Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Jun 20, 2012 1:14 am

More Prometheus Ranting:

Big questions about Prometheus:

Astronomy: Since the planet is apparently "half a billion miles from Earth" how the fuck don't we notice a star system a mere 1/20,000 of the distance from us that Proxima Centurai is ?
Economics: Since the expedition is established to cost a Trillion Dollars, and nets zero return, how is there any remnant of the Corp to get bought out by Utani for the later-in-continuity movies? Assuming historical inflation rates hold, that would be the fifth-largest one-year corporate loss ever in real dollars.
Medicine: Why is 3% C02 concentration described as "fatal within 3 minutes" ? When it's less severe?
English Writing: If you're not going to fact check, then why the fuck even use numbers for the above lines instead of descriptive phrases like "farther away from Earth than anyone"; "a stupendous amount of money" and "nearly toxic levels?" - all of which are probably clearer to the audience then the bullshit numbers anyways.
Geology: why does nobody in a ship full of "scientists" object to the line "God does not build in straight lines"? Exhibit A Exhibit B Exhibit C
Continuity: Why is there a ringed background planet in the landing shot after dialogue establishes it as a single-planet system?
Why does a movie with errors like that try to present itself as a smart movie asking big questions instead of just the tentacle-rape horror show it is? Did they write and edit the script without the internet?

Now as to stuff that belongs in a spoiler:

How the fuck can the android watch dreams from coldsleep and why isn't that technology a big deal in any of the other movies?

Why did the mural change when the exploration team first entered the room?

What the fuck was up with exploding the engineer head? How did that scene make any sense with anything?

How did the ship's captain figure out it was an alien bioweapons plant without ever leaving the ship nor seeing half the stuff the exploration team did?

Why did the replicant want to bring an alien foetus back to earth in cryosleep?

Why was the fancy high-end med pod in Charlize Theron's life-boat quarters only calibrated for males? I can speculate that the pod was specifically for old Weyland...but that makes the deception of his death less likely to succeed and runs counter to her own "I don't believe in taking unnecessary risks" persona.

Where did the Alien tentacle foetus gain the extra mass from after it was cut out of Shaw?

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Jun 20, 2012 1:58 am

Some responses to some of Josh's rantings.

Astronomy: The opening mentioning their distance to be 3.27E14 is well beyond half a billion miles, and is in fact reasonable for a solar system to be. Vickers babbling about a distance that wouldn't even get past Jupiter...I'm chalking up to a blonde moment, or at least the fact that even today, people don't fully understand the numbers involved.

Continuity: It was stated that the place they're going to is a moon, so what they see is the planet they're orbiting.

Economics: Probably a very easy buy-out, and I can believe Weyland Corp being huge enough (considering their capabilities, being a leading terraforming company) to not be wiped off the map with a Trillion dollar loss.

Geology: Everyone's already established themselves as not respecting the guy who states that line except for maybe his girlfriend.

Virtually anything done by the Engineers I'm fine with not being understandable, it creates a kind of Lovecraft appeal to them. They're alien (damn that '100%' DNA line annoys me), and I try not to think about the obvious Christian motivations they're given.

Same goes for essentially anything done by the black goo. It's random mutagen material. Granted, the fact the NEVER show the biologist after getting deep-throated really grates on my nerves. In regards to the proto-face hugger gaining extra mass; maybe it ate the spare food/organs in the room? Really, that's just Hollywood failing at the Conservation of Mass.

I can even understand the biologist acting as dumb as he did with that vagina/penis snake. They set it up that he's essentially high as a kite after the geologist showed him the good stuff.

The ship's captain does technically have constantly streaming vid-recordings of everything the crew do outside of the ship. This doesn't explain the incredible stupidity of nobody knowing what happened to the biologist and geologist, since they could just rewind their vids; or have an alarm in their suits that go off when their vitals do stuff like go hyper-stress or dead.

The med-pod, and really the entire life boat, was actually for Weyland. The fact it was calibrated for men only was supposed to be another hint that he's alive and on the ship (and probably just recently used on him, so still on that setting). Granted, I have no idea why Weyland seemed to think it a good idea to let Vickers come and be in charge; as she specifically wants him dead, none of the real crew know he's even on board or alive, and is 'half a billion miles' away from anyone who could find out. This is partly related to Weyland being amazingly stupid in general; hearing of people running around in absolute terror, proof positive that the Engineers are both mortal and not ageless (as evidenced by the cryopods), surrounded by danger, and wants to be right in front of the one survivor when it wakes up to demand his pony.

