Prometheus: What was the black goo?

[Snys93]

   If you haven't seen Prometheus, you should. If you have and you understand it, okay, you're smarter than me

 

   But for those of us who saw it and are wondering 'what the the hell was that?' and the Bluray pack wasn't enough, come and post your questions and together may find the answers.

 

 

 

 

 

   Personally, I like complex films and TV shows. Exploring the unknown, boldly going where no one has gone before. But it seems that movies today just aren't exciting and mysterious as they used to be. Star Wars Prequel trilogy just was not Star Wars to me. It lacked some things. Just like the Transformer trilogy, they were good films but editing and dialog were amiss.

 

   For further analysis, heres a link to The Rules of Science Fiction:

http://www.grumblemagazine.com/articles/elfpants/scifirules.html

 

   Everyone is welcome and obey mod rules.

[Vy'drach]

*WARNING* Spoilers if you haven't seen the movie.

 

The black goo, if I remember correctly, was some sort of biological weapon that they were planning on exterminating human life with. Now as to why the Space Jockey was drinking some of it in the beginning, I don't know.

 

My big beef with the movie was that it is a prequel to the Alien franchise, and honestly just kills the kainde amedha to me. The beautiful thing about the kainde amedha was that it was so contradictory to what we know. It didn't need to eat, drink, sleep, breathe, hell, they aren't even carbon based, but silicon based (don't confuse these things with them being unable to do so, however, they can eat and sleep and breathe, but it is unnecessary for them to do so). Then due to Prometheus, it suddenly becomes that they are descended partially from humans, rather than being a pure species that impregnates other alien life, and takes traits from them for that individual.

[The Shaper]

As Vydrach said, the [REDACTED] was associated with the [DATA EXPUNGED] that those [DATA EXPUNGED] were going to use in order to [REDACTED]. While I am not convinced that the black goo was the [DATA EXPUNGED], it was certainly related to it, and at the very least a byproduct of what they were actually going to use.

 

(Uncensored version)

 

As Vydrach said, the black goo was associated with the biological weapon that those ancestors/ancient alien race were going to use in order to wipe out the human civilization. While I am not convinced that the black goo was the weapon entirely, it was certainly related to it, and at the very least a byproduct of what they were actually going to use.

[Zzz]

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[Faisul]

A Prometheus topic! Alright!

 

To me the movie was pretty much the definite science fiction experience of the year, maybe the last movie since the first Matrix to really pull me in and make me think. While it doesn't come even half way close to the slow, deliberate unravelling of mystery that 2001 did (not that many mysteries are unravelled in Prometheus at all) it's certainly cut from the same cloth. The themes of cosmic mystery and horror in the movie really resonated well with me and every time I watch it I come across new things, new ideas to consider as to the kind of statement the movie is making.

 

The main point of the movie, however, is not to spell things out to you. As I said, it's the kind of movie that invites you to try to make your own conclusions about what happened, what things were, and why. Not a lot of movies do that these days, save maybe The Fountain, which was an acid trip all on its own (and deceptively simple, too)!

 

As for the black goo,

it's a DNA-altering agent. The core of the Engineer's plan, as I see it, is not to destroy humanity, but to transform them into

something else. As the title of the movie suggests, you could read the black goo as a kind of fire, a life-creating (and destroying) force, that transforms life.

 

Some people have the notion that the fire has become corrupted through hubris; the Engineers create humanity and their hubris comes to bite them in the ass when the 'fire' creates a xenomorph outbreak on LV-426 (the planet in the movie). When humans come to investigate, hubris brings Weyland to think that he, as a very wealthy and powerful man but a man nonetheless, somehow deserves immortality, and that it is something for the Engineers to give.

 

He dies for it, and his own creation (David) is both a catalyst for the destruction of the survey team, but also for the creation of life; he infects Shaw's husband with the 'fire.' Ultimately, he is nearly destroyed for it, and LV426 is once again subject to the depradations of Xenomorphs.

