Damn, you must be the new Ebert.
Based on the opening, how it played out and the overall themes this is what I’ve come up with:
The Engineers/Space Jockeys and the Xenomorphs are products of the same Shiva-like ur-species. One creates, the other destroys. Perhaps they are even the same thing just allowed to develop differently. Engineers seed like through sacrifice, xenomorphs survive by sacrificing others. To give humans life, civilization, technology (fire) Prometheus sacrificed himself and had his liver torn out again and again. Once again, xenomorphs are the opposite, their birth, their survival is about violently popping out not violently tearing in.
The cross stuff suggests there is a lot of Christian allegory I am definitely missing. I’d be interested to hear more about that. But I think the movie works without it. The Engineers value sacrifice for life. At some point, they decided that self-sacrifice for life was a shitty deal. They would rather someone else sacrifice so they can live – and why not let that someone be a creation of theirs? They can sacrifice what they sacrificed for. That behavioral sink lead to the Xenomorph aspect of their existence and the destruction we observed as well as the destructive impulses of the remaining Engineer.
I am a river.
But considering his already quirky/eccentric character it wasn’t compleltely out-of-character for him to talk like such. It’s not a big deal though, just another example of something filmed poorly.
If they did intend for him to be hypnotized, I didn’t understand that. It certainly wasn’t made clear – the thought that he was hypnotized by it hadn’t even crossed my mind.
In other news, I have a question: “…for him to talk like such.” ← is that a correct usage of the word ‘such’? I keep seeing it used like that in loads of places, and when I see it it just doesn’t feel right. It feels like a really sloppy wording. It seems like it’s one of those words that people use because it sounds more intelligent than the alternative : “…for him to talk like that” : kinda like how people use “whom” too much, even when you should use “who” instead, because they think people who say “whom” sound smarter than people who say “who”.
I could be totally incorrect about that, and maybe it’s a perfectly fine usage of the word, I’m just asking. It just doesn’t sound right to me.
Seems normally enough to me. But, putting aside the unnecessary criticism and the suggestion I’m being pretentious how can the word be both sloppy and yet have connotations of intelligence?
You’ll understand that when you get into the head of someone who always says “Whom” instead of “who”. It’s “sloppy” because, primarily, it’s actually wrong, but they think it makes them sound intelligent. I don’t know if you’ve ever met someone who does that, but I have. Joker, JamesLWalker, had a lot of writing habits like that as well – not that specific one, but similar ones. He’d uses phrases that he thought sounded fancy, but were really contextually quite inappropriate.
Ahh…well, if it’s a grammatical mistake I’ll sit and listen to anyone whose going to explain it. It might just be British/American thing, assuming you’re American. 
I actually now think it’s correct, after a bit of googling (though it still sounds strange to me). I wasn’t asking to pick on you specifically, I’ve seen tons of people doing it. I was just generally curious.
Disappointing movie.
Promising start, but story lines that lead nowhere and acting that is rubbish.
Bad script writing examples from Prometheus:
The two ‘scientists’ who were scared shitless when they saw the 2 thousand year old carcass of the Engineer seemed suddenly not afraid a bit later when they tried to pat the alien snake on the head.
The bit near the end where the spaceship rolls on one of them because she did have the intellect to run a couple of metres to the side.
The scene where she has a caesarean and then walks off like nothing much happened. Utter crap. Even having a hernia operation prevents you from walking correctly. A C-section f*cks you up big time.
They match the alien and human DNA and one of the so-called scientists is off getting drunk. Find of the millennia, oh, I’ll go get pissed.
The captain and sidekicks scream off to die ramming the alien ship like they’re about to go party or something. Utterly crap character development.
There’s heaps more.
Was a real shitty writing.
Very true.
And one part of the script which still irks me is when the old, rich guy is introducing David via the hologram. One thing David lacks is…(mortality is on the edge of my tongue)…a soul!? C’mon what unsubstantiated bullshit. We’re in a room of presumably some of the top scientists, not only that but it’s set relatively far in the future, and no one batters an eye-lid. In fact, the simplicity of the characters makes me question the whole genre of the film. The original Alien I would consider a sci-fi horror, but a realistic one at that. But for such religious naivete to exist alongside the scientific/technological advancements present in the film reminds me more of Star Wars i.e. fantasy.
In fact, I just don’t know why I expected more of a Hollywood film. I give up.
this.
Trevor,
There’s not much I’d defend the movie on, but I didn’t think the use of ‘soul’ had much to do with religion there, particularly because the rich old guy wasn’t a religious character; (he just wanted to use his money to fix his old body and figure out how to live longer). It’s pretty clear that David didn’t have much of what we do infact mean by soul, in ordinary language (i.e., perhaps not as it was used in the dark ages), like the ability to determine your own goal/ends, or have moral scruples (despite feigning them), or anything else. He was programmed for a goal, and executed it, relentlessly. Yea, he was polite… so what? In any case, you don’t have to buy into a dark ages ontology to understand what someone who uses the word means, if that’s what he means, and since the rich guy isn’t a scientist, I’m not surprised the scientists wouldn’t bat an eye. What’s surprising to me, is that they treat David like a person at all…
I mean, for godssakes, if you think something is odd at all… it should be the fact that the only religious characters in the movie are the scientists.
Sure. Fair point. It just stuck out like a sore thumb the way he said it.
The first thing I thought was that the cinematography was often rather gorgeous. These details and touches went a long way in terms of immersion.
