The Origin of Species in Prometheus
(click to enlarge)
I’m not sure whether I’m still that upset about how dumb certain aspects of Prometheus were, or I just like watching people feel the need to vehemently defend it for some reason.
This image shows the “Origin of Species” as it were with all the various creature combinations featured in the film. You probably won’t have any idea what this means if you haven’t seen it, but don’t stare too hard I guess if you want to avoid any semblance of spoilers.
Above all else in the film, the black goo’s properties bothered me the most, as there were too many weird combinations of things to follow, and there were some pretty big leaps made using it as a catalyst. (Actual spoilers) one drop of goo makes a guy super sick, but before he’s super sick he has sex and the girl gets pregnant and gives birth to a squid that ends up growing into a huge facehuger that attaches itself to the protohuman which gives birth to the original xenomorph? If that was the biggest run-on sentence in the world, that’s because that’s what it felt like in the film.
Thanks Carlos for making this, check out more of his work here.
The zombie thing still bugs me. Was it the acid to the face that turned him or the black goo? Was super sick guy turning into a zombie? When did they start having zombies in the Aliens universe?!?!
The black goo does the same thing for everything it touches. It mutates things to be vicious monsters. The guy fell face-first into the goo, mutated, and became violent. It would probably have happened to Holloway too, but he would have looked different because he did not fall face-first into the goo and consumed it instead.
I honestly don’t understand all of the confusion…it made sense to me but I will admit that they could have made it clearer.
I tired to explain this to my friend after the movie… he just looked at me funny.
Alien guy plus giant squid equals xenomorph! duh.
Does this mean humans are also evil monsters? If so they are humans who humans who are not violent monsters. Does this mean they are xenomorphs who aren’t aggressive and hostile?
Well I would go to argue that no, it did not give birth to the first xenomorph(aka alien), only because in the movie it is clearly depicted on one of the shrine statues that there was a xenomorph (alien) characters on it….It makes me wonder if people overlook when speaking of the movie, or just didn’t see it. I dunno.
That chart explains the dumbest thing about Prometheus in a nutshell. I expect better from Ridley Scott. Science fiction is so named because there is some semblance of science behind the fiction that you are watching/reading. Fantasy is more lenient in that you can simply explain anything away with magic a la Star Wars. Dopey horror cast behavior aside, Prometheus was doing a fine job as science fiction until that stupid goo showed up. Then shit got magical.
This movie kind of set me off my father and I spent an hour after watching the movie trying to figure out what made what. It was a totally let down for me. If you are making a pre-qual then you have to explain a little better then that. why have stray ends and characters surviving that have nothing to do with the original plot. Ehhhhh i’ll take the predator vs. aliens explanation over this one in some aspects.
This chart sums it up nicely, I think. The movie is all about creationism and scientific discovery. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans, he is then punished for eternity as a result. In the movie, the crew of Prometheus are searching for their potential creators. They discover the black goo, a mysterious liquid clearly packaged and developed by a species of much higher intelligence. Holloway consumes the goo (not designed for him) it rots his soul away. When he has sexual contact with Shaw they create a monster, and when the monster has sexual contact with the Proto-human, it creates and perfectly designed killing machine, IE alien. Even The android David watches the humans’ dreams in hopes of understanding the feeling associated with them.
That’s my opinion. Still confusing at times though. But I really enjoyed it.
I found it much easier to swallow once I realized that Ridley Scott had been playing Doodle God.