers had encountered the Xenomorph before (hence the Xenomorph in the mural). It was their opposite. Where the Engineers were the first link in the chain of life, the Xenomorph was the last. Where they sought to create life, the Xenomorph would destroy it.
Perhaps the Xenomorph is the worst endpoint of the Engineers' attempts to create life. When left unchecked, evolution sometimes derails towards the super-predatory and rapidly evolving level of the Xenomorph. This rapid evolution allows the rogue life form to become a near-perfect organism in terms of its survivability (which Ash touches on in the original Alien). This is why the Engineers keep a close watch on their projects, and destroy them when they begin to show violent and predatory tendencies. If left to its own devices, the predatory species will eventually approach the life form of a Xenomorph; this Destroyer form is the Engineers' worst fear -- it is not a creation of life, but a creation of anti-life.
Of course, this is all my own speculation. I don't know anything outside my own interpretation of the movie.
What do you think about it? If you have any ideas about the crystal I'd love to hear them. And what do you think about the mural? The mural depicting the Xenomorph really adds a layer of depth to the mystery of it all.
I think your analysis is pretty spot on and you delved way deeper than I did, so I dont have much to comment on other than the fact that I tend to agree :)
As far as the crystal goes, I am in the same boat as you. I have no clue.
Concerning the mural, I think it serves as a either a reminder/warning of what can become of the black ooze, or an explanation of how it is used to create the Xenomorph. I only came to the second conclusion after searching for images of the mural online however. There you can see that the sides of the mural clearly depict the face huggers on human/Engineer bodies. Link
I was only able to notice the xenomorph figure while in the theater,however, so I tend to give less credence to the second theory.
This is really solid and is what I have also concluded by reading many, many articles and comments. Some people ran a little too far with the religious symbolism, even though it is definitely present in the film.
Something people also forget is that the ending is Shaw leaving to find the answer to WHY they decided to kill us. That was NOT spelled out for us yet, so I agree with your outline that humanity simply became too ego-centric and run amok and needed to be wiped out before it started moving through the rest of the universe, hence the Engineer's rage at finding them face-to-face possibly moments after his mission briefing before being put into stasis.
I DESPERATELY wish that the writers/Scott made the "disaster" on LV-232 a little clearer. We still have no idea what precipitated the disaster, or what the disaster even was. There were bodies piled up but whatever was responsible vanished.
I am also hoping to have more background into the murals in the chamber: We clearly see both light and darkness represented, by the Engineer on the ceiling, and the xenomorph / "devil" on the wall, which lends to the idea that the black goo is a DNA modifier/accelerator that can be used both ways, but doesn't explain the specific image of the xenomorph.
All in all, the weak, hollow characters and their utter lack of precaution or professionalism ruined it for me. I never felt anything for anyone, or any tension save for the brief surgery scene.
This and the Engineer killed the movie for me. The disaster was absolutely pivotal, but it was completely unexplained. The Engineer was the most interesting part of the movie, but it turns out he was just an alien version of Jason Voorhees!
I'm glad they chose Biff from Back to the Future 2 to play Weyland.
I know I'm late but this is so funny
They did seem to overdue the makeup.
CONTINUED
But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.
The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)
And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.
(I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)
Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?
Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.
'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'
A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.
Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:
'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'
Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.
Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.
The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.
With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.
And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.
It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.
The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).
Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.
Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.
On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.
As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.
This was a great read. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I do have a question though. You say the black slime either is life creating or destroying based on the mindset of the individual. The botanist and geologist were killed by the weird penisy/vaggy snake things that evolved from mealworms in the dirt. Why were they affected by the slime? I presume their intentions would be harmless, if they had any at all. And yet they become destructive creatures. Thoughts?
If this is accurate: They were scared to die. They wanted to preserve there their own lives. As opposed to the engineer from the beginning.
Although it's one thing to fear murder, and another thing to willingly take your own life for a cause.
I think that the slime makes more sense if it was explained as "sin" in physical form. If we're going off the Christian undertones and parallels, the black slime is literally the mud that created Adam and Eve (AKA the Primordial Soup), and the Apple that Eve took. In the hands of the creator, the slime creates life. In the hands of someone who is self interested, the slime takes on its own creation and evolution, until it leads to death incarnation.
