Prometheus (2012) discussion - *SPOILERS!*

[Judderman]

So a couple of months ago we were seeing those awesome teaser trailers which looked very dark and Alienesque in style, and they clearly showed the link to the first movie. My expectations were raising that it could be a worthy addition to the series, especially with R Scott running the show. Then the trailer I saw a few weeks ago really brought my expectations down somewhat when I saw people like Charlize Theron running around shouting, and feared some nonsense plot with mindless hollywood action.
Well last night I watched the movie and did enjoy it. To some extent the plot was somewhat silly and a lot of the movie visuals, especially early on, seemed a bit bright for my liking. Not as gritty as I would expect. But to be fair it is an entertaining movie. The highlight was perhaps when the two engineers finally get picked off. In general when they were walking around the alien ship it was more interesting than the bickering back on their own ship. There were some novel alien types but too much concentrating on this idea of people being invented. There could of been some other explanation of how they reached/knew about the planet. What did others think?

Also I thought there were a few too many different types of creatures and that the face hugger could have more matched the classic type. Seeing the alien we know and love before the end would have been great. Maybe more in the sequel? Also I don't think there was much need for the black organic substance. Couldn't they have used the same alien egg style as in Alien? Maybe with one other thing (weapon/creature) for variety.
Why was the jockey alien eating the substance at the start of the film? We didn't see any strange creature come out of the sea later.
The geologist came back as some super creature when it seemed he had an acid burn at first?

The characters weren't really as cool as in the other movies and the android wasn't disturbing enough. Seemed like he showed more emotion than the one in Alien (until it malfunctioned).

Overall good movie (better than Alien 4), but not quite as atmospheric as the other Alien movies so somewhat disappointing.

 

[PTeppic]

Saw it a couple of hours ago (in 2D). Still not entirely sure what I watched. Going back tomorrow to see it again, this time in 3D. Can't deny, as a movie it's stunning: cinematography, effects, CGI, etc. Just haven't a clue what it was about.

 

[Connavar]

Not a hard film to understand what it is about. It was just bleak,uneven story but it still good to see SF like that with stunning visuals because of the big budget,the stars.

I like the struggle of the aliens, the creators got eaten by their own creations.

The end was the weakest part and ruined little the overall story. I would also like to have seen more Aliens eating,killing humans. Great birth for the alien monster though.

I think it was too different compared to other Aliens films but better alien story wise than Aliens 3,4. Aliens 3 had much better female lead in Weaver though.

 

[mr kite]

Me ?
I loved it .
A lot of unanswered questions.. true .
But you got to admit it is well worthy for a sequel .
I guess R. Scott may pass on that and give it someone else to play with .
Didn`t do Cameron any harm .
As for the Alien that came out in the end , it would be a lot different from the origanal Alien film as that came out of a human .
Great visuals and it will be on my shelf as soon as it comes out on Blue Ray ..

If you cant` love the film , then love the ones you have .

 

[Connavar]

Yeah Idris Alba was awesome, that line cracked up people.

Who dislike the film are the ones who expect too much Alien like film. Apparently people didnt get the prequel part and that it wasnt much about THE Aliens.

I wonder about sequel only for those giant aliens who are foolish enough to create alien mosnters who ate them.

 

[PTeppic]

Me ?
I loved it .
A lot of unanswered questions.. true .
But you got to admit it is well worthy for a sequel .
I guess R. Scott may pass on that and give it someone else to play with .
Didn`t do Cameron any harm .
As for the Alien that came out in the end , it would be a lot different from the origanal Alien film as that came out of a human .
Great visuals and it will be on my shelf as soon as it comes out on Blue Ray ..

If you cant` love the film , then love the ones you have .

There will be a lot of discussion about the engineer bit (timelines and evolution etc.) but as for the rest.

