With the critically unstable landing of Prometheus in theaters, confusion lay incubating inside the chest cavity of audiences everywhere. Open-endedness to frustrate, the reaction still remains polarizing; having some wonder…is it just too smart for most today’s crowd? Soaked with intellectual metaphor, the film brings about mind-altering philosophical and theological reflection while largely leaving the audience to piece together immediate story elements. Much like life itself, creation having overwhelming narrative presence, you’re left to derive meaning for yourself. Now Ridley Scott’s return to the Alien mythos is hitting Blu-ray this October 8th and it’s promising to deliver answers with its over seven hours of special features and deleted scenes destined to stoke re-analysis.

Mythology and Theology: The title and shared moniker of the vessel cover the allegorical foundation. The film and viral campaign offer just a summarized spark-note of the tale of the fire-bringer. To shed some light onto the ambiguity, an in-depth account of the mythology is mandatory. As with most myths, there are multiple variations of the same general story, so I will be drawing from the numerous adaptations and amalgamating them based upon the parallels established in the film.

Prometheus was a son of the Titan Iapetos. He was tasked with the creation of mankind, a chore that stoked long-running conflict with the king of the Gods, Zeus. He began molding man from mud and clay, the Goddess Athena breathing life into their figures, whiles his brother, Epimetheus, endowed them with multiple qualities and populated their world with many creatures. Prometheus came to have more affections for man than he did the Olympians, bestowing upon them other attributes his brother did not, those of which were not approved by the Gods. Zeus did not share this love, so he had man confined to Earth and denied immortality.

When Zeus decreed that man must present animal sacrifices, Prometheus fooled him out of taking the best portions for the Gods and instead acquired them for the feasting of man. For this, fire was taken from mankind so that they may only feast on raw flesh. In defiance, Prometheus climbed Mount Olympus with agenda afoot. Bringing fennel stalk in hand, he ignited it from the sun and gifted its embers to his creations.

His punishment was…severe. For his theft, the fire-bringer was restrained and forced to daily endure an eagle tearing out his regenerating liver, condemned to eternal agony unless either an immortal elect to die for him or kill the eagle and unbind him. Beforehand, the ruler of the Olympians also sought to hurt those he cared for most. He had the first women made, granting her rather misogynistic traits with which to bring about misery upon the new-found mankind. Epimetheus, despite the warnings from his brother to not trust the offerings of Zeus, wed his beautiful gift from the Gods. Her name was Pandora…and if you can recollect your middle school mythology, you’re probably familiar with her infamous box.

Sound familiar at all? Multiple characters are reward-seeking, the fire with which they can illuminate their lives. Likely due to her missionary father, Shaw deeply desires to meet her maker and have answers to the great cosmic questions. She devotedly predicts that her star map leads to the architects of man before she ever truly knew it, highlighting her individual theme of faith. For Wayland, the Olympian flames are what he believes to be the proverbial Holy Grail. He’s striving to reach godhood by gaining the knowledge of immortality, desperately believing that if our makers created us…then surely they could also preserve us. Even David can be interpreted as stealing the metaphorical fire when he takes the urn from the pyramid, the crew being symbolically burned for it.

“Genesis 1:27 – So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.”

Perhaps the most overt representatives of the Titan Prometheus are the so-called Engineers. Shaw discovers that their DNA is almost identically matching our own. The mysterious black goo is evocative of the mud with which we were sculpted by our benefactor. It’s enclosed in egg-shaped storage containers (yet more symbolism for birth and beginnings) which mirror the face-hugging cargo of the derelict ship on LV-426. Similarly, Pandora was also created from earth, the same as we were. Through the different outcomes produced by the liquid, this presents the in-depth dichotomy of the human condition. This is repeated in the Engineers, going from fathering mankind to our attempted destroyers for a number of theoretical reasons. Following suit, the original working title for the film was to be Paradise, which now is rumored to be the title for the probable sequel. They become our fallen angels in Paradise Lost.

