Warning, this post is literally nothing but spoilers for Prometheus. I mentioned in my review that the script had numerous plot holes, and I really need to vent them out, so I’ve listed them below. Do not read this until you’ve watched the film, and if anyone can fill the holes in for me please go ahead. I repeat, do not read this post until you have seen the film.1. Why is David riding a bicycle and shooting hoops? Is he trying to impress someone? I understand why he’s developing language skills, as he’s researching things as yet undiscovered, but what’s with the sports? He’s a robot!
2. When Holloway sees the lines on the planet that prove the alien presence, why does no-one suggest scoping the area out for a while? Even just a little fly around would have been nice.
3. What exactly are the holograms for? David starts one in the caves and another on the Space Jockey deck, but who are they for? They’re useful for him and us, but who made them? They could be some kind of ship’s log, but if so couldn’t someone have said that in one line of dialogue?
4. When Shaw, Holloway, David and Ford flee the caves, outside there’s two go-karts and a minibus. Two get on each of the karts, and no-one gets into the bus, yet they all drive off (at the time we assume Fifield and Millburn are in there). Who is driving it? You could argue that there’s a nameless crew member that stayed behind as a driver, and headed off to avoid the storm slightly too early for the others to get in, but there’s no proof of this.
5. Once David has rescued Shaw and Holloway, Janek mentions they don’t know where Fifield and Millburn are, but there’s a map showing their position! He uses it in the next scene. Plus, Janek seems pretty lackadaisical about two members of the crew being stranded on an alien planet. He practically says LOL. Also, how convenient is it that everyone has a surname beginning with a different letter?
6. Why does David cave in to Vickers’ threats? He’s a robot, there’s not a lot she could do to him.
7. Millburn the biologist is supposedly cowardly, as he is easily convinced by Fifield to run away at the site of a decapitated body (understandable), and later when he hears there’s a lifeform somewhere nearby, he says he’s heading in the opposite direction. So why, when he and Fifield go to the vase chamber, does he suddenly want to make friends with the alien there? He can’t even see the entire creature, so for all he knows it’s some giant beasty with a strange proboscis. Why did they even decide to stay in the cave full of weird bubbling vases anyway? It’s the exact room, with the dead decapitated body outside of it, that they ran away from earlier.
8. Millburn and Fifield die when no-one is watching the monitors, because Vickers and Janek are getting it on in her quarters, right? Firstly, how come Janek didn’t order someone else to watch the monitors, and secondly, even if no-one was there, don’t these guys have TiVo? Just rewind the feed and see what happened. We have it in 2012; I’m guessing it’s still around in 2094.
9. Why did Janek, the captain and pilot of the ship, go to investigate the disappearance of Millburn and Fifield? Surely he’s pretty integral to the running of the ship.
10.What exactly was David’s plan with the black goo? He gave some to Holloway in his drink; did he know he would have sex with Shaw and impregnate her with an alien? If so, why did he do that too? Was he curious, or trying to kill Holloway? Why?
11.Why did the infected Fifield come back to the ship to try and kill everyone? He was the one character I really wanted to die, and he’s the only one who came back to life! Typical. I thought Millburn would have come back with a chest-burster in him, seeing as an alien went down his throat and Fifield had his face melted with acid. Also, why did they go out and investigate Fifield’s clearly dead body (the helmet is smashed with a deadly atmosphere, and his legs are bent over his shoulders) seeing as there’s no way he could have just turned up there on his own, being dead and all.
12.Why does David tell Shaw she is pregnant? If he wanted an alien specimen, surely telling her will just make her try and abort it, and if he wanted to kill her, then not telling her will result in the alien bursting through her stomach and killing her that way. Being pregnant with a baby alien was probably the last thing she was expecting, especially seeing as she was barren and had only had sex 10 hours ago and not before for 28 months.
13.After she wakes up from being sedated by David, Shaw finds it pretty easy to escape from the medics and run to Vickers’ quarters with no-one chasing her. No-one comes for the entire time she is in there.
14.After the impromptu caesarean I could have done with a scene of Shaw breaking down from the intensity of what she’d just gone through. In the past few hours she’d lost her husband, found out she was pregnant when she thought she was barren, discovered the ‘child’ was in fact a killer alien, had a caesarean whilst fully awake and watching it, had the cut literally stapled shut and then fought the creature that had just gestated inside her. I’d say that warrants a little exasperation.
15.Did I miss a scene where everyone on board found out about, and was cool with, Peter Weyland being on board the ship? After Shaw’s surgery the rest of the crew seems OK with him being there. It was pretty damn obvious he was going to be onboard too, seeing Guy Pearce was highly billed in the opening credits. Stop doing that kind of thing. And making Vickers his daughter is pointless, unsurprising and ridiculous.
16.Ripping David the android’s head off is a nice nod to Ash’s fate in Alien, but is it possible for a robot to survive one of these films? Please?