 

Hubris really is a big theme of the movie, and the search for answers is part of that hubris. It's what brought Shaw to try to find God amongst the Engineers, and it turns out they're just as awful as humanity can be. Shaw and the team had so many assumptions about how the Engineers would be; that they'd be benevolent, somehow beyond the weaknesses of humanity. As it turns out, this isn't true at all, and the presumption and arrogance lying in the assumption that they would be very nearly

kills them all.

 

I love this kind of movie, it throws a huge number of fastballs at you and invites you to think about it. There's a lot that can go into an analysis of Prometheus, themes of religion, the blessed virgin aspect of the Shaw/Ripley comparison between Alien and Prometheus, and the godliness (or ungodliness, depending on your perspective) of the ability to create life. It's like, what would happen if Moses had chosen to look upon God's face instead of looking away during the whole burning bush thing. Awesome stuff!

EDIT: As for the stuff on the Weyland corp site... eh, I'm getting 'extended universe' vibes from it.

It does, however, point out why the goo affected Fifield and Shaw's hubby differently. Or at least attempt to.

 

Also, what is a kainde amedha? All that shows up on GIS is Alien fanfiction and Predators with breasts.

[Vy'drach]

Kainde amedha is the Yautja name for Xenomorphs. Yautja being the name of the Predator's race in their own language. It means "hard meat" though not in any weird sense. Humans are known as pyode amedha, or "soft meat." The Yautja aren't really known for their cleverness in naming things.

 

On the chance that you might want to see more into it, or at least that I'm not making this up, check towards the bottom of this page for most of the known language, though Vy'drach is missing on there.

 

http://www.jokerdesigns.com/thehunted/yautja/index.php

[Snys93]

Kainde amedha is the Yautja name for Xenomorphs. Yautja being the name of the Predator's race in their own language. It means "hard meat" though not in any weird sense. Humans are known as pyode amedha, or "soft meat." The Yautja aren't really known for their cleverness in naming things.

 

I guess every biological species in the universe according the Yautjia is meat. Whats their word for humans?

[Vy'drach]

I done said it, it's pyode amedha, or "soft meat." They also use the slang "Ooman," apparently. But that was mostly to bug a human that had been blooded by a respected warrior before dying, thus given the right to join their society and hunt with them. 'Least that's how I remember it. Been years since I read the books last.

[Faisul]

Huh. Thought it was Indian or something. Interesting, I had no idea they'd gotten far enough down the AvP side of things to make a language for the Predators.

 

 

Then I guess I can comment on your criticism of the movie, Vydrach. I don't really understand it; the Xenomorphs will always be partially descended from something since that's how they reproduce, by implanting a chestburster into some kind of animal. In Alien you had the classic Xenos, spawned from a human. In Aliens you had the dog-Alien on four legs, predictably a product of a facehugger humping a dog, and in Prometheus you've got the Deacon, the Engineer-spawned Xeno. If anything the movie displays how horrible the Engineer technology is; their creation is so advanced that it can spawn literally endless iterations of creatures especially designed to make your life horrible depending on what species you are. Remember the Predalien? That was fun.

 

In the long run though I guess Prometheus isn't really an Alien movie. None of them were; they contain Xenomorphs, sure, but they aren't the central focus of the narrative. In Prometheus it's Shaw's search for God and her hubris in thinking she and humanity is ready for it. It's more of a movie about religion than Xenos, just like Alien was about rape, Aliens about Vietnam, and Alien 3 some godawful abomination of an attempt to say something about motherhood. The Xenos are just a vehicle for the narrative to move into a certain direction.

 

Is your beef the fact that the Aliens are apparently created by the Engineers, through the use of the black goo? I have to agree with you that the Xenos take much more of a back seat in Prometheus compared to some of the other movies. To me, though, that allowed the movie to take a certain direction it probably wouldn't have been able to if it featured Xenos from the get-go.

Oh, the Engineer at the beginning of the movie drinks the goo to introduce some kind of organic molecules into the water, ostensibly to seed the planet with life. He sacrifices himself to create life, just like people implanted with a chestburster sacrifice themselves to create a Xeno, just on a vastly smaller scale. Note that it isn't explicitly stated that the planet this is happening on is Earth.

