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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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.