I addressed that in the rest of the post. You still need to get to your destination in one piece, in which case some competent crew, biologists, and geologists might come in handy.
PROMETHEUS - Grade and Discuss
- Thread starter Roshi
- Start date
Visually stunning and the opening scenes were very good but I cannot forgive the sheer unmitigated stupidity of the characters. It ruined the movie for me. Compare Ripley's sensible refusal to let Ash back on the ship to the total lack of health and safety protocols on this mission. They had the back of the ship open to the atmosphere without any regard that they might contaminate the planet and they had no mission debrief and medical checks. If one man takes his helmet off and doesn't die immediately then everything is safe for everyone else to do the same. There are no things on Earth or in space that can kill you slowly after all...
I was just watching a retrospective on the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing. Upon returning safely to the Earth July 24, the three astronauts spent 18 days in quarantine. This was a reasonable protocol created by scientists for new circumstances with unknown agents or consequences that highlights one aspect of Prometheus's weak script that makes no effort to imbue its scientists with the requisite, believable and characteristic common sense intelligence.
What's frustrating is that a lot of the movie's flaws could have been smoothed out if they had just spread the exploration over several months instead of them rushing in like lunatics. David's experiments on the side would have bypassed normal protocols anyway but at least the other characters or the plot would not have looked so idiotic.
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Simple. He didn't handpick the crew - he subcontracted that out to Vickers. And her priorities were to make certain Daddy Dearest didn't make it off LV-223 alive (but not in such an obvious way as to risk that David would 'terminate her employment') and to ensure, no matter what else happened, that she safely made it back to Earth. She didn't believe there were aliens in dem dar hills, but she did believe that if there somehow were, what would happen was what exactly did happen to Weyland. She could then go home and send another, far-more competent followup mission at her leisure.
David and Weyland's medics were beyond her reach, and they were very competent at their jobs indeed. She tried to put a scare into Shaw and Holloway, which obviously didn't work. The mercenaries could either adequately protect her or slow down any threat long enough for her to make good her escape. Janek and his two co-pilots did exactly what they were supposed to do: Get the ship on the ground in one piece (and presumably they could handle the return trip just as well). So send a couple of jokers along with those crackpots Shaw and Holloway to trip them and (hopefully) David up, while Janek and his co-pilots were close at hand to get her out of there the moment Daddy flatlined.
Far as Weyland was concerned, he already had all of that and more in one being: David. Which was why he didn't care less whatever Vickers tried to do to sabotage his mission (of course he knew, he wasn't stupid). He knew his medics were untouchable, and Vickers would make certain Janek/the co-pilots/the mercenaries were up to snuff out of sheer self-interest. For the rest, he absolutely trusted that his 'son' would take care of everything.
