History Headscratchers / Prometheus

* This begs the question: why did Weyland feel the need to hide on his own ship anyway? As the uber-CEO of his own company it wasn't like anyone was going to stop him. Did the folks back home (who hadn't seen him in two years) not care that their control-freak boss had gone AWOL? Was he worried that all those low-level scientist flunkies that he just hired wouldn't go if they knew he was on board? Or was this just one more example of how Weyland is batshit insane and shouldn't be allowed to choose his own socks, let alone trillions of dollars of company resources?

* This begs the question: why did Weyland feel the need to hide on his own ship anyway? As the uber-CEO of his own company it wasn't like anyone was going to stop him. Did the folks back home (who hadn't seen him in two years) not care that their control-freak boss had gone AWOL? Was he worried that all those low-level scientist flunkies that he just hired wouldn't go if they knew he was on board?

** Well, are there perhaps some terrestrial animals (both marine and otherwise) which could tolerate the elevated levels of CO2 on LV-233 relative to those on Earth.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x1YuvUQFJ0 This video sums up a lot of the headscratchers/inconsistencies regarding this film.]]

** Not sure what do you mean by that "only a vessel" bit, LV-223 had a gigantic Engineer base on it's surface, and the spaceship stationed there wasn't even the only one. Their original plan was to leave those clues so one day, when humanity developed sufficently, we could find them. Plus it makes sense that the point of first meeting wouldn't be on their own planet. Thing is, 2,000 years ago things changed for whatever reason, and their plans for Earth and humanity become hostile.

** It's pretty simple to presume that it can scan genitalia and deduce the (very likely) gender of the patient from that, even if all of it's procedures are calibrated for male patients. So no need to remove female reproductive organs. And if you do have some kind of genitalia abnormality relative to the gender you identify as... well then you'd probably need to do more of an intervention with instructions to it's programming or during treatment selection (which could add more dramatic tension when you urgently need a foreign body out of your's!).

*** Janek does not say its a military facility, or say the black goo is a weapon - He open speculates that may be the case, and admits he doesn't know. The only thing he says he's sure of is that its a installation (Because the only thing on the entire planet is a bunker like facility with zero infrastructure for a civilization), and that the reason for this isolation is obviously poison black goo. He then extrapolates to the worst case scenario, which is bio weapons, but he does word as speculation.

*** The simple answer there is that you ''don't'' control it. You drop a few drops of goo on a planet, let the "infection" run it's course, and then [[MemeticMutation nuke the site from orbit.]] It's the only way to be sure. Note the Engineers in the hologram running from ''something'' in the hallway. The goo had already gone beyond their control at that point.

* Am I the only one who feels that as a prequel to ''{{Film/Alien}}'', the timeline just doesn't quite match up? So this film takes place 2093 while Alien was supposed to take place 2122, a 29 year difference. The creature seen at the end of this film is referred to as a "Proto-Xenomorph" implying it was the first. Whereas the ship in Alien was stated to have been there a long time, with the pilot's remains having fossilised. However that ship was designed to carry the now fully formed Xenomorph eggs. There just doesn't seem to be nearly the amount of time between the films to have the results we saw.

** The creature at the end was not the first Xenomorph, it was one of the same type of creature from which the Xenomorphs had evolved (the painting that they see in that room where all the jars of black goo are found shows a Xenomorph, implying that they did exist prior to the events of this film), the planet upon which Prometheus takes place is also not the same planet upon which Alien takes place, so it's entirely possible that a similar process occurred on the planet in Alien as the planet in Prometheus but began a lot sooner (allowing time for the Space Jockey to fossilise).
** It's also possible that the system of tunnels shown in Prometheus was a facility for producing the black goo (which seemed to just be a general mutagen) and the ship shown in Alien was a from facility specifically for producing facehuggers (for some reason); maybe one facility didn't need time to develop into the other because they were both different to begin with because they had been designed for different purposes.

** Upon my first viewing of the film, I had arrived at a conclusion that perhaps the black goo isn't what gave rise to the Xenomorphs, but the other way around. Perhaps the Engineers had developed a way to isolate the rapidly-changing DNA in a Xenomorph and then weaponise it (they are masters of organic technology, so this might not be such a stretch for them). This would explain why it is so virulent, and why, when mixed with the DNA of actual living organisms, it does derive a xenomorph-esque organism after a few recombinations. The logic behind doing this is sound, too; the black goo, while extremely dangerous, would be a lot easier to handle than a cluster of volatile Xenomorph eggs.

** If the full opening scene with the Elder Engineer does appear in a Director's Cut (making it canon), that woule mean the Engineers, while obviously long lived, do age. Unless that guy voluntarily allowed himself to get old (why?), then even the Engineers don't possess the secret to eternal life, much less to revert the effects of aging. Of course, Weyland had no way of knowing this.

** No, I don't think so. Did you see the decorative sculptures in Weyland's room? One of them catched my attention - it strongly resembled a Predator mask. I know Scott isn't fond of the AvP spinoffs, but I think that it's too early to say that he has invalidated them.
*** Not sure of what are you reffering to. I tired to search for such a mask on the blu-ray, and found nothing. Shaw has a mask hanging on her room, but it's clearly something unrelated. Plus, like the other guy mentioned the Weyland in this movie is a different character than the Weyland in AVP, so those films certainly don't fit int he canon and at best are an alternate continuity.

** One of the writers confirmed that Ridley Scott deliberately decanonised the ''Alien vs. Predator'' duology -- which he had been against from the very beginning.

*** And considering that in the first Alien movie the engineer the crew of the Nostromo finds has already been Fossilised for SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS!!! and Prometheus only goes back 29 years from the first Alien movie, so obviously the Aliens have been around for a very long time, but they do seem to be the eventual form of what happens when the Black Goo goes far enough.
*** The Nostromo crew assumed the age simply out of observation, I don't recall any scientific tests being made. The fact that we know that the creature was wearing a biomechanical suit (so the hardened, apparently fossilised "flesh" wasn't really flesh) throws off that estimate.

** I don't understand why everyone's so confused about this of all things. Really, given all aspects in the film, the black liquid seems the most straightforward. It's just a general mutagen that turns whatever organics it finds into mosntrous versions of themselves. Worms become hammerpedes, humans become zombies, and so on. It's really not that difficult.

*** It is completely absurd. I suppose some people here are merely theorising, so allow me to illuminate this with some personal experience: your abdominal muscles are antagonistic with the muscles of the back and spine. One doesn't work without the other. So any time you bend to pick something up, take a step, or lean forward to get out of bed both sets of muscles have to work. I had abdominal surgery that required what amounted to half a Cesarian (a laparotomy) and let me tell you - it takes months to be able to do anything involving the use of your abdominal muscles afterwards. First few days all you'll be able to do is lay on your back. Anything as minor as sneezing or coughing results in excruciating pain. And that was with only cutting the abdominal muscles on one side of the stomach, and some excellent pain-killers. I don't care how futuristic those staples or spray were. And they were cosmetic by the way, muscle tissue has to be sutured internally and no-one in their right mind staples skin to muscle that they need to heal, unless you want it to stay that way. She'd have been laid out for the rest of the film, and walking maybe in a couple of days at best. If someone hit her in the stomach after that, she wouldn't have been wincing, she'd have been out cold, most likely in shock. There couldn't have been any tumbling, rolling, running or anything even close. This is a clear case of handwaving it as "bandaids heal everything" and "it's scifi so anything goes, stupid". It would have been fine if we were shown some futuristic procedure implying accelerated healing or something of that nature, but all she got wasa bunch of staples that wouldn't hold anything except her skin together. Nothing to close up the uterus, nothing to pull the muscles back together. On top of that the entire procedure is done without narcosis, and it's not even clear if the spray was topical anesthetic or just an antiseptic. More nails in the coffin.

** For future reference, the Med-Pod does state "initiating anaesthetic" right before it sprays on the fake tan, and since we heard no injection sound (which could've implied off-screen anaesthetic shot), it was either in the air or the brown dye itself (which could be a micture of therapeutic substances for all we know). And regarding the medicines: how do you know they can't heal injuries as fast as Wolverine? We've seen ''him'' suffer much worse injuries than Shaw ''and'' do entire fight scenes through them, all through virtue of magical genetics. We accepted it easily enough for X-Men on a flimsier basis, we can certainly do it here on a stronger one. Also, considering that the Med-Pod administered its own anaesthetic, we don't know what those shots she was taking were actually doing. They could have been doing anything from anaesthesia to stemming her blood loss to both those things and more, or something completely different altogether. Yes, it's bad that the scene was really vague, but that doesn't prevent it from theoretically working.

