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| David the android on the left; the titan Prometheus as sculpted by an artist on the right. I thoughtthat this was a neat comparison of the two and obviously done on purpose by Ridley Scott. |
First off, Cally Jackson put me in the Hot Seat over at her blog today so if you have the time, please go check it out HERE.In case you are wondering, this is a
Prometheus movie post. I apologize to Patrick Dilloway who thinks I talk too much about this movie, but I simply need to get these thoughts out of my head. I will be talking about some things that you could have an opinion about without having seen the film. However, I might "spoil" one or two minor things about the film in an attempt to answer questions that have plagued me for a week now. If you choose to comment, I would appreciate intelligent feedback aimed at the topic I will bring up instead of some smartass snarky thing (glares at Mr. Dilloway).
If you stayed through the end credits of Prometheus, you were greeted with the next stage of Ridley Scott’s elaborate tale. You caught a date – 10.11.12 – and a link to the Weyland Industries timeline. When you scroll down to that date, it reads:
WEYLAND INCORPORATESWeyland Corporation is recognized as a legal entity and corporation under United States law and receives their Certificate of Incorporation from the Companies House in the United Kingdom. Due to the combined value of Sir Peter Weyland’s various patents and patent-pendings, the company incorporates with a higher fair market valuation than any other company in history.
OCTOBER 11, 2012There’s a small flag to click on that links you to - http://www.whatis101112.com/ - where you’ll find a new video and book. Each “stage” will be revealed through the various modules.
And then there's a new viral video...presumably Mr. Weyland prior to his TED talk which I discussed in this post HERE. The website if you check it out, features a 3D version of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's work Thus Spake Zarathustra which in summary contains a parable on the death of God and the prophecy of the Übermensch (a super human).Now it has been a long time since I read Nietzsche, but I dusted off my copy of this book and turned to section X of the work and this is what I found:
"Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me--man is something that is to be surpassed...live your life of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared! I spare you not...my brethren in war!"
And this next piece is from section XI:
"The state...where all are poison-drinkers...where the slow suicide of all is called life...""There where the state ceaseth...do ye not see...the rainbow and the bridges of the superman?"
And finally from section XII seems to be an address to the Übermensch himself:
Nietzsche in the voice of Zarathustra compares humans to biting flies in a marketplace wanting to suck the blood from the super human. He says, "Even when thou art gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by thee; and they repay thy beneficence with secret maleficence...They are unworthy of thee. Therefore they hate thee, and would fain suck thy blood."
Okay...so to my points.
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| This is the sacrificial "engineer" who like Prometheus of the Greek legenddestroys himself to give something powerful to man. The container holds poison,but in his death comes life. |
1) At the beginning of the movie, we see an alien who could possibly be seen as a super human drinking poison. It slowly kills him and from that presumably springs all life on earth. I'm thinking that Ridley Scott is tipping his hat to Neitzsche in this by stating that the Engineers that created humans had gotten to a point in their evolution that creating life in their own image was the bridge to the next step. In other words, they were becoming gods.
2) The directive in section X indicates that man is to be surpassed and that to achieve this requires war. Therefore the Engineers were a war-like race. The planet of LV-223 was found to be a weapon's depot for them.3) The last passage might serve to explain the motives of the Engineers in wanting to destroy humanity. They believed that even though humans were their children, that humans would secretly grow to hate them and therefore they would eventually need to go to war against them.
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| Prometheus biological weapons in the Engineer ships |
Now to the unanswered questions that have bothered me all week. But first, a few facts for you to consider pulled from the movie:1) The Engineers created man.2) All of the bodies on planet LV-223 were two thousand years old. This means they started manufacturing weapons of mass destruction (the bio-matter or black goo) at about that same time.3) They were headed to Earth, so it's clear that the Engineers wanted to destroy mankind. But it wasn't always this way. They changed their minds 2000 years ago as Shaw clearly points out in her dialogue in the film.My conjecture:What event happened 2000 years ago? I got to thinking about this and decided that it would have to have been the birth, life, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But why would that event have caused the Engineers to change their mind about whether humans deserved to live or die?Perhaps it has to do with the idea that humans didn't recognize the Engineers as their true Creators. Perhaps they were upset that humans could kill a god and therefore, if one god could die then so could they. Or perhaps they believed that the death of Christ deserved to be punished.So I ask you, is Ridley Scott saying that the motivation for the Engineers to destroy humanity at all related to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? There is no doubt that at the heart of this film is a huge existential question which I never thought to encounter in an "Alien" franchise film.
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