Why they created this primordial liquid anti-life (ultimately resulting in their death) is already a highly theorized subject. One popular theory (HERE) claims that their sudden anger toward us was sparked by our crucifying of their representative. There are quite a few nods to this. Shaw does have a sort of virgin birth that leads to what eventually will become her savior. Holloway’s dubbed tomb is filled with what seems to have ceilings painted with almost biblical murals. The Engineers have a sort of resurrection, the last of their LV-223 compound (likely a reference to Leviticus 223) being awakened from its coffin-like cryo-slumber. The worms are transformed into the serpentine so-called “hammerpede,” allegorically Christian imagery evoking the Garden of Eden. This even all takes place over the Christmas season. While it’s certainly not all just coincidental, Ridley Scott has this to say on the theorized Jesus motif being put into the movie:

“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.”  

He confirms that there are biblical threads resonating through the script, particularly in the first draft, but essentially says that’s not the literal narrative itself, no more than the plot of James Cameron’s Aliens is about the Vietnam war so much as just baring allusions to it. That’s just one thematically element in the scope of theological significance featured in Prometheus. It’s also got quite a bit more holes in it than Engineers have in their chests. So if this is confirmed as not being the definitive in continuity answer for why the Engineers want to destroy us…this recycles the question.

The Gnostics (who flourished during approximately 150 to 400 A.D.) tried to answer the question “How can a perfect God create an imperfect world?” Their answer took its inspiration from Plato who, in the Timaeus, had argued that our material universe was created by an inferior craftsman who worked for God as a kind of laborer. The Gnostics liked this idea and modified it into many different variations. For them, the realms of spirit and matter were like the two ends of a very long spectrum. God inhabited the spiritual domain and employed intermediary beings in order to create things that were more material than Himself.

Imagine a ladder stretching downward from the divine realm. Each step down brings us closer to the material world. It also brings us downward into realms of increasing imperfection. Every step of this ladder was ruled by a Being called an Archon, and each Archon became less Godlike and more prone to evil as we move downward in the hierarchy. The last Archon (who is often named Ialdabaoth in the Gnostic texts) created our material universe. Since this Archon was very evil, our universe is itself evil according to the Gnostics. Ialdabaoth created humanity in the Divine Image in order to mock God. However, God has the last laugh in the Gnostic system because he filled the material creations of Ialdabaoth with the Divine Spark and thus animated us by giving us spirits.

Although we are trapped in the evil material world designed by Ialdabaoth we possess the potential to discover the Divine Spark within ourselves and return to the spiritual realm from where we originally came. Sadly, most people (just like the people trapped in the Matrix) remain unaware that they are divine creatures and stay imprisoned here in the material world, which they mistakenly believe is the only world. But some people, through “gnosis” (a mystical state of awareness attained through spiritual practices and meditation) manage to see beyond the illusions created by Ialdabaoth and attain an awareness of their true natures.

Gnostic myth (which is actually an amalgam of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Zoroastrianism, and very probably Buddhism) has exerted an immense influence over the past two thousand years. Modern and contemporary science fiction incorporates an amazing amount of Gnostic themes. Stories like Heinlein’s “Universe” and the Matrix films all focus on individuals who discover that their worldviews are complete delusions and that reality is utterly different from what they had previously believed, Prometheus baring elements of the theme of the Archons. “Who created them?”

Art and Architecture: One of the greatest misconceptions being spread about this film is that it’s not actually an Alien prequel. While it may be slightly indirect, the films highly enhance one another. Comparative viewings shed light on their more shadowed plot-points. Even the trailers for both are noticeably similar, right down to identical musical cues.

Studying the artwork for the original Alien reveals some interesting evidence. The Engineer ships foreshadow their relationship to us with their skeletal internal passageways, the scaffolding upon which we are built. Swiss artist H.R. Giger originally designed the derelict ship (and the extraterrestrials themselves) to incorporate subconscious aesthetics of somewhat awkward sexuality (externally giving it vaginal canals and phallus elements) to resonate the original film thematically being about survival post rape. This perpetuates that theme of conception as well as the outcome not always being desirable.

