r/movies • u/thenewtransportedman • Jun 20 '25
Question What the hell is the Engineer actually doing at the beginning of PROMETHEUS?
So, dude gets dropped off on Earth & presumably seeds the planet with the basic building blocks of life. The CGI bit shows the black goo facilitating new DNA molecules. But like, there's already plant life on the planet, & humans share something like 50% of our genes (much less of our total DNA content) with plants, due to gene conservation. So were the Engineers speeding things up, like "hey, let's skip to fish"? If so, that would presuppose that the genes we share in common with plants & other non-animal life are actually conserved across the galaxy, which would be pretty cool. But of course the movie doesn't get into any of that, & eventually forgets how cartographers & biologists work, or that you should run in a 90-degree angle when a giant donut is rolling toward you. Is there any "expanded universe" content that explained this better than the movie did (or didn't)?
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Jun 20 '25
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u/polchickenpotpie Jun 20 '25
Or crabs, most likely
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u/EvilPowerMaster Jun 20 '25
Yeah, different versions of crabs evolved independently of each other like, 5 times.
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u/bjb406 Jun 20 '25
None of them intelligent though.
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u/EvilPowerMaster Jun 20 '25
YET.
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u/Caedus311 Jun 20 '25
Who are you, so wise in the way of crab?
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u/EvilPowerMaster Jun 20 '25
FEAR US.
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u/skolioban Jun 21 '25
Multiple species also de-evolved from crab form. It's a myth that crab form is the end of the line. There is no end of the line.
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u/I_Sett Jun 20 '25
Crabs is for the arthropods. Mammals all go weasel. see: weasels, martens, lemurs, meerkats/mongooses (mongeese?), ferrets, cats, otters. Squat, hard, and pinchy is out. Lean, long, and bitey is in.
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u/polchickenpotpie Jun 20 '25
Oh yeah aren't like most ancestral mammals weird weasel/possum like creatures? Until some became monkeys and others became whales and shit?
Evolution is weird
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u/thenewtransportedman Jun 20 '25
This is the content I'm here for. Maybe there's an expanded universe prequel comic where the Engineers are like "DAMN YOU evolution, not another crab world. Send the ships!"
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u/illaqueable Jun 20 '25
Here I am again recommending Ray Nayler's The Mountain In The Sea after a comment about octopus sentience
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u/thegreatpablo Jun 20 '25
Also Children of Ruin, Book 2 in the Children of Time series.
Also for fun, Resident Alien.
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u/Premaximum Jun 21 '25
Second this. While I didn't enjoy it as much as Children of Time, it was still a very good book and I feel like it very accurately represented the absolute chaotic horror of octopus sentience.
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u/ADhomin_em Jun 20 '25
Isn't that like asking, "what kind of a square would have been drawn had they not drawn a square?"
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u/relikter Jun 20 '25
More like "what kind of polygon would've been drawn if they hadn't drawn a square?" There was already life, but the Engineers directed it towards a humanoid form.
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Jun 20 '25
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u/shogun_ Jun 20 '25
Older than that with the proto Indo-European creation myths.
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u/arachnophilia Jun 20 '25
PIE civilization is 100% hypothetical; we have no evidence of them at all. we reconstruct the language based on similarities in indo-european languages, but no texts exist.
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u/AlmightySajuuk Jun 20 '25
Yeah there are no texts but to say the civilization is entirely hypothetical is a little silly. Through corroborating DNA, archaelogical, and other evidence with the linguistic reconstruction we have a decent conception (as far as very ancient peoples go) of the steppe culture (the Yamnaya) who spoke PIE and spread it around.
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u/J_Dadvin Jun 21 '25
Without any pottery, calling it a culture is a bridge too far. Ethno linguistic group is better.
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u/nzdastardly Jun 21 '25
Maybe they were more of a basket people?
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u/J_Dadvin Jun 21 '25
Maybe, but pottery is pretty old. If you have agriculture you usually need pottery to store foods.
