determined to perish

I noticed a common thread between two very different movies I greatly enjoyed: Leaving Las Vegas (Nicholas Cage 1995) and Seven Pounds (Will Smith 2008). In both movies the main character is driven by a determination to perish. They have very different motives and follow very different paths, though I believe guilt is the overwhelming undertone for both.

Here is what I am pondering about the Engineers in Prometheus

Please note: if your answer to any of the below is "movie magic", fair enough, point made. But what I am really interested in is any cool explanations and speculations for how it might actually work as a story, sci fi or not.

Question 1 (has many parts). Did the Engineers pop along to earth 3.5 billion years ago to start all of life on earth.. or 85 million years ago to start just the primates.. or between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago to start homo sapiens?

How close was the the DNA match between humans and engineers?

How quickly does DNA in general change with evolution? I am wondering this because if the story is asking us to believe we are an exact DNA match with the Engineers, then there is a big puzzle regarding how we turned from crumbling Engineer who drank the black juice to a new race a) within a short enough time that our DNA stayed the same and b) how we managed to "inject" ourselves into the fossil records?

I can imagine that they popped along to earth at any of the times listed above and that their tech is somehow so super smart that it could have even have triggered homo sapiens at any time in the chain - maybe it was like some sleeping function in the DNA that waited for the right conditions before working its magic?

Question 2. Why did they trigger the cave paintings to be made? (And was it indeed an invitation or something else?)

Question 3. Of course, the third question is the same question asked in the movie: why did they change their minds and decide to destroy us with alien black goo?

My pet theory for 2 and 3 is that they were truly interested in creating life and leaving a sign to see if we could grow up enough to follow it. But then over the proceeding thousands of years, their society changed and became more aggressive, more warlike. Perhaps they suffered a terrible war? Perhaps they even had a war with another species they created? Perhaps they have been seeding the galaxy for millennia before they popped along to earth and one of their earlier creations came to fruition, found the Enigneers and started a huge war that was so bad that the Engineers got scared and decided they should destroy their other creations before the whole thing could happen again?

What do you think?

I posed this question on IMDB too. :)

This Weekend in Entertainment

The Deaths of Ian Stone was a promising but ultimately un-engaging horror movie. The initial premise is that Ian Stone keeps getting killed by some black spectral entity, and each time he wakes in another life, and I found this fascinating. It was what made me pick up the movie in the first place. However, the story becomes confusing as it tries to fill out a back-story for a race of spectral vampires that feed on fear - and it just didn't seem consistent. I wasn't engaged by the movie beyond the initial premise.


10,000 BC, a prehistoric normal man becomes a hero story that again looked promising - especially when I saw a preview of the special effects. But the story fell flat. I just didn't find myself caring about the characters. I stopped the DVD half way and looked this up on IMDB because I had a few questions in my mind... and found that pretty much every single detail of the movie was historically inaccurate. The metals, boats, mammoths, sabre tooth tigers, pyramids, and even the lands they crossed to get where they wanted to go.. all of these details were historically impossible for 10,000 B.C! I found it hard to suspend disbelief for this. Just like Gladiator or 300, some people might go away with this movie in the back their minds, informing just a little bit of their opinions on these times past. It is a little bug-bear of mine. :)

Street Kings with Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker. This was biggest disappointment for me this weekend. I usually enjoy Forest Whitaker's acting, and always look forward to Keanu, but the story sucked and the script didn't give them a chance to do their jobs properly. It is a bad cop makes good story, but there were too many holes in the plot for me. From the start, I just wasn't buying Keanu as a veteran bad guy cop when contrasted against the other weasels in his team. The motivations didn't make sense. Reeves was a bit of a "one note" actor in this, playing the depressed guy all the way through. Forest Whitaker was too nice to be the evil guy he was meant to be. And Hugh Laurie (House) was the most disappointing. Little more than an extended bit part - they used his character to wrap up the ending in a way that really made no sense. How the writers seriously thought that the whole plot of the movie could be construed to be House's plan is beyond me. Worse, his character was just a shade of House - as though they said to him "do like you do in House, only boring it up a little".


I also saw One Man with Steve Berkoff on Saturday night with Dad at the National Theatre. I loved his one man play in two acts. The first was Edgar Allen Poe's "Tell Tale Heart" and the second act a story of his own called "Dog" about a British soccer hooligan with a pit bull. He was brilliant, using mime to incredible effect to show both drama and comedy. I greatly admire the courage it takes to do a single person play - to maintain a dramatic monologue that succesfully draws the audience in and makes them forget the actor and focus on the characters - and this is just what Steve Berkoff did!