17.When Vickers and Shaw are running from the crashing spaceship, why in the name of LV426 do they not run sideways? I hate when films do this. There’s something rolling behind you in a relatively straight line, so instead of getting out of the way you decide to race it. Insane. Shaw only survives because she trips and rolls out the way. I did like that the last two alive were the two main women, just like in Alien, and similarly the blonde dies and the brunette survives.
18.Shaw’s air supply is supposedly running out at the end of the film, yet she’s barely been away from the ship. Earlier, Fifield and Millburn were away for longer, and were expected to survive overnight when they got stranded. Yes, they were in the chambers with breathable atmosphere, but they had to keep their helmets up because it was going to get cold, so they must have had to survive on their own air supplies.
19.The alien that Shaw had aborted grows pretty fucking huge seeing as it’s had no organic matter to feed on other than a little blood Shaw left behind.
20.At the end, Shaw is told that there are other ships. Does she check them all for surviving Engineers, or just leave in the first ship she finds? I’d have much preferred that the final shot be of her silhouette, with an axe in one hand and David decapitated head in the other, heading off to take out the surviving aliens.
Wow, I didn’t realise I had so many problems with the script. Am I being too harsh? Or stupid? Was a lot of this explained? Let me know.
*EDIT* Thanks to everyone for all the comments and page views so far, the response I’ve had from this is phenomenal. It turns out my list of plot holes wasn’t quite complete, and many of you have posed a few more. I’ve tried to give credit where it’s due, but apologies if I’ve left someone off. Also, some of these get a bit science-y, and I’ve not researched any of the theories, so please don’t shout at me if they’re wrong. Sections in brackets are from me.
21. How exactly did they manage to reanimate a head that’d be dead for several thousand years? I’m pretty sure in 77 years time that technology isn’t going to be available. Also, why did it explode? – Anon
22. Organic molecules do not form in oxygen-rich running water. – Anon
23. It’d be nice if they’d clarified at some point why the Hell the Engineers wanted to kill humans, and why did they think that the black goo, which creates a completely different, far more dangerous race, would be the best way to do it? (Personally I think it was for sport.) – J/Michael Shaw
24. The DNA was a perfect match, yet the Engineers are big, bald and pale. (My personal theory is that had the physical differences are due to environmental differences between Earth and LV-223 in terms of gravity, proximity to the Sun, etc.) – J
25. If the Engineers created humans, did they also create all the other life on Earth? From what, and how are they all different? Did all the different species evolve from that one Engineer? If so, how are we all different? – J/areanimator
26. The crew are really very unprofessional and lacking in protocol for such an important and well funded mission. (Perhaps these were the only people willing to sacrifice 5 years of their lives for a wild goose chase.) – Anon
27. Could they not have detected the oncoming storm, seeing as they just arrived from space? And don’t they have larger versions of Fifield’s ‘puppies’ they could send down to scout out the terrain first? (Hell, can’t they send the ‘puppies’ into the caves from the safety of the ship? There could have been aliens waiting just inside the cave for them.) – Anon
28. You can’t run around after having your body cut open to your uterus, even if the wound was closed with some stitches. Your body goes into complete shock, the stitches cannot make up for the fact tissue was cut and muscles were cut which are essential for your core, and by extension for your body to perform any kind of walking movement. – Anon
29. The two co-pilots at the end didn’t really need to kill themselves. They say Janek is a bad pilot (really? Weyland paid a fortune for a crappy captain?) but he doesn’t really do a lot of piloting, in fact he even says “Hands off” of the steering to crash into the ship. There’s also apparently a member of Weyland’s security who doesn’t go down to the planet with Weyland and co, who Janek is essentially killing at that point too, but fair enough it’s for the good of humanity. – Anon
30. Why do the cryo-beds have a function that allows David to see their dreams? (Possibly to see if they’re in distress or suffering some kind of psychological trauma from the cryo-sleep, but that’s a stretch). – Beta Max
31. Why was the medical machine only male-calibrated? OK, it was probably there to operate on Weyland, but it makes little sense to make machinery just for men or women. – Anon
32. How did the Engineer survive the toxic LV-223 atmosphere without a helmet when he attacks Shaw at the end? He must have needed the helmet to breathe, yet made it from the crashed ship to Vickers’ crashed pod pretty easily. – Anon
33. Why was it a secret that Weyland was on his ship, and why was it pegged as a surprise reveal that Vickers’ was his daughter? (Hollywood tension-generating bullshit.) – Anon
34. Why did the Engineers point all the ancient civilisations towards a military installation? (My guess: the Engineers thought we might have come back all guns blazing, so sent us to a battle-ready moon/planet instead of their home world.) – Anon
35. Once they discover that the Engineers have the same DNA as humans, they don’t make the logical connection that what killed the Engineers will probably kill the humans too, and no extra quarantine methods or safety precautions are put in place. – Areanimator
36. The Engineers were running away from something, yet ran towards a room full of deadly black goo that presumably they manufactured. (The room had the giant stone head in, meaning it could be of religious importance, and they thought prayer was their only option at that point. Alternatively, they may have been running towards the room to trap the black goo inside.) – Areanimator
37. The hologram of Earth resembles modern Earth, rather than how it looked at the damn of man. –The Movie Waffler
38. Why did Weyland think he could just rock up to an alien moon, have a nice chat with the Engineers and that they could give him immortality? (He was nearly dead, so was probably grasping at whatever straws he could reach.) – Anon
39. Apparently the Engineers were trying to leave LV-223 because it had all gone wrong, but how? There was no trace of active aliens on the planet. (They may have been trying to seal off the experiment going wrong into the cave with the vases, but one Engineer tripped and got decapitated by the door?) – Lisa
40. After decapitation, David’s head manages to stay pretty damn close to his body, even after takeoff, crashing and rolling all over the place. Seems pretty unlikely unless the white ‘blood’ is a damn good glue. – Christophe Abi Akle
Oh, and for those of you looking for a more informed, science-based look at the gaping holes woven together to form the net of this film, check out Stephen Gaskell’s post over at Creepy Treehouse.
