Let’s end with another brilliant death: remember all those films when someone tries to escape from a car chasing them by simply running on foot ahead of the car as if they could outrun it? The huge u-shaped ship is falling down, rolling like a wheel, and she runs straight ahead... I understand the panic, but she was supposed to be smarter than that :-/
Anyway, this time I followed the story more closely, and the story is interesting, although with many questions unanswered.
The movie starts with a disc-like ship, like the usual ufos; it leaves behind a blue alien wearing a robe: he eats something and his body dissolves spreading his molecules into the planet’s water. Then we see two archeologists finding new evidence of something that they’ve already found in many different Earth cultures: it seems like giant creatures point at the sky, at a specific point in the universe. Then we get to the point: Scientific exploratory vessel Prometheus, with 17 crew members, is traveling towards that specific star configuration, far away from Earth. The crew slept for two years, and now David the android wakes them up because they have reached their destination. It’s December 2093. The hologram of rich old Weyland explains to them all their mission (really? they all accepted without knowing what they were signing up for?). The archeologists Shaw and Charlie explain that they want to find “the engineers”, that’s what they call the blue aliens because they designed us, and they want to find them because they interpreted all those findings as an invitation to go to that planet (or whatever it is). Shaw is like This is a scientific expedition, we don’t need any weapon! ....
They land and some of them prepare to go out to explore. David wears a suit like the others to keep the illusion of him being like them, because mankind feels comfortable only dealing with their kind.
They go out and see a big structure: they go in to investigate. David activates a holographic image of giant aliens running, and then one of them getting killed when a huge door falls on him severing his head. The geologist is fed up already since he only likes rocks, not giant dead alien creatures, and wants to go back to the ship, joined by the biologist. They get lost in that maze and are unable to reach the ship. David opens the door (oops sorry.. and they buy it :-/ ) and they see a strange place, full of containers. David secretly takes one of them, while Shaw takes the alien’s head.
Analyzing it she finds that their dna is human dna; the head explodes. I wonder why only humans got his dna, and not any of the other species on Earth, that’s puzzling: he spread his dna and yet we got all of it and the other species nothing, they came out all by themselves or did they have their own engineers? One might wonder. If one really wants to.
David secretly opens the container he brought back to the ship and he finds some kind of green phials containing a mysterious liquid and puts a drop on his right index finger (if I remember correctly).
Charlie is upset because he thinks the “engineers” are all dead - they found more bodies, although not so many as to image that a species might be extinct... - and David offers him a drink, all the while careful that his finger won’t touch anything, but Charlie doesn’t notice. Not that and not even the fact that David puts said finger inside his glass before handing it to him :-/ Maybe he was already drunk, I don’t know, don’t remember.
Meanwhile the captain asks Vickers, the expedition ‘leader’, if she’s actually a robot, and that’s enough to make her decide to have sex with him, to prove him wrong... so the captain is not at his post - and nobody else is either - when the geologist calls in to say that he found something moving, and nobody hears them scream and die. Nobody sees that strange creature entering his helmet and his mouth.
Charlie has sex with Shaw and in the morning finds out that his eyes look weird, like there’s something moving in them. A team goes back to that place to look for the two men and they find their corpses, while David finds a place that looks like the bridge of a ship, with a big star map and one ‘engineer’ asleep in a capsule much like the cryogenic capsules they used.
Charlie is getting worse and worse and they all rush back but Vickers won’t let him get in, and Charlie lets her, invites her to kill him with the flamethrower.
During a medical check David tells Shaw that she’s pregnant but she knows that’s not possible, we heard her before saying that she can’t have children, and David tells her that 1.she looks three-months pregnant 2.that it doesn’t exactly look normal and 3. that she can’t look and he refuses to take it out of her and that she’ll be put back in stasis, and sedates her. When people come to take her she fights back (does she simply hurts them or does she kills them?) and runs out of that room, with a specific destination in mind. There’s a medical capsule (or whatever it is called) that can perform surgery automatically, and she gets inside it and programs it manually since apparently it’s designed to work only on men - but she probably has too much on her mind right now to wonder why, since it’s in Vicker’s cabin and she’s a woman. The machine opens her up and takes out an alien thing before stitching her up again. She gets out and closes the alien thing inside, activating the ‘decontamination’ procedure in order to kill it.
The geologist’s signal induces the captain to order the men to open the door to let him in, but when they go outside he attacks them, killing three or more men, before he’s definitely stopped.
