Home Featured Content

Fictional Science: 100 Glaring Logical Issues With Prometheus

With Ridley Scott's Prometheus arriving on Blu-Ray, we look at 100 glaring logical issues that consume the film in a swirling sea of plot holes.

Part 6 – Sex, Death, and Nasty Alien Pregnancy (1:01:30 – 1:20:00)

Recommended Videos

49. Why is the professional geologist smoking pot inside his helmet? How did he even rig that up? Moreover, why isn’t his drug of choice cocaine, given his expressed love of rocks?

50. Why does the Biologist consider the white, mysterious snake creature ‘beautiful’ when he fled frightened from the dead body just a few hours earlier?

51. Why does the Biologist – again, a man who studies living organisms professionally – not consider that putting his fingers in the creature’s mouth might be a bad idea?

52. Back on the ship, why does Holloway tell no one about the parasite he sees in his eye? He’s on a ship full of scientists searching for extraterrestrial life. You’d think they would want to know, and I imagine Holloway would want to tell them out of fear for his own life.

53. How do the Captain and crew not know the Geologist and Biologist are dead? With all the info being transmitted back to the ship, including camera feeds and a 3D map that locates each crewmember, wouldn’t they know immediately if vital signs went silent? Or transmitters just disappeared?

54. Why do the crewmembers examine the Geologist’s dead body without helmets on, making them susceptible to attack by the snake creature? That’s exactly what happens. No one is killed by it, but things could easily have ended badly, and wearing their damn helmets would have nullified the risk.

55. If the Engineers control their ships through music, why is music not the universal basis for their communications? It would not be outside the realm of possibility for music to serve as its own language, and in that case, David could actually plausibly understand their communication system and work with it, because music is a scientific and mathematic base that exists throughout the universe. He could study and learn enough about musical theory to reasonably confer with the aliens. It would be a much clearer narrative solution than just having David look at strange symbols and magically, impossibly know what they all mean.

56. The Captain suggests putting the infected Holloway in the medical pod. Why don’t they do that instead of burning him alive?

57. Are there no more humane ways to kill an infected crewmember than live embalming? Yes, the flamethrower is effective, but couldn’t you just as easily shoot him once in the head, humanely putting him out of his misery, and then burn the remains?

58. Why is Holloway suddenly ready to die? He offers himself up to be violently burned to death, but there is no clear reason for why he has spontaneously become the sacrificial type.

59. Why does Shaw get over Holloway’s death so fast? There’s a cut to white as she cries on the ground, and then she wakes up, a little shocked, but hardly broken up about it. She doesn’t even seem to acknowledge how much she lost until near the end of the movie.

60. Why does David say Shaw is ‘three months pregnant’ with the alien fetus? Three months ago, she would have been in cryostasis. I understand that David is just saying this as an analogy to demonstrate the size of the fetus, but as an android, wouldn’t he give a more logical and accurate estimation of size, like ‘the baby is X centimeters large?” Saying three months just confuses Shaw and the audience for no good reason.

61. Is there no medical staff aboard the Prometheus? David seems to imply this when he tells Liz there are no staff on board equipped to remove the fetus. We never actually see a Doctor in the film, so there must not be any on board. And that’s just ridiculous. How could you spend a trillion dollars on a mission to an alien world and NOT bring medical personnel along?

62. “To lose Dr. Holloway, after your father died after such similar circumstances.” Um…what? David says this to Shaw, but how on earth could those words be true? Holloway died under the most bizarre, unique circumstances imaginable, infected with alien goo by an evil android and burned to death by a crazy woman with a flamethrower. How could anything ‘similar’ to that have happened to Shaw’s father? David says mentions Ebola, which is, for the record, nothing like being infected by aliens and burned to death.

Continue reading on the next page…