The Black Goo — Is just fucking weird. It does so many different things to various organisms in the film. Ridley himself calls it “galloping DNA” but what’s so weird is that we see this stuff in so many variations. The control panel David touches. The canisters. The capsules inside the canisters. The cocktail our Engineer papa drinks at the beginning of the film. Never do these flashes of the goo allow us to make a set of logical deductions about its properties or intentions. All we know is black goo “makes things change.” And that the results of whatever these things change into has the ability to put a fagehugger inside a human.

This of course begets the question: Is the goo designed specifically to grow Xenos? It seems that way. Or is the Xeno an accidental hybrid of Engineer + Human + Goo? If that’s the case, why all the murals? Why the “tomb” of the “Deacon” Xeno? Believe it all speaks to that the Engineers either REALLY respected the Xeno or they really FEARED the Xeno. Do nuclear scientists paint their labs with murals showing mushroom clouds and shit? Doubt it.

Androids — Another parallel story inside Prometheus is the age-old tale of “what makes a human, human?” Weyland comes right out and says that David is immortal but has no soul. It’s plain as day. And throughout the movie it’s demonstrated that David does, indeed, NOT have a soul, because he does a lot of really destructive and careless shit that puts people in jeopardy. But Weyland’s words are a mouthful. He’s said, essentially, that immortality is possible. But that a being that IS immortal could be (and is) soul less. Taken to a logical end, something immortal may be something that’s not very nice. (And would have a much different value system, for starters.)

Which brings us back to the Xenos, what they are, and what the hell the Engineers may be doing messing with them. It’s mentioned in many Prometheus discussions that the Engineers appear to have no females, and that therefore reproduction could be a spotty thing for them. Could the search for a means to perpetuate their species have led to the biological experimentations that created the Xeno? Could the Xeno be, in essence, an “immortal” version of the Engineers? After all, it can live in nearly any climate and reproduce under harsh circumstances. And remember how the Xeno from Alien was all biotech-y? Like it was part machine? Well, Alien takes place AFTER Prometheus, but the ship found in Alien has been sitting dormant for possibly millions of years BEFORE Prometheus. Point being that the Alien we know is some prehistoric shit. The alien we see at the end of Prometheus is a lot newer. And it’s bigger (at birth) and it’s a lot less biotech. It’s more organic. Is this what the Engineers sought to create all along, a biological organism, born from them, that can perpetuate itself forever?

(Note the top of the temple exterior. One side we kinda see is Engineer-like, and the other profile side is Xeno-like. Hmmmmmmmm…)

Much like Weyland spent his life perfecting the David androids, the Engineers could have been working to perfect their “android” — a “machine” designed to mimic biology as closely as possible — until such time as technology allowed the bridge between organic and non-organic to fall away completely…

2000 Years Ago — The movie makes several references to a point in time that’s “2000 years ago.” Some folks think that has something to do with Jesus. That Jesus was an Engineer. That could be. It’s interesting. I think this is interesting too: I mentioned earlier that maybe the Engineers came around to help societies develop, then wipe them out when they got too big or bad or whatever. If that’s the case, and the outbreak or whatever happened on LV-223 2000 years ago prevented them from being able to get back to Earth to expunge the problem, well, I think the movie implies that our Western Religions are a cause of that. That Christianity is around now only because the Engineers never got back to Earth to eradicate a society that was getting too advanced.

Which brings me to my final thought:

More than 2000 years ago an Engineer ship leaves planet LV-223, headed to Earth full of alien eggs. The plan is to drop these on Earth and wipe out mankind. During transport, the Engineer becomes infected, the ship crashes on LV-426, and there’s the movie Alien.

At the same time, the base on LV-233 is overrun with the Xenos, which kills off nearly all the Engineers stationed there. One lives, a la Ripley, by getting in to hypersleep before getting infected. When he is awoken 2000 years later, much as Ripley awakes in Aliens — in that instant is he aware that he “made it” — only to find a whole new set of problems developing.

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So there they are, a bunch of crackpot theories on the holes Prometheus leaves wide open. I mean, sure, the movie could just be about a ship called Prometheus, itself a metaphor for man (Weyland and his crew) trying to steal “fire” from the “gods,” only to be punished for eternity for their transgressions against their makers. Maybe the black goo is a weapon that the Engineers plan to drop on Earth to wipe us out. Maybe they really did make us just to experiment on in an attempt to make something. As others have said, maybe the black goo is material from the original Alien-era aliens and the Engineers are trying to recreate the Queen. Whatever the final verdict, there are very cut-and-dry and honestly not so interesting ways to view the film, or much more interesting and mind-bending open ended plot elements to discuss. We just hope there’s a Prometheus 2 so we can know wtf is going on.

*It must be Earth. Why show DNA then reference DNA again later in the movie and show that Engineer and human DNA is the same if this scene doesn’t’ depict Earth?