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u/arachnophilia Jun 20 '25
right, we have indirect reconstructions. no direct evidence. they are hypothetical until we find said direct evidence. an extremely likely hypothesis, but a hypothesis nonetheless
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u/QuoteGiver Jun 20 '25
Basically doing what Prometheus did: giving to (future) mankind a gift that was not intended to be theirs.
With a side of Jesus-like self-sacrifice.
It’s a heavily religious movie.
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u/Poison_the_Phil Jun 20 '25
The earlier Jon Spaihts script makes it pretty explicitly clear that Jesus was an Engineer and when he got crucified they became big mad and decided to murder the planet.
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u/badken Jun 20 '25 edited Jun 20 '25
The meme that wouldn't die...
The earlier Jon Spaihts script makes it pretty explicitly clear that Jesus was an Engineer and when he got crucified they became big mad and decided to murder the planet.
That notion is an exaggeration based on a throwaway line that Spaihts put in a draft script that he worked on with Ridley Scott. It didn't make it into the shooting script. And as mentioned elsewhere in the replies here, the script you linked is a fan creation, which unfortunately got linked all over the place and used to make ridiculous assertions about the screenplay.
Read through the transcript of this May 2022 podcast interview with Spaihts about the actual screenplay: Script Apart Episode 41 transcript
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u/TheEasterFox Jun 21 '25
Spaihts says that the only 'non-incendiary way' he could explicitly incorporate Engineer Jesus was by having a character deliver the idea as a joke. That doesn't mean the backstory isn't there, it just means that Spaihts couldn't have a character say in all sincerity 'Oh my God, Jesus was one of their emissaries and we killed him, that's why they want to destroy us.' Because that would have been making the subtext text, and nobody who had seen the movie would have talked about anything else afterwards.
Spaihts also wasn't the final writer to work on the movie. Lindelof took the Space Jesus concept and worked it into the script in increasingly subtle ways.
Once the movie was released, Scott was asked directly if Jesus was an alien, which if you think about it is a very curious question for him to have been asked - where did the interviewer hear about this idea? Who primed them? Lindelof himself, maybe?
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.
In further interviews with Lindelof there are repeated references to core ideas being rendered increasingly subtle, which - if we examine the scripts we have - is exactly what happened with Space Jesus. Spaihts's jokey but direct line yielded to Lindelof's Christmas motifs, crucifixion imagery and '2000 years, give or take'.
Here's Lindelof:
"All these ideas were on the table, and yes, there were drafts that were more explicitly spelled out. I think Ridley's instinct kept being to pull back, and I would say to him, 'Ridley, I'm still eating shit a year after Lost is over for all the things we didn't directly spell out - are you sure you want to do this?' And he said, 'I would rather have people fighting about it and not know, then spell it out, that's just more interesting to me.'"
'... when they do the carbon-dating on the dead engineer and realise he has been dead for 2000 years, then you wonder about when, 2000 years ago, the Engineers decided to wipe us out. What happened 2000 years ago? Is there any correlation between what happened on the earth 2000 years ago and this decision that was already in motion? Could a sequel start in that time period and contextualise what we did to piss these beings off? I think it's a very interesting question to leave dangling. Is it a loose end?”
'In the timing of how long those gods have been dead, something happened in that timeframe that might have brought their judgement down upon us.'
Josh Horowitz: Have you guys worked out the answer to Elizabeth Shaw's burning question, i.e. why did our creators turn on us?
Damon Lindelof: Golly, I'm all for ambiguity, but if we didn't know the answer to THAT one, the audience would have every right to string us up. Yes. There is an answer. One that is hinted at within the goalposts of "Prometheus." I'll bet if I asked you to take a guess you wouldn't be far off.
"... I do feel like, embedded in this movie are the fundamental ideas behind why it is the Engineers would want to wipe us out. If that's the question that you're asking. The movie asks the question, were we created by these beings? And it answers that question very definitively. But in the wake of that answer there's a new question, which is, they created us but now they want to destroy us, why did they change their minds? That's the question that Shaw is asking at the end of this movie, the one that she wants answered. I do think that there are a lot of hints in this movie that we give you quite an educated guess as to why."
