Prometheus (Alien prequel?)

[RoXer]

(Page 2 of 4)
This was Jon Spaihts original draft of Prometheus?
Yes. And I thought it was really cool. It was not at all what I expected it to be. But obviously they were giving it to me for a reason. And this is one of those situations where you’re given no advance sense of what they like, what they don’t like, you just have to walk out on the plank and say, Here is my fundamental reaction to this thing. So when I finished it I went into my office and I wrote an email to Ridley and his producing partners. And this response was basically my job interview. I wrote maybe a four or five paragraph email saying here are all the things I love about it, I think there are some incredible set pieces here, I love the fundamental idea behind the movie, I feel like it’s a cool think piece. BUT I think it’s relying a bit too heavily on the Alien stuff that we’ve seen now five or six times in different movies. Chest-bursting and face-hugging and xenomorphs and I just feel that your idea is so strong and the characters can be made so strong that we don’t need any of that stuff. We can present iterations of that stuff in different ways. That isn’t to say that this isn’t a movie that should be set in that universe, but I look at it more like a story that is running parallel to the original Alien, so that if there was a sequel to this movie, it would not be Alien, it would be Prometheus 2. And then Prometheus 2 is parallel to Aliens. And here’s how we could do that. And so I sent off that email and I got into my bed. I didn’t sleep at all. And at 10 a.m. the next morning, my agent called me and said, ‘Whatever it is you did, they liked it. Can you go in and meet now?’


Who was at that meeting?
Ridley, two producing partners, and the executive from Fox on it. On my way over there I wrote in my head this sort of very formal speech on how much Ridley’s influenced me and what a thrill it is to be considered for this job… and I got about six words into that speech and he cut me off. He goes, “Let’s talk about your email.” So there we were sitting at a table talking about this science fiction movie that he wanted to direct and that they were considering me to write and I kept trying to leave my body and hover above the table and look down thinking, Oh my god, this might actually happen for you! And we had this great meeting. I think it was on a Friday afternoon. And at the end, he said, “Are you available to come in this weekend and talk some more?” And I said, of course. And at that point I realized they were probably going to hire me. That’s the long-winded origin story.


Did Ridley tell you at any point why he chose you? Was he fan of Lost?
He was definitely aware of Lost. Ridley is not the kind of guy who watches a television series. He will watch 20 minutes of a show here and an episode there. He was aware of it, he knew what it was, he knew what I did. He had seen the show, but he was not trying to present to me, like, Oh my God, I’m a huge Lostie! John Locke is my favorite character! As much as a writer can have a specific skill set or a brand, he was very interested that my brand seemed to be in mystery and ambiguity. And that’s what’s so cool about the original Alien — Hey, here’s this distress call, we just went down there, we see this weird massive alien creature sitting in a chair and there’s eggs everywhere and there’s nobody there to explain what happened. It’s just the situation they’re in. And I think the idea for this movie was, well, let’s have characters who are a little more interested in answering those questions before the s— hits the fan. They don’t just happen upon the haunted house, they’re actually looking for it. They just don’t realize it’s haunted till they get there. We talked a lot about mystery. That was my only hint of why he sought me out.


Did you have any reluctance about working on someone else’s script? Not being the guy who was there from go?
Yeah! Definitely! Especially since I felt like Jon had done a really good job of executing his drafts. I sent him an email as soon as I was formally hired saying, ‘Hey, you’re gonna read about this — that I’ve been hired to do this thing and I want you to know that whatever gets said, I’m going to try to retain as much of what you did as possible because I thought it was great. And then the story came out: Lindelof comes in and pitches this radical new take on this movie that used to be a prequel and is now transforming into its own original thing. I reached out to Jon again to say that’s not at all what happened. Ridley had a very specific idea of the story he wanted to tell. And sometimes you have to look at different versions of it to know what it is you want and what you don’t want. Whatever it is, I didn’t get the sense that there was any bad blood with Jon. They were just looking for someone to say to them, Hey, we don’t need the Alien stuff in here. It shouldn’t be about that. It can be a part of this movie, but it shouldn’t be what it’s about.

