>>...why did David set ole boy up as the guinea pig again?
>...on
>>first watch, i figured he KNEW dude would impregnate the
>>doctor and wanted to see what would happen, but as the movie
>>went on i wasn't sure if David hated humanity itself, or
>just
>>most if not all of the humans on that ship.....i still say
>he
>>manipulates events that lead to what happens in Alien....his
>>reactions to all the humans was GREAT, and i loved his line
>>about destroying something in order to rebuild something
>else
>
>I'm not convinced dude was following orders from Weyland here.
>He clearly has beef with Weyland and seems to know full-on
>that Weyland will be killed when they meet the Engineer. Also,
>the only person at the end who seems to know why LMG was
>killed is David himself. So I'd be inclined to believe he has
>developed an anti-humanity agenda. Except it goes against the
>beginning, where he clearly wants to be human. And except it
>goes against the end, where he clearly wants to help the
>human.
>
>So folks who thought the movie made sense could call him
>"mischievous" or perhaps "curious" while folks who acknowledge
>the movie doesn't really make sense could call him
>"haphazardly written while ingeniously acted."

I'm a little confused by you and a few other people talking about what David "wants" and what his motivations may be. Why do you guys think he can like, dislike, envy, resent, or feel any way about humans at all, one way the other? He *seems* like he has those feelings, but I think those are just projections - I don't think he feels one way or the other about them. I don't think he *feels* anything.

I think he's programmed to develop as much of an understanding about the alien/engineer species as possible, regardless any possible human casualties. (Kind of like in Alien when Ripley saw that the android's mission was specifically to bring back the alien and that the crew was expendable.) I don't think he was pro- or anti-human; I think if keeping humans alive would help him learn about aliens, he would try to keep them alive, but when killing them was necessary to gather data, so be it.

He poisoned Holloway to learn about aliens; he tried to have Shaw birth an alien to learn about aliens; he went looking in the cave to learn about aliens; he tried to save Shaw at the end because...it would presumably lead him to more information about aliens.

I think it might be a mistake to read into his character that he's making any subjective value judgements about any characters in particular or the human race in general. All of his actions seem to be driven by a desire to obtain information about this alien species. Sometimes that means helping people, sometimes it means hurting them, and sometimes it means doing both to the same person.

Then again, that's just kind of loose theory. I honestly didn't spend tons of time fleshing this out in my mind, but it sort of makes sense to me. I rarely see movies in theaters twice, but I might have to with this one.