 

The idea is that this is what the Engineers do, they seed the galaxy with life through the use of their fire, the black goo. Then, as the interpretation goes, the fire is corrupted through hubris, and the result is the awful Xeno-spawning goop we have in Prometheus.

 

That human and Engineer DNA is so similar may be because they returned to Earth thousands of millions of years later after seeding it in the distant, distant past, or, more likely, that they picked up a couple monkeys during a fly-by and fiddled with them to be more like themselves two or so million years ago. Why? Charlie puts it best when he explains why humanity created David, "because we could." It may just have been that simple.

 

Maybe the later decision to wipe out humanity was because the Engineers realized they had gone too far in their hubris. Or, maybe the human form produces more deadly and efficient Xenos to use in wars of subjugation. Maybe the Engineers have been seeding and harvesting worlds for millions of years, and only recently have they run into someone capable of turning their own weapon against them. There are people who think that the Space Jockey suit used to be another species that the Engineers enslaved and then started wearing. Maybe they use Xenos for that sort of thing instead of Engineer soldiers. That, or the Xenos have some sort of religious significance. This is reinforced by the look of the 'Big Head Room'; the Sistine-Chapel-like painting of the Xeno on the wall, and sculptures like this:


 

Seems to convey a sense of dominance, right? Or it's a statement of manipulation; the Engineer literally reaches into the organism with his hand, melding with it and transforming it. Maybe the Xenos are just a part of some ritual beyond our comprehension.

 

In any case, I'm really looking forward to an eventual sequel. Not because I'm starved for answers, mind you, I was just totally in awe of Scott's superb skills in making really goddamn atmospheric movies, and science fiction hadn't had many of those recently.

[Vy'drach]

Huh. Thought it was Indian or something. Interesting, I had no idea they'd gotten far enough down the AvP side of things to make a language for the Predators.

Then I guess I can comment on your criticism of the movie, Vydrach. I don't really understand it; the Xenomorphs will always be partially descended from something since that's how they reproduce, by implanting a chestburster into some kind of animal. In Alien you had the classic Xenos, spawned from a human. In Aliens you had the dog-Alien on four legs, predictably a product of a facehugger humping a dog, and in Prometheus you've got the Deacon, the Engineer-spawned Xeno. If anything the movie displays how horrible the Engineer technology is; their creation is so advanced that it can spawn literally endless iterations of creatures especially designed to make your life horrible depending on what species you are. Remember the Predalien? That was fun.

 

Aliens vs. Predator has been around since the late 1980's when the comics were thought up. Lots of folks credit Predator 2 for having the skull of a kainde amedha on the ship, but the comics were already underway when that happened. And I addressed the kainde amedha being descended from humans. The species itself is pure, but each individual of the lower versions of them, Runners, Drones, Warriors, Predaliens, and whatever else are based on the host species, but only for that individual. The higher tiers of their species, The Queen (and of course Praetorian since it's a juvenile Queen not ready to establish its own hive, and is used as a form of elite hive guard at that point), the Ravagers, Carriers, and any other form of higher tier species are purely kainde amedha regardless of host. A Queen embryo implanted in a dog, horse, human, gorilla, rynth, snake, bird, fish, whatever have you, will always be a Queen that will lay eggs that will be normal facehuggers, and what form the mature individual takes from those is based on the host, unless it's another Queen facehugger (Since Ravagers and Carriers are actually an alternate morph of Praetorians that are really only done in extreme cases, they come from Queen facehuggers as well). There are only three known exceptions I know of. The Queen and Newborn Alien from Aliens: Resurrection that was created artificially through attempts at cloning the species back into known space, the Predalien Queen from Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction, which was also the result of genetic experimentation, and the Predalien "Queen" from Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, which I hardly say counts given how much of a point the AvP movies makes at going against established canon (A species that only comes to Earth to hunt on the hottest days of the hottest years, let's put them in Antarctica. Oh, and their tools, specifically designed for hunting kainde amedha, melt like butter at the mere mention of acidic blood. Their flesh, too, when every other source shows that while Yautja aren't immune to the blood by any means, their own blood largely neutralizes the acidic blood. This is how Unblooded Warriors are able to mark themselves without causing severe damage, and become Young Bloods, and Dachande used his own blood to neutralize the acid in the Queen's finger in order to mark Machiko Noguchi without burning into her brain.