[RoXer]

(Page 3 of 4)
So how did you flesh out your version of the script with Ridley?
What happened was, I sat in a room with Ridley Scott for five days a week for three- or four-hour sessions and asked him a series of questions like an investigative journalist in an attempt to understand what exactly the movie he wanted to make was, what he wanted it to be about, what he wanted the characters to be looking for, what did he want to get out of the set pieces, is it going to be heady or scary or both? Who did he see being the audience proxy? And when I finished that project, I went off and wrote. You just listen to what they say and you write it down. That’s the way it is in movies, especially with visionary directors like Ridley.


And then how long did you sit down and write?
We met all through July and into the beginning of August. And then I turned in my first draft in mid-September. So it took me four or five weeks to write my first draft.


So the original script was more of an Alien prequel than yours?
Yes. The job that I was hired to do was to scale back the familiar tropes or symbology of what we think of when we think of an Alien movie. When I say Alien to you, you think face-hugger, chest-burster, eggs, acid blood, queen — the concentration of those things was much higher in Jon’s script than they are in Prometheus.
Let me just come out and ask on the record — Is this an Alien prequel?
I do not want to be evasive, but I do have to challenge what you mean by that word. Because that word is a very recent thing. I hadn’t really heard the word “prequel” before Phantom Menace. If your definition is: this is a series of events that precedes an existing movie, then, yes. This series of events that happens in Prometheus precedes the series of events that occurs in Alien. However, one of the other definitions is that the ending of the prequel leads you right up to the beginning of the preceding movie. The Thing prequel ends with a dog running across the Arctic landscape being pursued by a helicopter….


Okay, so this doesn’t lead to the first scene of Alien, but it does take place before Alien in the same world as Alien?
Correct.


Thank you. I’ve interviewed Ridley four times about this movie now and every time I get a different answer. How do you feel about all of the speculation about the film on the internet? Does it help the movie or hurt the movie?
I usually just put myself in the position of, let’s say I had nothing to do with this movie, and I was one of the people on the internet who was really curious about what it was, my feeling would be — and this is just me — to hear that it’s a prequel, makes the movie less interesting to me than if I don’t really have a clear sense of what it is. And I anticipated that at a certain point the fact that we weren’t openly addressing that question — or being cagey about that question — would lead to a certain degree of frustration, because that’s what I would be feeling as a fan. That’s when Ridley thought that it would be cool that in the teaser he’d have the word “Prometheus” reveal itself exactly the way the title Alien revealed itself in the original trailer for Alien. This is him saying, I’m making this choice for a very specific reason. If you want to continue asking me what this movie’s relationship is with Alien, why in God’s name do you think I would do that? The second thing is we wanted to generate viral content that starred and featured the characters from the movie. Let’s see if we can talk Guy Pearce and Michael Fassbender into doing some stuff that would speak very directly to the prequel issue. So I pitched the idea of the TED talk, which everybody was responsive to and Ridley was able to convince Guy to do. And that TED talk really speaks to the prequel question because it’s Peter Weyland! And Weyland is a name that is very familiar in all of the Alien movies. And we’re going to tell audiences that he is a part of Prometheus. So here’s another way we are showing them, as opposed to telling them, what the relationship between the two movies is. But hopefully with enough ambiguity that you’re generating some anticipation for what the movie is. And I will tell you, the hardest thing to do from the insides of these things is, you and I hate it when you sit in a movie theater and after the trailer, you say, I guess I feel like I just saw the whole movie! So you don’t want to do that. But at the same time, you don’t want to be so vague and precious and pretentious about what you’re working on that you build an expectation that you couldn’t possibly live up to. Everyone wants to know what the relationship is between this movie and Alien. And one could argue that we’ve set ourselves up for an inevitable disappointment. But look who you’re talking to right now. If there is anybody who is known for inevitable disappointment, it’s me. I’m Mr. Inevitable Disappointment!


When you were a kid, were you an Alien fan? Do you remember when you first saw it?
Yeah. I was born in 1973, so I did not see Alien when it was released theatrically. I saw Alien when it was on Home Box Office. I think I was probably 10. I was watching it for four or five minutes toward the end of the movie when Ripley is looking for her cat. I didn’t even know that there was an alien in play. And my dad caught me watching it and he turned off the TV and said, “Do not watch that movie — that movie is inappropriate!” He was upset. And as soon as I got the opportunity to watch it in its entirety, now that it had been stigmatized, I watched it. And I got to the point where the face-hugger bursts out of the egg and breaks through John Hurt’s faceplate and suddenly understood that my father was right. I did not continue beyond that point in the movie. I don’t think I watched the whole thing until I was 13 or 14 with my friends at a sleepover party at my friend Dave Spiegel’s. We watched the whole movie on VHS.

