PROMETHEUS - Grade and Discuss

[ManOnTheWave]

I was operating under the assumption that David was the first of his kind, the prototype, and no others had been made yet.

In the viral advert Happy Birthday David, we see two Davids playing a game. If we take the advert at face value, then he's not one of a kind. However, I suppose it is possible and even
likely that the first or one of the first Davids made would be claimed by Weyland if he took a great deal of interest in the android's development.

 

[Samurai8472]

Some friends tried to get me into "Lost," but I didn't care for it. From what I'm reading here, it seems that I saved myself some time and effort.

I watched season five and season 6. I got sucked in to the end

I did get annoyed at how prentious some of the creators and fans were


What is the smoke monster
Who are the others
What is jacob
What is the hatch?
What do the numbers mean?


Seriously just shut up!

 

[Mach5]

Seriously just shut up!

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I was operating under the assumption that David was the first of his kind, the prototype, and no others had been made yet.

In the promotional videos David is the eighth generation of his kind going back to at least the early 2020s, and as mentioned above there were others that looked like him. His was the most highly advanced in terms of understanding and mimicking human emotion, while not being able to feel emotions himself; or so he says, though the film seems to imply otherwise. Either that or his mimicry of contempt and wonder is so precise as to be indistinguishable from human emotion, in which case the difference between them being real emotions or not is largely a moot point.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The difference is that his brain is full of triggers. Some make his legs walk, others stop him from falling over, and others still has his react in wonder in a situation that graphically accounts as wonder appropriately in the same manner that he responds graphically to a pothole appropriately...

Or not.

 

[Mr Light]

David absolutely had emotions... he was secretly obsessed with Shaw and in love with her, and resented Holloway for being her boyfriend and for the way he treated him... he took every opportunity to very subtly jab at Vickers... he resented the meaningless of his creation while his creators search for their creators...

 

[DWF]

David absolutely had emotions... he was secretly obsessed with Shaw and in love with her, and resented Holloway for being her boyfriend and for the way he treated him... he took every opportunity to very subtly jab at Vickers... he resented the meaningless of his creation while his creators search for their creators...

If David really loved Sahaw he would have allowed her to go though the show pregancy thing, not even knowing if se'd live though it or not.

 

[Warped9]

"Love" might not be the word for what David experienced. He might have been just more than casually curious.

 

[DWF]

"Love" might not be the word for what David experienced. He might have been just more than casually curious.

David came across to me as being childlike in his emotional development, not as a advanced as Ash, Bishop or Call. I doubt if David fully understood emotions and what means to have them and express them properly, but then I guess that puts him in the same boat as a lot of people.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Joey Mengele was curious too.

I really hated that "How far would you you go" speech.

After a literal trip of thousands of light years, Studly replies metaphorically "a long way".

Fuck.

Am I supposed to reduce my imagination because "a long way" sounds considerably smaller than thousands of light years, or readjust my expectations because in his mind thousands of light years was "a short way" when he's really just a passenger who sat back and let a million other plebs do all the heavy lifting.

And really, how badly crafted was the question "How far would you go to find the answers to the questions that you have just gone exactly this far to find?"

Ridiculous.

Of course the end of the movie.

Fuck Earth.

LET IT RIDE!

Lets go find some better answers from some bigger deushbags.

Did she want answers, or did she plan on killing god?

 

[Professor Zoom]

Obviously there WAS - Elizabeth Shaw. (Or at least Weyland thought so.) SHE wouldn't run away, and her quest for answers would override any desire for fame and glory. Holloway, as events proved, was simply along for the ride as her boyfriend (to keep Shaw happy). He was in the same category as Millburn & Fifield = Canary in the Coal Mine/Cannon Fodder.

Again... WHY hire cannon fodder? That fundamentally makes NO sense. Why not hire people who are EFFECTIVE?

Good question. Obviously Weyland wouldn't have the prejudice against robots Holloway and others displayed. Vickers, on the other hand...