** It couldn't have been their home-world, or we'd see a lot more signs of civilisation... and the line between "medical research facility akin to the USA's CDC" and "mass bioweapon production facility" is a blurry one.
*** Janek does not say its a military facility, or say the black goo is a weapon - He open speculates that may be the case, and admits he doesn't know. The only thing he says he's sure of is that its a installation (Because the only thing on the entire planet is a bunker like facility with zero infrastructure for a civilisation), and that the reason for this isolation is obviously poison black goo. He then extrapolates to the worst case scenario, which is bio weapons, but he does word as speculation.

** The film implies they (or at least one) stuck around for a bit before leaving, "engineering" human civilisation: maybe they waited for it to hit a certain point, then left, giving them the codes to follow along. Failing that, maybe they left and came back for a visit, as hypothesised in the below answers.

*** There is also the possibility that it was within their original plans to welcome Humans once our civilisation progressed enough to find them, but those plans eventually changed.

** Maybe the group on LV-223 were a separatist faction that wanted to wipe out humanity and the WMD facility was their equivalent of a terrorist camp. It's pretty illogical to assume that [[PlanetOfHats an entire alien species is some monolithic organisation where every member shares the same agenda]].

** Maybe the one seen at the beginning was some sort of famous exile. Socrates of the Engineers, given no real clothes or weapons, just a poison to kill himself with rather than die a slow death if he wished it. Except it's not a poison, it's capable of allowing DNA to be broken apart. Interacting with the water and certain substances there instead threw the whole primordial soup together in a new way that created life on Earth. Later convicts were dropped off and found the smaller populations of humans that went undetected by the Engineer ships. They were worshipped as gods and tried to guide humanity to their own ends. Some of them could have been ex-military and spread to the other convicts knowledge of a military outpost on a certain star system. The convicts were simply too short-lived to get humanity to the level of civiliation where they would be able to take the engineers to the stars, go to that star system, and grab a bunch of military hardware laying around for the exiled Engineers' revenge. This same substance that messes with DNA and allows new configurations later reacts with local worms on the planet and turns them into the cobra-like things, including the ability to grow back cut off parts that is popularly believed about worms, but wrong. The reaction of the acid, dying human, possible engineer remains, and black goop caused a different, zombifying effect in the geologist (whose enlarged cranium somewhat resembled those of the Engineers). In Holloway, one thing it did was react with his sperm, which then entered Shaw, and developed into the fetus without using her DNA in any way.

** Partly because he doesn't like Holloway due to being enamoured by Shaw but also because he was testing the life preserving qualities of the liquid so that it might benefit Weyland which was his true purpose on the ship.

** It's not implausible that a multiplanetary civilisation advanced thousands of years beyond ours, might not have settled on a "Standard" version of language that, no matter what else, would not change, allowing individuals from multiple planets in distant star systems to be able to communicate no matter what evolutions of languages had occurred on their own home planets. And also, for them, two thousand years may not be a particularly long time in the grand scheme of things. Or they just adopted a historical "primitive" tongue to communicate with all their seeded planets.

** The ship assumed they could find their own way out when they left Team Shaw, and their attention was focused on Team Shaw anyway. Team ImNotHereToMakeFriends got lost. By the time they all realised what had happened, the sandstorm had already trapped them.

** Maybe when Shaw said her reason for wanting to know why they were trying to destroy humns was because she was human was a euphemism for "it will help be decide what to do with my payload of bioweapons".

*** I before E except after C. At first we see it as oversimplified due to the exceptions; then, once we realise it's wrong over half the time, we wonder why we ever conceived of the rule, it's just weird.

* Why was such a limited team sent to investigate possible aliens? There are aliens in space and you send archeologists instead of more biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and a full time security detail? At least the linguist mess can be passed off as Weyland relying on David for his own personal benefit of the mission, but he had to realise that a better research team would be needed to make some actual money off the trillion-dollar venture. Supposing he did come back, just the one guy immortal because his archeologists couldn't figure out an advanced alien healing device, the waste of money on the entire thing would probably convince the board to fire him, then have security detain him, and a proper research team put him under the knife to try to gain something from the entire expensive mess.

*** They were in a mission to find incredibly advanced aliens who were already incredibly advanced millions of years before humanity even existed. Not only would it be foolish to assume that we could hope to match their weapons, but the Promethus having them could lead to a potentially catastrophic misuderstanding. Plus, they assumes that the Aliens weren't hostile, since an invitation to visit them was left.

** The implication is that the worms are generated by the sludge. It is a life-creating substance. The moon seems to have no native life (and no conditions to support life), and the sludge's behaviour throughout the movie is consistent with it generating life.
** Well, are there perhaps some terrestrial animals (both marine and otherwise) which could tolerate the elevated levels of CO2 on LV-233 relative to those on Earth>

** Dinosaurs were an early creation of the Engineers, when the head of their bioweapons program favoured the concept of "huge monsters with big teeth and claws". In later ages, the bioweapons program was run by someone with a preference for body-horror and disturbing sexual imagery.

*** But not all fertility issues are the sort of thing that can be treated with, say, IVF or similar treatments -- there are chromosomal conditions that make it impossible to get and remain pregnant, for instance, or (if you want to go for maximum thematic misery) Shaw's own body overreacting to such hostile foreign bodies as her own eggs, or Holloway's sperm, and basically going TEAR OUT EVERYTHING. Maybe she had ovarian or uterine cancer, or had chosen sterilisation as a young woman and regretted it as a slightly older one. There's no one set cause behind infertility -- while future medical options are probably better for a fairly well-off young woman, it seems safe to say that medicine hasn't cured literally everything.

*** In addition to all of that, Weyland is shown favouring the ''created, artificial'' male child (David) over the ''natural-born'' female child (Vickers). He may have a misogynistic streak which might lead him, in the interests of saving production time and/or capital, to simply skip out on any treatment that's for women only, assuming that Weyland Industries built the autodoc. After all, despite being in Vickers' chambers, it's for Weyland's personal use, so why bother giving in and treating the ladies?

*** I think this is along the right lines, sort of. The Med-Pod should be able to recognise all the different organs of the body, and whilst uteri are abnormal in men, there already exists at least one condition (Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, or PMDS) in which XY males develop them (complete with fallopian tubes), so it should be able to recognise female sexual organs in men too as "natural", if undesirable, features. Perhaps if Shaw had asked for a full physical, it'd have informed her of her unusual presence of a womb (since it would assume her to be male), and offer her a hysterectomy (as is offered to current PMDS sufferers), but she'd already pre-set it to focus on ''penetrating injuries'', specifically foreign bodies, and a womb (despite being an abnormal development in a supposedly XY male) does not count as a foreign body, much less a penetrating injury. The alien foetus, however, would be truly unknown to the Med-Pod, so it would see the whole organism as a foreign body, and hence remove it whilst leaving the womb intact, which it did. At least, that's the only reasonable explanation I can think of as to why this situation would play out as such in-verse. In reality, I think the Med-Pod scene was originally much more coherently written, but got tweaked in the many rewrites the script went through and got weird in the process; I don't think the original writers could answer some of these question at this point, tbh.

** That said, if the machines were pre-set for specific genders (which I doubt, due to the manual calibration option), this wouldn't be necessarily illogical. There may be some gender-specific procedures that require specialised equipment, and the Med-Pod doesn't have unlimited physical storage space for all that equipment. It might have been considered more efficient just to make gender-specific versions. Or perhaps they just thought it would sell more Med-Pods to have special versions for each gender. Who Knows?

*** Being unable to conceive doesn't necessarily mean that your body doesn't produce eggs, it could just mean that something is preventing them from being fertilised, something that the mutated sperm was clearly able to by-pass.

** Whether or not she's pregnant doesn't predicate on her egg having been fertilised; if she'd had a ''human'' embryo implanted at a fertility clinic, nobody would argue that it wasn't a pregnancy. The fact that it's a ''freaky alien parasite infesting her body'' is what makes it something other than a true pregnancy.

*** In fairness, "of your life" doesn't need quite the emphasis you're giving it. In hypersleep/suspended animation, you don't age. So while you may miss out on sharing the natural aging process and life experiences of your friends, family, pets etc and miss other time-dependent events in the current Earth + colonised worlds' network of human population, not all potential employees are concerned about this drawback.