Life Vs Film 
Nope.. your mostly correct.. but nitpicking on a few places – taht might not be plot holes at all..1. bike+hoops = training to be humanand that – besides his obvious non-human acting tells us he is a robot.. would have loved him beeing more human – and then afterwards we got tol he was a robot.2. who cares for scoping – they wanted to open the gifts today :)3. hologram problem.. yeah. they are for others.. like a dying echo..6. the robots motifs delude even Ridlley Scott.. why why why.. we will never know.. he is a robot.. thats why.. there's lot of ilogical problems in the movie – but i liked it like a problem child who sometimes do good 🙂
1. I agree it would have been better if we didn't immediately David he was a robot (I thought Charlize Theron was going to turn out to be one) but then we'd have missed out on the amazing promo video.2. Yeah I suppose, but it was a bit hasty, having travelled all that way to be eaten by a giant sand worm or something. Then I suppose Holloway is meant to be a look-before-you-leap kind of guy, but what about the rest of teh crew?I liked the movie (though my review seems to come off far more negative than I intended) I'd just been hoping for a bit more. Still better than most other films out these days.
few more to your list:1. You cannot stick wires into 2000-yeard-old dead alien head and make it "talk" to you.2. why did their heads explode again?3. no need to destroy the whole body to put some DNA in the water.4. Organic molecules do not form in oxygen-rich running water
Yes, yes, yes and yes. My lord there were a lot of plot holes in this film! Thanks for the additions.
Cool post! It is definitely possible to be entertained by a good film and still find so many hilarious holes.As you obviously remember the movie so good, would you provide som insights for us on the whole storyline?- Why did the engineers want to destroy the human race?- Why did the create humans in the first place?- If the DNA matched completely, why aren't humans big, bald and pale?- If the DNA matched completely how did all the other life on Earth originate? – Why did they create aliens (or was that just a nature's coincidence fueled by the black goo?)- Being probably technologically massively superior to humans, why woudl they plan an attack using a payload of black goo with unpredictable effects and not just use the equivalent of a Death Star and torch the Earth?Can't think of more just now.I love films that makes you ponder after watching it but this one almost stretches it to the limits.Best,J
I'm with all of you on all of these points. A lot of quite obvious plotholes. What actually bugged me quite a lot too, wasn't any scene in particular, but just the attitude, professionalism and diversity of the crew making no sense at all throughout the movie. All characters are so one-dimensional and self-contradictory.You would expect there to be some sort of protocol. For example, once you get to a NEW PLANET(!?) you don't just land and immediatelly go out with most of the crew to explore an alien building. Saying that they've waited their whole lives for this is too weak of an explanation for professionals to just go out and do things recklessly.For example, they could have sent little robot-vehicles with a camera in first. If you have the technology to build an actual robot with extremely advanced artificial intelligence, you can at least build a few vehicles with a camera to scope things out. And that would also satisfy the researchers' thirst for answers. Instead, they go in right away, even though a storm can be detected (they just landed from space) 1 hour away and they know it's gonna be dark in a few hours.You would expect some kind of hierarchy and orders. Two crewmembers just saying, we're leaving, just isn't the way a company or military operation works.The fact that these two crewmembers get lost doesn't make sense either, as one of them was the expert in pathfinding using his 'puppies'. And, they have direct communication to the captain who has a complete overview of the structure, and at least all the corridors they walked through. You would think Fifield would have some way of reading his puppies' paths, or direct them for guidance, or communicate with the captain, or just check his own video feed to see where they walked, or at least, in 100 years from now, leave a trail of lights or something (24-hour lasting lights weighing nothing already exist costing nothing today) But instead, they wander around, then get back to where they ran from because they were so scared of a dead body, only now they walk past the dead body, into the cave, find an alien and try to pet it! Were they expecting the alien to cuddle Millburn's hand like a kitty? Come on. They went from scared shitless from a 2.000 year old humanoid and running away leaving all the crew, to going back there and petting a living snake-like alien making scary sounds.
