It is The Chaos. Were I Hollis I'd type it in allcaps.

People will sit through the fucking Star Trek movies and not bat an eyelid.

Well aren't you the fly in my theoretical Savlon

Bzzzz. **gaaasp**

Brooks wrote:

Well, it's lazy or it's polite insofar as it leaves it open to entertaining post-match speculation, which seems a valid artistic tactic to me.

That was one intention; they've even publicly compared it to the "is Deckard a replicant?" discussion post Blade Runner. It's an extremely lazy tactic compared to that.

As far as the captain is aware, the two scientists are perfectly safe down there as there is no life. IIRC. Plus, he is black, therefore doesn't care about two white guys, only about gettin with white wimmin.

I posted a few pages back why the David /Holloway thing makes sense to me. Check that out, not going to explain again. I think it makes a lot of sense. David even asks Holloway how far he is prepared to go.

Elmlea wrote:

Yeah, those bits didn't bother me. Even the exobiologist playing with the killer alien snake could have been explained; utter astonishing fascination at seeing an example of alien life for the first time?

You can't explain away the biologist being terrified at the thought of an alien life form one minute, literally running in the opposite direction from it, then going all touchy feely seconds later when he's faced with one. You're either scared or you're not.

Elmlea wrote:

Kow wrote:

I posted a few pages back why the David /Holloway thing makes sense to me. Check that out, not going to explain again. I think it makes a lot of sense. David even asks Holloway how far he is prepared to go.

Oh go on, at least find me a page number. I figured it was David's playful, experimental nature, and Holloway was an easy mark as he was pissed.

It was this page. I don't know how to get it to scroll to the relevant post. How do you do that?

Kow wrote:

He's not trying to kill him, although he doesn't seem to worry about it, he's using him to create a new form of life and thus join the ranks of living creatures.  When he discovers Shaw is pregnant with a creature, he insists on taking her cross, which, for me at least, symbolised his belief that he had succeeded in joining the ranks of living creatures. It was important for him to keep it with him as part of his predilection for tokenistic human behaviour. When she takes it back, it symbolises the human domination over whatever aberration David has managed to create. .

That's very good. The only problem I have with that is that when the writers themselves offered up such a simplistic explanation of why the black fluid did different things, I can't believe they're smart enough to have written your take on things in deliberately! Works for me though. I had David doing it out of a childlike sense of experimentation, but yours fits in even better. He should have done it to Vickers, though.

Elm, deliberate-ness/intention is irrelevant - if an audience member can construct a reading they're comfortable with, the product is a success.

The stuff with the cross is too clear for it to have been just a coincidence. They cut so much in the editing that I can't believe they left in the two scenes with the cross without it having a clear symbolic meaning. The meaning is obviously about the creation of life, and the fact that David is central to both scenes is telling.

Brooks wrote:

Elm, deliberate-ness/intention is irrelevant - if an audience member can construct a reading they're comfortable with, the product is a success.

I see what you mean, and I agree for the most part, but only really when it comes to discussing character motivation/intention, "is Deckard a replicant" or "was Tyler Durden real?" elements. The mechanics of how something works should be at least discernible from the movie, though. 

I'm sure I came up with some methods of action for the black goo that satisfied me that'd mean it meets your criteria, though. It disassembles engineers to DNA, and does the same to humans, but the stuff being stale/humans being different means it takes much longer, hence Holloway Wollstonecraft have eventually turned into DNA as per the opening scene if he wasn't killed. 

It exists to reproduce, hence why it impregnates females however it gets there. And Fyfield was already dead by the time he landed face first in it, having had snake acid spat at him, so that's why he became a zombie crab man.

Kow wrote:

We don't know he was dead. The air was breathable. Or am I misremembering? I don't think the gender of what it impregnates matters. John Hurt in Alien?

So maybe there was a creature living inside Holloway as he was killed? If so, that brings me back to confusion as to why a genetically-identical engineer could drink it and disassemble into constituent DNA parts, while the human gets monstered up.

Well, the engineer is clearly not identical genetically. We see his dna split up and reassembled with new parts. 

The worms also appear to be mutated, not something which has been birthed. Maybe it does need a female to actually gestate something new. Or maybe it acts differently in different circumstances. It mutates cells basically. Maybe in women in the womb, in men it just takes control of cells.