Part 5 – Studying on the Ship (0:44:50 – 1:01:30)
37. How does the Captain not know where the Geologist and Biologist are? He has a camera feed and a 3D map we previously saw him examining. For that matter, How can the Geologist and Biologist get lost at all if the Captain has this map to locate them?
38. Why, when analyzing the alien head, does the computer say “SAMPLE STERILE: NO CONTAGION PRESENT?” Not three minutes later, they will examine the head and see cells “in a state of change,” which would absolutely count as a contagion.
39. Why does Dr. Shaw have David just break the ‘helmet’ apart without doing any analysis on it? That would be a significant scientific and archeological find, but they just destroy the helmet without batting an eyelash.
40. “I think we can trick the nervous system into thinking it’s still alive.” But why bother? Dr. Shaw has the single most amazing discovery in all of human history in her hands, an actual alien head, and instead of investigating the bone structure, the organs, or the cells they see changing and multiplying, she decides to shock the head with increasingly powerful amounts of electricity. Why? We never find out. The absolute most that could happen is some facial muscles would twitch. Otherwise, dead is dead, and all Dr. Shaw accomplishes in going electro-crazy is blowing up this massively significant scientific discovery. It may be the stupidest thing any so-called ‘scientist’ has ever done in a movie.
41. Dr. Shaw – and the script – do not understand how DNA works. When Dr. Shaw runs the exploded alien head’s DNA, she finds that it is a 100 percent match with humans. She then, in a later scene, concludes emphatically that they must have ‘created’ us. That is a faulty deduction. A 100 percent DNA match means that the Engineers are humans. Their physical features are different because they lived and evolved in separate environments than us, but make no mistake: Identical DNA means identical species. That’s still a massively significant discovery, of course, to find other human life in the universe, but it absolutely does not mean that these creatures ‘made’ humans through some sort of intelligent design.
42. Why is Holloway so depressed? I hate this character so damn much, and this scene is the reason why. While getting drunk off his ass, he asks Shaw if she thinks they wasted their time coming here, which is a ridiculously stupid thing to say. They found ALIEN LIFE!!! It is literally the greatest discovery in human history, and Holloway wants to drink himself to death because he did not get to “talk” to them. Bullocks. For one, he’s still assuming they were our ‘creators,’ which Shaw’s little DNA test just scientifically disproved, and more importantly, nothing in Holloway’s previous actions indicated why he would be so obsessed with getting “answers.” He’s such a thin character that we have no idea what his motivations would be for wanting to know ‘where we came from,’ or anything else like that. His depression makes absolutely no sense, and it’s infuriating.
43. Why does the Captain screw with the Geologist and Biologist, subtly convincing them to go look for the source of the scanner ‘ping?’ Does he get off on putting crewmembers in danger?
44. Why is Shaw trying to ‘figure out’ what made the alien head combust? Is pumping it full of electricity not a good enough reason? There are risks to reckless experimentation, you know.
45. More faulty science: “Their genetic material predates ours; we come from them.” Shaw has no possible way to know this. We are told specifically how old the alien body was – “two-thousand years, give or take” – which means that 2000 years is the absolute furthest her equipment could ‘date’ anything in the body, and automatically nullifies her conclusion.
46. Why does Holloway automatically assume that the Engineers would have been able to tell the humans about their own creators? The entire point behind the Prometheus mission is that we know nothing about our creators, so why assume the Engineers would be able to explain everything about theirs.
47. What about Holloway and Shaw indicates that they want to have children? Never mind how awkward Shaw’s “I can’t create life” line sounds in context. Just consider how strange it seems for these two people, who travel around the world looking at cave paintings and are now on a multi-year space exploration, to think they could lead a parental lifestyle.
48. When Vickers and the Captain are awkwardly flirting, she says she flew “half a billion miles from earth.” That isn’t just bad math, it’s criminally inept math. They flew across the galaxy, and 500 million miles would barely get you to another planet. Pluto, for instance, is over 3.5 billion miles from Earth. Vickers does not know what she’s talking about.
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