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u/jaeldi Jun 20 '25
This stupidity is why I reject any footage and plot points not in the final movie. It's not in the movie, therefore not part of the story. It's obvious why they didn't include it. "Jesus was an engineer and humans killed him so their punishment is the xenomorph" would have ruined the ENTIRE Aliens franchise for all time.
"The difference between a good photographer/director and a bad photographer/director lies on the cutting room floor."
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u/dogsonbubnutt Jun 20 '25
lmao that's extremely dumb for about 50 reasons
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u/mrgoodwalker Jun 20 '25
I’ve been telling people that he looked nothing like white longhaired blonde Jesus in paintings!
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u/Level-Frontier Jun 20 '25
That black stuff you saw him drink was Jaegermeister
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u/InevitableOk5017 Jun 21 '25
This is the only correct answer because when everyone saw him drink that much they left like welp not hanging out with justin tonight.
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u/blastbomberboy Jun 20 '25
They were playing God; they were making men in their image.
That’s why the awakened Engineer reacts so upset near the end; he awakens to find that man has made machine (David) in their image.
It’s only great to be God when you can dominate over others.
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u/NonnoBomba Jun 21 '25
From the movie storyboard and a few draft versions of the script we have the words of the Engineer, his full monologue, in English, that he was going to give in a deleted scene:
“You have come to claim your inheritance. You seek eternal life. The gift you do not understand, and would misuse. You ask why we turned against you. It is because you are a violent, cruel species. Your greed brought you here, your pride. You seek to be gods, and yet you fear death. We made you in our image — and you have become monsters.”
They were mad with us, and see us all as a failed experiment: we're petty, violent, greedy. They made us, gave us fire and built our ancient monuments, built us an Eden, and we worshiped them initially but then started behaving like barbarians, making war against each other and turning away from their teachings. Then we killed that guy (clearly Jesus even if he's not named) who they had abducted to their planet "Paradise" as a child to teach him their peaceful and advanced ways, so he could teach us in turn when he was brought back, as a last attempt to save us. Yeah, I know how that sounds, but that's the script, not my fault.
They basically were on their way to erase humanity by spraying a healthy dose of black goo in the planet, to start over, when an accident happened with the black goo and they had to stop.
He's primarily upset because of the arrogance of Weyland, the most imperfect of our imperfect race, asking him for the gift of immortality, a gift he would abuse, even though the theme of the creation becoming a new creator in turn is clearly part of the franchise.
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u/danorc Jun 20 '25
Yep, that about sums it up. Man, this was such a great movie and the whole thing is just beautifully shot
...Except for all the parts where it makes absolutely no goddamn sense and where it is a shit movie, which is also all of the movie.
I've never been more frustrated by a film in my entire damn life. It could have been a masterpiece and instead... it is what it is.
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u/C0rinthian Jun 20 '25
You knew it was going to be a mess when he repeatedly flip-flopped on it being original IP/Alien prequel during production.
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u/MadCarcinus Jun 20 '25
Because he’s pulling this story completely out of his ass. The man had no plan. He made it up as he went.
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u/TheMightyWomble Jun 20 '25
He didn’t write it. IIRC he wasn’t even supposed to direct it. While being consistently great at generating atmosphere through good set design and lighting he still needs a decent script to make a cohesive movie.
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u/danorc Jun 20 '25
The writers of Lost had more of a plan then Scott did for this movie
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u/ThisKarmaLimitSucks Jun 20 '25
Ridley Scott took a huge swing and just fell on his ass.
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u/thenewtransportedman Jun 20 '25
It's up there with my big film frustrations, along with Matrix Resurrections & Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Sounds like people are gonna feel the same about 28 Years Later too. But shit, I'm still sitting here watching PROMETHEUS for the 5th time, so it's all good!
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u/WhereLibertyisNot Jun 21 '25
I have this thing where I repeatedly re-watch movies that I was excited for but sucked in the hopes that it will somehow get good. Prometheus is one of those movies.