In that case, the worms which have no motivation beyond "survival," which would be considered neutral motivation. When David introduced the slime to Holloway, he showed no immediate signs of the slime's effects (supposing that the slime in the beginning was the same slime that they found) until after he had sex; which by some accounts of the bible is 'lust.' After that, his body began to destroy itself and Shaw became pregnant with a beast that did not resemble humanity, but resembled the act that created it, I.E. Lust/Sex.
How do I reach that conclusion? Two reasons:
Take it as you will, the monster that came from Shaw after it evolved, looked extremely...sexual. The exact phrase my friends and I used to describe the monster was "the giant vagina monster." Go back and watch the scene and tell me that did NOT look like a giant scary vagina. Not only that but the only act that the monster performed was violent insertion of it's reproductive organ (i.e. giant phallic tube, aka penis) into the Engineer's mouth, which spawned the Xenomorph. Thus, the black slime, which had no form until it was transferred in an act of lust, became lust incarnate.
Let's say you didn't buy any of the stuff above. Well, then there's a better explanation. The genetics of the Engineers and the Humans were a perfect match. The movie made this extremely clear, and wanted to make this known. Lets assume that the black slime is still "sin". The act by which it was transferred from Holloway to Shaw was sex, and it took on the form of the giant gross vagina monster. The monster, attacked the Engineer and it was implanted and it embodied the sin of "rage" thus taking on the form of an early xenomorph. Thus, combining "lust" and "rage," two of the 7 sins, creates a newer version of a Xenomorph, which the article indicates is the "destroyer."
So, all of this seems like a jumbled mess, but let me explain. The Xenomorph is an anti-creator. It is death incarnate. It is the grim reaper. It is created from sin, and once it embodies all the sins, it takes on the ultimate Xenomorph form. This explains why at the end of the movie, the Xenomorph is not a perfect evolution. It has only reproduced in two ways, lust and rage. This explains why the mural of the Xenomorphic figure was on the wall of the Engineer's ship. The xenomorph is death and is the anti-creator; Satan if you will.
So how do the worms fit in with this? They have no sins. They only exist to survive. Note that the worms killed the two scientists; but that the scientists showed no chest busting. The worms did not reproduce, they only killed. They did it to survive, and this is where the worms DNA comes into play. Remember when they cut the mutated worm in half? Yeah, the worm REGREW itself just like a worm does (this may be a Ridley Scott fuck up; only some types of worms can do this, not the common earthworm). Worms mate asexually, which means that they could reproduce that way, but the one thing to take away from this is that the worms do not reproduce in the same manner as the giant vagina monster. Not only that, the more that the geologist struggled, the harder the worm tried to kill. It has no self-awareness and no consciousness. It retained some of the properties of the Xenomorph, but not a pure form of the xenomorph. Thus, it only leaped in evolution; and didn't embody sin.
So, tl;dr: The black slime is sin. If one contains no sin, the slime will either cause you to evolve genetically or destroy you to create new life (thanks engineers). However, if the slime is used in a sinful manner, the new life will eventually take on the form of death, which is the xenomorph.
Edit: Added some stuff about the worms evolution (alternate evolutionary non-Christianity undertone stuff).
I also believe that the xenomorph can only be created from a higher thinking life form. Because the DNA of the Human and Engineer are almost exact, the xenomorph couldn't evolve from the worms. Mixing the DNA of the xenomorph and the worms produces a basic functioning, kill everything worm monster. Xenomorphs, if everything above is true, represents and embodies death. So taking a dumb-as-fuck worm and mixing it with xenomorph DNA would produce nothing more than a worm that kills everything for no reason and doesn't evolve further than that.
It could also very well be that the black shit is just Xenomorph DNA and mixing it with anything that is not a pure engineer will result in a bastardization of the Xenomorph until it gets to an evolutionary Xenomorph form (since we never really saw whether or not the worm reproduced when it went into the scientists stomach). Hence when it mixed with the human, it created a creature that looked sorta like a super facehugger, leading to the queen Xenomorph, since it mated with the Engineer, which is the pure form.
Edit 2: Application to AvP canon: The Predators evolved separately from the Engineers; found the Xenomorph DNA and decided to fuck around with the Mayans and the Engineers allowed this because Predators would fuck them up (Okay, initially I said this was a joke. But, I never read this: Apparently the Predators and Engineers did have a history together. The history is unknown, but they did have a connection, possibly to hunt them).