Shaw wanders still all bloody, maybe looking for help, until she reaches a room where Weyland himself has woken up and David and two people are waiting on him. He explains that he only had a few days to live, so he came on this journey to find something that will make him live. He doesn’t want to die and figures that since they created us they may have a way to cure us, even of old age...
David tells her that they are not all dead, he found one still alive. The captain wants to go away, he says that this is not the engineer’s world, they came here to create something that eventually killed them, on this remote planet because they were at least smart enough not to produce mass-destruction weapons on their own world.
Vickers calls Weyland ‘father’. It’s not important, just saying: she’s his daughter.
That make-like place is a u-shaped spaceship, and its cargo bay is full of those containers.
Weyland, David, Shaw and two security guys go to wake up the engineer. Shaw wants to know why they hate us so much they wanted to destroy us, but Weyland doesn’t care about philosophical questions, only about himself, and he has David talk to him in his language. We can only assume that David learned his language well enough to accurately explain that Weyland wants a cure to live forever. The alien’s reply is silent but very clear: he detaches David’s head from his body and kills the two guys who started shooting him. Weyland dies too, I don’t know if he was hurt or if he simply ran out of time. Shaw runs away. Vickers, learning that his father is dead, orders the captain to go back home. The alien starts his ship, and Shaw yells at the captain that the alien is headed Earth with a ship full of death and that he must stop him whatever it takes. There are no weapons on the Prometheus, so he really has only one option, and the two co-pilots stay with him to die heroically, while Vickers runs to the escape-pod - I don’t understand why she rushed into a suit and entered a small escape-pod, when before she could reach it simply walking, it was part of the ship, it was her cabin.. maybe this way was quicker? Quicker than grabbing the suit and running as fast as she can? I’m missing something here, I know I must be.
Obviously the only way to stop the alien is to crash the Prometheus into his ship, and they do it. The Prometheus is destroyed while the alien ship falls down and starts rolling until it kills Vickers, but not Shaw who rolls sideways. Shaw enters Vickers cabin, and finds out that the thing that was inside her didn’t die and has instead grown much much larger, so much so it fills the room now. David’s head is still active and he tells Shaw to be careful because the alien is looking for her, and when she sees him she opens the door to let them deal with each other. The tentacled alien attacks the engineer and kills him, entering his mouth. She runs away again, then stops, crying that she can’t take it anymore, when David talks to her again. He asks her to help him, telling her that there are other ships and he can pilot them. She tells him that she doesn’t intend to go back home, she wants to find the engineers’ home planet and ask them why they created us and then changed their mind and decided to kill us all. Shaw takes his body and puts his head in a bag (apologizing in doing so) and they head toward one of those ships. She leaves behind a message to stay away from the place, and they fly away. It’s January the first, 2094.
Last scene, we see that from the engineer’s body comes out a fully grown Alien, with a capital A. For a second it seemed like a shark was emerging, but it was Alien’s back of the head.
The end.
To speculate that they want to kill us because they don’t like what we’ve become (and Weyland would only confirm that opinion, and so would the weapons for that matter), that would imply that they kept watching us, and this doesn’t convince me.
The first alien we saw had a disc-shaped ship and wore a robe. The last alien had a u-shaped ship and wore an armour. It might mean that the monk-like aliens create life and the soldier-like aliens destroy it, or it could simply mean that after thousands of years they simply changed a few things in their society. We’ve changed a lot, so might them.
Maybe they simply like to invent things and create stuff, maybe that’s just their nature.
The puzzling thing is that he seemed really determined to destroy us all. I don’t know why, but they would not end up with an empty planet to start over, they would end up with a planet full of Aliens, right? What good would that do to them? So it makes no sense to think that what they really want is Earth void of humans; it seems like their purpose is simply to kill us. How nice of them.
Shaw-Noomi Rapace - good. Her scenes running around all bloody is what I’ll remember more of the movie
David-Michael Fassbender - good. His character had no emotions, no fear, but it sure had arrogance and contempt
Vickers-Charlize Theron - good. Her cold figure in the background had something suspicious about her, just like David.
Captain- Idris Elba - good. Liked him a lot too.
Weyland- Guy Pearce. Why on Earth did they cast a young man to play such an old character? The aging make-up is the most difficult one, and even if it’s done very well it never looks really ‘real’. I didn’t like this.
Charlie-Logan Marshall-Green
Geologist-Sean Harris
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