Anyways, so the kainde amedha had the purebred castes, which are the same regardless of host except through genetic manipulation or downright idiotic and conflicting movie ideas, and then there's the lower castes that take genetic features of the surrounding hosts, which is a good design since they'll likely take features that aid them in surviving that type of environment.

However, the way it is now, the entire species is compromised. The kainde amedha in Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 (this was the one that had the dog-like Runner, btw), are all descended from humans. This is such a clash against what their original design was to be. They were supposed to be as unhuman as possible while still skirting the edges of the uncanny valley. They were supposed to defy every idea we have about the natural order and living organisms. Everything about them contradicted what humans knew what is and should be.

The subtleties you love in the Prometheus movie, I had with the kainde amedha. Not the movies themselves, but the very creature. Apart from the aforementioned aspect of being against everything we thought we knew about how organisms work and just are, their very design was artistic subtlety. They designed something to be horrific, grotesque, but at the same time, almost sexually provocative. In their words, "We wanted something that looks like it could fuck you just as soon kill you." Their design doesn't seem to indicate one gender over the other, they can easily be seen as either gender. And as violent, brutal, and unrelenting as the species is, they aren't evil from an objective standpoint. Granted if you were caught up with them they could easily seem evil given they have no issue slaughtering those that endanger the hive, or catching men, women, children, and impregnating them in a way that will ultimately lead to a horrifically painful death. Despite this, however, they're not evil. The main reason being, they aren't really malicious. They don't do it for sick enjoyment or anything, but to survive. This is how their species survives, and not doing it would mean extinction for them.

But Prometheus just threw a large part of this out the window, and for no reason. The movie would of been entirely the same if they didn't make the kainde amedha the bastard child of human and Space Jockey DNA. All those subtleties you loved would of remained there, all the ones I loved would of remained there. Instead, however, they had to try and inject some "shock" into the Aliens franchise through that cheap ploy. I had no issue with the Space Jockeys and Engineers being the same species, it didn't contradict anything and should have been all the tie-in to Alien that was there. I'm sorry, but decades from now, Scott is still going to be remembered for Alien and being the start of that series, and not Prometheus. Why he's trying to fuck over the Aliens series I don't know. I was damn near... crushed, when I found out kainde amedha were supposed to be descended from humans due to Prometheus.

[Faisul]

Holy crap, your knowledge of the franchise. Well put. And hurf durf I should've remembered the dog alien being in Alien 3, not Aliens. That's me playing AvP 2 that's got me mixed up, I think. It's been half a decade since I saw those movies. Anyway, I learned something!

 

Realizing my less than solid grasp of the canon of the franchise, I still wonder how the Xenos could've been integrated to be more central in Prometheus. As I said before, the movie certainly isn't about them;

really, the scene with the Deacon being squeaked in right at the very end like an afterthought really reinforces that idea.

But you can still see their handiwork,

the heap of Engineer corpses with their chests burst ensures that, while still not central to the narrative of the movie, they're still a very real and just as lethal a presence in

Prometheus as in any of the other movies. Then you have the penis snakes and the horrible tentacle vagina face monster, so really, the Xenos are in the movie more than you might be giving it credit for!

 

After all, they're still the horrible antagonistic force that's killing everybody, just in a different way than usual.

I also think the movie is more about Ridley Scott returning to one of his old pet projects, approaching it in a different way than Alien, and attempting to elaborate on the world of the first film. It bears to mention that Scott and Cameron had very different ideas on what made the Alien movies great, after all. Whether successful or unsuccessful is entirely up to you, I certainly think the setting is enriched for it, and didn't perceive it as an attempt to screw over the franchise at all.