[RoXer]

(Page 4 of 4)
Ridley calls the original an “old dark house film.” Does that sound right to you?
Yes, because when you say to me: Old Dark House film, I think of a bunch of characters whose car breaks down on the side of the road and they have to go into a place of which they have no understanding whatsoever and they discover that place’s secrets and bring those secrets out of the house with them. It’s classic Hammer Films filmmaking. And of course the marketing around the original Alien was geared to that: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” It was more horror than it was sci-fi. That being said, there were so many incredible science-fiction ideas presented in Alien — the whole movie being about the gestation process for what this being is and how original that was and how original that looked, but also the idea of Ash as sort of malevolent artificial intelligence was sort of a direct nod to Kubrick 10 years later. I’m hard-pressed to think of any movies that were released between ’69 and ’79 that had crazy robots in them. The idea of taking HAL and making him into a man and then playing it closed, not knowing that Ash is a synthetic being until he starts to freak out. That was an incredible idea. The biggest thing that makes it an old dark house movie is that one by one the characters are going to be killed and so the most revolutionary thing that happens in Alien is Sigourney Weaver is not really presented to the audience as the main character. So when Tom Skerritt dies about an hour in, you’re suddenly going, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know if anyone’s going to make it out alive! Dallas is supposed to be my guy!’ He’s the hero, right? It’s not going to be Harry Dean Stanton! So that Ten Little Indians idea of one by one people are getting killed, is why Ridley, I think, looks at it that way.


What do you think Ridley’s influence on the sci-fi genre has been?
When I saw Blade Runner, my understanding was that Blade Runner and Alien were sequels to each other — or they were related. They were set in the same world. I was not sophisticated enough to know that Ridley Scott directed both of them or even know what a director was. Ridley decided to say, I’m going to look at the future the way it might actually look. I’m going to think about what urban design is going to look like, the ships are going to be gritty and grungy, the people who inhabit this world are blue-collar people. He took the fantasy out of sci-fi and grounded it in a profound way, which laid the track to look at the future in a different way, which was dystopian instead of utopian.


Did you and Ridley ever discuss why he wanted to go back to a movie that he made 30 years ago? Did he feel like there was some unfinished business there?
The only sense of it that I ever got — because by the time I came into the process he was already very excited, he was already ramped — is that in his journey as a film director over the past 30 years, it seems like the movies that people are most interested in and the movies he probably gets asked about the most are Alien and Blade Runner. And so, for him, he doesn’t look at himself as a science fiction director. In fact, when he talks about the five other guys that he was up against to direct Alien, he’s sort of befuddled as to why they chose him. He was the unlikely guy. I don’t think he sees himself as a sci-fi director. So probably over the course of the last 30 years it’s probably confusing to him why people keep asking him about these movies. But I would assume that over time, it would start to get into his head: Wow, these movies that I made 30 years ago really resonated and people are still curious about them, maybe there’s more story there! And I can guarantee you that many times over the intervening years, he was aware of what was happening with the Alien franchise. And his silence on those movies, with the exception of Aliens, which I think he is a fan of and I know he’s also a huge Fincher fan, but post-Alien 3 — both Resurrection and the Alien vs. Predator mash-ups, I think Ridley’s feeling was, It’s time for me to now take the reins and put the ship back on course. I feel a sense of parenthood and I feel like my child needs a stern talking to. That’s my sense of it, it’s not anything that he has said to me.