Second, I thought the film sabotaged the gravitas of the ideas behind it by sloppily catering to short, uncritical attention spans. For instance: In traveling to a strange, unknown, and possibly inhabited planet for the first time, would you, upon seeing what appear to be several large intelligently designed structures, land your ship and set up camp right smack outside the gates? Or would you perhaps be more likely to land on a tall overlooking cliff, some respectable distance away where you can observe and take care to trespass in the least egregious way on possibly inhabited grounds? I mean that seems extremely basic to me, and easy enough to shoot and include at no real cost to time constraints and plot flow. Intelligence and realism seemed to be sacrificed again and again throughout Prometheus.
None of the characters were really likeable. Even “the scientists” were mostly dumb and scripted as gawky, id-enslaved, tourists with little tact or forethought in their observations, experiments, and data gathering. Peter, the android, was the least disappointing character because he was the only one who provoked interesting questions and somewhat competently explored the alien planet/ruins. Everyone else, with the exception of Vickers, was just sort of bumbling around. Vickers had potential to be an interesting character but she turned out to be maimed by a rather simplistic daddy complex whereby she felt unloved and neglected by her father and therefore behaved emotionally cold and unappreciative of “the mission” (her father’s vision). Trite and uninteresting the lot of them.
But if you stop thinking about why the characters are so stupid and why there is very little in the way of interesting discovery and insight regarding the remains of an ancient and technologically advanced alien species, then I guess Prometheus was an okay humans vs. aliens science-fiction flick. Maybe I expected too much.
As big movies go these days, it wasn’t terrible. It was terrible only in the case that it aimed to be deeper and more intelligent your average Hollywood throwtogether.
Beautiful film. Utterly shit.
It was like seeing your dream woman across a room, and then talking to her and everything’s ruined by a stream of trite, banal idiocy that has you praying for the party to end so you can just not be in the same room as the shrill-voiced imbecile.
I exaggerate. But plot holes you could drive a bus through, no attention to any character consistency or logic, a trillion-dollar expedition staffed by sociopaths and the criminally negligent… I lost interest.
Here’s a review that caught a few of my reservations:
digitaldigging.net/prometheus-an … rspective/
“astoundingly fucking corrosive” 
I finally saw this film on DVD. It was too short. I think it could have been an excellent film if it had had 20 minutes more, but everything was rushed.
It also seems to set up for a potential sequel, so the fact that it did not answer questions does not bother me. Though, in fact, I think we do get some questions answered. No Eden, Adam and Eve, and alien eats some nanotech which digests him and then reorganizes his dna to seed the earth. Why some alien would agree to do this rather than casting some already altered dna or organisms into the water instead is very odd. Though perhaps he was just a programmed clone or something. Still, it seems like a wasteful way of doing it. Though, perhaps some answer is coming in a later film.
I was also bothered by the scientist being stupid enough to think the cobra worm thing was cute. OK, he could have been hypnotized, but I see no reason to assume this was the case and Scott could have indicated this somehow.
That the entire group would take their helmets off is just silly. Oh, the CO2 levels are fine, let’s take them off. Hardly. Sure, their was enough O2, but there was absolutely no reason for their haste. And when the old guy comes in, takes off his helmet and then says smells good to me…please. Smells good?
As far as the religious propaganda element. Well…in support of this there is the fact that the religious human is the only one who survives. I don’t think having religious symbolism is enough to make something propaganda, but her survival gives this a kind of weight. On the other hand, I don’t think there is anything conclusive. If this is really the end of the story, then she is just off on a suicide mission - since the Engineers clearly have decided to clean up their earth life experiment and immediately. She will die like everyone else. She will die at the hand of Engineers - no garden of eden, no adam and eve. Yes, the Engineers are no proof there is no diety, but still all we are ever shown is technology. There is no supernatural event even hinted at in the story, there is nothing to indicate the very people she is seeking answers from believe in a deity. In fact the whole thing is a very bleak explanation of origins. The very creatures that made us, regret it.
That said, if there is a sequel, I can see where a foundtion might have been set for later religious or ambigious messages- ones with some religous overtones.
As a stand alone piece of religious propaganda, it fails miserably. So far all we have is a rather cold universe where the most powerful agents are organic life forms using advance science.
It also should be said that the other survivor is a robot /AI - since she took his body, it seems he will be resurrected to full functioning. Sure one could read his upcoming ressurection as echoing Jesus, but then his resurrection will be completely science based.
So it seems like two entities were worthy of survival: a Christian female scientist AND a ruthless AI robot.
I can’t see a clear support of religion here. And perhaps, given the complex set of voices that go into a film, one key player- say the screenwriter - did want a religious message and the director did not. I don’t know.
If either thought this film would make people more religious or more people religious they are seriously confused about human psychology and effective propaganda. Clinically stupid about it in fact. They need to actually watch the film they made.
Did a little more mulling:
Prometheus would be the first alien who sacrifices himself to give us life. IOW we have the use of a religious myth in the service of a very non-religious explanation for the appearance of life on earth. This would explain why the other aliens wanted to destroy life on earth, the first alien being some kind of renogade ‘god’.
Futher Dr. Shaw is not seeking answers via prayer, her priest, reading the bible, contemplation…
she is seeking answers by traveling to a species with more advanced science.
It seems to me that so far we have a film coopting religious imagery and stories to lend some power to a very science based mythology.