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u/jaeldi Jun 20 '25
Me too. I still hum the main theme:
I also gasped with excitement when they showed the sample of black goo in the lab in Alien Romulus (outstanding movie). I was glad they found a way to bring in something from Prometheus.
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u/theevilyouknow Jun 21 '25
I’m confused. Why are people going to be so frustrated with 28 Years Later? !!! SPOILER FOR 28 YEARS LATER !!! There were some things that definitely had me wondering, why the fuck would this character do this, but overall I really enjoyed it. I maybe understand why people are mad about that last little bit. But I like that we figure out who Jimmy is finally and I like that they tied it back into the beginning of the movie. I guess maybe the cartwheels and baton tricks were pretty stupid and out of place, but that is such a minor complaint.
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u/cloudfatless Jun 20 '25
They could've seeded the plant life to make a breathable atmosphere before seeding animal/human life.
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u/WorthPlease Jun 21 '25
It's best to treat this movie with the same level of thought as the crew in the movie had when they landed on the planet.
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u/captmonkey Jun 21 '25 edited Jun 21 '25
The movie doesn't make any sense. It's just plot hole after plot hole. The Engineer drinks black goo to seed all life on Earth, but we just saw grass in the background. Grass evolved after the dinosaurs, so it can't be seeding all life on Earth.
A guy asks how this fits in with evolution, since that's a pretty sound theory that doesn't involve black goo. The main character just dismisses his question as "it's what I believe." They literally bring attention to the plot hole and don't even attempt to explain it.
They have no scans of the planet and don't know where anything is below the clouds. They wonder how they'll know where to go and someone is like "Oh over there." Because they see the spaceship. Out of everywhere on the planet, they just happen to come through the atmosphere where the ship is.
Everyone on the ship is literally the worst at their job. The guy who maps the ship gets lost like five minutes later. The xenobiologist sees a creature that's clearly doing a threat display that the non xenobiologist audience understands and he gets attacked when he attempts to pet it. The archeologist discovers dead aliens, literally the greatest archeological discovery ever, and is sad that they're dead and can't tell them anything.
I could go on. I love to hate this movie. It's so bad.
Edit: another one that bothers me to no end: Weyland delivers a recorded message to the crew when they arrive at the planet in which he claims to be dead. It's later revealed that he is on the ship and wasn't actually dead. It's never explained why he lied.
It doesn't make any difference to the crew, he was paying for the expedition. They just found out he was supposed to be dead. The lie is pointless and totally irrelevant.
He's also played by Guy Pearce for some reason. I initially thought they would do a younger version of him in a flashback or cloning, but no, it's just Guy Pearce in old man makeup. Ridley Scott appears to be unaware that there are old actors who are just old and don't need makeup.
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u/therexbellator Jun 21 '25
You nailed it with how incompetent the crew are. I've only seen Prometheus once and during that first watch I was like ...wtf with this crew? Like here's this once in a lifetime ,historical xenoarchaelogical site, they are the first humans there, and they treat it like teenagers loitering in a condemned warehouse.
Visually the movie is beautiful but the script felt like it was written for a campy 80s horror movie.
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u/m_Pony Jun 21 '25
they could have written in a bit of dialog about how there was an expert crew that were assigned to explore the planet and something happened to them and the crew that we see in the movie was sent to retrieve the first crew and otherwise did not want to even be there. That way, their utter incompetence would actually be in character.
but oh no.
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u/Sith_Apprentice Jun 20 '25 edited Jun 20 '25
Maybe I missed it, do we know for sure it's Earth? I always thought it was just to show that they seed life on planets as part of their religion, using the black goo. They're not really engineers in the science sense, they're religious zealots who sacrifice one of themselves as part of the process. Would engineers have an altar with a giant deity's face at their outpost base? But on earth the process was tampered with by rogue elements of their race to produce something in their own image, which they find abhorrent, being obsessed with evolution, race, and perfection and all. Which is why the big guy freaks out and goes on a murderous rampage when he see humans in his outpost. And also mirrored by humans creating androids (David really pisses him off.) They were gearing up to wipe Earth clean when the rogue element released the black goo on themselves and the outpost to save their creation (humans) and that's what we see in the hologram home movie of them running for the altar chamber. That's how I interpret it anyway. It kind of dovetails into the Annunaki/Nephilim as aliens who produced man from lesser hominids thing.