That said, despite my defense of several points above, I am amazed at the fractal stupidity of the majority of characters. They were just vessels for a crappy plot in an otherwise beautiful and conceptually fascinating movie.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Jun 20, 2012 2:54 am

Damn you, Josh, for making me defend this movie.

I'm a geologist with about half a degree. I was actually impressed that they thought to include that in the movie, when they're looking at straight trenches/marks in the ground. I thought maybe this movie would be decent when he said that.

Large-scale erosion doesn't produce straight lines. Streams grow meanders that get more pronounced over time. Glacial hills are lopsided. Any rock face is going to get its edges worn down. Even wind doesn't erode in straight lines--which makes sense, because it's in many respects a dryer form of water. Trees pretty much always have a lean and they taper anyway. Now, there's very rare exceptions, but by and large, looking for straight edges and rectangles and lines is not a bad way to look for evidence of artificial construction.

So yeah. I knew as soon as I saw the lines on the ground that, yeah, they were built. That particular line WAS accurate. Straight lines just don't naturally occur on that kind of scale, especially not for geology.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Jun 20, 2012 7:21 pm

virgil wrote:

The ship's captain does technically have constantly streaming vid-recordings of everything the crew do outside of the ship. This doesn't explain the incredible stupidity of nobody knowing what happened to the biologist and geologist, since they could just rewind their vids; or have an alarm in their suits that go off when their vitals do stuff like go hyper-stress or dead.

But
A. The vids don't stream through the storm
B. He really doesn't watch the vids much even when he's on monitor duty.
C. He wanders away from the monitor station to make out with Vickers - who he thinks might be a robot.

All of which are understandable, but mean that he really doesn't have enough information to make that conclusion. The movie could have used a scene where he's shown putting the pieces from different vids together - instead of mangling an accordion.

Re: Alien exploding head. Yeah, sure random mutagen, but dangnabit even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cartoon didn't insult me with their mutagen being able to mutate millenia dead cells.

Really, nothing after Shaw gets out of the med pod makes any sense whatsoever. "Oh hi there android who just tried to kill me with a space monster baby and its programmer, how you doing? Lets head off to make first contact together without even a mention of this to anyone."

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 4:08 am

So, I can't remember where it came up last, but Angel and sunlight in the Angel series:

First: they seem to have a tough time with natural light before the whole "Oh hey, Angel works for the evil law firm now!" thing. Seriously, they have sunlight coming through windows with Angel in the room all the time, and no walking torch. It's frankly kind of ridiculous when the idea of vampires going up like a grill with too much lighter fluid is so established on this show, and one of the early episodes centers around Spike trying to get the magic "Be Invulnera-vamp" ring that Buffy sent to Angel after taking it off of him. But then, a camera man was caught in a fight scene in the second episode....

Second, doesn't Angel live/work out of an abandoned hotel? Or does that come later? Just a bit confused as to why Cordelia's and Doyle's living situations are the focus of a couple episodes when I remember Angel having a big empty building they could take rooms in...

Juton · Post by **Juton** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 6:44 am

My take away from Prometheus: I don't consider it in canon with Alien and Aliens. I know Ridley Scott directed Alien and all that, I don't care. If I considered Prometheus canon it would affect my enjoyment of Alien and Aliens, and I won't let it do that. Literally having no answers to the mysteries presented in Alien is better than the answers given by Prometheus.

erik · Post by **erik** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 7:10 am

I'm still satisfied with my interpretation that Aliens are

the lost dildo-cache of an ancient dead race fixated on mouth-rape

. I don't find it takes away any of my pleasure from the previous canon.

That's not a spoiler. Is it?

[edit: fuck, I suppose it probably is]

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 7:46 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:So, I can't remember where it came up last, but Angel and sunlight in the Angel series:

First: they seem to have a tough time with natural light before the whole "Oh hey, Angel works for the evil law firm now!" thing. Seriously, they have sunlight coming through windows with Angel in the room all the time, and no walking torch. It's frankly kind of ridiculous when the idea of vampires going up like a grill with too much lighter fluid is so established on this show, and one of the early episodes centers around Spike trying to get the magic "Be Invulnera-vamp" ring that Buffy sent to Angel after taking it off of him. But then, a camera man was caught in a fight scene in the second episode....

Second, doesn't Angel live/work out of an abandoned hotel? Or does that come later? Just a bit confused as to why Cordelia's and Doyle's living situations are the focus of a couple episodes when I remember Angel having a big empty building they could take rooms in...