Seems that they were great genetic engineers. Had created some fantastic weapons for destroying animal life by impregnation. Just like 4, it got away from them. The version we've seen was using squid-like impregnators (c.f. spider-like forms seen later) and chest-bursting almost fully grown with mouths not fully formed (compared to a much more eel-like form seen later).

But it does seem like a lot of effort when a "simple" virus might do the same job? Or would these xenomorphs work across multiple life-forms, which viruses probably wouldn't?

 

[JimBraiden]

Stuinning visuals, great performances- ruined because they were unwilling to spend a few bucks on hiring a writer who has even a basic degree of scientific literacy.
"we've traveled half a billion miles"!

 

[Moonbat]

LOTS OF SPOILERS!!!!

Watched it today and loved it, but there were a few bits I felt were wrong/silly

At the start it says 3.14 x 10 to the 14 KM from Earth, and then (as Jim mentions) Charlize theron says half a billion miles, by my calculations they were something 300 trillion km away, so that's a few orders of magnitude wrong.

When they landed, after 2 years of travel, they wouldn't wait a day to check things out before running off into the building? Ok I know they were keen to see it but come on, it was supposed to be a scientific study, they must have had plenty of patience to search the caves in Scotland, now they've travelled to a new star-system and can't waited a day to set up some basic security or fact finding.

Why did they take thier helmets off, people always do this in sci-fi and I don't think it moved the plot forward at all, the only plot part was the virus that infected the doctor they thought could have been air borne, but apart from that it was just pointless.


Lots of unanswered questions

- what was the black stuff - was it a biological weapon of mass distruction?
- what happened to the biologist who got a worm down his throat?
- will the alien that came out at the end (the xenomorph) actually become a queen and produce the eggs with face-huggers in?
- Why did David do what he did? Why did he want to kill Weyland, surely he was programmed to want to help him?

I thought some bits were really cool, we all agreed the caesaren section scene was a highlight. This film has really opened up a whole new tangent away from the basic Alien films, it gives the writers a lot more to explore. The engineers race, there must be a few sequels involved in that.

I do wonder why they cast Guy Pearce as Weyland, because apart from the TED teaser thing that had him at his real age, they had to make him up to be very old for the actual film.

 

[Connavar]

LOTS OF SPOILERS!!!!



Lots of unanswered questions

- what was the black stuff - was it a biological weapon of mass distruction?
- what happened to the biologist who got a worm down his throat?
- will the alien that came out at the end (the xenomorph) actually become a queen and produce the eggs with face-huggers in?
- Why did David do what he did? Why did he want to kill Weyland, surely he was programmed to want to help him?

I thought some bits were really cool, we all agreed the caesaren section scene was a highlight. This film has really opened up a whole new tangent away from the basic Alien films, it gives the writers a lot more to explore. The engineers race, there must be a few sequels involved in that.

I do wonder why they cast Guy Pearce as Weyland, because apart from the TED teaser thing that had him at his real age, they had to make him up to be very old for the actual film.

1. The black stuff was some experiment going wrong and it must have meant to be a bio weapon since it was show that giant aliens wanted to destroy their creation,experiment that was the humans. They were some sick aliens that deserved to die by their weapons. They created a species that changed,adapted by getting inside other beings and becoming something new. That must have the bio weapon part since it changed all the time it went inside someone.

2. The biologist we saw clearly his dead body when the worm left inside him to attack Ford. When Charlie was dying in their return to the alien ship.

3. The whole film was a prequel to show how THE alien was created, it became the big monster we know and love when it finally changed in the end. The engineer aliens matter created their big black alien monster look. A big mistake created an unstoppable species of freaky monsters. It had its look already and only the queen left. It must have started with the alien at the end. He/she is the first and produced the others.

With everything it did before becoming the final alien look how hard is it to be able to breed more of itself.

 

[Judderman]

The fight between the engineer alien and the big face hugger (/squid) was great but why had it suddenly grown so much (after coming from the ladie's stomach in the usual small style we know?). Was it a big face hugger because it was the mother alien creator type? There wasn't one like that in Aliens. Though I suppose it could represent a change in how the species works when the Alien was born at the end.

