A commonly cited “plot-hole” amongst Prometheus detractors is David 8′s “36 hours” moment…
When the crew reach the moon LV-223 and awake from their extended cryo-sleep, David responds to Meredith Vickers that they have been asleep for “2 years, 4 months, 18 days, 36 hours, 15 minutes.” A common complaint has been that if Michael Fassbender’s David is using established temporal units to measure time, then he should have said ”2 years, 4 months, 19 days, 12 hours and 15 minutes?” Why 36 hours?
One of our keen Prometheus fans tweeted screenwriter Jon Spaihts to ask him and he just notified me about the response he received from Mr Spaihts. In it the screenwriter confirmed that this supposed “plot-hole” was deliberate stating “Robots have been showing off with this trick as long as there have been robots…” It’s likely that the line was included to show that David had some elements of ‘twitchy programming’, rather like future android model Ash in Alien.
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12 Comments
This is big news indeed.
Haters use this to justify the plot hole and it’s clearly actually a well though out bit of the script.
And Benji you’ve established yourself as a Prometheus go-to guy. Your articles are fantastic and probably the best on the web for this genre. It’s nice to read on my lunch break that is film related but that also gets my brain thinking and gears turning.
The myth article was a beauty and I am looking forward to part 3 as are many.
@ Spaihts,
Thanks for commenting. I think a lot of people will be happy to hear that this was deliberate. When you think about it, how could it not be? It would be insane that a script ‘error’ of that magnitude would not only make it through proof-reading, but would then not be picked up by Theron, Fassbender & Ridley when shooting the scene…
You can just imagine Bishop’s updated line in Aliens… “The A2s always were a bit twitchy… and damn, don’t get me started on those D8s!”
Also a big shout-out to @PeterVallance1 who posed the question to Mr Spaihts on Twitter and then notified us here at What Culture as soon as he had a response. @PeterVallance1 has made some great comments regarding potential plot-holes under the name on ‘Kane’ on my “Answers to the Key Prometheus Questions” article…
http://whatculture.com/film/prometheus-6-answers-to-the-key-questions.php
Also I should add that during another interview Damon Lindelof says “nothing is an accident in Prometheus…”
Just cause someone says it was deliberate after the fact does not make it so.
“Just cause someone says it was deliberate after the fact does not make it so.” Then the onus would be on you to establish beyond reasonable doubt that Spaights and Lindelof are in fact denying a scripting error. All we have is their word. If it was an error we couldn’t establish it unless they admit the error but if they are merely keeping hum and make an ad hoc explanation that is consistent with David’s behavior and a nod to Bishop’s dialogue in Aliens then you can see why giving the benefit of the doubt cannot be ruled out. A lot of the film’s plot relies on ambiguity so most of it can only be explained after the fact. Since David8 was further fleshed out and revised under Lindelof over several drafts just makes the ‘error’ claim highly unlikely given how carefully nuanced David’s idiosyncrasies are throughout the film. I mean it’s right there in the dialogue! Who unwittingly writes ’36 hours’ unless there was a point? Even IBM’s Watson supercomputer makes occasional trivial errors despite its overall superiority to human counterparts and therein lies the point. David8 is only as good as he is ‘programmed’ to be. I’ll be looking forward to Lindelof’s explanation since I strongly suspect this was his doing. As Benjii so adequately put it, “It would be insane that a script ‘error’ of that magnitude would not only make it through proof-reading, but would then not be picked up by Theron, Fassbender & Ridley when shooting the scene…” Not to mention rehearsing the scene before takes. The blu-ray commentary can’t come soon enough.
Also David exhibited behaviour similar to the recalled David 7 models that ‘malfunctioned’. To quote a Weyland Industries press release made before the film’s release, http://www.weylandindustries.com/press/, “It appears that a handful of Weyland Cybernetics Repair Stations, mostly on Earth and Luna, have received some reports, less than a few dozen reports, that certain David 7 units…have malfunctioned while in service,” explains Kathryn Stuart-Rose, a Weyland Cybernetics spokesperson…David 7 owners are advised to carefully observe non-recall models and note any strange or unusual behaviour. If any David 7 unit appears to become even mildly uncooperative, aggressive or unresponsive, they should deliver him to a certified Weyland Cybernetics repair station immediately.” It’s obvious this was included in the marketing to portend what occurs in the film. David in the film we assume is David 8 given the viral but his anomalous behaviour is still consistent with the recalled David 7 models along with other ‘malfunctions’. And to quote Fassbender in a past interview describing David, “He’s less developed than Ian Holm [laughs]. That’s the way I’m going to describe him from now on.”
But you know what I immediately thought the first time I heard it in the film? I actually interpreted the ’36 hours 15 minutes’ as the last item in David’s account of time elapsed as ‘Mission Time’, which is counted in hours and minutes.
It’s just beautifully simple. Once you get a robot going with figures it will go on and on especially if Vickers only says “how long” after all. So perhaps David was just being inordinately thorough when processing the rather unspecific request from Vickers first with 2 years, 4 months, 18 days all the way to elapsed mission time in hours and seconds. perhaps David was just being inordinately thorough when processing Vickers rather unspecific request first with 2 years, 4 months, 18 days all the way to elapsed mission time in hours and seconds. I’d love to take David out to lunch and get him to order me a cheeseburger but recognizes cheese in multiple burgers and brings me back a big mac. “I said a cheeseburger!” “Please try to be more specific next time sir, according to my scans there are several burgers which feature cheese”. Ah, robots and their damn tricks!
And to be clear, the elapsed mission time of 36 hours, 15 minutes began with David doing a battery of checks and safety procedures in exhaustive detail before reviving the crew. (The extended edition may show more of this prep.) Perhaps even including oxygenating the entire crew quarters, since David could exist in, say, a nitrogen atmosphere.
This isn’t accurate — Jon didn’t understand the question at first. He meant it’s a “trick” in that androids are able to calculate off the top of their “heads” in that fashion. Jon then tweets “In candor, I didn’t write that line. I presume it’s an error on the page or on the day. Ask Damon.”
@ Steve,
Thanks for commenting. You’re right in that a lot more happened… I tweeted Jon & Damon back and you can see the full response here:
http://whatculture.com/film/prometheus-damon-lindelof-jon-spaihts-confirm-36-hours-was-not-scripted.php
I find it amazing that audiences are so quick to think an error was made. If you are rehearsing lines, and acting them out, do you really think no one thought about 36 hours for a single moment? It’s there in the script,. you have to learn the lines and read them out. You’ve got cameramen, editors, a director, actors and the scriptwriter. Everything is intentional, down to the greatest detail. But here’s a question. On about the 6th viewing of Prometheus I noticed something which could be a goof. Shaw is lying on the ground outside the lifeboat with her hand exposed, showing the ring. A few minutes later she has a glove on. Goof or did she merely pull on the glove of one of the slain crew in the cockpit area.
Pity for you, both script writers denied writing that line so it seems as if it was a goof, a pretty bad one at that