Prometheus/Headscratchers

• The first facehugger was a giant squid born from a woman who got intimate with a man suffering from a worm infection that could potentially have turned him into a zombie.
• So is the film trying to imply this is the origin of the Alien Ship from ALIEN or not? It really looked like it was trying to, even to the point of making the ship crash in a similar position, but the ALIENS mentions the planet/moon the ship was discovered on was LV-426 while the planet/moon in the film is LV-223. Then there's the discontinuity with the way the rest of the ship looks(the jars vs. the massive egg cargo bays) and the fact the Engineer who get chestbursted appears to die in the lifeboat and is pretty much torn open by it, as opposed to the rather small hole in his chest from ALIEN.
  • The movie is a reboot, not necessarily in direct canon with the original movies. However, the way I took it was that there were a number of ships there, all intended for different worlds (possibly one for each of the 6 worlds in the cave painting message). The crew of the one intended for Earth (the scene with David watching the recording of the Engineers in the control room) was slaughtered before they could take off, but the ship heading for LV-426 could have already left, landed, and killed all life on the world. Remember, in the original Alien, there was an Engineer dead in the control chair with his chest busted out, whereas in this movie the only living Engineer left the ship and died in the Prometheus life pod to the proto-facehugger, so if this were intended to be canon, it is clearly NOT the same ship.
  • Word of God states it's not the same ship or the same planet as the original Alien.
• Vickers and Shaw are frantically running away from the rolling Engineer ship, for an extended distance. Shaw trips and falls, and Vickers quite sensibly keeps running. Shaw rolls a couple of times to the side (probably no more than a few meters), and lives. Vickers keeps running, and is crushed, apparently unaware of the fact that a 90 degree turn and a handful of steps would have taken her away from an object rolling IN A STRAIGHT LINE.
  • You tend to make stupid decisions when you're disorientated from being in a shuttle crash and fleeing in blind terror.
• So... let's get this straight. The black liquid is a bioweapon the Engineers made that mutates indigenous life forms into monstrosities with corrosive blood, and the Xenomorphs were spawned when a human contaminated by this bioweapon impregnated a sterile woman?
  • Yes.
  • The starfish alien and the xenomorph-like creature that comes out of the Enginneer are just more bioweapons from the same type of factory. They are not the same. The facehuggers were likely a separate bioweapon.
  • The Facehugger/Xenomorph is a mutation that results from a very persistent bio-weapon that can adapt and evolve, and was able to pass through (and kill) 3-4 host organisms prior to taking that form. It's like a next evolutionary step of the black liquid; the Xenomorph has also shown an ability to mutate further when the situation requires it.
    • However there is clearly a sculpture of the Xenomorph on the wall in the jar chamber. The Xenomorph shown in the film cannot just be an unpredicted evolution from moving through several host organisms, the bioweapon must have been planned to create a creature of that approximate appearance for it to be on the wall.
• What the fuck did David say to the Engineer?
  • "Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"
• Why the hell didn't Elizabeth tell anyone else about the monstrosity she cut out of herself? If you were infected by an alien parasite that you had to forcibly remove, it seems logical to tell others about it, or at least, try to make sure it's dead, rather then just abandoning it and staggering around the ship, never telling anyone about it.
  • Then it's a shame she probably wasn't in the best state of mind to make logical decisions, what with her being doped up on painkillers and anaesthetics and all.
  • She isn't the only one to hold her tongue. She is never shown to reveal the alien she removed from herself, or the presence of Peter Weyland on the ship to anyone. Nor does the Captain reveal to her the attack of the mutated Fifield that killed several crew members, even though they have a scene shortly after both these events. I would suspect a deleted scene or it is just to be assumed by the viewer.
• The properties of the black liquid seem really inconsistent. In one shot we see worms in the jar chamber (where the heck did they come from, anyway?), and later, they seem to be coated by the liquid, apparently turning them into the pale cobra things. Yet, when humans are touched by the liquid, they become massively sick and die, only to come back as zombies. Is this supposed to be a weapon, or something meant to make creatures evolve?
  • Maybe it reacted differently to humans because they have DNA that's almost identical to the Engineers.
• Why, in heaven's name, did David intentionally infect Holloway with the black fluid? Was he deliberately trying to kill him? Was he curious about the effects of the black liquid, and wanting to see what it would do? Or was there some other cryptic reason that we don't know about?
  • Most likely "to see what would happen". Don't forget that conversation he had with Holloway earlier where he asks "Why did you make us?" and Holloway responds "Because we could".
• How can Shaw be running around after a self-administered hysterectomy? I don't care if this is the future and she's doped up on pain killers, how can she be doing that?