In AvP hadn't the Predators engineered the Aliens?

Main issues I thought apart from strange story was 1) not enough excitement. There seemed to be a string of separate events divided by going back and forth to the human ship.
2) Not the cool/nasty characters we expect from Alien movies and want to survive/dislike.
3) The survivor's main character point of interest was just that she wore a cross??
4) There wasn't a huge point to Charlize Theron's character's amount of screen time other than having quarantine orders ignored. Could have had something interesting to do.

 

[PTeppic]

In AvP hadn't the Predators engineered the Aliens?

Can't remember if it explicitly says they engineered/created them. It's feasible they only found them, realised their great potential as training prey and captured a queen for that purpose. It could theoretically also fit the timeline, since LV-233 was abandoned for at least 2000 years. It could be "old" technology they were messing with there.

 

[Moonbat]

1. The black stuff was some experiment going wrong and it must have meant to be a bio weapon since it was show that giant aliens wanted to destroy their creation,experiment that was the humans. They were some sick aliens that deserved to die by their weapons. They created a species that changed,adapted by getting inside other beings and becoming something new. That must have the bio weapon part since it changed all the time it went inside someone.

2. The biologist we saw clearly his dead body when the worm left inside him to attack Ford. When Charlie was dying in their return to the alien ship.

3. The whole film was a prequel to show how THE alien was created, it became the big monster we know and love when it finally changed in the end. The engineer aliens matter created their big black alien monster look. A big mistake created an unstoppable species of freaky monsters. It had its look already and only the queen left. It must have started with the alien at the end. He/she is the first and produced the others.

With everything it did before becoming the final alien look how hard is it to be able to breed more of itself.

1. We only have the human's supposition that the black stuff was a bio weapon they don't really know that it was - they are guessing, also there was, engraved into a large wall or a chair, something near the big human head, a picture of the alien (xenomorph) before it ever came out of the engineer's body, so they must have known it was some kind of alien and that means the one at the end of the film was not the first one.

2. I don't think we did, I think that was the Geologist (the ginger guy with the tattoos on his head, and that was the same guy who attacked everyone at the ship.

3. Although the film is about the engineers creating the alien, I'm not sure that the whole film is about that, it is also about how weyland enterprises found the planet, how they unleashed the alien, and there is also a whole bunch of stuff about Shaw going off to hunt the engineers down.


Ok, some more points that bugged me last night.
The main one is a bad writing point, it is all about the matched DNA.
IMHO the first scene can be taken two ways
1, Earth had no organic life and the big marbled skined dude took some stuff (looked similar to the black stuff) which destroyed him and his DNA but then allowed the DNA to recombine and regrow and possibly seed life on earth.

2. Earth had organic life, but Humans didn't exist so the big marbled skined dude drank the black stuff to seed his DNA into the earth and so from that Human's evolved/came to be

Both of these scenarios have major flaws in what we (and the people in the film know/knew)

If there was no life on earth then how come the DNA matched so perfectly, because we, like every other living thing has evolved from the first DNA, why would we have such exact match, when other creatures (cucumbers, flowers, rats) have all evolved from the same DNA?

If there was life on Earth then it sort of does away with the 300 years of Darwinism that shows we are releated (genetically) to other apes and even all other life, so how does that work.

AND how can the DNA match, they are obviously different from us in that they are 10 foot tall and have marble skin, surely there must be some (even if it is only .5%) differences between our 6 foot lots of skin tones DNA and their 10 foot very white skin tones.

Not to mention the whole white/black thing, we know we evolved from black Africans into the plethora of skin colours today, yet the white dude was in Iceland (shot there but it could have been an ancient Africa I suppose!) so how did the DNA get all the way to the middle of Africa and black skin humans not white ones. Ok I'm getting picky now, but this is a sci fi forum and it was supposed to be a sci fi film.

