I find it particularly annoying that Lindelof and Ridley are now changing their versions of the Prometheus storyline based on what has actually been written in forums by the audience, post viewing it.
Suddenly its possibly NOT the Earth in the beginning , it could be any planet! WTF!!!! Strangely the Wikepedia plot summary has been updated VERY recently and the prologue explaination has now gone missing. I suspect that this is because somebody has suggested the idea elsewhere and they like the fit of it,given how flawed the beginning actually is.
If anything they both seem to be becoming deliberately more vague about explaining Prometheus, and this is exactly what happened in Lost . Nobody in production gave any set answers,so there were forums of debate with so many theories ,some good, some terrible, that it was almost impossible to get a coherent storyline, which is exactly what happened in the series. The writers tried to be far too clever or pretend to be ,and ,at the very end ,when viewing figures had collapsed because they had run out of the narritive tricks, they gave us two very disappointing endings. Which is exactly what the next two sequels seem to propose , a film leading directly to Alien, the other going way out there in a different direction, one where spaceships are driven and manned entirely by alien brassbands and not just a single flute player (and I did note the accordian on the Promatheus didn't get much of a squeeze off the Captain, well ,not as much as the one he presumeably gave Vickers to determine if she was a robot or not, and who could blame him.)
The stories that are best remembered are not ones written by audience participation and a concensus of internet opinions. We all view the world in very different ways and ,as evidenced by some of the interpretations of the plotpoints in Prometheus here, very different angles. Now this may work for a TV series where the next season is just a year away, but I should think it won't engage much enthusiasm in an audience ,some of who have already waited thirty odd years for answers and maybe now be a few more away from getting two very different versions.It seems an awfully long time away and interest is likely to tank very rapidly much beyond the first two weeks of release of Prometheus ( with no new weekly episode to add anything to the myth, although we will, surpise/not a surprise, maybe possibly get an extended version at DVD release. How predicatable was that!).
I have to admire how rapidly thats been done and got out there. Buy the DVD and MAYBE there will be some more answers in it. Call me a cynical. But then the speed at which the Prometheus got built, once the starmaps had been discovered, must have broken all records. I'd have guessed a starship like that would have taken YEARS to develop and construct given the trillion dollars spent on it. PS: Oh yeah I forgot to ask? What happened to the Magellan that Ridley mentioned ages back when he said there were two ships in the film.