Did the black goo affect life forms in different ways in Prometheus?

Question

In Prometheus, the black goo appears to affect life forms in five different ways.

1. At the very beginning of the movie, the Space Jockey drinks the black-goo, and it kills him and makes the body decompose very quickly.So it creates human life on earth.

2. While watching the worm attack, the black-goo mutates into a "cobra-hugger" and it attacked on Milburn's throat.

3. When Fifield falls into the goo, he later returns as a mutated monster version of himself.

4. When David spikes Holloway’s drink with a tiny amount of black goo, Holloway appears to follow the same pattern of cell breakdown as the sacrificial Engineer, only at a slower rate.

5. Also, Shaw impregnate because of black-goo infected Holloway.

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Did the black goo affect the different people in different ways? If so, why?

Answer 1

The black goo does not affect its victims in different ways. It consistently causes organisms to mutate into bizarre killing-machine versions of themselves:

1. At the very beginning of the movie, the Space Jockey drinks the black-goo, and it kills him and makes the body decompose very quickly.So it creates human life on earth." -Actually "Space Jockey" consumes something other than the black goo -- what he consumes is a brightly colored, congealed substance (which does have different effects than the black goo).

2. While watching the worm attack, the black-goo mutates into a "cobra-hugger" and it attacked on Milburn's throat." -the "cobra-hugger" is the result of the worms coming in contact with the black goo.

3. When Fifield falls into the goo, he later returns as a mutated monster version of himself." -like the worms turned into "cobra-huggers," humans turn into mutated monster humans.

4. When David spikes Holloway’s drink with a tiny amount of black goo, Holloway appears to follow the same pattern of cell breakdown as the sacrificial Engineer, only at a slower rate." -Actually Holloway is not suffering the same fate as the sacrificial engineer -- instead, Holloway begins to mutate slowly into the same thing as Fifield, though Holloway gets himself killed before he mutates all the way.

5. Shaw impregnate because of black-goo infected Holloway." -Shaw has sex with Holloway when Holloway has begun to mutate, so what she is pregnant with is some kind of mutant offspring.

Answer 2

Don't assume that there is only one type of black goo. The Engineers have mastered biological technologies far beyond ours, and may use one type of goo for seeding foreign planets (as in the opening sequence) and another type for weapons development. These might look similar to us in the same way that a television remote control looks similar to a telephone to a two-year-old. That doesn't make them do the same thing.

(Also, the opening sequence preceded the main action by millions of years. The technology presumably changed over time).

Answer 3

Given the following assumption; the Black Goo is Death, then the observations made about the Black Goo's effects correlate nicely. As a weapon the black goo will mutate the victims into death-dealing daemons which would quickly die out as its environment was rapidly killed. It was biologically controlled Death with no ability to procreate. (*Base on all the Engineers are dead after exposure.

One major design flaw: if the victim achieves procreation while carrying Death, then Death just gained the ability to promulgate itself, albiet only in the host-dependent parasitic form. This is based on http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Xenomorph, which maps the life-cycle as egg, face-hugger, chest-burster, and [Death-dealing] adult.

Truisms of note: The xenomporphs in Aliens were meant to be much older than the one that was born of Kane in Alien; they do not seem to eat and only seek sustenance on the lowest level; perhaps absorbing energy from environmental sources as they are simply high-efficiency Death-machines. They cannot promulgate their species without a host, limiting their spread that of its hosts' environment. (*Based on http://www.prometheusforum.net/discussion/624/what-do-xenomorphs-eat/p1 http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Engineer