 

I'm sorry the movie rubbed you the wrong way! If it's any consolation, I don't think that the origin story for the Xenos in Prometheus necessarily makes their portrayals in older media uncanonical, or that the way it's presented in the prequel is the way every Xeno colony has to start off. The intricate delineation of castes you describe could very well be the next step after enough people have been horribly molested by and become wombs for Xenos, and their basic nature is still the same. Sure, they're not a species that evolved on their own terms that were later picked up by the Engineers and used as weapons or what have you after that, but they're still relentless killing machines whose biological and reproductive complexity makes them the single greatest threat to life in the universe as a whole.

I'm still unsure why Xenos being descended from humans cheapens them though? They still work exactly the same way unless I missed something. For all we know, there's countless hives of the things with queens and all that littering the universe already, just in different forms than the human-spawned Xenos we're used to seeing. What's the shock that you are referring to? If anything, doesn't the Prometheus Xenos have a lot more nuance to them, what with the many and quite frankly bewildering cycles that the black goo goes through to eventually produce them?

[Vy'drach]

Looking more into things, I came across something that makes me glad. Despite what one of the writers, Damon Lindelof, wanted to do, the Deacon can not be the progenitor of the kainde amedha, at least not the ones found on Acheron LV-426, since The Derelict Ship that housed all the eggs and the dead Space Jockey, crashed on that planet over ten million years before the events of Prometheus. I had forgotten just how ancient that ship was in the time line of events. And in an interview, if they do get a sequel, it will be heading further away from Alien. Good. There is no reason for the kainde amedha to be related to the things that were created in Prometheus, beyond perhaps both being created via the goo, and actually attempting to bridge a connection would likely require severe retcons as it's really not canonically possible right now. Plus, the creatures aren't really all that similar. Apart from their forced impregnation and violent emergence, they aren't really the same. Kainde amedha, generation from generation are practically the same, and the differences are determined via host but they are all very similar. Runners may be born from the likes of a dog, but it still looks like a smaller, sleeker, quadrupedal Drone (which is capable of quadrupedal movement just fine), which is born from a human. Predaliens can look rather different from Runners or Drones, being a different colour, being larger, stronger, having mandibles, but they still look very similar to the other types. Then in Prometheus, the creature looks nothing like the host or like any of the other things. The tentacle monster is born from a human, which goes on the impregnate a Space Jockey that gives "birth" to a creature based on a goblin shark. Trying to pass that off as the progenitors of the kainde amedha is just downright irritating.

 

And Prometheus wasn't about the kainde amedha, but that just makes it worse really. Rather than being a prequel to Alien, it was a movie that could of been a stand-alone sci-fi movie taking place within the same universe. Instead, they made a sci-fi movie and attempted to shoehorn Alien into it, rather than making it other alien life forms in the same universe, like PREDATOR. That takes place in the same universe, but there's no correlation to the events. At no point during Prometheus or Alien, Alien 2, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection do they mention the events of 1987 where a commando team was almost entirely hunted and eliminated by an alien hunter, or how the same happened ten years later in Los Angeles. They're all in the same universe, but are not connected beyond perhaps all the creatures originating from the black goo.

 

And the kainde amedha being descended from humans doesn't change how they operate, but it changes what they are and why they are as potentially terrifying as they are. They go from being a complete anti-thesis to us as humans, to being the bastard child of humanity. Oh sure they still use you to violently birth new members of their hive, and they're still able to survive almost any climate except for living in fire or lava (like I said before, they can even survive in the vacuum of space, and even fire/lava isn't out of the question given the right hosts), but they'd still no longer be this strange alien life-form that defies what humans know as science, but merely some strange human/alien hybrid. That would just greatly diminish them because they would stop being a creature made up of those subtle nuances I listed before, but just some generic creature feature monster.

 

And I'm not saying the movie's bad and you should feel bad for liking it or anything. Go on and enjoy it if it suits you, it's just that I didn't because they tried to alter the very foundation of one of my favourite creatures, and trying to fuck with the "dream team" that matches that creature and my all-time favourite creature, the Yautja. To me, Aliens vs. Predator is a match made in heaven. Or hell, perhaps. Either way, I can not think of a more perfect pairing. The universe's greatest hunters (with their rigid code of honour), and what is perhaps nature's most perfect killing machine (who will stop at nothing to ensure the safety of the hive and the continuation of its species).