Ok last bit, and this will only help if people have seen it once, read this and see it again (Pteppic) After Shaw gives herself emergency surgery and then meets David he says he is amazed by her survival instinct, at that bit both my fiancee and I thought we heard him call her Lisbeth (instead of Elizabeth) I'm not sure if it was just a poorly enunciated word or if it was a nod to Noomi Rapace's character in the millenium trilogy Lisbeth Salander, it would seem a bit of an odd nod to give in such a different film, but we both heard it and I'm wondering if anyone else noticed it?

 

[Judderman]

Good points Moonbat. The holes in the science are pretty big. Better to avoid storylines relating to present day people and evolution if they are not going to research the plausible ideas properly.
Surely that was just the way he said the name wrongly? Could also be he was getting amused by her and gave her a bit of a pet name. )

 

[Connavar]

Moonbot:

The Geologist got turned and came back to the humans in their ship and Idris Alba/the captain burned him. Come on watch the scenes again. The ginger geologist got turned and came back as a human monster while the biologist died directly we saw his body twice. The snake in his throat just ate him and attacked Ford. I saw the film less than two days ago. Rewatch the scenes. The nerdy biologist died clearly and never came back. You cant miss one of the few monster eating human scenes in the film.....

About 3: Weyland company have always been little side story as generic evil company. They have never been really important. It depends on what you find most interesting. I find the engineer aliens and the messed survivle instinct of the monster they created. Like Greek gods in mythology creating humans that can kill them.

Overall the strenght was we didnt know the answer for sure, some were answered and others were left to our imaginations. Thats a good thing. Otherwise it is too simple film.

There were some big holes in the science and in the plot that you cant over think. I like it was different film than just copying the horror feel of Alien films.

 

[Judderman]

Anyone got any comments on the actual characters? A bit weak?

 

[Connavar]

Anyone got any comments on the actual characters? A bit weak?

They were weak characters because of weak actor playing Shaw's husband/boyfriend.

I think Idris Alba,Fassbender and Rapace gave their characters depth but the films pace was too high after half the film so you couldnt get to know them better. Thats why it cant be compared to quality of the best,first two alien films. There were many good characters in those films.

 

[PTeppic]

Ok last bit, and this will only help if people have seen it once, read this and see it again (Pteppic) After Shaw gives herself emergency surgery and then meets David he says he is amazed by her survival instinct, at that bit both my fiancee and I thought we heard him call her Lisbeth (instead of Elizabeth) I'm not sure if it was just a poorly enunciated word or if it was a nod to Noomi Rapace's character in the millenium trilogy Lisbeth Salander, it would seem a bit of an odd nod to give in such a different film, but we both heard it and I'm wondering if anyone else noticed it?

Yes, noticed it even during the first showing

 

[mr kite]

Anyone got any comments on the actual characters? A bit weak?

They did`nt really have enough time to for us to get to know them I thought.
But there was one or two I didn`t really want to know .
The Scottish woman for one .

 

[James Coote]

Went to see Prometheus last night in 3D with two flatmates. It was ok, but I wouldn't recommend it. Maybe if it came on TV

The problem with the film was that it tried to shoehorn about half a dozen different themes into one film and does none of them justice. Same with the characters. There are just too many, so none get the screen time to make them really deep and allow me to connect with them

All this leaves no time to build anything resembling tension or atmosphere

**BIG SPOILER WARNING AHEAD. SPOILING JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING***

<rant>

Characters

The characters were not believable in the slightest. They were two dimensional and irrational. Quite frankly there were too many of them put in front of you to give any time to develop fully. For example, the two pilots of the ship start off with their bet, and have a bit of banter, but you never see them put into a really dangerous position where they have to depend on each other

The geologist and biologist duo really wind me up. Right when they have their first encounter, you think "ok, these two aren't going to get along and that will be the basis for something later". That never really comes to pass.

