Allow it.

g.man wrote:

I have started reading that Jesus Built My Hotrod thang that Reg linked to. It's rather long and poorly written, so I shall return to it later. Smacked of geekboy blathering. ringadingdingmydangadonglinglong g.man

The g in g.man stands for Gibbytronix amirite?

Made my day with that post g. I shall now spend the afternoon listening to Al and co.

Just finished reading that Jesus theory thang that reg posted. While there is clearly a tiny amount of truth compared to some of the symbolism in the film, , the whole piece reeks of fail. There's nothing worse than Internet fangeeks taking the germ of an idea and batting it clean out the park. Just once it would be nice to read a piece where the author concludes that while there's a bit of religious symbolism in this film it's still an incoherent mess.

fucking Lost

g.man

Also: A pretty good close up of what this guy was turning into. Nice smile too.

BUT WHY?

Overall I did enjoy the film, and a lot of the things I personally moaned about can be expended upon and answered in a sequel.  What were the Engineers running from?  Why did they record everything?  Well, maybe they were just told to record everything (we do in my job!), and no-one complained that we didn't know what the Engineer in Alien was doing when he was flying about with a stack of alien eggs.

But the total lack of consistency about the black goo irritates still.  I suppose it could have eventually done to Holloway what it did to Fifield, but I don't see how that helped it propagate at all.  If it wanted to get stuff into wombs to explode out as squid monsters like with Shaw, why did turning Fifield into a monster have any effect; especially when he killed the forgettable Scottish doctor.  

There should have been some structure to the way it tried to propagate.  Turn worms into snakes that go into people's stomachs, no problem; unlike the Alien face huggers, it looks like it kills its host, as the Engineer at the end seemed dead when the alien popped out of him.  

Maybe it just has random effects, but I can't agree with that as a good method of storytelling. And that utter bollocks in the interview that talking about "what does the black goo do?" is the same as talking about whether or not Deckard was a replicant?  NOT the same, nowhere near as subtle, and basically total crap.

The film definitely drives you down the road of thinking it's a weapon, and the sole living Engineer was going to pop off to Earth and distribute it liberally around.  Which is fine.  If it was a blob of Alien alien DNA, then that would make sense too, as whatever it mixes with produces some sort of alien form (mix with worms, get killer snakes, mix with human female, get squid monster, mix with Engineer, produce Alien alien).

But 3 genetically-identical people are exposed to it; 2 by ingesting it, one by falling in it.  I guess maybe it sent Fifield mad because he was only rubbed in it rather than it getting inside him, and the deconstruction we saw in the Engineer at the start would have been mimicked by Holloway, but it took longer because it was designed for Engineers rather than humans?

This still doesn't mesh that well with it being used as something for good in the opening sequence.

Elmlea wrote:

This still doesn't mesh that well with it being used as something for good in the opening sequence.

Atomic energy can be used as power, or as a weapon.

One would imagne the goo was a similar discovery.

They find a way of seeding life via this wierd goo stuff. It might not even be their invention, it might be something they found, hence the murals of worshi.

Then some radicals weaponise it.

I AGREE WITH REG.

Tempy wrote:

Elmlea wrote:

This still doesn't mesh that well with it being used as something for good in the opening sequence.

Atomic energy can be used as power, or as a weapon. One would imagne the goo was a similar discovery. They find a way of seeding life via this wierd goo stuff. It might not even be their invention, it might be something they found, hence the murals of worshi. Then some radicals weaponise it.

Aw, that's just a cop-out answer.  Nuclear energy can indeed heat water to provide electricity, or in an uncontrolled way can produce an enormous explosion.  But those are 2 distinct different mechanisms of action; doing the same thing to a block of uranium doesn't sometimes produce an explosion and sometimes produce energy.  Doing the same thing to the black liquid, however, produces different results.

Ok, I've just read something that suggests that Fifield is killed by the acid that the killer snake produces when he tries to cut it off Milburn's arm.  His corpse lands in the black goo, and the resulting monster zombie thing is due to the fact that he was already dead; if he were alive, he'd have suffered the same fate as Holloway and the original Engineer at the start.

I can get behind that.  I'm convinced Holloway was undergoing the same DNA-level deconstruction as the Engineer at the start as well, so the only thing I don't understand is how the "life giving" stuff Scott's spoken about the start being about fits in with the other stuff this thing does.

Maybe that Engineer at the start wasn't trying to seed life in a nice way; maybe that was some random planet and he was going to destroy it.  The DNA he releases could be nasty alien stuff, after all, in the same way that Holloway put nasty alien DNA into Shaw?

Elmlea wrote:

Tempy wrote:

Maybe they did do something different, who am I the writing cast of Prometheus? No, Ridley wants us all to speculate. And we have, for MANY POSTS I made a far more interesting boardgame thread, GO THERE.

Shush Tempy.  There's a difference between some interesting up-for-discussion points like whether or not Deckard's a replicant or where the Space Jockey from Alien was going with his eggs.  

If this is an attempt to engender discussion then it's a coarse, irritating way to do it, by deliberately making the black stuff do different things.

Don't make me an enemy, I agree with you!

Elmlea wrote:

BUT WHY? Overall I did enjoy the film, and a lot of the things I personally moaned about can be expended upon and answered in a sequel.  What were the Engineers running from?  Why did they record everything?  Well, maybe they were just told to record everything (we do in my job!), and no-one complained that we didn't know what the Engineer in Alien was doing when he was flying about with a stack of alien eggs.

I think the Engineers were running from a xenomorph outbreak.  The Engineer in Alien wasn't flying about with a stack of eggs, that ship was the site of another outbreak - but a more recent one than in Prometheus, which is why the eggs were still around.  The Alien Engineer was probably trying to get off the planet when he started feeling a bit funny.  If the Prometheus had got there a few thousand years earlier they may have also found an infested planet like the crew of the Nostromo did.

Alien was set on a different planet.

Good call in the comments section on Peter Weyland/ Guy Pierce looking like Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China.

The more I look at the mutated geologist the more I see Ridley Scott's face.