The apartment episodes are in season one. They buy the hotel in season 2 because their old office is blown up at the end of season 1.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Fri Jun 22, 2012 9:03 pm

For another way back reference:

The end of season 1 of Avatar the Last Airbender, because even leaving out murdering the fucking moon, it is one of stupidest climaxes I've ever seen.

Oh, no. The fire nation is invading.
Well, they are all in boats. On the fucking ocean. And you have several dozen waterbenders.

Boats capsize, everyone drowns.
Done.

It just makes a lot more sense than sending a single canoe full of teenagers to try (and fail) to murder the enemy leader in the middle of his goddamn fleet.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sat Jun 23, 2012 5:05 am

Akula and I watched the new Pixar movie, Brave, earlier today. It was pretty underwhelming. Mediocre slapstick took up valuable time that could been spent explaining what was actually going on, and I kept hoping in vain for some kind of twist right up to the end of the movie.

The story might have been much stronger if the mother were the protagonist. Once Brave finally gets around to explaining that the political situation is really unstable and could dissolve entirely if the 1st-generation royal family isn't really careful, the teen rebellion plot became something I felt like I had more reason to care about. The mother seems to be one of the only people really worried about holding the clans together, and exploring that perspective would make things more compelling to me.

It's really difficult for me to feel sympathy for someone who asks Bear Wizard for "a spell" and then gets upset when the spell turns out to involve bears.

I was really hoping that Evil King got transformed into a bear because he'd be less of a menace that way. Then his human form/ghost could start being nefarious once he was freed. If the rest of the movie were compressed, dealing with the evil that destabilized the country in the first place could make an interesting third act.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 23, 2012 5:18 am

Voss wrote:Oh, no. The fire nation is invading.
Well, they are all in boats. On the fucking ocean. And you have several dozen waterbenders.

Boats capsize, everyone drowns.
Done.

I didn't care much for the first season climax either (it felt way too pat and hoaky) but really. Did you see how fucking big those ships were? Do you know how much a ship weighs? Yes, it would have been better than nothing, but I find this as a 'why didn't they do this easy thing' complaint somewhat churlish.

Not that I'm against churlishness, mind, I'm just saying that there's enough legit criticism of Avatar: The Last Airbender that you don't really need to reach this far.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jun 23, 2012 6:26 am

Water bending has a range and it takes a seriously bad dude to bend enough water to seriously impact one of those big metal ships.

Sending a bunch of water benders out to try to swamp some ships before they got torched would involve sacrificing a bunch of very valuable assets for dubious gain. On the other hand, non-bender warriors are pretty cheap, and sending them on a low-odds assassination mission against valuable military leaders seems like a decent risk/reward tradeoff. The risk is low (you will almost certainly lose some non-bender warriors), and the potential rewards are high (you may send the enemy command structure into disarray).

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jun 23, 2012 8:05 am

hyzmarca wrote:
Prak_Anima wrote:So, I can't remember where it came up last, but Angel and sunlight in the Angel series:

First: they seem to have a tough time with natural light before the whole "Oh hey, Angel works for the evil law firm now!" thing. Seriously, they have sunlight coming through windows with Angel in the room all the time, and no walking torch. It's frankly kind of ridiculous when the idea of vampires going up like a grill with too much lighter fluid is so established on this show, and one of the early episodes centers around Spike trying to get the magic "Be Invulnera-vamp" ring that Buffy sent to Angel after taking it off of him. But then, a camera man was caught in a fight scene in the second episode....

Second, doesn't Angel live/work out of an abandoned hotel? Or does that come later? Just a bit confused as to why Cordelia's and Doyle's living situations are the focus of a couple episodes when I remember Angel having a big empty building they could take rooms in...
The apartment episodes are in season one. They buy the hotel in season 2 because their old office is blown up at the end of season 1.

Ah, thank you. This is why I'm watching through Buffy and Angel on netflix, because I was a very, very infrequent watcher when they were on air.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sun Jun 24, 2012 2:35 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Water bending has a range and it takes a seriously bad dude to bend enough water to seriously impact one of those big metal ships.

Which would be fine if that were true, but they didn't seem to have any problem impaling the first few on ice spurs, lifting them up in the air, and essentially wrecking them in a tidy 'nobody dies' sort of way.

Then they just... stopped doing that.

Nor did they take any sort of defensive measures, or really do anything with the ice and water that was all around everybody when the troops disembarked off the big metal ships and were in their face.