** Also, one may argue that what the machine did was just a rapid scan of the nucleotic DNA, maybe not recognising some of the "mithocondriae" of the Engineers as such, and thus ignoring them... not to mention that we do not really know how much "sideway" information could really be involved in the transmission of life... this would still give you a high match, while allowing for a very different cellular metabolism. Anyway, it would be nice if someone noted the discrepancy and concocted any such theory on screen. But, for this to happen, I fear the writers should have consulted a biochemist, who would have pointed out the fact that any two human are not "100%" matching and that a "99.87%" was probably high enough...

*** Its one thing to do that, this is different though. This is someone going against everything that he has done before (including previous characterisation) to do something so absolutely stupid no human would ever do it ''especially'' one trained enough in biology to be chosen for a dangerous field mission on another planet.

*** It doesn't go against any previous characterisation. What are you referring to? I find it really weird that people keep thinking the scientists' behaviour was weird. It's like, everyones experience of science is Hollywood Science, so as soon as a movie shows scientists actually acting like real people, they say it's unrealistic. I saw nothing unbeleivable about any of the scientists' behaviours; I've been on multiple expeditions, to multiple conferences, and practised science in the field. Yes, scientists can be jerks. Yes, scientists can be lax about safety. Yes, geologists can get lost in their own field sites while holding a GPS. Yes, biologists are oddly fearless around even dangerous animals. Yes, scientists do things purely for money.

*** It's basically this, mixed in with his desire to impress Fifield, whom Milburn appears to think is cool, or something. It's more obvious if you watch the deleted scenes. Also, the original script by John Spaiths included a line that basically said "I'm not afraid because our suits are made to protect us from shit like this". He didn't realise the snake would be so strong, and thought he was totally protected. He was essentially doing the xenomorphic equivalent of tapping against the glass of a lion's pen in a zoo to make it be more interesting.

*** On my second viewing of the movie, the impression I got was pretty much that of the above poster (he's wearing what amounts to armour, the snake looks relatively small, and he wants to look like less of a wimp in front of Fifield), with two other points: since he's a biologist, the discovery of actual alien life is the biggest moment of his career (and pretty huge for biology in general, too), so naturally he's extremely excited. The second is that, after the encounter with the dead Engineers, the sight of the snake has to be a massive relief to him because it's ''just'' a snake. An animal on an alien world is one thing, but a race of what are basically the creator gods of humanity, which are now ''[[GodIsDead dead]]'', has a lot of existential horror built into it (hence his disgust and fear at the sight of their corpses), considering all the religious themes going through the film.

* Why haven't the Engineers checked up on their military outpost in the 2,000 years since things went pear-shaped? They obviously have some kind of civilisation, so why don't they have systems to keep track of their assets like the enormous cache of {{WMD}}s they left behind for any schmuck in a spaceship to chance upon? And speaking of which, why didn't they follow up on their "exterminate humanity" order? Did they not care to scout Earth even once to see if the job was done? If so, they are ridiculously guilty of extreme BondVillainStupidity.

*** --- Vickers threw David up against a wall, much more violent, masculine bahviour than anything observed in Shaw.
*** --- She's particularly cold in her demeanour, hence Janek's joke that she's a robot in disguise.

** It's been awhile since I've seen the movie, but it's possible that they couldn't get a good scan on the planet through an unfamilar atmosphere and decided to do it the old fashioned way.

*** But since it's so quirky with unknown infection vector and, you know, ''came from where they want to enter again, with her dying oh-so-loved father no less'', wouldn't it be wise to at least analyse what the hell it is and take proper measures? It's a space ship, I call bullshit if there's no air-tight completely sealed off the rest of the ship room for such cases.

** It's not quite right, though, to say that both of the ships had the ''same'' [=WMD=]s. The LV-426 ship was infested with xenomorph eggs, which may or may not have been loaded into it by the Engineers as a bioweapon. The LV-233 ship had the black goo containers, which are certainly intended to ''evoke'' the eggs (and effectively serve also as a prevursor to them), and were almost certainly loaded with intent to use them as bombs by the Engineers. And it's not suggested, in either film, that either of these weapons were '''both''' present (as a two for one deal) in ''either'' ship.

* If the Engineers intended to wipe out humanity circa 2,000 years ago, why would they have gone to the trouble of engineering a sentient—if not sapient—biological weapon to do so, when they could have, say, [[ColonyDrop simply resorted to orbital bombardment?]] After all, we've only had flight technology for roughly 100 years, and we've only had spaceflight technology for roughly 50 years. 2,000 years ago, the Engineers could have wiped Earth off the star maps with total impunity, and they wouldn't have lost the facility on LV-233.
** Maybe the Engineers weren't trying to destroy humanity, maybe they were just trying to modify it and turn it into something else, that black goo did kill some living things, but it also caused others to mutate. Maybe life on Earth is just one big on-going experiment being conducted by the Engineers and introducing that mutigen was meant to be the next phase in the experiment. Dr. Shaw said that they were trying to destroy humanity but if there's one thing we've learned about Dr. Shaw it's that she's capable of being wrong.

** And then there's the option that they only needed humans to breed the xenomorph aliens, which they would then in turn use as bio-weapons (Not a fan of the Alien universe, but I think they were used as such against the predator race, correct me if I'm wrong)

** I have two theories on that: either their sense of time is so unlike ours that 2,000 years didn't seem like a meaningful delay, or they were struggling with some problem of their own, if not indeed driven extinct by it, and this problem might have something to do with their destructive intents.

* It's just occurred to me that Shaw and David set off in a second Engineer ship to find some form of creator/higher power at the end of the film... yet they have no real target (unless the holographic map provides a planet of origin), no stasis pod for the most likely long journey and no food/water/sustenance. Oh, and if it's the same as the first ship, there's likely to be a whole room full of vase-eggs and black goo. I can't see them surviving for too long

** If you remember when Shaw and Holloway go to see Vickers for the first time, David explains to them that the lifeboat is outfitted with food, medicine, and anything necessary for surviving in an emergency. Shaw goes back to the lifeboat near the end of the film for air and is seen dumping many canisters from the shelves into her bag. I'm guessing that the viewer is supposed to infer that this is the substance that David mentions earlier. Seeing as the film takes place in the future, the food is probably designed to remain edible for quite some time and you wouldn't need much of it to survive off of it. As for the jars containing the liquid, Shaw mentions that the murals were changing due to change in the atmosphere, which triggered the containers leaking, so she knows not to go there. Also, the other storage containers were sealed. As for the issue of time, on the bridges of the ships there were the stasis chambers that the Engineers were using that functioning for 2,000 years, David probably knows how to use them. As for David fucking things up once again, I remember in an interview, one of the writers said David is genuinely curious as to where Shaw's journey takes and is free and willing to aid her now that Weyland is no longer available to program him.
*** Also it's already been confirmed that there is going to be a sequel. Seems to hint that David and Shaw manage to find their destination, and boy, does it seem unpleasant. [[http://uk.omg.yahoo.com/news/sir-ridley-scott-reveals-prometheus-paradise-sequel-plans-182642376.html]]

** You can buy telescoping ladders from Amazon.com for a couple hundred dollars.

*** This is a good point I'd never thought of. When the movie was originally being written it was only humanity that was influenced by the Engineer's sacrifice, likely due to the monkey's that were being modified. But in the final film it makes it seem like most life was started by the sacrifice so shouldn't everything share the same DNA structure? Humans look nothing like Engineers beyond the basics but yet we are a genetic match for them. Shouldn't it be similar to the situation like we have with primates where it's a close match but not identical? The movie makes it seem like a full on 100% match up which seems odd. If it transformed us that much shouldn't it have done so to other animals in the least?

** Dinosaurs were an early creation of the Engineers, when the head of their bioweapons program favoured the concept of "huge mosters with big teeth and claws". In later ages, the bioweapons program was run by someone with a preference for body-horror and disturbing sexual imagery.

* This is a minor one, but on two separate occasions David is shown dying his roots. Not his whole head, just his roots. Wouldn't this imply that his hair grows? Why would an android have hair that grows?
** I only remember the one occurrence in the early part of the film where he dyes his hair to look like Peter O'Toole's, copying Lawrence of Arabia.