“I always wanted to go back and make an Alien 5 or 6, where we find out where they came from and go there and answer the question, “who are they?” Mars is too close so they can’t be gods of war, but the theory was, in my head was, this was an aircraft carrier, a battlewagon of a civilization, and the eggs were a cargo which were essentially weapons. So right, like a large form of bacteriological stroke bio-mechanoid warfare.” – Ridley Scott (1999).

The original idea for the unexplained Space Jockey (also known as the Pilot and now Engineer) was that of creatures who would basically dive-bomb a planet with genocidal plagues. The LV-426 ship contained thousands of eggs in what appears to be a fog-inducing stasis that crew-member Kane broke upon falling inside. This implies they knew at some point that their cargo was dangerous…but much like the Titan himself and the Nostromo’s unfortunate second officer, the Space Jockey has its abdomen chewed open.

Exploring the work of Giger brings about noticeable amounts of resurfaced designs originally abandoned by Alien. From his steady use of monolithic heads harkening to some perverted and macabre Easter Island to even the first unused face-hugger designs, far more cephalopod than arachnid, Prometheus reinvigorates the old ideas of its cinematic roots. It also draws heavily upon its sci-fi film brethren, pulling largely from 1956’s Forbidden Planet and its ancient lost alien civilization, destroyed by their own technologies. The Prometheus crew attire in the uncannily similar retro-space suits of Russia’s Planeta Bur/Planet of the Storms and obvious nuances to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1965’s Planet of the Vampires, a relatively unheard of cult movie, directly inspired both Prometheus and Alien with its arcane beacon used to lure the unsuspecting crew to its blood-thirsty terrain, dilapidated craft riddled with extraterrestrial remains, yet more of the same space-suit fashion statement, and even zombifying residents. Even the Engineers draw from classic science-fiction and horror literature and cinema by carrying titanic and cadaverous similarities with the creature from The Thing from Another World, the original film version of the later more popular remake by John Carpenter, 1982’s The Thing.

Archaeology and Paleontology:  In Alien, upon finding the Jockey dead in the pilot seat, Nostromo captain Dallas assesses that it’s fossilized. If all this were accurate then the Jockey would have to have been millions of years old. Fossilization is completely dependent upon chance natural circumstances. It requires burial, compression, and time. It doesn’t fit the criteria. When once we believed that the bizarre elephantine alien literally was the bodily remains of the…thing, now we know it’s merely a kind of hazmat suit for the enclosed Engineer. I am lead to believe that Dallas simply mistook the skeletal suit to be a fossil rather than it actually having been fossilized.

“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, et cetera.” – Ridley Scott (on the opening of Prometheus).

The opening scenes show the process of creating life, a procedure that depends upon their self-sacrifice. Where we seeded with the first microbes and Darwinism took course or were we created after the extinction of the dinosaur? “Big things have small beginnings,” references one of Wayland’s (and Ridley Scott’s) favorite films, Lawrence of Arabia, but also calls to mention the microorganisms that began life as we know it. Mammals had little presence in the Mesozoic. The earliest were bottom of the food chain mammal-like reptiles that co-existed with the thunder lizard. The first evidence of bipedal man is credited to Australopithecus and dates back somewhere between four to one million years ago. If we were planted post-Mesozoic…the theory of evolution has officially been discredited in the Prometheus universe.

Chariots of the Gods was a 1968 published book by author Erich von Daniken. It proposed that some ancient civilizations had technologies far too sophisticated to have naturally existed at that time. He claims that evidence points to outside extraterrestrial influences being the cause of their accelerated advancement or even possible making. Regardless of the real-world credibility or lack thereof, the film blatantly utilizes elements of von Daniken’s hypothesis via the culture-spanning “invitations” discovered by Shaw and Holloway. These call to mind ancient astronaut theory, particularly readily used examples like the Nazca geoglyph lines.