They are supposed to be educated professionals (the best for the mission?) and I'd assume to be picked for this they ought to have been on expeditions before. Instead they are running around like headless chickens. When they get creeped out and decide to leave the room with the big head and jars and get lost is where the film finally loses me. Everyone else managed to get out just fine and in a hurry. You're telling me a geologist can't navigate, read a map or doesn't bother to bring one with him? And with all that technology. We can see where they are the whole time on the hologram on the ship's deck, and that alien structure does not look very complex

Once cut off by the storm, why did they decide to hole up in the room with the head and jars? Did they not think that hanging around in a previously sealed room with a bunch of vases that have black goo oozing out of them, that weren't oozing before (as was even pointed out by one of the characters at one point iirc) wasn't the greatest idea? The biologist clearly did not study biology (oh yeah I'll just stick my hand at this animal that I have no clue what its biology is and whether it is about to bite my hand off or spit acid. Even to me that looks like a mouth and not something you poke your finger into).

The geologist guy is also meant to have a whole 'bad omens' thing going on and an 'I'm just here for the money', hesitating before they first enter the alien structure. However, we've really not seen anything up to that point to justify his fears.

Furthermore, the rest of the team quite blithely wander into the structure like it's the disney castle. They don't take any time to do a survey, safety assessment, make sure they don't contaminate the structure with anything they've brought with them.

Then there's David, who is the most confused character of all. I wanted to like him, but really he didn't have a moment where his previously ambiguous character suddenly shone through, showing his true colours, in the way it did with Bishop and Archer in the other Alien films. He's like a child playing, but the film never really lets us get that. I just wanted one of the other characters to turn around and slap him and tell him to stop playing, but they never do (they never even question what he's doing, like why did he touch that alien machine when he can't possibly know what it'll do). What is his ultimate motivation anyway? Trying to justify himself as worthy of his creator? Or trying to find the true meaning of the human soul he apparently lacks?

Elisabeth is another confused character. The whole can't have kids thread is chucked in half baked and so late into the film that you just think "wait what?". Her cross and religious beliefs feel like they've been dropped in to somehow add a theological element to the story that really shouldn't be there and satisfy a certain Christian demographic in the USA.

And her husband/boyfriend. They are built up to be the core relationship around which the story revolves. Then half way through he is just randomly flamethrowered to death. Why is he drinking so heavily? He shows no sign of it before the ship sets off, then soon as they find the engineers he goes all out of character, slouching around with a bottle in his hand.

Charlize's character is the most believable until she bangs the captain a bit too readily. So she suffers from inferiority complex and being second fiddle to David, despite being Weyland's own flesh and blood (which is another thing that doesn't make sense as Weyland claims he loves David like a son, but in the same breath says he has no soul... most people don't love soulless robots over their own daughters). She also suffered a crappy death. I never really hated her, and I figured she had a reason for getting to the escape pod in time, but apparently not.... Also she hand picked the crew ("well, at least those I picked") but you never quite work out who she didn't pick or get a sense of factionalism that is hinted at maybe coming later

The captain was reasonable, though quite why he was so happy to suicide kamakazi himself at the end was a bit out of character (same with the two pilots. They all went a bit too happily to their fiery deaths). Also he never really seemed to care for his crew, who were being picked off in batches, nor ever really sweat at the weight of responsibility for the ship and crew, nor get very involved in the obvious power struggle and questions over authority from having Theron and Weyland on board

Weyland was also ok, but never struck me as someone who was desperate. More like he went on the trip on the off chance. He didn't really have a comeback when the obvious point of "well what if these engineers don't feel like making you live longer (assuming they even could do that)," which surely he must have thought through before even setting off. I can't really believe this guy was a rich business mogul with such naive and optimistic outlook on things

Engineers

The engineers are a total cop-out. The original alien film had the pilot, who was never explained or really covered in any of the subsequent films. All we know is he's bizarre looking alien and fossilized and a victim of the (main) aliens. Part of the appeal is having some things that are never explained. So going back and saying 'oh he was just an advanced human in a suit' is quite frankly insulting