The crewmember who then dies and returns to the shit, all fucked up, is greeted by an opening door and a crewmember saying hey what's up? Come on. You can see the video footage showing the two guys dying. They went there, saw the two guys dead. They see on the cameras outside the door that the guy is sitting there with his spine bent in a circle and a zombie face, and they just open the door unarmed?Or the fact that a little bit of black alien goo in a human stomach makes your sperm alien sperm which a sterile non-alien human actually can grow just fine. The baby is an octopus. And the octopus's baby apparently is a walking lizard? The fact that these things grow within a few hours, and completely without any food develop hundreds of kilo's of muscles makes no sense.You can't run around after having your body cut open to your uterus, even if the wound was closed with some stitches. Your body goes into complete shock, the stitches cannot make up for the fact tissue was cut and muscles were cut which are essential for your core, and by extension for your body to perform any kind of walking movement.The robot infecting crewmembers makes no sense, why? The robot is continuously given the appearance of being evil, or feeling emotions or annoyance. But in the end there's no conclusion that his programming was off, or that he did have bad intentions, or that he had a reason for infecting crewmembers. The boyfriend also sees he's infected but ignores it, doesn't report it either. In the end, he just commits suicide really, and the entire crew seems to not really care, including Shaw. Noone says, this is fucked up, a crewmember died, what do we do? What killed him, what infected him, can we even take of our helmets (true hollywood moment where he takes off his helmet, for no reason other than stubborness)The suicide scene at the end also makes NO SENSE. Two crewmembers, who we didn't get to know, don't understand, who have no background or interest or passion or struggles or emotions, other than a shallow bet: Choose to stay with the captain when he does kamikaze. Why? Because the pilot, solely chosen from all humans by the richest trillionaire on the planet, to fly the spaceship, is a shitty pilot. And in the next scene, ironically, what unfolds is that the captain presses a few buttons, goes on autopilot, says HANDS OFF, everyone raises their hands, and no piloting is done and they all die, implying the other two didn't have to be there to die at all. They don't even eject an escape pod or anything after the hands off, nothing. The captain just sings his little song in happiness. What the hell!? They're going to DIEEEEE. All they say is, let's keep that bet in heaven. Come on! You don't die like that. There's no, omg im dying, no emotions, not even a cliche i love you man, or screaming, they just keep the bet, sing a song, do a dance and die, two of them (perhaps all three) completely unneccesarily.The general attitude of the crew is just weird. Noone seems to care about the insane things that are happening. After finding two crewmembers dead, they don't even have a 5-minute meeting in which they discuss who could possibly have done this, if it's safe, what they should do, communicate with earth, equip people with weapons, set rules, set up a military base next to the ship, send vehicles with cameras, do scans. They don't think about taking much weaponry, apart from a pistol invented 100 years ago, 100 years into the future.
The religion/atheist girlfriend/boyfriend dialogue was extremely weak and virtually nonexistant. Similar to the father/daughter relationship having no impact on the story that they might as well have left it out.A lot of things are further left unexplained, which are not necessarily plotholes, but definitely huge dissapointments or even shameless milking of a franchise by creating cliffhangers that aren't cliffhangers, just things left unexplained that might be part of sequals. For example, who are the engineers, why do they want to destroy earth (this was also concluded very quickly by a captain who was not at all keeping up to date with all the information). Why did they build a military base to engineer biological alien weapons to kill earth, when at any point in the past thousand or millions of years they could easily wipe out all life on earth by much simpler methods than creating a new alien species to physically attack and kill all humans. (e.g. contaminating water, throwing a few nuclear bombs, destabilising the climate, just bombing and killing humans ordinarily from space etc). None of it makes any sense. Everything happens absent of explicit reason or motivation, we can only guess.Then there's many technical things don't make sense. Like sound in space (space = vacuum) But I usually don't care at all, as long as the plot makes sense.Thanks for the blog post!
could someone please explain this to me? the engineers are pre-evolved humans because of they're DNA right? or did they create us from they're DNA? and when the space jockey is killed at the end how does he end up in the ship where they find him in the first Alien film? other than these small points i loved the film and find most of the small plot holes pointed out in this article unimportant or interesting to think about the reasons. if someone could explain this point to me i would be extremely grateful 🙂
The space jockey in this film isn't the one seen in Alien. He's on a different planet, LV-426, rather than LV-223 in Prometheus, so there must be another space jockey out there somewhere that gets killed later on.I think they created mankind from their DNA, but maybe altered it a little bit like Jurassic Park using frog DNA to fill in the gaps, hence why we look a little different to them. That, or us better suiting ourselves to Earth's atmosphere and gravity could have caused the differences in height and skin colour.