They also could have just gotten creative and played shenanigans with ice tunnels under the fleet (which fucking parked for the night), gone underwater where the fire nation couldn't attack them, and bent shit from there.

But at the bare essence it was a weird situation where the water benders had every defensive advantage imaginable, but somehow it was an almost totally one sided fight... in favor of the fire nation. To the point that the enemy commander they wanted to assassinate strolled through the entire fucking city into their sacred site like he was out walking his dog.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Not that I'm against churlishness, mind, I'm just saying that there's enough legit criticism of Avatar: The Last Airbender that you don't really need to reach this far.

I don't think it is all that far a reach, to be honest. Considering the over the top shit people get up to, the idea that a large group of waterbenders working together on an ocean couldn't just create a tsunami literally didn't occur to me (their limits and capabilities aren't exactly codified, especially during season 1). One hillbilly can use waterbending to move plants through an entire fucking swamp, and these guys can't defend their city when literally surrounded by their element? OK... It made the entire thing seem cheap and essentially 'fake danger' as a backdrop for a plot that was also complete bullshit. As in, no, seriously, you've already won. No need to go punching fish.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 2:37 am

I liked Avatar. but they really didn't think through the.. "Fire Nation Wins" scenarios very well. I'm still not sure how the Water and Earth Nations lose to the Fire Nation. They've got seriously bad ass benders. And Earth vs Fire. Fire really should win. Also, I don't get how in a thousand years, noone has figured out how to metal bend until what's her name does it.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 4:21 am

I am similarly baffled that it took, like, two thousand years of advanced, scholastic civilization before we got any kind of economic or sociological theory. Sometimes civilizations just don't think of something.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 12:50 pm

The goddamn comet of doom and fire let Sozin get a massive opening blow in.

As for the battle at the north pole, the capital ships stretched beyond the horizon. There were just so many of them that sinking them all was beyond the horrifically outnumbered waterbenders of the defense. If it were possible for ordinary benders working together to create a wave big enough to destroy the entire fleet, it would have been equally possible for the firebenders on said fleet to vaporize the city and boil the ocean for miles around.

On how the matchups break down, the thing is, Avatar does not have elemental rock-paper-scissors. If two benders from different elements square off, the more competent or stronger one wins regardless of which elements are involved. They have their strengths and weaknesses, but the fact that waterbending favors defense while firebending is so aggressively offensive that it basically defends by attacking incoming strikes essentially cancels out.

I figure the reason Toph invented metalbending when no one else had was her seismic sense. In the episode where she develops it, the framing of the shots places focus on tiny crystals of earth. No one else could "see" the impurities.

npc310 · Post by **npc310** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 2:31 am

My problem with Prometheus was the surgery.

Who could reasonably just lie there conscious while their stomach was sliced open? Fine, she had super futuristic painkillers so she didn't feel anything, but she just layed there while her abdomen was lasered open by this crazy machine she had never seen before, had no previous experience with, but was somehow able to operate efficiently enough to tell it to successfully perform a customized surgery that it had no program for how to do. Run-on sentence anyone? Then the second it was over, she was able to squirm out of the tube -- which would require abdominal muscles, I guarantee you -- and had the mental focus to trigger the cleaning phase of the surgery tube's programming, and flee down the hall. Then she poceeded to wiggle her way into one of those crazy bubble-head suits and go running all over this strange planet, performing all sorts of physical feats like jumping chasms, fleeing from underneath falling rock-spaceships, and repelling off the side of that same spaceship after retrieving the remains of Dave the Robot.

There were some continuity errors and weak moments in the story or acting that many of you have already identified, but that was the moment it lost me.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 5:25 am

I just watched Prometheus about an hour ago. Hmm...

The movie is trying really hard to be like 2001 or Bladerunner; smart and baffling at the same time. The writers (according to wikipedia, at least) had some raging nerdrections for both of those movies and intentionally re-wrote the script from being "Alien - the Prequal" to being... Prometheus.

The filmmakers' goals were admirable, especially given the schlock that habitually comes out of Hollywood. The concepts it's trying to convey are cool ones worthy of being conveyed. For example, the Matrix was all the better a movie and societal event because it brought Plato's Cave front and center in a way that made people who'd never read a book since High School briefly contemplate some Philosophy 101 shit. Alien was a huge deal because it had a strong female lead, creepy Giger-designs, and did that whole rape/body horror thing super well. Prometheus could have been a clever but widely-approachable look at the whole Frankenstein story, but with humanity in the role of the creature instead of the creator. All those scenes where David the android was talking about his motivations, about his feelings towards his creators, and speculating about how humanity would actually respond if it met its creator only to learn he was just as, if no more, flawed than it was... those scenes were great, but far too few.