The introduction to the engineers is all amiss. Got his head chopped off by the door? Looks quite a hard feat to achieve considering the bulkiness of their suits. What happened to the other engineers who were just in front of him? If they were in a panic, running away from something, they still had time to record a video of the whole thing for whoever came next? But not record what they were being chased by. And if humans had been pointed to this place in space, why would they give any clues or help to those humans coming after them? And why was the recording quality so bad? In the pilot's room they had some pretty swanky graphics

There are multiple engineer ships, but how come none of the others ever gets launched to go destroy humanity. Even if one gets taken over by aliens, the engineers in the others should have enough warning to get off the planet (the engineer at the end certainly wastes no time in getting out of there).

I quite like the idea they created humans and then changed their minds, but if they're so smart, I can't imagine them failing to destroy humanity nor picking such an obscure way to do it.

Black Goo

The black goo stuff is another part of the alien lifecycle that wasn't in any of the previous films.

Why did the engineers create a weapon with such a round-about way to kill? Using creatures that are transformed by the black goo into yet another creature that then impregnates yet another creature to finally produce the alien that will actually do the killing?

Then again, for my favourite geologist, it just zombifies him, causing him to rage beat up a bunch of throwaway characters, whilst for the engineers, it causes their heads to explode. Inconsistent

Deeper Meanings

The film starts off 'oh look, here are these aliens who were on ancient Earth.' Well that's gonna be a fairly fundamental turning point in human history and could probably take up a whole film in its own right.

The archaeologists then make the unqualified assumption that these aliens created us somehow (as one character points out, throwing out centuries of established Darwinism). Again a whole film's worth of stuff at least right there.

Then we have all the stuff about David and can androids have souls, something that again isn't something you normally just chuck in there. And then on top of that you mix a bit of 'I can see your dreams'.

And then throw in some vapid shallow christian belief stuff.

Then Mr Weyland rocks up and tells us he's looking for immortality. Really now? This film is only 15 minutes in and already I'm thinking "What is this film about? Because at the moment it seems to be about half a dozen different things."

Other Inconsistencies

David finds some alien-type goo when he plays the first engineer's hologram, but that is never expanded on.

The alien cut out of Elisabeth somehow grows enormous despite being locked in a room with nothing to eat

Quarantine is another thing that riles me about this film. It's like all the characters purposely ignore the most fundamental and basic rules of quarantine. Taking your helmet off on an alien planet that obviously has life on it? You might as well roll out the red carpet and welcome on board whatever unknown pathogens happen to be floating around

The eponymous ship is nice and shiny, a (no doubt expensive) research vessel, yet the crew look like they were just picked randomly from a bunch of dock workers looking for casual employment.

Then at the end, flying off to ask the engineers some more questions? It may be a nice setup for a sequel, but after the response the engineer in stasis gave when woken up and queried, I wouldn't hold out much hope that any other engineers are going to give a more polite answer. In fact they might just blast Elisabeth's ship out of the sky

Finally, the warning beacon Elisabeth places that ties into the first Alien film. If it was a human beacon then the crew of the Nostromo would have immediately recognised it as such, not mistaken it for a distress beacon. If Weyland corp still exists (even as a merged WeylandYutani corp) that suggests not far enough into the future that language has changed enough they don't understand it, nor that so long has passed, the beacon has become corrupted and scrambled and sending out an ambiguous signal. If the Nostromo was sent on company orders and the company knew about the fate of the Prometheus, why not send a proper expedition. It could still work, but is just more plausible as a mysterious alien signal than a human one

</rant>

 

[TheTomG]

I didn't like the movie that much, too inconsistent.

For instance, the geologist has these little flying bots ("his pups") that do all the mapping - yet he gets lost on the way back to the ship? A feat that no-one else manages, even without them being in charge of the mapping bots.