And David wasn't running away... nor getting lost... seemed to be able to do everything...

AMEN to that. But ask anybody these days under 30 who was on that mission, and you get "Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and...uh, the other one..."
(I really wish there was a thumbsup that didn't have the wink.)

You brought up Michael Collins in comparison to the "dregs" of the science community, like those on board Prometheus, not what people under 30 would think. Why don't you address that?

 

[Set Harth]

"Love" might not be the word for what David experienced. He might have been just more than casually curious.

David came across to me as being childlike in his emotional development, not as a advanced as Ash, Bishop or Call. I doubt if David fully understood emotions and what means to have them and express them properly, but then I guess that puts him in the same boat as a lot of people.

I just noticed the A, B, C, D thing...

 

[DWF]

"Love" might not be the word for what David experienced. He might have been just more than casually curious.

David came across to me as being childlike in his emotional development, not as a advanced as Ash, Bishop or Call. I doubt if David fully understood emotions and what means to have them and express them properly, but then I guess that puts him in the same boat as a lot of people.

I just noticed the A, B, C, D thing...

Yep, somebody mentioned it upthread it's a nice piece of continuity.

 

[Nightowl1701]

Again... WHY hire cannon fodder? That fundamentally makes NO sense. Why not hire people who are EFFECTIVE?

(sigh) Hell, I don't know...maybe because he thought they'd be more effective than they were (or at least not get themselves killed)? This goes back to the whole "Vickers sabotaged the mission by hiring idiots" theory. I have a hard time believing Weyland himself would have handpicked two squeamish potheads. I'm sure if he was doing the recruiting, he would have gotten more competent people. Again, effective or not, his only real criteria would have been that they STAY THE HELL OUT OF HIS WAY when it comes time to say "Hi" to E.T.

And David wasn't running away... nor getting lost... seemed to be able to do everything...

David was Weyland's ace in the hole, no doubt. (Even against Vickers' presumed backstabbing.) I'm guessing he was the first David 8 off the assembly line, hence Weyland thinking of him as a son.

You brought up Michael Collins in comparison to the "dregs" of the science community, like those on board Prometheus, not what people under 30 would think. Why don't you address that?

Thank God, there have been no "dregs" on any real spaceflights for me to compare Millburn & Fifield to! OK, dregs was obviously too strong a word. I was only trying to draw the parallel to who people remember from these history-making missions and who Weyland would obviously like Earth to remember from this mission. I in no way intended any insult or offense to Mr. Collins, and I apologize.

 

[MacLeod]

"Love" might not be the word for what David experienced. He might have been just more than casually curious.

What about 'Infatuated' then?

 

[roliver]

Again, effective or not, his only real criteria would have been that they STAY THE HELL OUT OF HIS WAY when it comes time to say "Hi" to E.T.

Not to beat the dead horse too much more, but that makes absolutely no sense. Weyland could not have been stupid enough to think that he only needed a crew barely capable of getting him to an alient planet, and that after that the crew was expendable and everything would go exactly as he wanted it to. The man hadn't a clue what he would find.

You are going to MEET AN ALIEN SPECIES YOU (SOMEHOW) THINK CREATED ALL OF MANKIND. This is not a job for amateurs.

Even if Weyland cared only for extending his own life, and absolutely nothing else, would he not surround himself with the absolute best that his massive amount of money could buy? The best. No ands, ifs or buts about it. Top shelf talent. Bright, razor sharp minds with extensive training and massive contracts (with clauses for a successful mission completion).

The way things went down he could have hired a pack of Cub Scouts and the results wouldn't have been much different.

 

[Guy Gardener]

To do that job you have to be a highly educated genius.

These days only sad ass boring people are HIGHLY educated geniuses, or have had their extensive education paid for by the military that any mischievousness inside of them has had the shit kicked out of it...

In the future, one would hope that if every one is a highly educated genius, because it's almost impossible not to be highly educated genius, we are going to have scruffy cantankerous asshole highly educated genius drunks with chronic nicotine/pot habits who can sum out multiple quadratic equations in their heads simultaneously, which is what you have to do to pilot a star ship if your computer starts to go crazy and kill the crew.