* Okay, bit of a minor one here: What's up with the whole thing with Shaw being unable to have kids? I mean, we already have a few methods of dealing with infertility or other complications, so wouldn't it really be a bit of a non-issue by 2094?

** I assumed that the medical pod had been bought along in case Peter Weyland needed it when he woke up...not sure about why it was so small.

*** The pod was programmed for men, no other explanation given. I seriously doubt (and it wasn't shown) that the pod analyzes the patient's gender, so it would treat them as male by default. Within that framework any female reproductive organs would be "foreign" within a male body, as those are known developmental abnormalities.
*** Maybe it was just lacking the programming for dealing with specific women's issues (like a c-section), but can otherwise operate normally on a female body for general issues (and thus carry out muuch or less the same operation as "removal of foreign body"), else it could have just refused to operate on a body for which it wasn't programmed for.

*** In addition to all of that, Weyland is shown favouring the ''created, artificial'' male child (David) over the ''natural-born'' female child (Vickers). He may have a mysogynistic streak which might lead him, in the interests of saving production time and/or capital, to simply skip out on any treatment that's for women only, assuming that Weyland Industries built the autodoc. After all, despite being in Vickers' chambers, it's for Weyland's personal use, so why bother giving in and treating the ladies?

*** I think this is along the right lines, sort of. The Med-Pod should be able to recognise all the different organs of the body, and whilst uteri are abnormal in men, there already exists at least one condition (Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome, or PMDS) in which XY males develop them (complete w/fallopian tubes), so it should be able to recognise female sexual organs in men too as "natural", if undesirable, features. Perhaps if Shaw had asked for a full physical, it'd have informed her of her unusual presence of a womb (since it would assume her to be male), and offer her a hysterectomy (as is offered to current PMDS sufferers), but she'd already pre-set it to focus on ''penetrating injuries'', specifically foreign bodies, and a womb (despite being an abnormal development in a supposedly XY male) does not count as a foreign body, much less a penetrating injury. The alien foetus, however, would be truly unknown to the Med-Pod, so it would see the whole organism as a foreign body, and hence remove it whilst leaving the womb intact, which it did. At least, that's the only reasonable explanation I can think of as to why this situation would play out as such in-verse. In reality, I think the Med-Pod scene was originally much more coherently written, but got tweaked in the many rewrites the script went through and got weird in the process; I don't think the original writers could answer some of these question at this point, tbh.

* "Hey Shaw, you're three months pregnant." Wait, what? David, you're either cruel as hell because you know she's infertile, or you're terrible at your job. Having a ''foreign body'' (a mutated sperm from Holloway which didn't fertilise anything, and therefore didn't impregnate Shaw) grow to a large size doesn't make her any KIND of pregnant, much less give the impression that she's carried it for three months (for starters, there would be a plethora of hormonal changes, not just a lump in her belly). Or, what, do you think that a child with a distended belly due to a three foot-long intestinal worm is also x-months pregnant?

* So let me get this straight: with the exception of two people, a team of scientists are sent into space, spend two years in cryo sleep...and only AFTER that are they informed of what THE MISSION'S PURPOSE IS. How did the recruitment process work? "Hey, this is Bill at Weyland Enterprises. We've been looking at your LinkedIn profile and we think you'd be perfect for this project of ours. No I'm sorry, the nature of the project is classified, we can only tell you the exact details on site. Where is "the site"? Oh, several thousand light years away, the journey requires 2 years of cryosleep. We do pay extremely well thou...hello?" Maybe this is why the characters act so stupidly: they're the only ones who fell for this.
** What's shocking about that? That's virtually the exact pitch they used to recruit the lead in ''VideoGame/AliensVsPredator'', so Weyland has clearly had some success with it in that other canon. Anyway, given the bet the pilots made and the fact that they brought a geologist and biologists, most of them probably just assumed it was some newly discovered planetary mining site that Weyland wanted to develop before his rivals learned about it.
*** Travelling to Antarctica on a badly explained pitch is risky yet still survivable in case something bad happens, especially if you have experience in survival and hazardous environments like said lead. Here, you're asked to spend ''two years of your life'' on a journey and have no means of return other than the one your employers provide (at least Antarctica has some human presence). For reasons UNKNOWN.

*** You've got to look at it in context of the universe. Weyland is a massive company, probably one of the ten largest on Earth (in terms of capital and revenue, assuming that the money and resources required to terraform entire planets would be hard to come by for even the top 100 largest corporations). It's basically the Microsoft of the Alienverse. It also obviously keeps lots of trade secrets and hide a lot of internal info, and most companies that do this gain a public reputation for doing so (look at Apple). So if Microsoft or Apple came to you or began advertising for a project that they come right out and say needs to remain confidential, but offers fantastic pay (or just think about putting that you consulted for Weyland on a resume) and the chance to work for a global giant, I don't think it's hard at all to imagine they'd have a little bit of choice in applicants. They know to expect some secrecy from Weyland (admittedly not to the extent we see in the films) but are swayed by either the money or the resume experience.

** Also, one may argue that what the machine did was just a rapid scan of the nucleotic DNA, maybe not recognising some of the "mithocondriae" of the Engineers as such, and thus ignoring them... not to mention that we do not really know how much "sideway" information could really be involved in the transmission of life... this would still give you a high match, while allowing for a very different cellular metabolism. Anyway, it would be nice if someone noted the discrepancy and concocted any such theory on screen. But, for this to happen, I fear the writers should have consulted a byochemist, who would have pointed out the fact that any two human are not "100%" matching and that a "99.87%" was probably high enough...

*** Among humans on this planet Earth people come in plenty of different variations. There are dark skin and light skin, various eyelid types, subtle differences in esophagus; there are even populations who are very tall and very short. And there are albinos, although on this planet they don't form a population on their own. So yes, it's perfectly possible for the Engineer DNA to be 100% match with the humanity, and still offer enough leeway for the relatively minor cosmetic differences. In fact, there would be leeway for much more than that, and tests could still give a 100% match.

*** Er, yes they did. They overlaid a readout of the Engineer's DNA over a human sample and it was a perfect match (they even said so). What I think they meant was that the Engineers possessed the same genes as us (not necessarily the same alleles, however), which allows them to look like 10 ft. albinos and still have the same DNA (in a manner of speaking) as us.
** All of that being said, just because their genetic structure appears to have the same layout doesn't mean there isn't some sort of genetic variation using the same materials. At our most basic level, the DNA of an Asian midget is the same as a 9 ft tall African-American with gigantism. On top of that, there's barely a few percent differences between humans and apes, yet the two look nothing alike. It's very easily possible that the base pairs in the Engineer DNA exists in the same quantities as in human DNA, similar double helix, just different variations in the genes affecting physical shape.

*** Real life scientists have injected themselves and their children with jellyfish venom, stuck their heads into particle accelerators, and [[http://www.cracked.com/article_16301_the-6-most-badass-stunts-ever-pulled-in-name-science.html stuff like this]]. And in Jack Barnes case, that was after years of research.

*** It doesn't go against any previous characterisation. What are you referring to? I find it really weird that people keep thinking the scientists behaviour was weird. It's like, everyones experience of science is Hollywood Science, so as soon as a movie shows scientists actually acting like real people, they say it's unrealistic. I saw nothing unbeleivable about any of the scientists behaviours; I've been on multiple expeditions, to multiple conferences, and practised science in the field. Yes, scientists can be jerks. Yes, scientists can be lax about safety. Yes, geologists can lost in their own field sites while holding a GPS. Yes, biologists are oddly fearless around even dangerous animals. Yes, scientists do things purely for money.
** It bothers me so much that he goes forth with it when the phallic cobra is acting so obviously hostile -- making itself bigger, opening its headflaps and ''hissing'' -- and he's shown to be rather cowardly before. Also, what's his reluctance in dealing with the corpses before? He's a biologist! That's why he's in this mission!

*** Indeed, it ''would'' have been fairly easy to deal with if not for its acidic blood, which neither scientist had suspected until Fifield cut the thing in half. Fifield might've had to chop it into twenty smaller worms, but it wouldn't have been able to penetrate the suits without the corrosive.