Thanks very much! Most of these plot holes came up when me and a friend of mine just started riffing on the film on the journey home from the cinema. We recorded the whole thing, didn't realise there were so many holes before we started though!-My cynical answers as to why they want to destroy the human race is because we've developed into a bunch of shits that deserve to be put down for what we do to each other and our planet, but honestly I'm not sure.-I think they created humans just because they could. If you were given the power to create life, chances are you'd try it out too. That could be why they wanted to kill us as well. Think about playing the Sims, what more fun is there to kill your creations in interesting and cruel ways?-My guess for why the humans aren't big balf and pale is because we have maybe evolved to live on Earth, with a different gravity, atmosphere etc. A higher gravity would make us shorter, closer distance to the sun could account to darker skin etc.-Maybe the other life on Earth was already here? I'm just guessing here, but they say in the film that LV223 has a similar ability to support life as Earth, so they could have picked the only other planet we'd have been able to survive on, regardless of the pre-existing wildlife. Kind of flies in the face of evolution though.-The aliens could be an experiment gone wrong, or right, depending on what they were trying to do, or as you say just a coincidence.-No idea. Maybe they thought this way would be more fun, watching humans being impregnated and eaten rather than a giant laser. For all we know this is some kind of a sport for the Engineers.Most of these are just guesses. I like films that make you think too, but I'd have preferred a coherent story with a more open-ended finale, or a few less questions throughout.
You'd think there'd be something like the 'puppies' already that does the job of scouting out the planet before landing. And I'm surprised Janek the captain wasn't listening to the conversation of Fifield and Millburn, and watching them get lost. He probably just didn't like them and thought it'd be a laugh to see what would happen if they got stranded. There is no possible explanation for why the two of them went back into that cavern though. I'm guessing they couldn't exactly get the best people in the world to go on a wild goose chase, taking 5 years out of their lives (counting the return journey), which would explain how crap a captain Janek is and how incompetent everyone else is.
I'm guessing the two sub-pilots read the rest of the script and just decided to kill themselves there and then, rather than see what the rest of the mess would look like.As for David infecting people, I'm guessing this was from some orders from Weyland, but why the orders would be issued is beyond me too.
I actively cringed when Vickers announced she was Weyland's daughter. It's such a stupid, pointless non-twist that does nothing but leave a bad taste in the mouth. As for the obscure chocie of weaponry, I think the Engineers were just fucking around, trying to come up with a way of killing humans that could be entertaining to watch.Most of the supposed cliffhangers were probably just for cliffhangers sake. Look at the space jockey in Alien, Ridley Scott fought tooth and nail to keep it in when the studios wanted to cut it, just so he could add an air of mystery to the film. I'm betting he did the same thing here.Thanks for reading/writing the most epic comment in history.
thanks that's been bugging me
It's a different planet? Then why crash the ship in precisely the same position? And it certainly looks like the same planet/moon.
I just saw Prometheus this evening and I have a few questions. — What caused the black goo to "activate"? Why did the ampoules start oozing after the humans arrived? — What is the relationship between the snake-type alien in the cavern and the alien that Shaw was carrying (and which eventually gobbled up the Engineer)? — Was the Engineer in hyper sleep to protect itself from the attacking aliens? Or was there an engineer in hyper sleep in each of the spaceships? — What sort of welcome did Shaw think she'd get when she reached the Engineers' home planet? Presumably the Engineers back home would have been aware of the disastrous experiment and would not welcome one of their own biological warships back to their planet? — Can someone please explain to me how they came to find the moon on which the experiment took place? I missed the explanation in the movie. Shaw does explain the relationship between the moon and the five planets depicted in the primitive art on Earth. — Speaking of which, how did all these primitive cultures come to depict those planets? Was it because the Engineers visited them over the years? — I like all the comments above about the crew's behavior and motivations. Really good. Thanks.
PS All the ladies out there who have had cesarean sections must have found Shaw's post-surgery activity hilarious. Also, what did the male-calibrated operating machine think when it encountered Shaw's uterus?!! It would have had to cut the uterus and then stitch it back up before stitching up all the muscle, etc. I know you have to suspend disbelief for this kind of stuff but that was too much. Why couldn't they just let the machine say "you want a C-section? certainly" — that wouldn't have affected the plot, other than removing the opportunity for making the audience laugh when the machine declares itself to be for men only.
On a ligher note… It took a while to get over the initial disappointment that Michael Fassbender was a robot in this movie. I hadn't seen any of the promotional material, and I was looking forward to seeing Fassbender as his fascinating, limber, human self (and I'm not talking about Shame here). Having a robot in flip-flops was a nice touch. I didn't understand what David was up to, though — either in contaminating Holloway or telling Shaw about her alien baby.