Unfortunately, the movie flailed around strangely once the characters came into contact with freaky shit. The movie either needed to be a series of extended philosophical musings by the various characters interspersed with body horror OR, if they wanted to make it scarier and or more action-y while still pretending to be deep, it should have been "philosophical opening -> horror/survival middle -> severed droid head gives synopsis ending". Instead it was a stranged and garbled mix of directions, reminding me too much of the schizophrenic Spielberg/Kubric movie AI.

Now to the spoilers.

There's a lot of stuff you just have to sort of handwave away as being either wrong or heavily under-explained to the point of being inexplicable. The Engineer dissolving into primordial ooze at the beginning to seed life on Earth... fine, whatever. Remember that these Engineers were on Earth around 3000 BCE (either returning, or having never left) to inspire our ancestors to make cave paintings and pictographs of them pointing at a specific star system. Why they created us at the beginning of the movie, wanted us dead by the end of the movie but somewhere in the middle showed up on Earth to hand out star maps to our ancestors, to point them to the planet where we could go to get killed/horror raped is... baffling. Whatever, move on.

I'm convinced the "straight lines" that Charlie Holloway saw were nazca lines. His remark was still stupid, but having Nazca lines on an actual alien runway is a very nice touch given the aliens in question both created us and visited our descendants around the time of Gilgamesh.

I don't understand the black goop. At first I thought it was mutagen. The first room with all the containers in it had what looked like mealworms in the soil (you see them when David first enters the chamber). Goop oozes out, mealworms get mutated and you get lamprey face huggers there to throat-rape the stupid, stupid biologist who insists on petting them. However, when David puts a drop of the ooze in Charlie's drink, he starts filling up with, and being dissolved by, horror lampreys. When he looks in the mirror, he sees a little tentacle whip out of his eye. When he fucks Shaw, she gives birth to a squid. Therefore, ooze == horror eels, apparently. Why that specifically, I don't know, but then that's no more arbitrary than the original face huggers being spider-like.

The purpose of the biological weapon that is the ooze seems to be to unleash a horrible, invasive species that treats everything around it like parasitic wasps treat caterpillars, and evolves forms based on those hosts to better... well, we're not really sure why their morphology changes based on their host. Either it's to make them more effective weapons while taking down a population, or the freaky xenomorph IS the desired end-product and you want it to go all zerg on its surroundings, evolving into a superior form by modeling itself after its hosts. Having the Engineers go around seeding planets with humans, because humans are the preferred host for xenomorphs, and the xenomorphs are the desired end goal of the Engineers bio-tampering would be kinda cool. I'm not sure if the films bear that out; I'm pretty sure the xenomorphs are just there to flip out and kill stuff as horrifically as possible.

I really, really, really don't get why all the people who aren't David started acting really inconsistent, and stupid, once the storm hit. One of the two cowards decides to go all Crocodile Hunter and pet the angry alien lamprey. When folks found the engineer corpse they should have broke down and wept and thrashed and screamed and danced like they had just found the most amazing thing ever in the history of human civilization because THEY HAD JUST FOUND THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION. They even acknowledge that in their weird, wooden fashion later on. Once people started dying they should have done what the folks in Alien did and pull back to the ship, lock the doors and start asking questions while poking samples of alien goo in laboratories. The guy who got face-raped by an alien worm should have showed up later as a mutant rage zombie, not the guy who got his face ruined by acid. And why did anyone show up as a mutant rage zombie? Infection = alien popping out = people dying, not Infection = human raging out = people dying. What the fuck was that!?

Why was the Engineer captain unable or unwilling to fly off to Earth before David showed up to push buttons? They said that the decapitated Engineer had been dead for about 2000 years so there was plenty of time for the ship to say "the last face hugger starved 200 years ago, wake up the captain so he can fly to Earth". And why did the Engineers on Earth back in 3000 BCE pointing us at that planet anyway? They were essentially saying, "Hey humanity. Once you learn interstellar travel, please report to this planet so we can exterminate you and/or use you as the fleshy test tubes for our xenomorph creations." For a species that can just terraform planets and create life, there must be more direct ways to create hosts/murder victims.

Shaw, upon finding out she had an alien murder baby in her womb, acted in a sufficiently empowered way and had the robo-surgeon give her the abortion she damn well wanted. Afterwards she... just sort of decided to tag along with the decrepit, god-complex CEO and the Aryan robot who tried to deny her her caesarian. I get that almost everyone else went stupid after the shit hit the fan, but Shaw was supposed to be the competent non-android in the mix. Sigh...