Every starship mission is a suicide trip.

Only mad men and expendables are going to sign up.

But even the worst of the best is still pretty damn good.

 

[Professor Zoom]

Again... WHY hire cannon fodder? That fundamentally makes NO sense. Why not hire people who are EFFECTIVE?

(sigh) Hell, I don't know...maybe because he thought they'd be more effective than they were (or at least not get themselves killed)? This goes back to the whole "Vickers sabotaged the mission by hiring idiots" theory. I have a hard time believing Weyland himself would have handpicked two squeamish potheads. I'm sure if he was doing the recruiting, he would have gotten more competent people. Again, effective or not, his only real criteria would have been that they STAY THE HELL OUT OF HIS WAY when it comes time to say "Hi" to E.T.

Ultimately, one has to twist and twist in order to make sense of THIS CREW... this is a failure of the writing. Characters doing stupid things in order to advance the plot.

Weyland's desire to meet the aliens, to ask for more life, THAT makes sense... but why hire these people? That makes NO sense, unless one twists and twists.

 

[Nightowl1701]

Not to beat the dead horse too much more, but that makes absolutely no sense. Weyland could not have been stupid enough to think that he only needed a crew barely capable of getting him to an alient planet, and that after that the crew was expendable and everything would go exactly as he wanted it to. The man hadn't a clue what he would find.

The whole crew wasn't expendable. Just Shaw, Holloway, Millburn and Fifield - aka the non-Company freelance associates who were kept out of the loop about the real mission. Like HAL 9000, David (the "top shelf talent" who he didn't even have to pay) was programmed to carry that out all on his own, and he succeeded.

"Barely capable of getting him to an alien planet?" Captain Janek and his men (plus David) got the Prometheus down on LV-223 just fine. Not a scratch. Weyland/Vickers didn't mess up there. Only mistake the female doc made was getting too close to a desperate Shaw (and it's hardly her fault David didn't sedate her strongly enough). And NO ONE saw the Zombie Fifield attack coming. (I counted three, maybe four killed in that fight - how well you think they'd have done against a full-fledged Xenomorph?)

With the exceptions of Millburn & Fifield, who had no clue what they were in for when they signed up, and loose-cannon Holloway (and let's face it, they're the only ones we're complaining about), the crew of the Prometheus was "pretty damn good." Take those three (plus Shaw) out of the equation, and everything DID go exactly as Weyland wanted it to - right up to the second the Engineer ripped David's head off and caved Weyland's skull in.

True, Weyland didn't know what he'd find. But the man was dying. He was desperate. (And he certainly didn't consider himself an amateur.) The minute he woke up, the countdown clock started. He had days left, if that - he had nothing to lose. He could only bet everything on this one roll of the dice and hope for the best. If not - hell, he was dead either way.

 

[Nightowl1701]

Weyland's desire to meet the aliens, to ask for more life, THAT makes sense... but why hire these people? That makes NO sense, unless one twists and twists.

Shaw: "Well, if we...if we can't make contact, why did you even bring us here?"
Vickers: "Weyland was a superstitious man. He wanted a true believer on board."

And with Shaw on board, Holloway HAD to come too - neither he or Shaw would have it any other way. And, until a living Engineer is found and Weyland's ready to step out from behind the curtain, it wouldn't do to have just the two of them going into the temple without some kind of Company-provided aid. It couldn't be just David and the lady doctor - David would likely have to split off from the main party at some point to pursue his "agenda," and the doctor is, well, a doctor. It can't be any of the other main Prometheus crew members, they're needed to fly the ship. So a pair of extra scientists, just to make Shaw/Holloway feel supported and secure. And Doubting Vickers, who doesn't want to see the mission succeed anyway, has no intention of making things any easier for our two "true believers" by hiring any professionals. So she picks out a pair of "anything for a buck" union types.