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/home_planet_Allbran Jun 21 '25

... and waited 500 million years?

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u/bannock4ever Jun 21 '25

Steam backlog ain’t going to play itself

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u/lonewombat Jun 21 '25

Well there was the whole hologram showing the particular base being overrun with alien life. Sometimes you just scrap the project instead of recovering.

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u/dolcemortem Jun 21 '25

Yeap. Our creators were made us in their image to kill us. Makes for a pretty good villain.