It sure sounds right though. Let me ask you about the lead character that Noomi Rapace plays in Prometheus. How important is it for this film to have a strong female action lead like Ripley?
I think it was very clear — and this was in the script before I came to it — that she was clearly at the center of this thing. And the inevitable comparisons to Ripley are going to come down the pike and therefore it was really important that although she is the lead of the movie, she be different from Ripley in a lot of ways. And I think that from a jumping off point, Ripley is a blue-collar miner/terra former who is basically doing a gig for money and wanders into this horrific situation and she has to react. It’s just a survivor’s story. And in Aliens, Ripley’s story begins to get fleshed out in a more significant way where she becomes maternal with Newt. But if you just look at Alien, you can’t tell me much about Ripley. We don’t know much about her as a character. Whereas Noomi’s character, Shaw, has a very specific background that leads her to where this movie leads her. She is a seeker. The Mulder character for lack of a better pop culture metaphor. And classic sci-fi, to me, is based on the principle that science has the opportunity to cross a line — the line is defined by cultural and religious ideas. Should we do this? Are we breaking God’s will by doing this? That’s sci-fi. So the idea of just because we have the technology to create life, should we create life? This is the be careful what you wished for, I shouldn’t have crossed that line story, which is what all sci-fi is. In Alien that doesn’t happen. All they do is answer a distress call, which is what they’re supposed to do. They’re not paying for anything they did wrong. I think it was important for Shaw to be directly responsible for everything that happens in this movie. For the hero of the movie to say I want to go find this out and I understand that it may be dangerous, that became a critical driver for her. And something that existed in Jon’s work, but really we talked about a lot as we developed the screenplay.


As someone who’s worked in TV and movies, what is it that you like about film vs. TV?
They’ve each got their own benefits. I think the advantage of film is the canvas is much smaller, which would seem like a contradiction. If you take something like Lost where the story was told over 121 episodes, and you take something like Prometheus where the story is told over two hours, it’s a smaller canvas. But because of that, you have to be so much more detailed. There’s a lot less area for screw-ups. I think movies are more exciting– it’s a slower moving ship. So the idea that I started on the movie in July 2009, I wrote on it essentially through the beginning of production in March, 2010 — that’s seven or eight months of writing. And then Ridley called me into the editing room a bunch of times, so all told it was a year of my life. In a year of my life in TV, you make 30 hours of it.


Last question, tell me about what the title means in terms of the story you’ve told.
I don’t want to sound like the movie is a history lesson, but I do think that the primary take away from the myth of Prometheus is that the Gods were nervous about mankind. They were nervous about what they would be capable of if they had fire. Fire was a big piece of technology that they would build off of. And the story of any creation is eventually a child will try to destroy its parents. It’s a very paranoid world view, mythologically-speaking it pops up a lot. Especially for us Star Wars aficionados. So the essential story is: I don’t want to give my kid this toy because eventually he will develop it into a weapon that will kill me. So I will therefore withhold it from him. And what is the price I must exact on somebody who betrays me? So Prometheus steals the fire from the Gods, gives it to mankind, knowing exactly what mankind is going to do with it and even though he knows he’s going to be punished for it. So this myth felt perfect for this movie because the movie is all about creation, it’s all about punishment, and it’s all about our desire to understand why we’re here in the first place. It just felt like the natural way to go even though we knew people would have a hard time pronouncing it and that it was wildly pretentious.

[Swiss Ultimate]

Nice.

[nolanve]

God I can't wait for this one.

[mitch_h]

So far the reviews for this haven't been that great, but they haven't been bad either. I have really high expectations for this, so I was hoping for raves, still excited though.

[RoXer]

15h Damon Lindelof ‏@DamonLindelof
So it begins! RT @jbiz91 @DamonLindelof Reading the reviews. Seems like you screwed up Prometheus with your crappy writing. Good job.

• Reply
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1h Damon Lindelof ‏@DamonLindelof
... You're welcome? RT @MickBim Hey @DamonLindelof, you are the second person to rape my childhood after George Lucas ! Congrats !

[The Destroyer]

Originally Posted by mitch_h So far the reviews for this haven't been that great, but they haven't been bad either. I have really high expectations for this, so I was hoping for raves, still excited though.

Reviews I've seen so far seem to be averaging out around the 3 star mark.

Pity, but I'll still see it.

[The Mackem]

There's no way it can be any worse than what followed Alien 3

[Kalyx triaD]

Yeah, I'm still way down for this.

[Crimson]

Im guessing the ending is a big let down

[Requiem]

Has an 8.3 on imdb. Dunno.

[Kalyx triaD]

How about fuck what people have to say and watch the damn thing.