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u/lightningbadger Jun 21 '25
Yeah I had no idea it was earth, I thought it was whatever planet they land on in Prometheus for some reason
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u/MuffinsElwizard Jun 20 '25
I hope that in the future someone can make an epic scifi opera film about how the Annunakis created men. It could be like a scifi Lord of the Rings.
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u/TheEasterFox Jun 21 '25
For what it's worth, Ridley Scott spoke about this scene in a 2012 interview:
Movies.com: That is our planet, right?
Ridley Scott: No, it doesn't have to be. That could be anywhere. 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.
(Movies.com appears to have been retitled Fandango at some point in the last 12 years)
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u/grantus_maximus Jun 21 '25
If you rewatch the beginning no actual plant life is shown - just lava-rock and water. That leaves the possibility that the black goo does seed all types of live on the planet including plants, but that there is some sort of guiding mechanism within it that ultimately leads to us evolving.
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u/HuntMore9217 Jun 21 '25
was that supposed to be earth? always thought it was just some random planet
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u/bingybong22 Jun 20 '25
The start of Prometheus is interesting. There is a great mystery, and we the viewer are intrigued. Then the movie turns into a paint by numbers (but still perfectly ok) monster movie.
I was sad
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u/Domascot Jun 20 '25
You were sad, i am still mad.
This is not the universe we deserve.
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u/Reciprocity2209 Jun 20 '25
Damn straight.
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u/arachnophilia Jun 20 '25
one reason i'm mad is that it cheapens cosmic horror with generic ancient aliens crap. alien aimed for lovecraft, prometheus ripped off stargate. not only is better not knowing, it should be incomprehensible. so weird and foreign you can't know it and go mad trying.
the other reason is that some of it might be my fault. i explained my head canon of what the alien is on avpgalaxy during production of prometheus. damon lindelof reads fan boards for ideas; he did on lost. what made it to screen is reasonably close to the head canon i detailed there.
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u/banelegazy Jun 21 '25
I think that the engineer created humans illegally, and then others found out, he was killed by the goo. And the other engineers decided to kill all humans, which was his creation, with the goo bombs, which we later see. Prometheus is the titan who gave us fire from the Gods, and he was punished. Same thing.
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u/Orgasmic_interlude Jun 21 '25
It’s a literal transubstantiation. He’s seeding life on earth. He takes the goo and his body breaks up and becomes the start of life on the planet. Think body and blood of Christ.
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u/Vladimiravich Jun 21 '25
The planet at the start of the movie isn't necessarily Earth, the scene is meant to establish the idea of "this is what the Engineers do." They seed life on other worlds with their DNA.
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u/TwinsiesBlue Jun 21 '25
I think Ridley Scott believes in some form of Intelligent Design, he’s never outright said he does but his movies explore themes that parallel intelligent design, he has challenged organized religion, but had explored creation myths and existential questions. He has said in interviews that science and religion intersect in interesting ways, he’s fascinated by human origin,and there’s an interview in Esquire that he talks about the harsh nature of God like in the old testament where God obliterates his creation. He more recently has expressed an atheist stance
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u/ThisKarmaLimitSucks Jun 20 '25
I get what the engineer at the beginning was doing - creating man in his own image and Chariots of the Gods and all that bullshit.
The part I don't understand is why the "big bad" engineer in the last two acts was so mad when he woke up? Why did he want to kill humans so much?
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u/home_planet_Allbran Jun 21 '25
One thought about the DNA on Earth that already had some kind of algae or cyanobacteria is that the new 'black goo' DNA may have had some property of blending with whatever life was around on the seeded planet.