Pyramids are often cited by ancient astronaut theorists for their culture spanning presence. While it can be easily dismissed as just being universally recognized for its structural efficiency, its place in many ancient civilizations that never had or couldn’t have had any known interactions has led some to believe in interstellar influences. In the original Alien, the Jockey race was to be more predominately featured. Due to budget restraints and pacing it was entirely scrapped. The Nostromo crew was to have discovered the titanic corpse in a blinding dust storm with an etched triangle upon its consul. When the storm settles down, a gigantic pyramidal temple was to be revealed and explored. Inside they find a tablet chronicling the life-cycle of the xenomorph and how they were used in human sacrifices. If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because this concept was adapted into the plot of the less than popular Aliens vs. Predator. The pyramid also became a layover for the 1981 science-fiction B-movie, Galaxy of Terror, the poor mans Alien coincidentally production designed by Alien sequel director, James Cameron.

The cave painting and hieroglyphics reveal that the Engineers have visited and re-visited Earth throughout our existence up until 2,000 years ago when we seemingly displeased them. Shaw interpreted the drawings to be an invitation…but why would they invite us to LV-223 if it were a military compound? I believe these drawings were actually warnings from early humankind, the Engineers periodically abducting human beings to do experiments upon them to discover what we’re susceptible to.

In the so-called tomb that contains the urns, there’s an enigmatic xenomorph carving fixed into the wall. If the climactic xenomorph is an evolutionary predecessor, how could this carving exist? The Engineers are confirmed by Scott to have Mayan-like culture anchors, the Meso-Americans being known for their legendary apocalyptic predictions. This carving is almost like that of an idol that’s placed for worshiping near an unknowable emerald gemstone. Add to that that Prometheus literally means foresight.

I believe, at some point, between our seeding and the creation of the instillation at LV-223, an Engineer had a precognitive vision of the xenomorph. They foresaw it becoming something of an intergalactic Black Plague. Most importantly, its creation somehow revolved around humanity, believing that we intentionally created it. This is reinforced by the hostilities of the Roman Empire, some 2,000 years ago, witnessing us progressing toward very violent tendencies.

The xenomorph became the deity of bereavement, manifestation of death incarnate, the reminder of what is to become should they fail. This statue-like object is placed in one of their holds, the cargo being their weaponry. I believe they wanted to kill us because they believe our destruction would prevent galactic destruction. Our existence would bring about the dawning of Armageddon.

Biology and Evolution: With their advancement, surely the Engineer race didn’t have to experiment with bioweapons to exterminate us. Yet they did and through their experimenting they accidentally cause their own unwanted decline. The known xenomorph life-cycle takes a life to create new life (literally and figuratively) through the incubating chest-busters that kill their host upon their birth. Even those infants mature into biological weapons themselves, a form of living death. This enforces survival of the fittest and sacrifice again being of prominent sociological respect to the Engineer civilization. David states that to sometimes create life one must first destroy it. With a nod to Mary Shelly, that quote being eerily similar to one featured in Universal’s Frankenstein, it calls attention to the extinction of the dinosaurs that paved the way for mammalian dominance.

Needless to say, things went awry. The dilapidated remains of their bioengineering instillation and war ships are populated by their corpses. Upon finding a decapitated head of one of these Engineers, they electrically re-animate the muscles to extract information. Not so subtly parallel Frankenstein again, this even deeper extends to the Asimov coined Frankenstein Complex; fear of losing control of your creations. Unsurprisingly, the subtitle of Mary Shelly’s literary masterpiece is The Modern Prometheus.