** There is a deleted scene that attempts to HandWave Milburn's behavior towards the Hammerpede. The scene shows Milburn collecting some of the worms that later mutate into the Hammerpede and he's excited because he's never found an extraterrestrial lifeform larger than a microbe before. YMMV on how effective of a hand wave this is, but to this viewer, it provides a perfect explanation for his behavior towards the Hammerpede: He simply thought it was a larger version of the small, harmless worms he collected earlier.
*** Indeed, he probably assumed that he'd found the top predator of the ecosystem to which the smaller worms belonged. In which case, it'd be a logical assumption that it was equipped to kill ''small worms'', not humans fifty times its size. Certainly there were no indications that anything as big as a human was part of the strange ecology which Milburn believed he'd discovered. The threat display it showed would've been used to intimidate rivals of its own species, not to attack man-sized creatures, had it actually ''been'' a natural animal and not a sludge-spawned living bioweapon.

* Why haven't the engineers checked up on their military outpost in the 2,000 years since things went pear-shaped? They obviously have some kind of civilisation, so why don't they have systems to keep track of their assets like the enormous cache of {{WMD}}s they left behind for any schmuck in a spaceship to chance upon? And speaking of which, why didn't they follow up on their "exterminate humanity" order? Did they not care to scout Earth even once to see if the job was done? If so, they are ridiculously guilty of extreme BondVillainStupidity.

** Seeding planets with their DNA is done by robed, ritual sacrifice. The containers are laid out before a giant idol, surrounded by a mural of what looks like a religion involving Xenomorphs. The Engineers never display any firearms or other weapons, even in recordings. Especially given the goal may not be extermination, there is no guarantee it was a military operation in the first place.

* Considering the state of the outpost as the Prometheus crew find it, the last surviving engineer would have known the black goo had gotten loose since it wiped out his comrades. Upon being re-awoken, why does he make no effort to check the containment status of the ship's cargo and the possible infestation of creatures like the hammerpedes? Why is "take off and blitz Earth" his first and only priority? Heck, why doesn't he break for lunch first, since he hasn't eaten in 2,000 years? Doesn't he at least need to pee? Or does his biosuit take care of bodily functions?
** If we assume the reason why the Engineers wanted to kill humans in the first place is that they feared the human race would advance too far, and be able to challenger the Engineers themselves, then the actions of the surviving Engineer make sense. Consider his situation of the Engineer when he wakes up: the first thing he sees is a bunch of humans, from which he can deduce humanity is now capable of intergalactic space travel (something which they couldn't do 2,000 years ago, when the Engineer went to sleep). That means the humans a ship of their own on the planet, possibly some weapons too. Now, the Engineer quickly observes the humans that have come to meet them. They are clearly at odds with each other, one of them even punches another to the stomach. Then one of the humans speaks in the Engineer's tongue and tells him that the reason they are here is because this old geezer wants to live forever, instead of accepting that he'll die of natural causes. From this the Engineer deduces humans have become what the Engineers feared they would: a selfish and violent race, which is now capable of challenging their makers. Also, the Engineer guesses that if the humans were smart enough to wake him up from his cryosleep, it’s quite possible they have figured out (or will figure out) what the cargo of the ship is and where it was supposed to fly. Because of this the Engineer knows he can't be doing any long-term observation on the humans, since the others on the planet might be able to stop him flying to Earth. (Of course The Engineer could’ve been wrong, and the humans hadn’t figured out the purpose of the ship, but better err on the side of caution, right?) So, considering the options he has, he decides his best chance is the element of surprise: kill the humans and try to get his ship to air as soon as possible, before the humans can stop him. And the thing is, the Engineer is absolutely right in his deductions: the humans did figure out what the purpose of the ship was, and they do try to stop him, and succeed in that… But that was only because not ‘’all’’ humans are as selfish as the Engineers thought, some of them are capable of sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

* Am I the only one who feels that as a prequel to ''{{Film/Alien}}'', the timeline just doesn't quite match up? So this film takes place 2093 while Alien was supposed to take place 2122, a 29 year difference. The creature seen at the end of this film is referred to as a "Proto-Xenomorph" implying it was the first. Whereas the ship in Alien was stated to have been there a long time, with the pilot's remains having fossilized. However that ship was designed to carry the now fully formed Xenomorph eggs. There just doesn't seem to be nearly the amount of time between the films to have the results we saw.

** The creature at the end was not the first Xenomorph, it was one of the same type of creature from which the Xenomorphs had evolved (the painting that they see in that room where all the jars of black goo are found shows a Xenomorph, implying that they did exist prior to the events of this film), the planet upon which Prometheus takes place is also not the same planet upon which Alien takes place, so it's entirely possible that a similar process occurred on the planet in Alien as the planet in Prometheus but began a lot sooner (allowing time for the Space Jockey to fossilize.)

** Upon my first viewing of the film, I had arrived at a conclusion that perhaps the black goo isn't what gave rise to the Xenomorphs, but the other way around. Perhaps the Engineers had developed a way to isolate the rapidly-changing DNA in a Xenomorph and then weaponize it (they are masters of organic technology, so this might not be such a stretch for them.) This would explain why it is so virulent, and why, when mixed with the DNA of actual living organisms, it does derive a xenomorph-esque organism after a few recombinations. The logic behind doing this is sound, too; the black goo, while extremely dangerous, would be a lot easier to handle than a cluster of volatile Xenomorph eggs.

*** The AvP movies aren't 'the original movies', but aside form that slip, producers don't determine canonicity, it is a general fan consensus (and often not even a consensus). Most people happily ignore AvP, whereas many others happily include everything. Whatever increases your fun is "correct". Anyway, Prometheus did well enough, and many people absolutely love it. It will quite possibly be remembered as one of the best old school sci-fi movies of this generation long after the internat backlash has been forgotten.
** Worst-case scenario, Prometheus invalidates the two {{AvP}} movies, which is no big loss. Unless there's a line specifically stating that the Predators do not exist in this universe, there's still room for them. (And the only reason to include such a line would be as a TakeThat to the {{AvP}} franchise as a whole.) Even if the characters blanket state that they've encountered no other intelligent extraterrestrial life, that still doesn't invalidate the Predator crossover, the Predators are sneaky and tend not to leave evidence of their activities behind.
** One of the writers confirmed that Ridley Scott deliberately decanonized the ''Alien vs. Predator'' duology -- which he had been against from the very beginning.

*** And considering that in the first Alien movie the engineer the crew of the Nostromo finds has already been Fossilized for SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS!!! and Prometheus only goes back 29 years from the first Alien movie, so obviously the Aliens have been around for a very long time, but they do seem to be the eventual form of what happens when the Black Goo goes far enough.
*** The Nostromo crew assumed the age simply out of observation, I don't recall any scientific tests being made. The fact that we know that the creature was wearing a biomechanical suit (so the hardened, apparently fossilized "flesh" wasn't really flesh) throws off that estimate.

** Watch the scene again. 1) The ship is ''not rolling in a straight line'' and they don't run in one either. They can't easily see where to run from where they're located. 2) Shaw lives because of sheer dumb luck and a well-placed rock, not because she moved out of the path of the ship (she didn't). This film has many plot holes, but this ain't one. (You can instead blame crappy editing if you like, for making it ''necessary'' to closely examine the scene before it makes sense.)

*** My interpretation of David’s character is that he has been programmed to mimic human emotions and facial expressions in order to make humans feel more comfortable (and we see that he goes thorough a lot of effort to appear “normal”), but he really doesn’t have a sense of right and wrong from a human standpoint. This leads him to say really inappropriate things (like “didn’t think you had it in you” and “I watched your dreams”) with a creepy placid smile on his face, which makes him even MORE CREEPY. So, he was impressed with Dr. Shaw’s sudden badassery, but didn’t realize he had said anything inappropriate until he saw her reaction (or... maybe he’s just messing with her head. The ambiguity of his motives really adds to the creepy atmosphere).

** It wasn't a hysterectomy, it was a cesarean section (c-section.) A hysterectomy is the removal of the entire uterus, whereas a c-section only removes what's inside the uterus (usually a baby.) Shaw didn't cut out her uterus, just the thing that was growing in it. Considering her "strong survival instinct" and the accompanying adrenaline rush and the no doubt really good drugs she was taking, it's not really that absurd. And notice how she winces and groans in pain every so often, particularly when something hits her abdomen.