Why did the engineer in the end not wear a helmet? The decapitated one did. They were human so they would need one to breath in the atmosphere. Instead he had to wear one inside the ship, when getting ready for his journey… But inside the ship there was a normal atmosphere. So he risked his life to find Shaw, whom he could not know where was, and for what purpose? Revenge? And how did David know? Did he tell him? Why did the engineer just take off? If he had been at sleep for 2000 years shouldn't he check what happened first?If it was the same DNA, why were the engineers so disappointed in humans that they wanted to exterminate them? Could it not have been different DNA (please)?Why was it a secret that Weyland was on the ship? Why a secret that Vickers was his daughter? It just took up extra frame time.Why did the engineers tell all the ancient cultures about a secret military installation?Why were the scientists not following some sort of protocol instead of jumping into everything (take off helmets, touch everything, open doors, electrify an old head)?Why could Shaw get pregnant with a weird alien, when not with a human? Just to surprise us and explain why they didn't use protection?
They definitely give it a different name in Prometheus than in Alien (LV-223 & LV-426). I'm guessing the crash position was just another parallel between the films? There's no way the same Engineer could make it back to the jockey chair in the state he's in, plus in Alien the jockey only had the after effects from a chest-burster, not a full on Zenomorph tearing through it.
I'll see what I can do.- When Shaw etc. entered the cavern, she says they changed the atmosphere in there. Maybe the goo and the worms reacted to a subtle increase in the overall temperature or humidity of the room?- It could be like the facehugger -> xenomorph relationship, where one lays eggs and the other grows inside the body, a la John Hurt In Alien. The snake-things don't lay any eggs, but they grew from the small worms in the black goo, and the goo gave Holloway the alien sperm to impregnate Shaw. – David says at one point that there's only one surviving Engineer on the planet, so maybe he's the only one, but then he only investigates one ship. I think there's maybe one on each, which is why I could have done with some clarification as to whether Shaw goes around all the ships at the end killing all the surviving Engineers.- I think Shaw is just trying to do as much damage as possible. She's been through a lot, and could just be acting out of vengeance. Maybe we'll see if James Cameron makes Prometheuses (Promethei?)- The cave paintings showing the planets/moons only matched one solar system in the entire universe. They looked at the positions in relation to one another. I'm not sure how they correlated a 2D cave painting into 3D space, and to say that something so basic only exactly matched one set of planets is a bit of a stretch even for this film.- I'm guessing the Engineers visited Earth and either painted the maps themselves or instructed others to do so, maybe with the intent of getting humans to travel to them one day? I'm not sure why. Maybe that would be the end goal of creating life, to aim to have that life advance itself enough to come and find the creatures that made it?Thanks for reading, I hope I've helped.
Seeing as the machine was in Vickers' quarters too, kind of makes it a bit weird that it's only programmed for men. Shaw was surprisingly active afterwards, I think it'd take more than a few staples and painkillers to do that.
I thought Fassbender was brilliant as the robot, easily the best part of the film. Have you seen the David promo yet? It's incredible. David motivations are very unclear. I'm unsure of his end goal, but whatever it is he didn't take the right steps to get there.
No idea why it didn't wear a helmet at the end, that's a pretty glaring omission from my list, good spot.I think he took off because the humans had come back, maybe it was his species' protocol for if that ever happens to flee back to the home planet to report back and initiate all-out war?They might not have been disappointed, they could just be sadists who wanted to create something, allow it to become a bit advanced, then hunt it for sport, a bit like Predators.The Weyland/Vickers reveals were just silly and unnecessary, meagre attempts to add twists no-one was surprised by and no-one cared about. Having some plot points to spoil allowed the production to hype up how much their script was under wraps. If there's nothing to spoil, there's no hype.Again, the military installation could have been used to prevent humans from finding their home planet. If we are hostile, we've been sent to a battle-ready planet, or if they want to kill us, then that's probably the best place to do it from.David did all the door opening etc. and he had his own agenda. I've just realised he probably gave Holloway the alien DNA to see if it would give him eternal life, so he could then use it on Weyland. Holloway taking his helmet off, etc. was ust showing his gung-ho attitude, and Hollywood being a dick.The not using protection argument is good, I hadn't thought of that. The alien is pretty much the worst kind of STD. Even in space, always wear a condom.
But if the Engineers didn't want humanity to seek them out, all they had to do was… NOT give us any directions to anything. There are billions of star systems so the odds of us evolving, developing spaceflight and seeking out the Engineers by just randomly sending out ships is miniscule. Why point us to that planet specifically?And did the Engineer in the beginning sequence create all life on Earth? Or just human life? If he created all life on Earth, that means the Engineers came back to point to LV-223 to all the fledgling human civilizations. If he only created humans, why is human DNA so similar to the DNA of other primate species? Did the Engineers create them too?
Also, another plothole (or maybe just a minor annoyance) about the DNA thing: when the expedition enters the pyramid, they quickly find the Engineer's recorded last moments, when they're clearly in panic. But when the crew finds out human DNA matches Engineer DNA, they don't make the obvious conclusion that whatever killed the Engineers (if it's an infection or bio-weapon) would easily infect and kill humans too! They don't take extra quarantine measures, set up safety precautions, analyze the black goo to see what it does…Also, I just thought of another thing: if the Engineers were running away from something (presumably a black goo infection or one of the bioweapons they created running amok), why did they run into a chamber containing… lots and lots of bioweapons?