Then one bot picks up life signs, and geologist and biologist decide to quickly go in the other direction. Sensible. But when life finally does turn up, the biologist has the totally opposite reaction than he just had a few moments ago and wants to cozy up to it and not get away. So why did he not go zooming TOWARD the detected life sign earlier if he is that eager? Or why not be equally cautious or fearful when some (frankly, disturbing-looking) lifeform shows up in front of him?

As mentioned, some fresh goo on some control panel, but apparently all life was in stasis, so where did that come from?

As mentioned, a life form that manages to grow about twenty times larger with no biomass to draw from to grow like that.

Now, if this was 35,000 years ago (or was it 3,500, sorry I forgot, all the same, quite a while) - why was there no search party from the engineer's home planet come to find out what happened here?

And if the engineers appear to have happily forgotten to eradicate the Earth for many thousands of years, why go to their home planet and go "Yoohoo! You forgot to destroy us, we'd like to remind you of that so you can have another go."

One point about the distress beacon, this is not the same planet that the Nostromo lands on, it's an "LV" but a different number. Of course, somewhat weird that the crashed ship crashes in much the same way as the one the Nostromo finds, though maybe given its shape, it can't crash many other ways ha!

David was also annoying in fiddling with things, and none of the humans seemed to say "STOP fiddling with things! Honestly!"

Then Elisabeth, having just undergone emergency caesarian, fails to mention this to the people she then runs into. "I just gave birth to a weird freaky monster, maybe your search for immortality is misguided!!" Or even "Help me!" or any other sort of reaction, other than to calmly join a discussion and saddle up to go back in to the place that started such horrors.

She'd started out fighting for her life on hearing about her abnormal pregnancy, pretending to be drugged and then smacking people around, and knew David planned something against her best intentions with his announcement to just deep freeze her with the thing still inside, but all is quickly forgiven and forgotten eh? What's a little alien impregnation between friends and work mates?

Her husbands change was dull, as was his death, served no real point.

Why indeed would there be some recording of the engineer running, but no recording of what they ran from - defeats the point of your security camera if you're not going to record the criminals, right?

Why would the humans be sent to the bioweapons planet and not the home planet? How, in fact, would they have known about that planet anyway? I guess there is the large flying saucer shaped ship, perhaps some engineers stayed on Earth to watch how their life developed, based on that. Though, why would they send humans to the bioweapons planet again, especially if said planet was going to send ships of mass destruction here anyway.

The engineers were disappointing, the "strange unknown type of alien body" being "just a space suit" was disappointing to say the least. As was their brutish nature - no mystery or mysticism, just "smash things up a lot." They don't seem like a very interesting species.

The mysterious green crystal placed below the carving of the alien, what was that? Also, it was a carving of a finished alien of the type we all know, though the film seemed to show that we were evolving toward that with first a giant face hugger, hatching into a fully formed alien (or something pretty close to it.) So where did the carving of the final form alien that hasn't evolved yet come from?

Where did the original crawly bugs come from (that the black goo presumably turned into the larger snake alien) ? Why does the black goo make things with acid for blood? Why does the biologist just die, but the geologist (who presumably can't breathe since his plastic helmet just melted over his face) turn into a crazed being? And why does he not mutate further, or just go like Elisabeth's husband and turn black and get very sick, or go like the engineer and just break apart?

Unanswered questions a-plenty too. Did the engineer at the start MEAN for that to happen? He seemed kind of surprised by it all.

Why did the engineers need so many capsules of black goo when it seems like just a few would be enough, given the chain of events it can start?

Altogether, unsatisfying. Even the monster designs didn't do it for me, losing the demonic sexuality that Giger imparted to his creation and becoming blunt regular horrors more like a Cronenberg (or as someone elsewhere said, something more like an H.P. Lovecraft imagining.)

I did love the tech and ships though, and plenty of spectacle, but a disappointment to me overall.