*** It is completely absurd. I suppose some people here are merely theorizing, so allow me to illuminate this with some personal experience: your abdominal muscles are antagonistic with the muscles of the back and spine. One doesn't work without the other. So any time you bend to pick something up, take a step, or lean forward to get out of bed both sets of muscles have to work. I had abdominal surgery that required what amounted to half a Cesarian (a laparotomy) and let me tell you - it takes months to be able to do anything involving the use of your abdominal muscles afterwards. First few days all you'll be able to do is lay on your back. Anything as minor as sneezing or coughing results in excruciating pain. And that was with only cutting the abdominal muscles on one side of the stomach, and some excellent pain-killers. I don't care how futuristic those staples or spray were. And they were cosmetic by the way, muscle tissue has to be sutured internally and no-one in their right mind staples skin to muscle that they need to heal, unless you want it to stay that way. She'd have been laid out for the rest of the film, and walking maybe in a couple of days at best. If someone hit her in the stomach after that, she wouldn't have been wincing, she'd have been out cold, most likely in shock. There couldn't have been any tumbling, rolling, running or anything even close. This is a clear case of handwaving it as "bandaids heal everything" and "it's scifi so anything goes, stupid". It would have been fine if we were shown some futuristic procedure implying accelerated healing or something of that nature, but all she got wasa bunch of staples that wouldn't hold anything except her skin together. Nothing to close up the uterus, nothing to pull the muscles back together. On top of that the entire procedure is done without narcosis, and it's not even clear if the spray was topical anesthetic or just an antiseptic. More nails in the coffin.

** This troper simply assumed that since Weyland had invented all sorts of nanites/nanobots, Shaw just injected plenty of those into herself and they stitched her up from the inside. It makes more sense than the idea of shooting up future-morphine and then bouncing around like an action hero immediately afterwards.

*** Or, you know, creepy alien snake poison. There is weird natural stuff going on back home at earth, with wasps turning caterpillars into zombies. Also, airborne poison/something isn't still out of the equation. I agree with the headscratcher, from "strange stuff happen after we know of an aggressive dangerous alien animal" to "OMG it is a bio-WMD facility!" is a ''big'' leap. "They're transporting bio-weapons/viruzes/disease/etc" would be logical, quite ok and serve the exact same purpose until the killer engineer, where things could've naturally escalated to "they want us deeeeeeead!", but as is, they came to the conclusion by watching the finished movie or something.
** It couldn't have been their home-world, or we'd see a lot more signs of civilization... and the line between "medical research facility akin to our CDC" and "mass bioweapon production facility" is a blurry one.
*** Janek does not say its a military facility, or say the black goo is a weapon - He open speculates that may be the case, and admits he doesn't know. The only thing he says he's sure of is that its a installation (Because the only thing on the entire planet is a bunker like facility with zero infrastructure for a civilization), and that the reason for this isolation is obviously poison black goo. He then extrapolates to the worst case scenario, which is bio weapons, but he does word as speculation.

** The film implies they (or at least one) stuck around for a bit before leaving, "engineering" human civilization: maybe they waited for it to hit a certain point, then left, giving them the codes to follow along. Failing that, maybe they left and came back for a visit, as hypothesized in the below answers.

*** There is also the possibility that it was within their original plans to welcome Humans once our civilization progressed enough to find them, but those plans eventually changed.

** Maybe the group on LV-223 were a separatist faction that wanted to wipe out humanity and the WMD facility was their equivalent of a terrorist camp. It's pretty illogical to assume that [[PlanetOfHats an entire alien species is some monolithic organization where every member shares the same agenda]].

** Maybe they are just Dicks

** A bit of WMG: the Engineer at the beginning of the movie could have been part of a different faction than the ones that the film shows. It would fit with the theme of Creation vs. Darwin, one faction creates life and the other wants to destroy the other's creation due to ideological differences. Then again it would seem that life on Earth was also the result of the Black Goo dissolving and mutating Engineer DNA, so make of that what you will.

** Maybe whatever catastrophe that some speculate killed their civilization left them looking for a new homeworld, and Earth is a perfect biosphere.

** It's not implausible that a multiplanetary civilization advanced thousands of years beyond ours, might not have settled on a "Standard" version of language that, no matter what else, would not change, allowing individuals from multiple planets in distant star systems to be able to communicate no matter what evolutions of languages had occurred on their own home planets. And also, for them, two thousand years may not be a particularly long time in the grand scheme of things. Or they just adopted a historical "primitive" tongue to communicate with all their seeded planets.
** It doesn't make sense if you consider it as the Engineers' own language, but Weylon's reasoning might have been that since the Engineers seem to have visited earth more than once, they might still remember something like Proto-Indo-European. As we see in the hologram briefing scene, there are many later depictions of the star map than the one found in the opening scene. It might not have made it possible to have a conversation, but might make communicating easier. That does raise the question of why David would learn reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, which is a tentative guess as to what the Indo-European proto-language might have sounded like, and not a language for which we have solid evidence in the form of writing, like Sumerian. The Engineers would have been more likely to have made contact with or monitored the urbanized Sumerians than contemporary steppe dwelling Indo-Europeans.

** The ship assumed they could find their own way out when they left Team Shaw, and their attention was focused on Team Shaw anyway. Team ImNotHereToMakeFriends got lost. By the time they all realized what had happened, the sandstorm had already trapped them.

*** Beleive it or not, these sorts of things really happen. Who would have thought a privately funded expedition based on one rich guy's crazy fantasy, centred on the Eric Von Danikan's of the era, hiring the kinds of people who would break all their connections with Earth for the sake of a decent payday, could make common expeditionary errors like that? Bear in mind also that nobody really thought they were in danger at that point. Very accurate portrayal of privately funded science, to be perfectly honest.

*** Fifield ''was'' the one who first panicked at the dead alien, and he didn't get stoned until ''later'' that evening (Milburn was freaked by it too, but not as much.) And even if he HAD spent the entire recon stoned, that doesn't excuse MissionControl (the guys following everybody's trackers on the map aboard the Prometheus, and were neither stoned nor afraid nor in a hurry) losing track of them before the storm hit.

** There are theories that that's an Alien Queen (it has the same shell-like head and ''starts out'' at the size of a full-grown drone xenomorph.) Maybe it'll just lay a bunch of eggs for the next squishy explorers to find, like in the first movie.

*** The thing is, if you said that people would still know what you meant. Especially in England, where fag means cigarette before homosexual and faggots can also be any number of (often disgusting) meat-based mincey type things. Although that second one might well apply more up North. Maybe you should try to get less angry over a single line in a film, no?

*** That's '''not''' its name. It's called "evolution" or "natural selection" depending which aspect you want to emphasize. No scientist calls it "Darwinism". If your grade school teachers claimed differently, they were wrong. Heaven knows it wouldn't be the first mistake schoolteachers ever made about science (or history for that matter), lots of things are routinely said in high-school science classes that are oversimplified at best and just plain wrong at worst.

** Darwin's theory of natural selection is NEVER referred to as "evolution", in fact the belief that Darwin discovered evolution is a common misconception and to lump the theory of natural selection together with a evolution theory is a major oversimplification (though there is overlap between the two.)
** "Darwinism" is pejorative in the United States, but in Britain it is not, and is in fact commonly used. So maybe the scientist who says it is British, or after the 2080's the term isn't pejorative anymore because the anti-evolution faction in the US dies out by 2050?

* Why was such a limited team sent to investigate possible aliens? There are aliens in space and you send archeologists instead of more biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and a full time security detail? At least the linguist mess can be passed off as Weyland relying on David for his own personal benefit of the mission, but he had to realize that a better research team would be needed to make some actual money off the trillion-dollar venture. Supposing he did come back, just the one guy immortal because his archeologists couldn't figure out an advanced alien healing device, the waste of money on the entire thing would probably convince the board to fire him, then have security detain him, and a proper research team put him under the knife to try to gain something from the entire expensive mess.

** There was no guarantee that they'd find aliens. I view it as the board trying to salvage the mission their CEO forced them into, by slipping in people useful for non-lifeform planet research. Of course, the lack of safety precautions are pretty fridge logic'ed.

* Why would the scientists on the expedition try to revive a detached alien head? Even if they could jump-start the brain, it's unlikely it remembers enough of anything to provide any knowledge to them, and it lacks vocal chords to even talk, which is something they should realize because they found it decapitated by watching a recording of it getting decapitated. Instead, they jumpstarted a brain and lost a chance to study some of the alien physiology. You know, because they never bother checking out how the bodies are different from their own after they realize their DNA is 100-hundred percent the same but the two species look entirely different.

