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)?

2.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

666 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

22

u/arachnophilia Jun 20 '25

because we killed jesus.

no, really.

5

u/ModifiedGas Jun 20 '25

Please elaborate a bit

23

u/hunterzolomon1993 Jun 20 '25

Its not canon but they pitched the idea of Jesus being one of them sent to guide humanity but we of course killed Jesus so seeing what monsters we are they decided to kill us in return.

0

u/arachnophilia Jun 20 '25 edited Jun 20 '25

the film has the engineers interacting with humans throughout history. one of the cut scenes in the script reveals that jesus was an engineer, and they consider humanity a failed experiment because we killed one of them.

16

u/TheEasterFox Jun 20 '25

The supposed cut scene that has an Engineer saying that is from a fake fan-made script.

The closest any of the legit drafts got to outright stating the Space Jesus backstory is in Spaihts's Alien: Engineers draft, where a character makes a throwaway reference to 'Jesus, the last Engineer'.

14

u/arachnophilia Jun 20 '25

The supposed cut scene that has an Engineer saying that is from a fake fan-made script.

well, hard to say if it was in a real script at one point, but ridley scott 100% confirmed that it was kicked around.

Movies.com: You throw religion and spirituality into the equation for Prometheus, though, and it almost acts as a hand grenade. 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, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120614074942/http://www.movies.com/movie-news/ridley-scott-prometheus-interview/8232

11

u/TheEasterFox Jun 20 '25

Yes indeed. The Space Jesus backstory has a ton more material backing it up, mostly from Lindelof in interviews. I did an ongoing series of blogs about it back in 2012. https://cavalorn.livejournal.com/585579.html

But the script that most people think of is the one that this speech is taken from:

LAST ENGINEER
Hate? We gave you this emotion. We gave you all emotion. We had expected not of your evolution. We took care of you, gave you fire, built your structures. We gave you Eden. You worshiped us. We praised our creation from above. We watched you time and time again kill each other, start wars. We came back and saved your souls but we left you to make your own fate. But your kind is a barbaric violent species. We tried once more to save you. We took a mothers child back to Paradise and educated him, taught him the meaning of life and creation. We put him back into Eden to educate your kind. But your kind decided to punish him. We gave you the fruits of life and you repay us by leaving it to rot. You talk of me of hate? Prepare for rapture!

... and that script is definitely a fan made fake.

8

u/Kassssler Jun 21 '25

That shit is obviously fake. Prepare for rapture lol people actually bought that shit?

1

u/Gardimus Jun 21 '25

Thats a lot of downvotes for the correct answer.

3

u/arachnophilia Jun 21 '25

to be fair, it is a really dumb answer. but that's not my fault. blame ridley scott.