[Faisul]

Hehe hey, I wasn't thinking you were calling my tastes in movies bad, Vydrach. I'm not out to heckle you or anything!

 

Anyway, your points are fair and it is, after all, your opinion to have, and now I understand your position a lot better. I know how it is to have a favorite monster, and then having Hollywood come fuck it up with a brain dead prequel or some other director come over and decide that what made the monster cool is suddenly not the case any more. When that happens and the movie is still relatively good in some way, I usually just dismiss everything that has to do with the monster in question and instead focus on what the movie does right. Maybe if you viewed Prometheus as an adaptation, or even better, a movie completely unrelated to the Alien franchise, as you say it should've been? It's already such a different beast of a movie that it might as well just be taking place in the universe tangentially. Maybe you could enjoy it better that way!

[Zzz]

Zzz

[Redeemer]

Oh yeah, there's plenty to suggest that the Engineers know very well about the Xenomorphs. That mural is very interesting to me. Look at it one way, it seems to be something out of respect, like they're aware of its power. Look at it another, and you can perhaps see folds of skin around it - it kind of looks like it's bursting out from something. Could be something out of respect for those who have lost their lives through being a Xenomorph host.

[Vy'drach]

That looks more like the Deacon than a kainde amedha, and as I said, it turns out that even though the writer was trying to make it that the kainde amedha were directly descended from the Deacon, that isn't possible given the Derelict Ship found on Acheron LV-426 was on that planet for over ten-million years before the events of Prometheus. Thus, the creatures in Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection can not possibly be descended from the Deacon.

 

Don't really have a beef with the movie itself now, just the creators trying to fix what ain't broke and shoehorn Alien into the mix.

[Redeemer]

That looks more like the Deacon than a kainde amedha, and as I said, it turns out that even though the writer was trying to make it that the kainde amedha were directly descended from the Deacon, that isn't possible given the Derelict Ship found on Acheron LV-426 was on that planet for over ten-million years before the events of Prometheus. Thus, the creatures in Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection can not possibly be descended from the Deacon.

 

Don't really have a beef with the movie itself now, just the creators trying to fix what ain't broke and shoehorn Alien into the mix.

 

I'm a little confused - how does this mean that there were no Xenomorphs before this? The Deacon and Alien movie Xenomorphs don't need to be related, they're still from the same DNA.

The mural found in the black goo room is clearly a creature made from this DNA.

[Vy'drach]

I didn't say they're not before this. Quite the opposite, the ship carrying the eggs had been there for over 10 million years before Prometheus. That ship and those eggs were ancient before the great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents of the Prometheus crew were ever conceived. Kainde amedha might be created by black goo, and maybe not. Either way, this makes the creatures in Prometheus more akin to being their great, great, great, great, great (insert a plethora more greats), great niece/nephew, as opposed to them being the Progenitors of them.

 

I'm just saying the mural looks more like the Deacon than a kainde amedha. The head shape, the lack of a tail, the whole flesh (kainde amedha have large sections of missing flesh, or at least the appearance of it with their exoskeleton), the type of jaws, lack of back spines, etc. etc.. I'm not saying kainde amedha didn't exist, as they undoubtedly did. Hell, perhaps they're not even made from the black goo but an even more ancient species than the Space Jockeys. Perhaps the black goo is developed from the kainde amedha. Perhaps the DNA altering ability of the goo is taken from their ability to alter their DNA based on the host (Of course this is just "what iffing" for the sake of discussion really). Who knows? Point is, the eggs and subsequent creatures discovered on Acheron LV-426 (This is the planet from Alien and Aliens, btw) had long since been laid and been sitting dormant for eons before the events of Prometheus. Damon Lindelof might of tried nudging the idea that the Deacon is the progenitor of the kainde amedha (He didn't want it expressly stated but he was more than leaning that way), but the timeline doesn't support this.

[Zzz]

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