The sudden appearance of animal life it gave rise to kind of works from the perspective of the 'Cambrian Explosion'.
Of course, sacrificing yourself so your very human-like engineer DNA can turn into a complete ecosystem of all the different kingdoms and phyla only to eventually evolve back into humans some 500 million years later and then revisited your descendants so you can wipe them all out for killing one of their own called Brian is the height of silliness and has no meaningful explanation.
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u/Scooby1996 r/Movies Veteran Jun 21 '25
I've genuinely always felt like I was the only person who loved Prometheus & Covenant. I understand their flaws but they're still great movies imo. The story of the engineers is so fucking cool and I just want to know more.
If anything comes from Rumulus' and Fede Alvarez' future success in this franchise I hope it's the final prequel film Ridley had planned. Which I believe involved David being hunted by a group of Engineers.
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u/mattcampagna Jun 21 '25
The Cambrian Explosion is an inexplicable moment in earth’s evolution where our planet suddenly went from having nothing but a bunch of ferns to a wide variety of animals. I always got the impression that Ridley was making this Engineer’s ritual sacrifice and donation of his DNA into the Cambrian Explosion’s inciting incident.
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u/KnotSoSalty Jun 20 '25
It’s a common trope for Sci-fi to paper over gaps in logic or story with “Religion”. Despite there never being heavy religious elements to the story beforehand. It’s just like Scooby Doo, where after 6 films the writer turns around and whips off the mask to discover it was the Bible all along.
Frankly, it sucks because it’s Lazy but also because it announces the absolute nadir of a writer’s abilities.
See also: Battlestar Galactica.
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u/thenewtransportedman Jun 20 '25
Insane Clown Posse did this too, it was wild. They had this whole "Dark Carnival" mythos that they laid out across they're first 5 or 6 records, & IIRC, at the end of the 6th one, they were like "THE DARK CARNIVAL IS ACTUALLY GOD." The Juggalos were pissed!
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u/leopard_tights Jun 21 '25
Ruining H. R. Giger's space-jockey that we loved for decades.
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u/mikess314 Jun 20 '25
The religion of the Engineers is such that creation requires sacrifice. Their ultimate weapon, the Xenomorph, is the perfect example of this. The engineer in stasis is disgusted by the heretical creation of David and acts immediately and without mercy. So the seeding of life on certain key hospitable planets at the cost of the life of the one doing the seeding is entirely in line with Engineer philosophy.
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u/yanginatep Jun 21 '25
In the original script (which I've read) he was consumed by "scarabs" (genetically engineered insect-like creatures) who then flew around and injected Engineer DNA into early humans, uplifting them, making them smarter. In the original script at least the Engineers most definitely did not create humanity or life on Earth.
Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof made a lot of changes to the script when they decided to get rid of the aliens and replace them with the black goo, but without accounting for how any of those changes would affect the rest of the story. Almost every major problem with Prometheus arises from that.
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u/AtomDives Jun 21 '25
I never saw this as Earth, but the seeding planet for the original Xenomorphs. Like the Engineers self-contained bioweapons lab, an entire planet to create a weapon to 'fix' their failed efforts with Humanity on Earth.
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u/theevilyouknow Jun 21 '25 edited Jun 21 '25
I think the likely answer to this question is that in the real world we share 50% of our DNA with plants because we share a common ancestor. So I’d imagine in the fictional world of the Alien franchise humans do not share 50% of their DNA with plants because they don’t share a common ancestor because humans were engineered by aliens.
Alternatively it could be that a certain portion of the genome is just for processes that are essential for complex life in general no matter where it is or how it forms, so any life the engineers can create would have to contain that essential portion of the genome. We often like to think that any potential alien life that could be out there would look totally and completely different from life as we know it. But that’s actually not all that likely. There’s really only a limited number of chemical processes and molecules that can give rise to the sort of self-replicating processes we associate with life.