The iconic xenomorph has specific anatomical and physiological traits that have been entrenched into popular culture. Here we can see related characteristics in the mutated alien creatures, pointing to the black goo containing universal genetic coding that it imprints into whatever touch it. We have:

The Hammerpede: When the assuredly indigenous worms came into contact with the black liquid, they were rapidly evolved into the hostile cobra-like creatures that resulted in the death of the ships biologist. It’s shown to have acidic blood, regenerative abilities, and heightened strength powerful enough to break an adult human arm. It then thrusts itself down the throat of the victim. It doesn’t appear to lay any sort of embryo in its sufferer, despite more than a few anatomical and behavioral similarities with the face-hugger.

Holloway and Fifield: When Charlie Holloway consumes the drink David contaminated (presumably on the order of Wayland), he seems to become ill as if infected with some sort of plague virus. Whether this was killing him or just mutating him is uncertain. The final results are unknown, but one thing is for sure. Charlie had one bad day. The ships douche baggy tattooed geologist, upon slicing off the head of the Hammerpede in an attempt to rescue his coworker, has his helmets visor doused in powerful acidic blood. He then trips face first into the seeping black liquid. Bizarrely missing from the Prometheus crew investigation that turned up Millburn’s corpse…he eventually returns as some sort of super powered mutant zombie.

Trilobite: The infected Holloway has intercourse with the infertile Shaw. Somehow she ends up three months pregnant with a squid-like Lovecraftian horror. Much like that of the hammerpede and the xenomorphs seen in later films, the genes rapidly accelerate the creature into adulthood with seemingly no ingestion of matter required. Then shown to be a sort of steroid-enhanced face-hugger, it lays an embryo inside the last engineer. It plants its seed inside its host and then dies.

Proto-Xenomorph: The gestation of a trilobite embryo within an Engineer results in what appears to be a chance evolutionary precursor to the famous xenomorph that haunts the life of Ellen Ripley. It bypassed the chestburter stage and emerges seemingly grown. It was nicknamed the Deacon by the production team, now sent forth to spread the purest word of its lord creator. I’m also of the opinion that “proto-xenomorph” is a slight misnomer fabricated by fan assumptions than ever the official in-continuity title. It may be the first of its individual breed, but not the first of its xenomorph genus.

View life from a strict biological perspective. It could be argued that life’s purpose is to ensure its continuation, not on an individualistic level but rather for the survival of the collective species. Sometimes personal sacrifice is necessary for the well-being of the order. The Engineers promote that theme by committing suicide in order to create something much larger. Shaw is sterile. Coldly scientific though it may be…one could say she’s a biological failure. She cannot procreate. This trait is emphasized.

It would appear that in the steadily evolving life-cycle of the creatures, parasitic trait didn’t sprout into being until Shaw and Holloway had intercourse. This is in contrast to some of the Engineer corpses with holes in their chests however. We know that the iconic alien takes on the genetic imprinting of the host. Ex: If a face-hugger lay with a dog; it will be more canine in appearance. I believe the Trilobite is actually a large mutated effect of enhanced sperm baring the aggressive biological war-machine coding from the black liquid. Due to its conception it was implanted inside the sterile eggs of Shaw, but could not fertilize it. Its heightened survival capabilities rapidly adapted it into a life-giving creature to counteract her inadequacies.

I hypothesize that this sequence of events displays that the only way to get a xenomorph is to introduce sterile human DNA into the black liquid. If the liquid be the same from the opening prologue, it is shown to break down Engineer matter. This is probably the reason for their Hazmat-like suits. It however does not have the same effect on human beings, making them hostile mutants. They designed their anti-life to plague us but rather, as divine punishment for breaking their purpose of creation with the intent upon our extinction or simply out of natural irony, it scoured them.

That is my theory of the origin of xenomorph beginnings, the Engineers effects resulting in the creation of an embryo-laying creature that in turn creates biomechanoid life. Due to their abducting of human beings, at some point they experimented upon a sterile human and tests went horribly wrong and resulted in a monstrous parasite that spread across the compound. The Engineers were killed, some of which were impregnated, consequently resulting in the happenings of the films immediate plot.