Edit 3: There is one actual edit I want to make to this that is separate from the worm issue. The one thing that bothered me was the fact that the Geologist came back to the ship "some how." I do believe that this is a parallel to 1 Corinthians 15:13, or "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised." If we assume the article is true, then Elizabeth's impossible birth parallel's Christ's birth, and Christ has returned in some crazy vagina monster form (I want to believe that maybe its the Anti-Christ, but that's just...not right). It's an odd assumption, BUT I do believe that this is what Ridley Scott was going for. I just don't know how or why the dude came back to life since there was nothing that could have caused it to have happened. He just got Xenomorph Worm Blood on him.
Edit 4: I took a swipe at answering the "Abortion" vs. "Cesarean" debate; I think if we buy the whole Space-Jesus argument this somewhat further proves the analogy. It could also very well be he just didn't want to piss off the anti-abortionists, but the large over use of religion makes this a bit hard to ignore.
Am I the only one that thinks the grown monster extracted from Shaw's belly is simply a good old Facehugger? Going on that, we can go back to the old "Alien is a huge rape analogy" thing. Which it is, in my opinion. Just a big-ass rape analogy.
The way I see it, the Engineer bioweapon is simply a DNA strain that gathers more biomass with each successive host..
In other words, it encountered the little worms in the vase-chamber, resequenced their DNA, and turned into those proto-facehugger-snake worms.. then those encountered the two team members and -attempted- to subsume their biomass (the whole Space Zombie thing that the mohawked guy became doesn't really fit into Xenomorph canon at all).
The same virus encountered Holloway's sperm as Holloway was putting the business to Shaw, and so became a mutated sperm that we can assume would have burst out of Shaw had she not removed it surgically.
We see this same mutant-sperm facehugging the Engineer at the end of the movie.
It looks as if the goal of the Engineer bioweapon virus is to collect biomass, modifying itself with each "birth" to become a more efficient weapon.
So, basically, Xenomorphs are Tyranids.
Seriously, did no one notice that there were already worms in the dirt? There's a shot of peoples' feet as they enter the chamber, seemingly just to show that there were already earthworms wriggling in the dirt.
The black slime, however it may be related to "intention," pulls genetic information from life that it comes in contact - that's why we share DNA with the engineers, and that's why we got an entire shot of earthworms so we could be prepared for the evil worm creatures...and why the dog that gets attacked by a Facehugger in Alien 3 is quadrapedal.
What do you have to say about the thought that the black goo is "eitr," as described in Norse mythology, as the liquid which "created all life" and yet is also extremely poisonous, flowing from Jörmungandr and other serpents?
Certainly that theory/analogy ties into this "create life but also destroy" idea that the film is showing us.
Wow. I wish I were smart enough to extrapolate a thesis like this.
Hmm I think the black slime is better described as Chi (Qi) which can manifest in both positive and negative aspects (yin and yang) and develop along either route accordingly. Especially as the black slime is a powerful creation catalyst in the first instance but only become a destructive force later.
Yea, this makes more sense. Although the intent or the disposition of the entity that uses it is still significant. If we hold hands and think pure thoughts (thanks FZ) then all will be well :)
Some of the AvP books stipulate that xenomorphs take on similar forms and traits as their hosts. This can be seen in even the movies. Alien 3 where the xenomorph comes from the dog. There is many dog-like traits. In the AvP books, the most cunning xenomorph are those from humans and Predators. The predators actually will only actively hunt and trophy the xenomorphs from higher beings. I am foggy on the details (been so long) but the cattle that are from the alien planet that are infected are seen as more of a nuisance more than anything until sheer numbers overwhelm. I believe that once a being is created of the black goop, it continues to perpetuate the evil of the host and the future beings. It continues to evolve itself towards true perfection evil and the ultimate destroyer. With each new sin it touches, it continues to grow, to evolve.
Edit: Alien 3 for the dog and ended a note on AvP Book.
It's always been my understanding that the Xenomorph "remix" the DNA of their host animal to some degree, possibly to gain the evolutionary attributes that made the host organism successful. One could introduce sentience to the equation by stating that the Xenomorph tend to target the most dominant life forms available simply because they are the ones who should yeild the best genetic material.