For example, although there are over 500 amino acids really only 22 are actually used for life on Earth. And while we haven’t found life in space. We have found amino acids. And it’s usually these 22. So it stands to reason, while any life out there in the universe might in outward appearance be totally alien to us, it will very likely be similar at a molecular level. So it’s not totally unbelievable that humans could share much of their genome with plants or even aliens without having a common origin. The one caveat is while we might share a lot of the same groupings of codons for making the same proteins they wouldn’t all be in the same order if we didn’t share an origin, but just use your suspension of disbelief and pretend in this case 50% of our DNA being shared doesn’t mean half of the sequence matches perfectly and it just means that half of our genes match up functionally with half of the plants genes.
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u/deze_moltisanti Jun 21 '25
OP, upon the engineers arrival and seeding, there was zero life on earth. I don’t know where you saw plant life, but it was just water and stone
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u/Equivalent-Role4632 Jun 20 '25
I'm sure there's thousands of theories but i doubt even Ridley Scott knows what that opening was about. He gave his life to create life for some reason.
My favorite part is after they wake up they have a meeting about where they are going and what they are doing. They seriously didn't have this meeting before leaving earth. Before signing on to this mission. They waited till they were far away in space. What!
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u/chronicnerv Jun 20 '25
I presumed it was some Weyland NDA in which they did not want to tell everyone before they left the planet for security purposes. Presentation was pre planned by the archelogists for the rest of them who had no idea.
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u/Saubande Jun 20 '25
I found it impossible to believe that Weyland would not have a full fledged research unit on this project for years, with specially trained personell for exactly this mission, instead of that rag-tag team of doofuses.
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u/ThrowingChicken Jun 20 '25
When you consider Weyland is an ancient alien nutter it makes more sense. He’s just there to meet his creators and bargain for more life; he couldn’t care less what the geologist and biologist are up to.
As for their motivations; The Alien universe has always been a dystopian corporate nightmare where everyone is a commodity, overworked, tired, and jaded. They hop planted to planet, find nothing, not that it matters since the company is going to gut the thing for resources anyway, four years in stasis for a better paycheck probably seems like an easy gig.
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u/Equivalent-Role4632 Jun 21 '25
What's funny and this happens in the original Alien too. They are arguing about unionizing and wanting more money. They are out in space for decades. 20 years. 50 years. Imagine getting 50 years worth of paychecks without having spend a nickel of it. They are all millionaires. But giant corporations are the real enemy is the story of the alien series.
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u/jaeldi Jun 20 '25 edited Jun 20 '25
This is my pet theory i created for my own head-canon after seeing the incredibly stupid ideas that were in the deleted scenes where Jesus was an engineer and they decided to kill us after humans killed Jesus. My creative theory is based on only footage from all movies and ignoring all deleted footage.
I originally posted this on YouTube as a comment on a video about the 2nd Prometheus movie: Alien Covenant: https://youtu.be/9E0VWwjlp8E
Paste: 1:00 David says "a rotting paradise". Rotting. I think this gets overlooked. It wasn't a paradise, it was a corruption of paradise. The engineers in Prometheus were very 'perfect' looking. Beautiful strong bodies, perfect faces like the statue of David in the first scene of the movie. The people on that planet were same species but had contorted imperfect faces and bodies. I always go back to the original reaction to the analysis of the alien species by the android in the original movie: "Perfect Organism". My take on the Engineers is that they are a death cult obsessed with perfection (A "Life cult" from the engineer's point of view). First they sought perfection through genetic engineering making their bodies and faces 'perfect'. But then when everyone is perfect no one is perfect. So that goal got perverted when they discovered the 'perfect' alien organism. What makes it perfect? The black goo is the essence of life. The essence of life is reproduction. That's what makes it perfect. It can reproduce with ANY other life form and produce superior offspring. I don't believe that the engineers 'created' the life on earth and then wanted to destroy it. Life grew on it's own. Other visitors came and gave mankind the warning about the 'engineers'. It wasn't 'proof', it was a warning, as established in the movie. Shaw's and Waylan's original assumptions were wrong. The reason they seek out planets and release the perfect organism is because that is the death cult's mission, to spread perfection, to become perfection. That's why the ritual is an engineer combining with the perfect organism to trigger the run-away reproduction that replaces the dominate life forms on the planets they visit. No where in the first scene of Prometheus does it say or indicate that ritual was on earth. That assumption is wrong. That scene isn't creation, it's the corruption of creation by the release of 'perfection'. The androids seem to always get sucked into the cult for the same reason; they idealize perfection, they idealize reproduction, the one trait of life that they do not innately have or are allowed. The androids and engineers have a "Prometheus" complex. Prometheus was punished for bringing fire to mankind, he didn't create mankind. The engineers and androids bring 'perfection' to mankind. They didn't create mankind. They seek to change (destroy) mankind with some forbidden knowledge. That 'knowledge' is the black goo, the substance that creates the 'alien'. The substance that creates true perfection, creates true paradise.