I think the machine (and quarters) was meant for Weyland and not really Vickers. This would have been clear if we had known Weyland was on the ship from the beginning. Wayland was looking for immortality, so they probably brought the machine in case they needed to do surgery on him. It is another plot element that seems strange because the writers decided to give us meaningless surprises.
The lack of context bugged me. In Aliens there's a bit where a character refers to the mission being "Another bug hunt", which hints that maybe they've had to do battle with other – perhaps, less dangerous – alien life forms before. In Prometheus it's unclear whether or not this is the very first time that humanity has encountered proof of life on other planets. If it is, you'd think they'd actually be a bit more excited about finding any evidence of it at all. "HOLY SHIT – there's a pyramid thing there! And, I know our expert geologist hasn't mentioned this, but part of the top of it seems to be carved into a GIANT freakin' SKULL!" I took the opening scene to be a visiting engineer giving up his DNA to create new life on earth, or somewhere similar. But it seemed a bit of an odd way to do it; also his DNA looked so charred and destroyed by the process it looked like he'd have been better off just masturbating into a stream and hoping for the best.If the black goo was sent to earth with an engineer to create intelligent life in an act of self-sacrifice, that seems a generous, positive thing to do. So why, when the engineers turn on humanity, do they think "HaHA! We'll… send them some more black goo! That'll destroy them!" Maybe they were just tickled by the irony of using the same stuff that created life to wipe it out, but it seems a bit of an unpredictable substance to use for that ("Erm, captain, you know how we thought this mission to earth would destroy humanity? Well, humanity seems to have given birth to a load of big squid-like monsters that are even more dangerous than us. Except for the random humans that became zombies, for no consistent reason." "Doh!")
Actually I was quite disappointed that the planets have two different names because there is no really good reason for it and them being the same planet would actually be more coherent. Two different moons raises a lot of questions about why and how do the aliens suddenly infest a second planet?But of course there would be problems explaining why the Nostromo crew did not find the debris of the Prometheus and such….
Hahaha.I totally agree.
I understand how David could give the alien DNA to see if it gave eternal life, but how would he test if that was the case? In also doesn't make sense to test it on one of the chief scientists. Why not a less important crew member?… or even start with some simple lab-test with cells. Of course you could argue that he had limited time, but still…When I saw that scene, I was hoping that we would get an explanation later, but it just fell into the pit of unexplained elements along with the rest.Making such an uncontrolled experiment with a foreign substance doesn't make any sense. Certainly not for an Android. There was no indication that the goo would have that effect. To me it seemed more like David wanted to pay back for all the times Holloway had treated him like a lesser being and then picked him. It is obviously a large theme in the movie that David is the most advanced being coming from earth (that's what the scenes with the basketball, lifting the helmet off the Alien, learning languages, fixing probes, using the extraordinary Lawrence of Arabia as role model etc. were about), yet he was treated like a slave throughout. The only one treading him with some respect, was Weyland when he said David was the closest thing to a son — You would think the daughter would be, but no — Still Weyland treated him more like a butler than a son… BTW. the father/daughter/substitute-son bit was also a very unexplored, unneeded, useless plot element that seemed attached in the last minute and went nowhere…. but this is an underlying problem in the film. We don't understand the motives of many of the actions; Unnecessary suicides, sex instead of keeping an eye on crew-members in a hostile environment and in the middle of alien storm, supposedly brilliant scientists that suddenly act like schoolboys and below average IQ, alien engineers doing strange things, Androids having their own irrational agenda… … and how did David know there were more ships? Did he read a sign? How could he be sure that they hadn't taken off after all the engineers died?It is like the writers decided that the film needed to have a bunch of elements or a bullet list, and whenever they couldn't fit things together easily, they just ignored all the underlying problems, instead of dropping the ideas that didn't make sense and reducing the bullet list to maybe 5 instead of >20 plot-elements.The best example of that, was the last unnecessary scene with the alien crawling out of the engineer. The only thing it did was tie the film into the Alien universe, but the last year we have been told it wasn't strictly speaking an Alien prequel, and the alien we see is not really like the previous aliens. It is fully grown and looks more like a lizard. Much less alien than the original alien. It doesn't do anything for the story, we don't go home scared that there is an Alien loose on a foreign lifeless planet where it cannot possibly do any harm. We are not even shocked by a last minute revelation. We are just left with yet another weird cliffhanger thing, that will be hard for the sequels to explain or even include in their story.
I'm guessing they were on different planets to try and keep the plot a little less predictable. If they'd said they were heading to LV-426, everyone would have known exactly where it was heading. If it develops into a franchise, that might be in a future instalment.And the Nostromo not discovering the Prometheus wreckage could be explained away by them not spending an awful lot of time down on the planet's surface, plus I doubt there was an awful lot left after the crash and rolling of the Engineer's ship.