This is the flaw I see with that idea too.
So...once we killed Jesus (a benevolent alien ambassador) we pissed them off they decided to destroy us. So...is it that they then went to that planet to engineer something to destroy us but it ended up killing them and so humanity caught a break since the engineers fucked up with their biological "manhattan project?" So then dumbass old man wakes the guy up and the engineer guy's first thought is "oh yea! I I was supposed to go kill the humans. Let's roll."
Do u think that the engineers failed because instead of using the primordial soup to create life and good they planned to use it for destruction and thus doomed themselves in the process since their intentions were bad?
Actually, no. This theory doesn't hold water. The way we found LV-223 was by following the star diagrams carved on 35,000-year old tablets. These predate the death of Jesus by 33,000 years, so the Engineers must necessarily have occupied LV-223 well before we incurred their wrath.
I think the opinion expressed in the analysis that OP posted is a reasonable one, although it requires us to accept the idea that the goo's behavior is affected by emotions (like the stuff in Ghostbusters 2). The installation on LV-223 was not built for military purposes, at least not exclusively. Rather, it was a base from which to launch their missions, both for creating and destroying life. The Engineers there were telepathically linked with their emissary--Jesus--and when he died, all the negativity of his murderers was felt by the Engineers on LV-223, and that corrupted the goo and led to their demise, even as they planned ours.
pretty much this.
the engineers hated us because we were murderous and ignorant, so they turned their means of creation (from which i believe created us from them, thus why we look so much like them) into death. from their bad intentions, creatures were born in the form of those snakes and such to kill them.
In the final scene take a look at what the monster looks like (ITS A GIANT FUCKING FACEHUGGER) and it latches on to the engineer who has horribly malicious intentions and what does it create? THE FUCKING ULTIMATE KILLING MACHINE. THE PERFECT GENOCIDAL ELEMENT. From blind bloodlust and hatred Alien was born, and now you get to watch all the alien movies with this knowledge in tow (i did this and holy shit it explains their evolution and different forms)
The snake things were snake-like because the ooze spilled onto the worm-infested floor and caused a rapid evolution in the worms, but that evolution led to a result very similar to the Xenomorphs (acid blood, mouth-dick, etc).
Perhaps the Jockey DNA is the antithesis to the black goo (which in its pure form would be some kind of mega Xenomorph DNA?) and so they destroy each other, but when the black goo comes into contact with "neutral" DNA it corrupts it instead of destroying it entirely
In every Alien film that is considered canon, the android refers to the alien as a perfect life-form, or at least hints at it as such. Maybe, just maybe, after creating humans tens of thousands of years ago, they created the xenomorph and decided that in doing so they outdid themselves, hence the carving (e.g., posting photos of your beautiful kid on the internet). Humans were created prior to the xenomorph, were considered a failure, so the Engineers (just scientists attempting to create the perfect life-form) decided to test their new creation out on us. Recall, if you will the number of planets capable of supporting life depicted in the holographic map: there aren't very many. So maybe they just wanted to clean the beaker for a fresh experiment, and what better way to do that than to test their new creation. Unfortunately for them, their baby got the best of them.
I bet if you go see the film a second time and watch very carefully, you'll see a split-second capture of a xenomorph in a corner somewhere (just a tail, maybe?). We don't see any eggs because the dome we saw in this film did not store that particular recipe. The mother alien was in one of the other domes, and in a sad attempt to survive, the impregnated Engineer of the ship beneath it flew off-world and crashed on a different planet. And the rest is canon.
Keep in mind, David initiated the first holographic recording. Maybe he saw something the rest of the crew did not. Maybe what he saw helped him pick the correct canister after admiring the xenomorph in the mural. Seriously, how did he know? ("He said to try harder"???)
When David said "he said to try harder," he was returning from talking to Weyland and was accosted by Vickers trying to find out what her father was thinking. In the conversation between Vickers and Weyland, we find out that Vickers has been trying to stop Weyland from visiting the Engineers and attempting to continue his reign. My only thought of that quote from Weyland, by proxy through David, was that Weyland was telling his daughter that she could do anything she liked, but she would never stop him from reaching his goal. I hadn't considered it might have an alternate meaning..