[Ermaximus]

Originally Posted by Kalyx triaD How about fuck what people have to say and watch the damn thing.

Exactly this. The only "review" that should matter is your own. See the movie because YOU want to and not because some overpaid idiot tells you why you should or shouldn't.

[Damndirty]

I think as long as this flick has alot of HR Giger elements in it, I'll be satisfied, just as long as there's still that sexually-designed dark concept I get from the other movies he inspired.

[Kalyx triaD]

I don't think so. Very different look.

[mitch_h]

Originally Posted by Ermaximus Exactly this. The only "review" that should matter is your own. See the movie because YOU want to and not because some overpaid idiot tells you why you should or shouldn't.

What , shut up. No one has said they aren't going to see the movie. Seriously, can the only discussion be gushing over production stills and trailers (which are just as useless as critics). We're just expressing some minor anxiety about how the early word of mouth seems to be that the movie is lacking in certain ways. And I agree that American criticism is largely a wasteland (albeit for different reasons) but there are still some quality critics who I often agree with and are good writers to boot, some even liked this movie (Todd McCarthy)

[Kalyx triaD]

I wouldn't say trailers and stills are as useless as reviews, because media helps you shape your own opinion going in.

Why have even minor anxiety about what people have to say? I've never been any more or less excited by good or bad reviews. I've liked badly reviewed movies (SW Eps. III), and hated good reviewed movies (The Notebook). Sometimes reviewers agree with me. But they're agreeing with me; I don't look for the other way around.

This sort of thing makes reviews the overstated thing it is now.

[mitch_h]

Originally Posted by Kalyx triaD I wouldn't say trailers and stills are as useless as reviews, because media helps you shape your own opinion going in. Why have even minor anxiety about what people have to say? I've never been any more or less excited by good or bad reviews. I've liked badly reviewed movies (SW Eps. III), and hated good reviewed movies (The Notebook). Sometimes reviewers agree with me. But they're agreeing with me; I don't look for the other way around. That sort of thing makes reviews the overstated thing it is now.

Because it's more than if the movie got a good review or a bad review, it's what a knowledgeable critic says about the movie. Maybe you don't, but I have certain tastes and if I find a critic with similar tastes I kind of care about what they say. Plus a really good critic can open me up to things that I never noticed on my own. Sure i've had times where i've deviated from them and the critical consensus and that's why i'm still going to see this movie and i'm still excited, but I do see the value in certain critics.

Also I hardly think reviews are overstated seeing as most high grossing movies usually aren't critically praised.

[Swiss Ultimate]

I loved the Notebook.

[Kalyx triaD]

Originally Posted by mitch_h Also I hardly think reviews are overstated seeing as most high grossing movies usually aren't critically praised.

I suppose I'm channeling my issues with game industry reviews.

[mitch_h]

That I don't know, but you shouldn't be too hostile towards film critics because they play/played a big part in bringing attention to smaller films and filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Coen Bros, Tarantino, Clerks(don't like K Smith's other movies), PTA etc etc

[VSG]

Already bought tickets for the opening night, fuck whatever others want to say.

[Ermaximus]

Originally Posted by mitch_h What , shut up. No one has said they aren't going to see the movie. Seriously, can the only discussion be gushing over production stills and trailers (which are just as useless as critics). We're just expressing some minor anxiety about how the early word of mouth seems to be that the movie is lacking in certain ways. And I agree that American criticism is largely a wasteland (albeit for different reasons) but there are still some quality critics who I often agree with and are good writers to boot, some even liked this movie (Todd McCarthy)

That was more of a general statement, not specifically aimed towards this movie dude.

[Crimson]

imdb is not a place to judge if you want to see a movie or not. Every board for every movie ever made has a "worst movie ever made" topic.

I usually go there to see movie history info on actors/directors/writers.

[The Destroyer]

Originally Posted by Crimson Im guessing the ending is a big let down

I didn't find the ending completely satisfying but I still thought it was a good film overall. Michael Fassbender was great as usual.

SPOILER: show

I still can't work out if the ending is designed to set up Alien, since it seems to be set on a different planet, despite the obvious birth of some kind of proto-Alien and the ship being identical to the crashed one from the first two films.