** Given that ''both'' the Engineer ships from ''Alien'' and ''Prometheus'' had their crews wiped out, with neither being salvaged, neutralized, or even investigated by their fellow-Engineers, it's possible that some sort of mass sabotage was launched against their military and/or their entire civilization 2,000 years ago. It'd be one hell of a coincidence for ''two'' spacecraft carrying the same [=WMD=]s to be left abandoned on two different planets, otherwise. Certainly it'd explain why none of their vessels ever made it through to Earth to wipe us out.

* It's just occurred to me that Shaw and David set off in a second Engineer ship to find some form of creator/higher power at the end of the film... yet they have no real target (unless the holographic map provides a planet of origin), no stasis pod for the most likely long journey and no food/water/sustenance. Oh, and if it's the same as the first ship, there's likely to be a whole room ful of vase-eggs and black goo. I can't see them surviving for too long

* A minor one, but I'm not sure if the worms were naturally in the soil of the planet or were they carried onto it by the crew? They look like just regular earthworms that you would see on, well, Earth. (If they were natural, I guess there would be probably be more of the mutated worms, but we only see two of them.)
** They were presumably native to the planet, since they're a bit big for the crew to accidently bring them along. The fact that they look like the worms you see on Earth could be connected to the fact that the Engineers created life on Earth, or just aresult of convergent evolution. It's also possible that there were many more worms and we only see the two.

*** But not all fertility issues are the sort of thing that can be treated with, say, IVF or similar treatments -- there are chromosomal conditions that make it impossible to get and remain pregnant, for instance, or (if you want to go for maximum thematic misery) Shaw's own body overreacting to such hostile foreign bodies as her own eggs, or Holloway's sperm, and basically going TEAR OUT EVERYTHING. Maybe she had ovarian or uterine cancer, or had chosen sterilization as a young woman and regretted it as a slightly older one. There's no one set cause behind infertility -- while future medical options are probably better for a fairly well-off young woman, it seems safe to say that medicine hasn't cured literally everything.

** Fireproof does not mean whatever's inside doesn't catch on fire because the inside of the suit reaches combustion point (admittedly, unlikely with a modern flamethrower.) If he doesn't roast alive, [[NightmareFuel he's most definitely boiled alive...]]

*** Presumably it's being recorded on the ship's computer. They hadn't actually realized that something was up with the two until the main team found them, IIRC.

** This troper assumed that the medical pod had been bought along in case Peter Weyland needed it when he woke up...not sure about why it was so small.

*** It's also possible that the autodoc was programmed to prioritize the most threatening medical issue on the patient in the pod. Kind of like how it would fix a life threatening injury before a cosmetic one. Ergo, it would probably go for the thing that was completely 100% alien to human physiology rather than something just not in human males, ex. a uterus and ovaries. Or Elizabeth Shaw was able to just use a pre-set program to remove malignant masses from the abdomen, which seems like a procedure that the pod should be able to do for someone as elderly/diseased as Weyland appeared to be.

* "Hey Shaw, you're three months pregnant." Wait, what? David, you're either cruel as hell because you know she's infertile, or you're terrible at your job. Having a ''foreign body'' (a mutated sperm from Holloway which didn't fertilize anything, and therefore didn't impregnate Shaw) grow to a large size doesn't make her any KIND of pregnant, much less give the impression that she's carried it for three months (for starters, there would be a plethora of hormonal changes, not just a lump in her belly.) Or, what, do you think that a child with a distended belly due to a three foot-long intestinal worm is also x-months pregnant?

*** Being unable to conceive doesn't necessarily mean that your body doesn't produce eggs, it could just mean that something is preventing them from being fertilized, something that the mutated sperm was clearly able to by-pass.

** Whether or not she's pregnant doesn't predicate on her egg having been fertilized; if she'd had a ''human'' embryo implanted at a fertility clinic, nobody would argue that it wasn't a pregnancy. The fact that it's a ''freaky alien parasite infesting her body'' is what makes it something other than a true pregnancy.

*** Additionally, it's likely that Weyland was looking for little-known people who would get him where he wanted without asking questions. Remember in both ''Alien'' and ''Aliens'', the Weyland-Yutani corporation prioritized getting an alien specimen over the lives of those involved in the operation, both times using the simple cover of a "rescue mission". In the case of ''Alien'', Ash's programming reveals that the crew were "expendable", and in ''Aliens'' we find out that Burke had planned to not only impregnate Ripley and Newt but ''murder'' any surviving marines by sabotaging their cryo chambers. Theoretically Peter Weyland could have done the same thing here, disguising the true purpose of the expedition (the faint possibility of extending his life) as a "geological expedition" on some new planet. Of course, by the time Shaw explained that they were there because of an ancient star map, they were already at the planet and thus everyone present had no real choice but to go along with it since they couldn't exactly turn back.

** It's possible some contamination occured since the crew had been walking around with their helmets off the whole time they interacted with it. It already seemed contaminated by the black goo so it may have been mutating already or maybe they simply sampled their own DNA on/in the head by accident, they only run the one test after all.
** Also, one may argue that what the machine did was just a rapid scan of the nucleotic DNA, maybe not recognizing some of the "mithocondriae" of the Engineers as such, and thus ignoring them... not to mention that we do not really know how much "sideway" information could really be involved in the transmission of life... This would still give you a high match, while allowing for a very different cellular metabolysm. Anyway, it would be nice if someone noted the discrepancy and concocted any such theory on screen. But, for this to happen, I fear the writers should have consulted a byochemist, who would have pointed out the fact that any two human are not "100%" matching and that a "99.87%" was probably high enough...

*** Among humans on this planet Earth people come in plenty of different variations. There are dark skin and light skin, various eyelid types, subtle differences in escophagus; there are even populations who are very tall and very short. And there are albinos, although on this planet they don't form a population on their own. So yes, it's perfectly possible for the Engineer DNA to be 100% match with the humanity, and still offer enough leeway for the relatively minor cosmetic differences. In fact, there would be leeway for much more than that, and tests could still give a 100% match.

*** Its one thing to do that, this is different though. This is someone going against everything that he has done before (including previous characterization) to do something so absolutely stupid no human would ever do it ''especially'' one trained enough in biology to be chosen for a dangerous field mission on another planet.

** Although I haven't seen the movie, why do we assume that Engineer society and civilization is perfectly unified? This might have been the work of a renegade faction that was operating in secret but ended up blowing its wad with this operation.

** Vickers was needed as a thematic counterpoint to Shaw, Holloway, and her father. She isn't important to the actual sequence of events that makes up the pot, but the movie did need someone to vocally contrast the believers' obsessions and poorly-founded ideas.

*** How is Vickers a Vasquez? Just because she does a few push-ups and flames poor Holloway to death? She's a cold, selfish person and obvioulsy Creator/RidleyScott used her to divert attention from Shaw being the FinalGirl.
*** Vasques Always Dies = tougher female is preferentially offed over the more feminine, and Vickers was definitely less feminine. Indeed, let us count the ways:

*** --- Whilst Shaw was chundering her frail little guts up after stasis, Vickers was doing push-ups

*** --- She carries herself in a noticeably authoritative, masculine way

*** It's conclusive: Shaw is depicted as less tough than Vickers. It doesn't matter why they did it (to distract from Shaw being the final girl, for example), because it doesn't change the fact that Vickers is still the more competent, masculine female main character (The Vasquez), and she still died, why? Because the VasquesAlwaysDies. Whether or not you find her likeable is an entirely different matter.
*** And another thing: Vickers may be cold, but if you think Vickers is selfish then you clealy haven't been paying attention to the film. Consider the following:

*** --- She denies Holloway entrance to the Prometheus in the interest of the rest of the crew, and rightly so: she'd already watched the crew find Milburn dead (w/Fifield missing) and found evidence of potentially hostile lifeforms that they don't understand (the snake that jumped out of Milburn's throat), not to mention the fact that she already knows that the place was inhabited once but is now only filled with dead bodies of the previous residents (one of whom she observed being blown up by an unknown ailment before her own eyes). Things were clearly spiralling out of control at the time, and there was a very real possibility that Holloway's unknown ailment could present a danger to the entire crew. For all she knew, Holloway might have been going the way of Milburn, complete with potentially contagious alien snake breaking out of his suit and spreading the disease. She was taking decisive action to protect everyone. And she didn't even want to torch him at first, she just wanted him to stay outside for the time being. Her dialogue and hesitation prior to immolation show that she didn't really want to use it, and it was only at Holloway's insistence that she torched him. If it weren't for Vickers, they might have all been killed (well, killed sooner, anyway)

* To get back to the original question, the point of Vicker's character is to serve as a distraction. She pretty much possess the character traits of a cross between Ripley and a corrupt W-Y official. Her purpose is to keep the audience guessing if Shaw will be killed off and Vickers will turn out to be the last woman standing or if she'll be the one to screw the mission for greed/wanting alien samples. Turns out she's neither.