I thought David just knew things the crew didn't because he spent the two year flight tracing the roots of every language back to the mother language given by the Engineers in order to do exactly what he did and act as translator. Which explains how he would have known how to operate machinery.
David picked that specific canister because it wasn't "sweating." The other canisters had condensation on them because of the atmosphere change, and David wanted an uncorrupted canister to study. That's why he sprays said canister with liquid nitrogen (or some other cooling agent) before packing it up.
Honestly I much prefer this explanation. It leaves in enough religious stuff to make sense but leaves the rest of the over-extrapolation out. Thank you good sir have an upvote!
I want to know WHY David planted the black seed in Holloway and started everything. It seemed as if he knew or was carrying out some agenda the way he announced the pregnancy. Can someone help me understand this part better?
David was hoping Halloway would knock up Liz, which is exactly what happened. He was trying to get her into cryo ASAP to preserve her "child" for the ride home. This could have been part of his programming, to preserve the creature, as was the case in the original Alien. However, it seems to me that David was grooming Liz to be a mother, taking a liking to her and keeping her safe, etc, because he wanted to create life with her, something he cannot do because he is a robot. Also in a twisted way he felt he was doing her a favor, he knew that her inability to have children bothered her, and in a way he was granting her wish.
My only problem is, after she aborts it, he has no reaction at all. Nobody does. So if his intention was to freeze the alien, wouldnt he be like..."dammit, Weyland is gonna be pissed." Or something?
I agree, its a huge hole in the plot. Same thing with the zombie attack on the cargo bay. Homeboy wastes like 10 redshirts and no one ever mentions it again. I'm hoping that there is a director's cut out there that will fill in the gaps. Ridley is known for vastly improving his films for the home video release.
Doesn't he say something like "what would you do to find out the truth"? before doing that. Maybe he just wanted to know. I also remember him talking to Weyland before that (or was it after), so maybe Weyland told him to.
She does try to kill it. Immediately after she runs the decontamination protocol which appears to kill the alien fetus.
"We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it"
Unless you count the fact that when they come upon the pile of engineer bodies they very clearly say "Jeez it looks like something burst out of them"
Agreed, was wondering how he missed this. I personally just think it was Ridley Scott not wanting to get himself in trouble with pro-lifers.
It kind of bothers be that people have all these theories about why she said caesarean instead of abortion. A big ass monster (she saw the picture) is about to rip through her stomach, and she knows it. An abortion happens through the vagina. Would you want to try to pull that big scary motherfucker through your vagina? And then, I'm pretty sure an abortion doesn't just automatically pull out the fetus. The procedure kills it, then removes it, which takes more time than just pulling it out, which is important when you think the thing inside of you is seconds away from eviscerating your insides.
Thank you. Let's not read so far into everything that it becomes a convoluted mess. She has a fucking alien in her belly that wants out. It's clearly terrifying and extremely painful. I think she solved the problem pretty well given the circumstance.
He seems to miss a lot and jump to a bunch of conclusions. For example his mural of the life giver with his "abdomen torn open" where it seems the wound he's seeing is simply a crack in the wall.
better picture of the mural: http://www.prometheus-movie.com/media/concept001.jpg
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Here's the thing - they're all great points. Maybe drawing a long bow on some of them, but enough evidence from the film is provided for me to say 'okay' to each of them (I think the death of Christ causing the black goo to turn on the Engineers from several lightyears away might be a stretch, but I digress).
But with a script that raises about a hundred different ideas - and resolves precisely zero of those ideas - there's bound to be a handful of themes that you COULD read into the film. There's bound to be some level of profundity that COULD be inferred from the final product, since the final product leaves every single tangential rambling or thought that it contemplates completely unresolved. Conversely, there are a far greater number of moments which completely collapse on further analysis. There's a monstrous amount of bullshit that the above critique chooses to completely ignore.
This is a crew that has traveled across however many lightyears of space to some wholly unknown and mysterious hunk of rock, on which there is good reason to suspect that life exists, but collectively possesses the same level of professional protocol or plain ol' commonsense as the garden-variety eggplant. Why, on a foreign planet with the suspicion of extra-terrestrial life, would the entire ensemble be so eager to remove their helmets and breathe the Martian air, oblivious to the contamination and infection risks? Vickers can hardly hold back her excitement when she makes a human candle out of the infected Holloway, but even she's more than happy to allow an entire platoon of potentially infected crew-members back on the ship she's so eager to protect. Also, the whole removing the helmet thing serves absolutely no plot purpose. Maybe I could overlook crap like that if it advanced or facilitated some story element, but the whole ordeal was, as much of the movie is, completely unnecessary and redundant.
