What is Going On in ‘Prometheus’? A Universe of Questions, Answers and Theories

DAVID,

THE FILM’S ONLY ANDROID?

And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:27

The “male and female” part of that passage above interests me, but we’ll get to that in a second. First, by creating cybernetic individuals completely indistinguishable from humans, Weyland believes humans are now gods in that he is able to do what God did before him. By leading the statement in his TED 2023 Talk with, “In the year of our Lord 2023,” he further leads us to believe this is his thinking.

Problem is, God’s creation of humans in His own image is less a statement of the physical being and more of the spiritual. David may look like a human, but he is still just a robot, a point Weyland himself hammers home. Weyland acknowledges David as the closest thing to a son he’ll ever have — but, as a robot, a son he cannot truly be — all while ignoring Meredith (Charlize Theron), his actual “daughter.”

Just as many films before Prometheus, David is a warning. Humans must be careful what they wish for. If this is the evolution humanity has been working toward, what’s next other than an android uprising that proves humanity to be what Darwinism believes it to be… the furthest and potentially last line in the evolutionary history of apes?

This is an idea that has been explored more than once in science fiction and once Prometheus concludes, should Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) be able to get David fully functional and working again (and why couldn’t she with his help?), who’s to say how he’ll act? David’s master, creator and “father” is dead, who is he “living” for now? What is driving him? Is he free?

At one point in the film he says, “Who doesn’t want to see their parents dead?” Well, he got his “want,” now what?

It’s also important to look at his obsession with T.E. Lawrence and Lawrence of Arabia. In my review I noted David’s emulation of Lawrence and how it painted him as an “idealized, yet artificial construct of a human.” I still believe that to be the case, but I think there is more to it than that.

To David, his creator, Peter Weyland, is god. He gave him life and as we see in his TED Talk, Weyland finds inspiration in T.E. Lawrence. Knowing this, David explores the character, seeking a greater understanding of who he is, emulates him and uses his words in an attempt to gain a closer relationship with his creator and an understanding.

David doesn’t feel (an important deficiency), but he understands human emotion and can even mimic it and knows how to press buttons as we see with Holloway just before he infects him. It’s also at that point I noticed a slight twinge of hatred. A lot of what David does seems extremely self-serving and the fact we never know what he says to the Engineer at the end of the film is certainly not by accident.

Now for the question I hinted at above… Is David the only android in the film?

At one point in the film Idris Elba‘s Janek asks Meredith, “Are you a robot?” To that point all we’ve seen is the by-the-book, stone cold demeanor of a woman in charge. Human emotion seems to escape her and yet she awoke from cryosleep and is seen working out. However, like David needlessly putting on the helmet, maybe she is just doing this because humans find it more comfortable. After all, how long did it take the Nostromo crew to realize Ash was a robot?

There’s also the question of Peter Weyland’s age. Born in October 1990 (source), that would make him 103-years-old when they land on planet LV-223. We don’t have an age for Meredith, but going by Theron’s age she would be 36-years-old, which would mean Weyland was 67 when she was born. Not an entirely unlikely age to have a baby, but definitely getting up there.

When asked about the possibility, Theron didn’t give away answers. Like so many things in the film, it is just one more ambiguous question on top of another:

“We played around with a lot of stuff, I’ll just say that. We threw a lot of stuff out there very loosely. There was definitely something that happened once David and I kind of stood next to each other, where I started feeling like his posture was overtaking my posture. There’s the good age-old question like, ‘Is the chicken before the egg?’ Like, is it him or is it me or is it part of my DNA in him? We did talk about that a lot, that it was nice to have something ambiguous about the origins of both of us, maybe, like why do we look so much alike? Why am I walking so much like him? Is it that I am an android or is it that I gave him human qualities, that I gave him my DNA?”

Like Deckard in Blade Runner, all you’re left with is faith in what you believe. Personally I think she was an android, and had it been revealed in the film I think a lot of audience members would have said, “I knew it!” Scott didn’t give them the luxury. Instead she’s crushed by a falling spaceship and unless someone returns to LV-223 to see her wired remains.

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