* The method that ''Prometheus'' used to find a landing site seems obscenely slipshod. A reasonable method would be, say, using radar to map the planet and then look for potential landing sites from the radar data. Instead, they decided to enter the atmosphere, fly around at an altitude better suited for a sightseeing aircraft than a vessel supposed exploring a whole planet, and hope to stumble onto something. The fact that they actually succeed at stumbling onto something indicates either that the planet is littered with unexplored Engineer sites or the ''Prometheus'' crew is the (un)luckiest group of people in human history. Worse, for all we (or the crew) know, there is a peaceful city of Amish Engineers just over the next hill that would have told them not to go to the old black sludge facility.

* So, why does one only program a medical pod to only perform "male surgeries"? Did they run out of disk space and were too cheap to pay for the 32G version instead of 16G? Joke aside, what does one gain by overspecializing this machine, especially when ''it can perform a c-section anyway''?

*** [[http://www.tuaw.com/2011/11/30/debunked-ridiculous-claims-of-pro-life-bias-in-siri/ Apparently not]]. And I doubt they'd have all the equipment needed to perform a C-section if they were that oblivious. From a Doylist point of view, the reason for that is to create (gratuitous) tension and foreshadow [[spoiler:Weyland stowing in the ship]], but from a Watsonian view, it just makes no damn sense to take a machine limited like that in a trip to another galaxy.

*** The pods can probably be re-calibrated as needed for other patients, and can be overridden and used anyway in an emergency. Presumably, under circumstances other than I-need-an-alien-cut-out-of-me-right-away they would have had a medical professional tweaking the settings before using it. The pod is not intelligent, and doesn't understand what's happening around it, so it's going to issue a warning when it's being used non-optimally even if it's not the best time for it.

* Why is Vickers considered to be the OnlySaneMan on the front page? She kills Holloway not out of adherence to quarantine protocol (like Ripley tried to), but because of an irrational fear of contagion. Note that when Shaw contacted the ship and requested the doors be opened, she specifically asked for quarantine failsafe to be implemented. Vickers, in fact, subverted protocol and took matters into her own hand. In any case, since when does quarantine mean "kill the infected bastard" or even "leave the infected bastard to die"? Quarantine is about isolation (to prevent further contamination), observation and eventually, hopefully, treatment. All Vickers hears over the comm is that Holloway is sick and she suits up, picks up a flamethrower and gets ready to burn him to death. Look at the expression on her face when she does this. She is terrified, not determined. She is not doing this out of rational calculation, but out of panicked fear. Later on, she tries to ignore Shaw when she tells Janek that the Engineer is going to travel to Earth to destroy it and is incredulous when Janek overrides her. At no point in the film (except the very beginning) is she acting intelligently and rationally.

*** But since it's so quirky with unknown infection vector and, you know, ''came from where they want to enter again, with her dying oh-so-loved father no less'', wouldn't it be wise to at least analyze what the hell it is and take proper measures? It's a space ship, I call bullshit if there's no air-tight completely sealed off the rest of the ship room for such cases.
** Burning humans alive tends to horrify just anyone. It would be a problem if Vickers ''wasn't'' terrified by killing Holloway in one of most gruesome ways.
** And what exactly she was suppose to do? "Yes, Holloway, come here, have a dinner with the crew, how do you feel with your unknown, alien disease that we can all get and then maybe carry to our home", so we can land in Alien-esque lack of quarantine? That kind of thinking is the fastest way to get an epidemy. Of unknown disease. With no real way to cure it. Not to mention that Holloway's state was deteriorating by the second. But yeah, you can be easily labelled as sociopath, because you employ rational thinking into emotional situation. And rationallity in case of unknown, potentially uncurable diseases of unknow way of spreading says "burn the fucker".

*** Yeah, the sequel hook pretty much hangs on finding why they went hostile against earth.
** The entire movie is based around the fact that the protagonists ''don't'' understand ''anything'' about the Engineers. The real horror in the movie isn't the black goo, it's that our creators are incomprehensible beings who decided to create and destroy us for reasons that may be not only completely alien to us, but also undercut out notions of significance in the universe.
** I think the answer is pretty clear if you look at the subtext in the movie. Engineer culture is based on self-sacrifice so that something bigger than you can live. (The xenomorphs are the 'dark opposite' of this). Weyland is about sacrificing *others* so that he can continue to live long beyond his normal lifespan. Weyland represents a human impulse, the Engineers have an exactly opposing alien set of values. It's black & white morality meeting blue & orange morality, and blue & orange has long ago decided "nope, we can't let that crazy species live."

** Not only that, but if the derelict crashed on LV-426 several thousands years ago, and had been broadcasting a signal ever since, they why didn't the Engineer base (whoch had only been out of comission for 2000 years) send a salvage mission?

** Not sure what do you mean by that "only a vessel" bit, LV-223 had a gigantic Engineer base on it's surface, and the spaceship stationed there wasn't even the only one. Their original plan was to leave those clues so one day, when humanity developed sufficently, we could find them. Plus it makes sense that the point of first meeting wouldn't be on their own planet. Thing is, 2,000 years ago things changed for whatever reason, and their plans for earth and humanity become hostile.
*** The point is that the planet the star maps pointed to was ''not'' the Engineers' homeworld, but only an outpost. The Engineers' homeworld is where Shaw goes at the end of the movie.

* This is more a question, but what was the cord that Shaw ripped out when the alien embryo started moving around after her c-section? Was that just an umbilical cord or was that Shaw's own intestine?

* Just before Dr. Shaw and Dr. Holloway give their explanation for the trip to Nowhere, Chance and Ravel make a bet concerning their purpose, with Chance claiming they are doing a terraforming survey. All well and good, but ''immediately'' after they do this the following briefing declares they came looking for ancient precursor aliens. Instead of settling their bet right then and there, Chance continues insisting that their wager is still open and actually should be resolved in his favor since the alien facility they explore had environmental controls ([[InsaneTrollLogic which somehow qualifies as terraforming]] despite his initial terms specifying a planetary ''survey'' and the fact that only the facility itself has any modification). Why did such an easily answered question get expanded to the point of becoming a RunningGag and literally the only source of characterization for these two individuals? Is Chance just stupid or is he stubbornly trying to weasel out of the deal he made? For that matter, why isn't Ravel calling him out on what is obviously a load of bullshit?
** Ravel ''does'' call him on his bullshit. "No, you said 'terraforming survey.' If you'd said the old man wanted to talk to aliens, you'd win." I don't think two instances quite constitutes a RunningGag, but seriously, haven't we ''all'' know that one guy who pulls any thread he can to try and weasel out of a bet?

** Kinda odd question you have there. Janek's squeezebox was clearly a personal belonging, and that piano... well Vicker's paying for the mission and providing the spaceship, so she clearly can bring whatever she fancies with her.

*** The extended conversation (found in the deleted scenes) between the Engineer , David and Weyland makes that pretty clear. Weyland says that since he created David, he and the Engineer are the same: gods. And gods can't die. Of course, the Engineer didn't agree.

** Maybe when Shaw said her reason for wanting to know why they were tryign to to destroy humns was because she was human was a euphemism for "it will help be decide what to do with my payload of bioweapons".

*** The extended conversation (found in the deleted scenes) between the Engineer , David and Weyland makes that pretty clear. Weyland says that since he created David, he and the the Engineer are the same: gods. And gods can't die. Of course, the Engineer didn't agree.

** Because all of that requires childishly simple ability to make conclusions about facts at hand? Fact: an isolated facility on an otherwise uninhabited planet contains highly virulent contagion. Conclusion: the planet is empty either because the cotagion killed everything (but that would leave signs that aren't present in atmosphere), or because it was created for the purpose of creating and/or studying the contagion. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to jump to the conclusion of a military facility. Second fact: they are going to Earth with a cargo full of canisters containing the said highly virulent contagion, which is well known at this point. How on earth would you conclude that they are intended to do anything but spread the the content of those canisters? Especially since the pilot of the ship just butchered all the people he made contact with. This is basic, elementary deduction, for crying out loud!