Why, after spending two years in hibernation, would the biologist - the BIOLOGIST, mind - be so keen to GTFO of the area the second they discover (dead and harmless) alien BIOLOGY? If he's the biologist, what did he think his job was going to be? Furthermore, how did the guy whose job it was to map the alien caverns GET LOST on his way out of the same alien caverns, when the rest of the gang made it back with no trouble? FURTHERMORE, why the fucking fuck did the same biologist who freaked the fuck out over some harmless and dead alien biology later decide he was going to play peak-a-boo with the very much alive and threatening snake-like alien biology? Bullshit after bullshit after bullshit.
Then you've gotta ask yourself the questions of why half the crew was in the film in the first place. As near as I can tell, we had a zero sum gain from the Scottish nurse, co-pilot one, co-pilot two (the guy who 'fucked up' in Danny Boyle's Sunshine), Fifield, Milburn, a bunch of mechanics, engineers and mercenaries who aren't even used, and even Vickers. Seriously, I cannot work out why Vickers was in the film at all, other than to deliver that awfully hackneyed '...father!' line to Weyland, and to open up more strands for Christ-like analysis as per above. An ensemble cast of seventeen is a ridiculous number. That's more than Hamlet, for fuck's sake. All it did was create confusion, and, as is becoming a theme, unresolved redundancy. And I swear to God half of them just plain vanished in a truck at one point.
And there's a bunch of other BS as well. Shaw performs acts of super-human strength with a giant hole in her guts. On top of that, the quarantine crew who were so eager to put her to cryo-sleep and preserve the xeno inside her are fairly cool with the fists she throws at them and the abortion she administers shortly thereafter. They even invite her out for a nice spacewalk to meet ET minutes later. They find a football-field sized cavern on an earth-sized planet within seconds. A 5 kg squid-child becomes a 5000 kg squid monster in the space of an hour, without consuming any matter. The black goo is some plothole panacea, serving whatever function Scott and Lindelof need it to in a particular scene. Shaw dreams in the third person, for some reason.
So I suppose my TL;DR would be the following: yes, you can read some very deep themes into Prometheus, but it's still rife with countless plotholes which lie on the border between stupidity and incompetence. Alluding to themes which the filmmaker may or may not have intended to incorporate do not make up for the absence of any logic or intelligence in the script.
Shorter TL;DR: you can infer virtually anything if you inspect a piece of work closely enough - even Vanilla Ice predicting the collapse of the World Trade Centre.
I agree wholeheartedly with your points - it's unfortunately what grounded the film for me. I've enjoyed the post-film analysis more than the film for all these reasons I observed cringingly in the theater. If you want to have an epic metaphorically dense sci-fi masterpiece, no matter how fascinating and clever your thematic allusions, you cannot do it at the expense of the basic requirements of plot, character development, pacing and consistency.
Absolutely perfectly put.
Why Vickers? Why Vickers? Because 124 minutes of Charlize Theron in a skintight bodysuit.
This was all practice for the role of Samus Aran she will play next.
I managed to backburner most of the plotholes you brought up in an effort to enjoy the film, but Shaw-after-surgery was the killer for me. Everyone reacts to her with such apathy, you'd think it's a regular occurance for her to cut herself open and staple herself shut. Nobody bats an eye when she's constantly moaning and doubling over in pain, nobody (who wasn't privy to the pregnancy/abortion) questions why suddenly had major surgery, nor do they seem to care.
It was at this point that all the rest of the WTF came flooding back and tore me right out of the movie. From that point on, my two goals were to see in what way Vickers would die, and to see when they finally show the xenomorph in a form we're familiar with.
TL;DR: About time someone brought up all the glaring nonsense, thank you.
I have a theory for why Vickers was in the movie. Although we think Vickers dies at the end, we're not shown her dead body, so for all we know she might yet live. If that is the case and she does live, she perfect for populating the Alien race.