 

Philosophy and Ethics: Despite the mixed reactions, one stable positive seems to unanimously be Michael Fassbender. Prometheus is often criticized for the majority of the crew caricatures feeling throw-away, the irony being that they feeling more robotic and uninteresting than the artificial David. I don’t believe that is without purpose, intending a profound subconscious humanizing of the synthetic more than with many of the humans themselves. This makes his caricature resonate into questions delving into reanalyzing what defines human life and reason, sentience and, if at all, the intrinsic value of it all. This is magnified by the conversation he shares with Holloway, “We made you because we could.” “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?”

David seems to bare hidden motivations that sometimes feel as if they teetered upon just a whim, naive child-like curiosities Wayland perhaps never instructed. Like the wondering of Greek myths first woman that resulted in plagues and horrors rushing into the world, our first of its kind android opens the metaphorical Pandora’s box time and again, nothing pleasant ever being freed. Correlating are the black containers, mirroring not only the eggs of Alien but also large urns, life and death, breaking down into the original Greek version of the Pandora myth being more jar than ever box. Hidden deep within David’s moral uncertainty, where he feels just as likely to shove his hand through your chest as he is to profusely apologize for the blood he gets on your shirt in nods to Blade Runner, there’s more than meets the eye.

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed that things that look and act too much like humans can appear…creepy. In stark contrast, cartoonish robot parodies tend to be considered quite charming. Mori hypothesized that somewhere between faceless machines and those that are indistinguishable from human beings lies what he called the Uncanny Valley. The uncomfortable emotions that advanced human robotics stir up are caused by the echoing of our own fragility and comparative significance, where we can step outside the box and observe a manner of ourselves. Ultimately this is the novelty of Prometheus and likely the simultaneous divider, people often afraid of admitting to their possible unimportance, David being the subconscious catalyst to the over-all point and purpose of that keynote. Are we nothing but programmed wind-up toys to our divine craftsmen?

To quote Ridley Scott, “Of course what I want to do is scare the living shit out of you.”  The underlying horror lies within the films unknown, uncomfortably echoing our real-world  late night pondering on purpose and meanings. The Blu-ray reveals a deleted scene in which Peter Wayland explains to the awoken Engineer that he created David and thus is worthy of godly immortality. Perhaps out of revulsion or primitively just out of cold brutality, Wayland is subsequently murdered by the Jockey with the severed head of his own artistry, paralleling the Engineers downfall. From a manner of speaking, Wayland is granted at least one answer, even if it’s disappointingly nothing whatsoever. What comes after death? Prometheus provides answers in its own subtle subtext while offering an unending paradox of creator and creation that echoes our own fragility and the terrors of an existence with no celestial significance. We endlessly search for answers to the most remedial of questions and yet if we are provided even so much as an inkling…we may regret those yearnings.

As Peter Wayland says on creating cybernetic individuals, “We are the Gods now.” Were we no more than assembly line product designed to serve our maker, our cosmic value ultimately just the delusional ego of inflated self-importance? The provoking and core-speaking climaxes to the questions are that there may be no answer. There may be no purpose. As David seemingly randomly quotes, “There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing,” yet again references Lawrence of Arabia, but more poignantly echoing mankind’s very personal quest for substance and our in-explicit necessity for it, be it fabricated or not. The script is very self-aware, chaotically employing these concepts in the narrative itself, thematically and literally. Where do we come from? What is our purpose? These are not the wondering of Shaw and the crew, the characters are vessels for us, delivering a social commentary to the audience on everything from theology and religion to self-worth. It’s not about the theorizing and hypothesizing reaching proper solutions. It’s about the delving we do for our answers more than it’s ever about the correct answers themselves. It’s about why we do it. The underlying success of Prometheus lay within its often denounced ambiguity, exploiting our burning anxieties and fears of triviality and inconsequentiality …and if there is meaning to life beyond merely living it, if they should be, perhaps only the Gods should know.