Prometheus - with spoilers. Seriously - I am completely spoiling it here.

I caught the late showing of Prometheus last night - mrs gearboy begged off since she was not interested in potentially having nightmares of having aliens inside her. I enjoyed the visuals, but had a number of concerns about the plot points. 

First, the sacrificial alien is clearly somewhat humanoid. Is he supposed to have been the progenitor of ALL life on earth? Then what about the millions of years with non-humanoid forms being the dominant species? Is he supposed to have started humankind? Pretty dicey attempt, and the planet overall seemed rather barren.

Second, if he is on the planet millennia before the rest of us, how does his supposed image get put into all the ancient carvings? And how did the scientists make the leap that they were supposedly the "engineers" of all life? Wouldn't a more reasonable claim have been that they were lost travelers pointing to their home? 

 I'll skip over all the time problems of going in 3 years from finding another representation in a cave to having a fully funded spaceship, nearly 35 billion light years away. Instead, the crew seems raqther small - 17 people. And yet they barely know each other? Really? Didn't they do any kind of training together, or get a briefing on the mission that would take them several years to complete?

After they find all the aliens are already dead, the husband appears to become a complete a-hole. How did such an unpleasant guy end up with the heroine of the movie in the first place? She doesn't appear to be a complete shirking violet who would have been easily bullied by him in the first place.

The surgical unit tells Elizabeth that it is programmed for males. Yet it was in Charlize Theron's escape pod. Since presumably Peter Weyland's presence was a secret to her, wouldn't she have had the unit programmed for a woman?

I'll gloss over the surgery being done without any kind of muscle relaxants (which are needed to actually get into the abdominal cavity during surgery), or the ultra rapid recovery of butt-kicking action (it is already a bit long as a movie). But once the alien was removed from her body, how did it grow to such a large size with no evident source of food in the locked room? 

I thought the overall structure of the movie clearly echoed what I remember about the original Alien - there is a cold hearted company tool; an ultimately untrustworthy android who in the end provides some useful information to the survivor; and a final escape attempt with a smaller shuttle (which gets destroyed in Prometheus, but still, makes an appearance.)

My other thought is in answer to the big question of the movie - why destroy what you created. My theory is that the original alien (and what I presume to be the other aliens represented in different times in carvings) were not pioneers who set out to create a new life on Earth. Rather, Earth is the penal colony for the alien race. The first death was not a "noble sacrifice", it was an act of desperation. But his DNA survived in some form to evolve into us. The planned return of the aliens to wipe us out was because we were seen as dangerous or parasites on the planet. They were simply planning to come back and "weed the garden" if you will. Thus, rather than a metaphor for the biblical origins, life on earth is closer to the view of scientology.

Anyone else provoked to think about this movie?