Good point, I hadn't thought of that. I don't understand why a machine couldn't be unisex though. Surely it's going to use the same machinery and just require a little more programming?
areanimator: Maybe they ran into the room because the giant stone head was there, and it had some sort of religious meaning, or they were running with the intent of wiping out the remaining black goo? And I think the Prometheus crew just jumped in with taking samples etc. from the sheer excitement of this being the right planet. For all we know this is the first enoucnter man has had with an alien species.
Anonymous: I definitely think that David using the goo on Holloway was revenge for all the insults throughout the film. The final alien not looking like the classic alien could be because it has been influenced by an Engineer rather than a human. That would explain why it looks similar to the xenomorphs we know and love, but not identical, due to the whole same DNA thing. But yeah, there's little to no shocking moments in the film, as there are no characters you care about and the story makes too little sense.
Agreed, it's an insane plan. The Engineers deserve everything they've had and got coming to them, especially being in this film.
I think I have an answer for your question above, "how did David know there were more ships?" I have seen the film only once, but I remember noticing that there were a series of the structures visible in the distance as the Prometheus ship approached the first one (guided by the straight lines etched on the ground). At least, I'm pretty sure there were.
I think I have an answer for your question above — "how did David know there were more ships?". I've seen the film only once, but I remember noticing that there were several of the temple-like structures visible in the distance behind the one they explored. They were visible in the shot as the Prometheus came in to land, guided by the straight-line etchings on the ground.
You have — thank you! Your original post and all the conversation in this comment thread are great. I'm going to see the movie again. It is really interesting to find a film that was so engrossing and that I want to see again, even though it had so many problems. In Wikipedia I read about how the script was worked on for a long time and by a few people. Hard to believe how it can have ended up so loose. I wonder if the writers have answers for everything?
I wondered if the Engineer's body was destroyed so that he would not be in the fossil record. But even that doesn't make sense. Also, after the sizzled DNA is loose in the water, you see cells dividing, as in the early stages of gestation. What were those cells? The beginning of a human? Growing in what? Am I a dope for not understanding this?
Forgive me if I am repeating what has been said before, but:-how are we supposed to make the leap from stone vases to eggs?-how are we supposed to make the leap from a plant-like alien bud that opens like butterfly wings to a face hugger?-how (and why) does the engineer who chased Shaw get back into his command seat in the already crashed space ship where he will be found by the crew of the Nostromo years later? The film makes it clear that there was only one engineer still alive. Why have him die in Vicker's escape pod where his body is completely wrecked when the fully formed alien emerges? In Alien, it looks as tho' a chest burster came out of him and he was at the helm when it happened.-what was the point of the opening scene with the engineer ingesting the alien DNA?I did enjoy the exoskeleton suits for the engineers and many aspects of the film but plot-wise it was pretty dumb. I felt like the fans of the film knew the Aliens movies more than the writer of Prometheus.
Good point about the presence of other ships and how David knew, but how come there is no mention of this in Aliens when there are terraformers making the planet habitable – wouldn't they have found other ships in their investigation of the planet?
Anskov, Prometheus does not occur on LV426, the planet that the Nostromo arrives at in Alien. So the Jockey killed in his seat there is another pilot of another ship with another story, not the Jockey killed after chasing Shaw down. Confusing? Not anymore. Stupid? Yes.
Ah! Now I understand. Thanks for the clarification!
(Apologies if these three points have been made already, I haven't read through all of the comments!)1)If the moon/planet was a military instalation (as Janek puts it) why would the Engineers leave cave paintings inviting us to it/pointing the way? Forcing is to go there through our own curiousity didn't seem to be part of the grand, sinister scheme to wipe us all out.2) During the "Weyland washing feet" sequence, there is a bodyguard dressed all in black in the background. His fate is never revealed; he doesn't venture out with the others to see the Engineer so I presume he is still aboard the ship when Janek crashes it – funny that, he gave Vickers, Chance and Ravel the option to leave but pretty much signed that guy's death warrant.3) During the "beginning of life" sequence, one of these Engineers completely sacrifices himself. Surely these higher beings with huge levels of intelligence could have found away to spread DNA without killing one of their own… unless of course it was some kind of ritual, but that is never confirmed.
Anskov: The Moon in Prometheus and the planet in Alien/Aliens are two different planets (liv-426 vs lv-223). Regarding the final scene: I thought the alien coming out of the engineer looked a lot like a not fully grown version of the alien queen in Aliens. Could it have been the "birth" of the queen?If so: how the h…. Does the queen move to lv-426?
I have horrible feeling that there is most definitely a directors cut version which will probably give us more answers. If we are to assume the black goo causes evolution (well kind of) presumably the Alien esk version at the end of the film was the primitive version. If there's a sequel it would be good to see Shaw take on the space jockeys. Maybe she discovers other versions of the eggs/vases.
Scott has said this is the first in a trilogy so presumably LV426 will come up later
Yeah maybe, or it'll always be hinted at.