[El Vaquero de Infierno]

I'm going to see this on Wednesday.

[El Vaquero de Infierno]

Sono andato a vederlo oggi. Non è stato niente speciale.

[OssMan]

This was stupid. It just turned into a typical Hollywood monster movie.

[Nowhere Man]

Got my full review of the movie here, if you're so inclined.

[Buzzkill]

Here's a huge breakdown of some of the themes/motifs throughout the movie (spoilers obviously)

SPOILER: show

Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.
Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)

Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.

The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.
Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter.

A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.'

Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.
And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'

So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.

Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.

The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.

And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'

Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.

From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:
Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?
Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.

So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.

So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.

The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.
Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable.

Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.

But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life.

The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.)

And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'.
(I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.)

Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before.

'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.'
A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley.

Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out:
'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.'

Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face.
Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil.

The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk.

With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid.

And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador.

It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way.

The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head).

Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death.

Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out.
As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed.

The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

[Kalyx triaD]

Think you can space that out and clean it up? Epic wall-o-text there.

[Reavant]

I liked it

[Reavant]

I do have a question though...

SPOILER: show

So is the typical alien that we see at the end and is in all these alien movies made first in this film or is it an existing species and just pops up here.


If it was first made here, was it just because the creature implanted in the humanoid creature? If so then the chain of events would be infected scientist impregnating other scientist... her birthing/aborting a squid alien which face hugs an engineer, which causes a typical xenomorph to birth?

What about the deep throat snakes in the pyramid? did the black slime cause the meal worms to turn into that? then once they jumped down the throat of the scientist, why did it turn him into a miami resident and not impregnate him with an alien?

Actually why didnt he start to disintegrate when he drank the shit like the engineers did?

[Reavant]

also was there another dark knight rises trailer before prometheus... i got there a little late

[Buzzkill]

Fixed...I didn't write that, BTW

[Nowhere Man]

