It's pretty clearly a biological weapon that can turn any biological creature (i.e. not-David) into a potential weapon. But at it's most refined form it can be used as the building blocks to the xenomorph, the "perfect organism" to quote Ash or perhaps any of the engineers. Shaw and Hollway incidentally created the conditions in her womb to turn it into a xenomorph, but a messier less elegantly designed one as it was done by accident.
I just can't see how the same "stuff" can (a) represent the "seed" of a lifeform, and (b) act as a transformative element on a living being's DNA.
We never see Holloway's finished genetic mutation before he dies. I imagine Fifield is supposed to be something similar, but that was where the movie had really awkward and uneven writing/plotting. I think they should have just left Fifield dead and the other scientists find his head melted away by acid. Then Janek still lets Holloway on board to be treated against Vickers's wishes and Holloway transforms fully into whatever the black goo would make of him and goes on a killing spree. It would have paced the movie better and feel less jarring as Holloway's death was so sudden as was Fifield's return. In fact, I really wonder why they didn't just combine those elements as they blend so easily.
Yes, the two scenes were so similar that I have managed to confuse them.
See, I didn't think the black stuff was anything at all. It seemed more like a broth or something which contained the little things (one of which David gave to Holloway). I thought those were the actual weapons, not the ooze.
Now we get to it: did David just give Holloway a "blob" or ooze, or did he discover and select a small organism of microbe from it? If David deliberately gave Holloway a worm/serpent/squid in microbe form, then a lot of my confusion is cleared up: the "ooze" merely contains living things in microbe form. They grow to become "worms" which grow into "serpents", these impregnate victims like a facehugger, which makes a squid, which makes the Xenomorph. The extra layer of metamorphosis is still troubling, but it begins to make sense.
You might be right. It seemed a bit different from the rest of the ooze. Perhaps the black ooze itself is just genetic life-creating conditions, hence how when the SJ drinks it at the beginning of the movie it creates life on Earth. They add those little suckers to weaponize it on LV-223, hence the rest of the movie.
Yes, like the white in an egg. This all rests on David giving Holloway an actual organism to drink rather than just ooze, of course.
I think you're mixing up Holloway, and Fifield. It's not Holloway that becomes aggresive, and a super strong rage zombie, that's Fifield. Holloway just lets himself be burnt to death by Vickers.
I was. Momentary loss of concentration.
What exactly happens to Fifield? You would expect the "serpent" to impregnate him, so how come he just becomes Frankenstein's monster?
The camera also stays on the worms in the black ooze to me is to show that when we see the alien snakes later that they were those worms, just mutated now. Also we don't really know if they impregnated the guy or not. We never see any alien monsters come from his dead body, and we see the alien snake shoot out of his mouth when the crew finds his body.
Argh! This gets more confusing. So, is the ****ing ooze a weaponising fluid, or is it just a nutritional culture for the worm/microbes to live in? If the serpents didn't impregnate Fifield, what exactly happened to him? Did they just fail to find a womb in him? Maybe these early creatures need a womb to develop in, while the later "facehuggers" can make do with a stomach or intestine?
Maybe David deliberately slipped Holloway a microbe in the weaponizing fluid, realizing what the effect of each was? That would allow both for the fluid to contain the "seed" of the squid,
and have the weaponising effect on Fifield.
I'm presuming the "worms" must be in the ooze. It seems too much to believe that they were in the chamber by coincidence
Wouldn't the proto xenomorph now have Engineer dna, hence it's change from it's previous squid forms? I think even the xenomorphs we know have Engineer dna in them as their bodies resemble the Engineers suit in the later part of the movie.
Good spot.
I think their's also something that happens between this movie, and the original Alien that changes the xeno's physiology majorly. Maybe other Engineers capture the proto xeno, and change it for the worse into what we know from Alien?
I think something like that is a given. It's just that the transition from "squid" thing to "crustacean" thing is a much bigger leap than small "crustacean" (facehugger) thing to big "crustacean" thing. And the leap from laboratory-based genesis to a giant Queen laying eggs is a really huge one.
Need to see this movie again!
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