Last Saturday, we looked at the scene where the crew of the Prometheus destroyed the alien ship that may or may not have been on its way to destroy humanity. Elizabeth Shaw ends up being the only human to survive the mission to the mysterious moon.

She walks to Meredith’s ship, which was damaged during its ejection from the Prometheus. She enters the ship, and it’s obvious she can’t fly the thing. I mean, it’s not as if a smaller ship that’s designed to eject from a larger one would be able to land safely or anything. That would end the movie.

Dr. Shaw meets her child

Dr. Shaw soon encounters another problem. She hears a bang and remembers that she’s just had an alien baby (c-sections are so easy to forget while running around on an alien planet). She goes to investigate the noise and sees the room where she’d locked the alien up in a med-pod.

Dr. Shaw’s alien baby has grown considerably and broken free of its impromptu cage. All she sees is a giant tentacle slamming into the door’s window. She begins to back away, but then she hears a familiar voice. David the robot’s head has survived. He tells her that the giant that was driving the alien ship is now on his way to kill her.

How did the giant know she was alive? Don’t know! How did David know what the alien planned to do? Don’t know! How did the giant alien know how to find Dr. Shaw? Don’t know! But there he is, banging on the ship’s door a second later.

He makes a beeline for Dr. Shaw, but she opens the door behind which her baby, a tentacled monster, is waiting. The monster grabs the alien. They wrestle for a while, then the monster shoves something down the alien’s throat, and both of them die.

Dr. Shaw meets David’s head again

Dr. Shaw doesn’t see the fight’s end; she has run out of the ship. She cries for a time, but then David speaks to her, explaining that he can fly the aliens’ spacecraft. Wonder of wonders—there’s an identical ship just waiting for them.

How did David find this second ship? Don’t know! The Prometheus crew didn’t detect it or anything, so there’s no reason to think that he’d found the ship earlier. I’d like to think he found this vessel before he became a useless, rolling head, but the movie doesn’t tell us that. Dr. Shaw makes a truce with David and agrees to help him fly the ship, since he’s just a head now and there’s no way she could figure out how to fix him.

This part of the movie really annoyed me as well. Let’s not forget that it was David who killed Dr. Charlie Holloway, Dr. Shaw’s lover. Granted, there is no real opportunity within the story for David to confess this fact. But I think Dr. Shaw should’ve found out and confronted the malicious robot. It would’ve been nice if she’d kicked his head around like a soccer ball for a while.

Her faith struggles

Dr. Shaw tells David that she has no intention of returning to Earth. She wants to meet her makers and ask why they decided to destroy humanity. Now, this is ridiculous on multiple levels. For one thing, she has no reason to think these beings wouldn’t kill her before she had the chance to find out anything. For another, if she really was determined to meet them, she could’ve returned to Earth and resupplied. I’m sure another elderly billionaire somewhere on the planet would have been willing to fund her mission.

But there’s a deeper problem: Throughout the film, questions of faith have been a consistent issue. Dr. Shaw has been challenged about her belief in God despite the fact that she’s suffered immense pain and that these giant aliens have been shown to have created humanity.

While it’s good that she manages to maintain her faith throughout her various trials, a more satisfying ending to this movie would’ve shown her realizing that her faith was enough and returning home.

There’s no reason for her to continue to try to find these aliens. They have no answers for her. Discovering the origins of humanity changed nothing for her, so why does she need to know the reason these aliens wanted to destroy the human race? Being content with the answers she’s found would’ve been more consistent with her character arc. Faith provides all the answers she really needs.

If her story’s theme had been about her desire for knowledge and discovery, this ending might’ve made more sense. But her journey was about continuing to believe despite harsh circumstances. Plus, she’d already decided that chasing these answers wasn’t worth it when she tried to convince Weyland not to wake up the alien.

A viewer can point to no particular incident that would lead to the conclusion that she had changed her mind. She knew Weyland’s pursuit would bring more trouble, and it did. Her decision earlier in the film was affirmed, not refuted. So, this decision to find the race of giants goes against her character.

In the end, Dr. Shaw finds David’s second ship and leaves the moon to search for the aliens. However, just before the movie ends, we see an alien from the previous Alien films burst from the corpse of the dead giant.

Some final thoughts

This is a stupid movie. The problem is that stuff just happens, and characters do things that make no sense. There’s no reason for one of the crew members to try and touch a strange-looking snake creature when he was already so terrified of a giant alien’s corpse that he left his fellow crew members. There was no reason for David to kill Dr. Holloway. There’s no reason for Dr. Shaw to go searching for the giant aliens. And why didn’t Dr. Shaw and Meredith turn to get out of the way of the rolling ship when that would’ve been the fastest route to safety? The plot holes in this film are legion, so, if that sort of thing bothers you, I’d advise that you skip it.

Here are the first three parts of my review of Prometheus (2012):

Sci-fi film explores idea that Earth’s life was seeded from space. Prometheus (2012) offers an intriguing premise: ancient civilizations were told in mysterious ways of a habitable moon in a distant galaxy (Part 1 of 4). The corporation funding the mission to investigate the moon may have a different agenda from what the crew supposes.

Prometheus (2012): Don’t touch the aliens’ stuff! Upon entering what is described as the Engineers’ “temple,” the crew unleashes strange and deadly perils… After contact with deadly alien chemicals, Dr. Shaw finds herself pregnant with an alien life form and, worse, Fifield returns as a zombie.

and

Prometheus (2012): Oops. Our alien creators now want to kill us. What should have been an awful revelation degenerates into what seems like the dumbest scene ever filmed. It’s not even clear how the crew knows that the alien creator wants to destroy humanity, let alone why.