I'm not sure how much science fiction some people posting here read. There are any number of science fiction movies that have weird plot devices but I don't think the black goo is a plot device, it's something quite different, I think it's the first decent cinematic representation of a (relatively well-known) idea - nanotechnology see
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology. I think the black goo is weapons grade nanotech. I think the black goo, an extension of the will of the engineers, *is the antagonist*.
I'm pretty geeked out about it, too, because it's considered a "big gun" in science fiction and isn't always very well written. If that's what we're to take black goo to be, I think they pulled it off nicely. In sci-fi literature, it's typically portrayed as very nasty stuff - a really dirty weapon.
Nanotech, for those who don't know the term, is theoretical and is basically lots and lots of tiny machines no bigger than a germ. In science fiction literature it's typically represented as a fluid, in fact, it's been common in "hard sci-fi" circles to call it "grey goop" or somesuch.
Features of nanotech, depending on how the author is characterising the concept, often also include the ability to self replicate like bacteria, the ability to interface with organic forms at the cellular level, the ability to manufacture things that *aren't* more copies of itself *as well* (molecular factories), and in many representations, it also doubles as a supercomputer and is *conscious*, it's an artificial intelligence. In Prometheus, we would be talking about an artificial intelligence that's designed for warfare, for being pointed at the enemy and
deciding for itself how to attack.
I think this fits the black goo beautifully. The black goo even vaguely resembles ferromagnetic fluid (see
here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4) in certain shots.
(Ferromagnetic fluid is a suspension of magnetic particles in a special oil that binds them together loosely, but they still respond to magnetism, so, if you allow the idea of microscopic machines that also are able to switch on and off an artificial magnetism within themselves, it's not difficult to imagine that they could align themselves to produce the magnetic fields necessary to move a blobby collection of them about in search of things.)
If I'm right, then I think essentially we're also to take it that everything we've seen so far in the alien franchise is really just *biological scaffolding* for the black goo. i.e. - the xenomorph isn't the alien.
It's the black goo that's the alien.
Nanotech, in science fiction literature, is an extemporiser. It makes things up as it goes along. And if the Promethean black goo is a weapon it's probable that it will have a series of templates to work from that it can adjust to suit it's environment. What's why the original "Alien" and the Cameron Aliens look different. That's why the dog alien in Alien 3 looks different from both. The goo is choosing whatever form that's most useful at the time. In the first movie there's not much life to take advantage of, so it feeds and kills a few "enemies" and then just hides.
I'd suspect that those cannisters of black goo aboard the Promethean ship are delivered like bombs and the goo is just dispersed all over the landscape, programmed to react to whatever environment it's in by exploiting whatever it can find to kill anything that looks like an enemy, which would probably be anything that looks intelligent. When it has nothing to do it just waits.
It's all about efficiency. The xenomorph in the original Alien movie was hiding in the escape pod Narcissus at the end, but we don't know if it's intention was to kill Ripley, it might have been more interested in hiding and waiting until the capsule it was in got back to her home "base", which it wouldn't know anything about, but might contain more "enemies" for it to kill. I'm assuming it would still be carrying it's "kill anything that looks like it can think" programming.) The black goo in *Aliens* has got lots of biological material to play with, many colonists, so it builds a hive with a queen to take advantage of all this abundant flesh.
There's never been any specific claim in any of the Alien movies that the creatures reproduce *genetically*. I've never liked the idea that the creatures take on characteristics of the host because DNA doesn't work like that, you can't just stick some new DNA in an organism and expect it to grow bits of new animal or take on coherent, new characteristics. That would be like removing filing cabinets of material at random from the office of an insurance company and replacing them with one or two new ones from a travel agent and expect the receptionist to suddenly know everything about being a travel agent - you would need an organising influence to take advantage of the information, a new boss or developer, and I think that's the role of the black goo in the movie. DNA doesn't think, there isn't enough state-space in DNA,
not enough memory to encode for a thinking machine, do you have to introduce a different process to get creative gene-splicing going.
We saw at the very beginning of Prometheus that the black goo was doing stuff to the lost strands of the engineer's DNA, so it's pretty obvious that it's a creative DNA rewriter. Given that the possibilities of nanotech aren't very well defined at the moment, it would seem like an elegant theory to suppose that the black goo not only takes advantage of whatever biological scaffolding is around to help it in it's immediate goals like moving around (hence Fifield's possession), but would also take advantage of the biological capacities of whatever it's host is. Once it gets inside Elizabeth Shaw it recognises that it has an opportunity to take advantage of. "this is a reproductive system," it thinks to itself once it finds itself inside her womb. "It will be warm and quiet and undisturbed for some time, and well fuelled with nutrients that I can use. Its carrier will have instincts to protect me and whatever I build here, providing it remains ignorant of my presence. I have time to spend, so I will use it to build something big and interesting like a really huge distribution mechanism for MORE of ME."
I don't think the appearance or behaviour of any of the xenomorph variants we've seen so far have anything to do with genetics. I think all of them have been and are being built by the black goo from the available biological material. What more elegant and terrifying way to wage war but use the enemy's
own bodies against them? I think there's a definite psychological component.
I think the black goo got out of control aboard that ship somehow. I don't see why it would have to be programmed not to attack the engineers as that would probably require an intellect capable of recognising them, which should be unnecessary when a simpler intellect and careful quarantine procudres when dealing with the dangerous substance would also work.
Except it didn't...
So there you go. That's what I think....
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