I'm thinking that the blond boss lady was the CEO's clone, or something along those lines. That CEO was waaaaay too old to have a natural born daughter that young. She might have been an android (again, the writers had a major hard-on for Blade Runner), with David being Star Trek's Data and boss lady being Data's brother with an emotion chip. Her being an android would be really stupid given the surrounding evidence, but I wouldn't put it past these writers to try and shoehorn that in.

There's more but that's enough for one screed.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 6:28 am

Personally, I have a theory on the black goop in Prometheus.

That there's more than one kind of goop. Probably all based on the same principles, but for different purposes. Some to do the bioweapon/turns critters into KILL MACHINES, some to become gene-seeders. Probably some to do other things, too--like infect whatsisname.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:18 pm

Maxus wrote:Personally, I have a theory on the black goop in Prometheus.

That there's more than one kind of goop. Probably all based on the same principles, but for different purposes. Some to do the bioweapon/turns critters into KILL MACHINES, some to become gene-seeders. Probably some to do other things, too--like infect whatsisname.

There were vases of goo which, when it leaked out in the mural chamber somehow resulted in eel-like face huggers. David stole one of those vases from that chamber, cracked it open and found three identical alien vials containing the goo. It's possible there are three different flavors of goo but that isn't made clear in any way; David just cracks one of the vials open seemingly at random to spike Charlie's drink. Charlie ingests the goo and he impregnates Shaw with a squid monster and has a tentacle whip out of his eye. He was full of terror-worm-things. However, the outward progression of his disease in every way matched the progression of the dissolving gene-seeder Engineer from the beginning of the movie AND the progression of the exploding Engineer head after they poked it with electrodes. This leads me to believe that all the goo is the same, and therefore it is face-raping tentacle worm monsters all the way down; why the beginning Engineer dissolved into primordial ooze instead of a slurry of chest-bursters is beyond me.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:29 pm

Shatner wrote:
Maxus wrote:Personally, I have a theory on the black goop in Prometheus.

That there's more than one kind of goop. Probably all based on the same principles, but for different purposes. Some to do the bioweapon/turns critters into KILL MACHINES, some to become gene-seeders. Probably some to do other things, too--like infect whatsisname.

There were vases of goo which, when it leaked out in the mural chamber somehow resulted in eel-like face huggers. David stole one of those vases from that chamber, cracked it open and found three identical alien vials containing the goo. It's possible there are three different flavors of goo but that isn't made clear in any way; David just cracks one of the vials open seemingly at random to spike Charlie's drink. Charlie ingests the goo and he impregnates Shaw with a squid monster and has a tentacle whip out of his eye. He was full of terror-worm-things. However, the outward progression of his disease in every way matched the progression of the dissolving gene-seeder Engineer from the beginning of the movie AND the progression of the exploding Engineer head after they poked it with electrodes. This leads me to believe that all the goo is the same, and therefore it is face-raping tentacle worm monsters all the way down; why the beginning Engineer dissolved into primordial ooze instead of a slurry of chest-bursters is beyond me.

some worms got into the black goop. Pretty sure those turned into the facerapers. The other dude fell into the goop and turned into KROGNOR THE PRO-WRESTLER DEATHZOMBIE.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:59 pm

Maxus wrote:

some worms got into the black goop. Pretty sure those turned into the facerapers. The other dude fell into the goop and turned into KROGNOR THE PRO-WRESTLER DEATHZOMBIE.

Good point; supports the mutagen theory. However, why did Charlie sprout a tentacle from his eye when he drank the goo straight? Why did he impregnate Shaw with a lovecraftian squid baby? If the critter had been human-like, like the xenomorph in Alien then that would jive with everything else, but squids... not so much. That really makes me wonder if it is meant to be a mutagen but the writers decided to make Shaw birth a moar different alien for the sake of being moar different than Alien, plot coherence-be-damned.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 6:49 pm

Prometheus: Why did anyone in that movie do anything they did?

I speculate the planet has a natural stupefaction field that kills the delta brain wave, and that the Engineers hoped to breed a race of Frys that would be unaffected - but that species was killed off and replaced by public telephone cleaners from yet another planet, so as soon as the ship hit orbit they were all doomed.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 8:19 pm

Ancient History wrote:Prometheus: Why did anyone in that movie do anything they did?

They read the script.