// Beautiful

Consider the legacy of the man at the center of David's favorite film, as seen in Prometheus's sublime opening sequence. T.E. Lawrence was born in 1888, helped upset order in the Arab world in 1916, was immortalized on celluloid in 1962's Lawrence of Arabia, and then, years later in the world of Prometheus, inspired an android to not only imitate his blond coif but instigate the beginnings of the Alien universe in 2093. Lawrence is really the key to understanding David; in helping Weyland achieve his immortality by way of launching the destruction of humanity, David is immortalizing himself, and a part of me thinks that a part of him yearns to express this measure of often foolhardy human emotion. Or maybe he's just designed to be a close, but not close enough, imitation of the humans who built him?

T.E. Lawrence, indeed, provides many clues,

The dedication to his book Seven Pillars is a poem entitled "To S.A." which opens:

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

                    and wrote my will across the sky in stars

To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,

                    that your eyes might be shining for me

                              When we came.

//

At the age of 15 Lawrence and his schoolfriend Cyril Beeson bicycled around Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, visited almost every village's parish church, studied their monuments and antiquities and made rubbings of their monumental brasses.

From 1907 to 1910 Lawrence studied history at Jesus College, Oxford.[14] In the summer of 1909 Lawrence set out alone on a three-month walking tour of crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, in which he travelled 1,000 mi (1,600 km) on foot. 

Lawrence was a polyglot whose published work demonstrates competence in French, Ancient Greek, and Arabic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence

Wikipedia also mentions the themes of Lawrence of Arabia:

"Its themes include Lawrence's emotional struggles with the personal violence inherent in war, his personal identity, and his divided allegiance between his native Britain and its army and his newfound comrades within the Arabian desert tribes."

David in the movie has a divided allegiance too.

This, I like. I'll have to watch LofA.

Watch it on a big screen if you can. The cinematography is amazing!

Btw, I truly enjoyed both the and the other Prometheus Convo: http://pandawhale.com/convo/2591/prometheus-explanation-spoiler