Originally Posted by Buzzkill Here's a huge breakdown of some of the themes/motifs throughout the movie (spoilers obviously) SPOILER: show Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes. Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.) Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article. The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a lifegiver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying. Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices. Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: 'That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, etcetera.' Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'. And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.' So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'. Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed. The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the lifegiver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here. And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.' Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out. From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them. If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott: Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered? Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, "Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it." Guess what? They crucified him. Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT. So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good. So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it. The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android. Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakeable. Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice. But some humans do act in ways the Engineers might have grudgingly admired. Take Holloway, Shaw's lover, who impregnates her barren womb with his black slime riddled semen before realising he is being transformed into something Other. Unlike the hapless geologist and botanist left behind in the chamber, who only want to stay alive, Holloway willingly embraces death. He all but invites Meredith Vickers to kill him, and it's surely significant that she does so using fire, the other gift Prometheus gave to man besides his life. The 'Caesarean' scene is central to the film's themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she's pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT'S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN. How many times has that image come up now? Four, I make it. (We're not done yet.) And she doesn't kill it. And she calls the procedure a 'caesarean' instead of an 'abortion'. (I'm not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don't think they're clear, and I'm not entirely comfortable doing so. Let's just say that her unwanted offspring turning out to be her salvation is possibly problematic from a feminist standpoint and leave it there for now.) Here's where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a 'virgin birth' of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn't possibly be pregnant. And Shaw's the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born? Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she's pregnant, and tell me that's not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can't possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it's no ordinary child... yeah, we've seen this before. 'And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.' A barren woman called Elizabeth, made pregnant by 'God'? Subtle, Ridley. Anyway. If it weren't already clear enough that the central theme of the film is 'I suffer and die so that others may live' versus 'you suffer and die so that I may live' writ extremely large, Meredith Vickers helpfully spells it out: 'A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable.' Vickers is not just speaking out of personal frustration here, though that's obviously one level of it. She wants her father out of the way, so she can finally come in to her inheritance. It's insult enough that Weyland describes the android David as 'the closest thing I have to a son', as if only a male heir was of any worth; his obstinate refusal to accept death is a slap in her face. Weyland, preserved by his wealth and the technology it can buy, has lived far, far longer than his rightful time. A ghoulish, wizened creature who looks neither old nor young, he reminds me of Slough Feg, the decaying tyrant from the Slaine series in British comic 2000AD. In Slaine, an ancient (and by now familiar to you, dear reader, or so I would hope) Celtic law decrees that the King has to be ritually and willingly sacrificed at the end of his appointed time, for the good of the land and the people. Slough Feg refused to die, and became a rotting horror, the embodiment of evil. The image of the sorcerer who refuses to accept rightful death is fundamental: it even forms a part of some occult philosophy. In Crowley's system, the magician who refuses to accept the bitter cup of Babalon and undergo dissolution of his individual ego in the Great Sea (remember that opening scene?) becomes an ossified, corrupted entity called a 'Black Brother' who can create no new life, and lives on as a sterile, emasculated husk. With all this in mind, we can better understand the climactic scene in which the withered Weyland confronts the last surviving Engineer. See it from the Engineer's perspective. Two thousand years ago, humanity not only murdered the Engineers' emissary, it infected the Engineers' life-creating fluid with its own tainted selfish nature, creating monsters. And now, after so long, here humanity is, presumptuously accepting a long-overdue invitation, and even reawakening (and corrupting all over again) the life fluid. And who has humanity chosen to represent them? A self-centred, self-satisfied narcissist who revels in his own artificially extended life, who speaks through the medium of a merely mechanical offspring. Humanity couldn't have chosen a worse ambassador. It's hardly surprising that the Engineer reacts with contempt and disgust, ripping David's head off and battering Weyland to death with it. The subtext is bitter and ironic: you caused us to die at the hands of our own creation, so I am going to kill you with YOUR own creation, albeit in a crude and bludgeoning way. The only way to save humanity is through self-sacrifice, and this is exactly what the captain (and his two oddly complacent co-pilots) opt to do. They crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, giving up their lives in order to save others. Their willing self-sacrifice stands alongside Holloway's and the Engineer's from the opening sequence; by now, the film has racked up no less than five self-sacrificing gestures (six if we consider the exploding Engineer head). Meredith Vickers, of course, has no interest in self-sacrifice. Like her father, she wants to keep herself alive, and so she ejects and lands on the planet's surface. With the surviving cast now down to Vickers and Shaw, we witness Vickers's rather silly death as the Engineer ship rolls over and crushes her, due to a sudden inability on her part to run sideways. Perhaps that's the point; perhaps the film is saying her view is blinkered, and ultimately that kills her. But I doubt it. Sometimes a daft death is just a daft death. Finally, in the squidgy ending scenes of the film, the wrathful Engineer conveniently meets its death at the tentacles of Shaw's alien child, now somehow grown huge. But it's not just a death; there's obscene life being created here, too. The (in the Engineers' eyes) horrific human impulse to sacrifice others in order to survive has taken on flesh. The Engineer's body bursts open - blah blah lifegiver blah blah abdomen ripped apart hey we're up to five now - and the proto-Alien that emerges is the very image of the creature from the mural. On the face of it, it seems absurd to suggest that the genesis of the Alien xenomorph ultimately lies in the grotesque human act of crucifying the Space Jockeys' emissary to Israel in four B.C., but that's what Ridley Scott proposes. It seems equally insane to propose that Prometheus is fundamentally about the clash between acceptance of death as a condition of creating/sustaining life versus clinging on to life at the expense of others, but the repeated, insistent use of motifs and themes bears this out. As a closing point, let me draw your attention to a very different strand of symbolism that runs through Prometheus: the British science fiction show Doctor Who. In the 1970s episode 'The Daemons', an ancient mound is opened up, leading to an encounter with a gigantic being who proves to be an alien responsible for having guided mankind's development, and who now views mankind as a failed experiment that must be destroyed. The Engineers are seen tootling on flutes, in exactly the same way that the second Doctor does. The Third Doctor had an companion whose name was Liz Shaw, the same name as the protagonist of Prometheus. As with anything else in the film, it could all be coincidental; but knowing Ridley Scott, it doesn't seem very likely.

That actually makes me enjoy the movie an awful lot more. Who did write that, by the way?

[mitch_h]

Didn't even meet my lowered expectations, awful.

[YOUR Hero]

oh jeez. not liking what im hearing

[DLVH84]

If they do make another one, I bet the new android's name will start with E.

Think about it...Ash, Bishop, Call, David.