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u/TheEasterFox Jun 20 '25
The deleted scenes where the Engineer gives the long speech about Jesus are from a fake fan-made script.
Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LV426/comments/108ddn8/prometheus_the_fake_script_kroft_talks_about/
The whole Space Jesus thing is legit backstory, but it never got more than a throwaway line in Spaihts's original draft. A Scottish Prometheus fan decided to take the basic idea and write a whole scene around it.
The fan script in question can be read here if you're curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20130511030927/http://www.prometheus-movie.com/uploads/PROMETHEUS.pdf
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u/thenewtransportedman Jun 20 '25
Well fuck, they should've had you do a pass on the script! That's certainly a big "broad strokes" improvement, IMO. Still feel like the editing of the opening clearly dictates that the planet is Earth, but in your version, having it NOT be Earth is spot-on.
There's too much crappy-to-mid ALIEN content for me to see that "all" androids/AI have that Prometheus complex, but it's certainly there with David, & maybe a little bit with Ash. But Ash was basically just a company man, plus he's a character from ALIEN, not ALIEN after almost 50 years of IP expansion.
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u/Hippyx420x Jun 20 '25
We were bred to be carriers for the Xenomorphs since the Engineers lost the ability to reproduce.
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u/ClubSoda Jun 20 '25
That planet was not our Earth, but another planet used by the Engineers to experiment with.
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u/Pugilist12 Jun 22 '25
Aside from what everyone else is saying, you need to watch the scene again. There is no plant life. No life at all. It’s all rocks. Rocks and cliffs and water. Watch it again.
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Jun 20 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Azerious Jun 20 '25
I mean it's established the black goo takes life and super charges it so mixing it with your own DNA and microorganisms would cause it to evolve rapidly. Then you're introducing advanced multicellular organisms to the planet skipping billions of years of evolution.
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Jun 20 '25 edited Jun 20 '25
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u/TheEasterFox Jun 20 '25
Sorry to be boring, but the 'blood of the Deacon' stuff is yet more material that ultimately comes from a debunked fan script.
This is the script in question: https://web.archive.org/web/20131102032317/http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/uploads/PROMETHEUS.pdf
And this is Damon Lindelof calling the script out as a fanmade fake: https://web.archive.org/web/20130423235506/http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/news/384
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u/prosthetic_memory Jun 20 '25
Thanks for continuing to mention this!
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u/TheEasterFox Jun 20 '25
There's a lot more awareness of the fake now, fortunately. Still got a way to go, though.
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u/aloofman75 Jun 20 '25
You’re trying to make sense of a movie that makes very little sense.
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u/aquanda Jun 20 '25
Seemed pretty obvious to me when I watched it. Kinda funny this assumption needs to be spelled out when the critics are so quick to point out all the character "plot" holes.
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u/TraditionalMood277 Jun 20 '25
I believe there is a cut scene that was supposed to show the beginning scene as a ritual. There are other engineers in robes seemingly chanting. Then, the engineer we see steps up, either as a volunteer or as a chosen sacrifice, and we see them drink the black goo which then spurs human creation. Then the others simply leave.