Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.
Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He
was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place,
forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that,
until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to
be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to
a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an
eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)
Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with
his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of
this article.
The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary
sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the
ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden
Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a life giver who voluntarily dies for
the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and
proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not
ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.
Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We
fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth.
According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a
waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that
causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the
fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiraling into DNA
helices.
The Engineers?
At the beginning of the movie, a humanoid alien debarks on Earth and drinks a strange liquid.
An alien is dropped off on Earth by a massive spaceship.
After drinking the liquid, the alien completely disintegrates and falls into the water.
So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding
principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and
including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life.
Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity
are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the
most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.
The alien is disintegrated at its very core, at the DNA level and interacts with the Earth’s water to create a new life form.
In the water, the DNA triggers a biogenetic reaction and, on a microscopic level, we see single cells beginning to multiply themselves. This is the movie’s theory on how human life appeared on Earth.
The movie’s title screen shows a single cell multiplying itself, creating life on Earth.
The movie then fast forwards to 2089, where two archeologists, Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway, are searching a cave in Scotland. The crew of the Prometheus discovers an ancient
chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same
black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you
did as I asked earlier on, you will recognize instantly: the life giver with
his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. The researchers discover that this particular star formation can be found in the art of several ancient cultures.
The star formation in this cave painting is similar to star formations found in ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Mayan art.
The archeologists believe that aliens (whom they call the “Engineers”) came from this particular star formation and spread human life on Earth. This causes them to embark on a space mission to find that planet and seek answers from the Engineers.
The premise of the movie is heavily inspired by the “Ancient Astronauts” theory originally proposed by authors such as Eric Von Daniken and Robert Temple. According to those theories, humanity was either created or “helped” by visitors from another planet, who left lasting traces on human history.
The director of Prometheus, Ridley Scott, appears to believe this theory. In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, he stated:
“NASA and the Vatican agree that it is almost mathematically impossible that we can be where we are today without there being a little help along the way … That’s what we’re looking at (in the film), at some of Eric Von Daniken’s ideas of how did we humans come about”.
– Hollywood Reporter, “Ridley Scott’s New Alien Movie Influenced by Ancient Astronaut Theory
– Hollywood Reporter, “Ridley Scott’s New Alien Movie Influenced by Ancient Astronaut Theory
Ancient Astronauts
Proponents of the Ancient Astronauts theory believe that much of human knowledge, culture and religion are remnants of an alien “mother culture”. Ancient monuments considered to be too advanced for the technology of the time such as Stonehedge, Easter Island and the Great Pyramid of Giza are considered to be proof of alien contact. Eric Von Daniken also claims that ancient art and iconography throughout the world contain depictions of space vehicles, non-human intelligent creatures and advanced technology. He claims that cultures that had no contact with one another had similar themes in their art, proving that there was a common source for their knowledge.
An actual cave painting found in Italy that is said to depict Ancient Astronauts visiting earth. This image was probably the inspiration for the cave painting found in Prometheus.
Egyptian hieroglyph said to depict flying machines.
In Prometheus, similarities between Egyptian, Mayan, Sumerian and other civilization’s artifacts prompt the research team to travel to space and seek humanity’s “Engineers”.
Proponents of the Ancient Astronauts theory claim that many ancient religious texts contain references to visitors from outer space. Two of the main works often cited are the Book of Genesis and the Book of Enoch, which both mention the existence on Earth of enigmatic giant beings named the Nephilim.
The Movie Storyline
Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a more conventional plot. I'd like to draw your attention to the use of motifs and callbacks in the film that not only enrich it, but offer possible hints as to what was going on in otherwise confusing scenes.
Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)
Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.
The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a life giver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.
Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.
Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: '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. 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, etcetera.'
Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.
And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'
So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.
Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.
The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the life giver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.
And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'
Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.
From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.
If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:
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.
Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.
So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.
So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.
The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.
Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakable
Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.
Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. (His liver magically grew back, in case you were wondering.)
Fix that image in your mind, please: the giver of life, with his abdomen torn open. We'll be coming back to it many times in the course of this article.
The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life's sake. That's a pattern we see replicated throughout the ancient world. J G Frazer wrote his lengthy anthropological study, The Golden Bough, around the idea of the Dying God - a life giver who voluntarily dies for the sake of the people. It was incumbent upon the King to die at the right and proper time, because that was what heaven demanded, and fertility would not ensue if he did not do his royal duty of dying.
Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista, which may or may not be primordial Earth. According to Ridley Scott, it doesn't matter. A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.
Ridley Scott has this to say about the scene: '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. 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, etcetera.'
Can we find a God in human history who creates plant life through his own death, and who is associated with a river? It's not difficult to find several, but the most obvious candidate is Osiris, the epitome of all the Frazerian 'Dying Gods'.
And we wouldn't be amiss in seeing the first of the movie's many Christian allegories in this scene, either. The Engineer removes his cloak before the ceremony, and hesitates before drinking the cupful of genetic solvent; he may well have been thinking 'If it be Thy will, let this cup pass from me.'
So, we know something about the Engineers, a founding principle laid down in the very first scene: acceptance of death, up to and including self-sacrifice, is right and proper in the creation of life. Prometheus, Osiris, John Barleycorn, and of course the Jesus of Christianity are all supposed to embody this same principle. It is held up as one of the most enduring human concepts of what it means to be 'good'.
Seen in this light, the perplexing obscurity of the rest of the film yields to an examination of the interwoven themes of sacrifice, creation, and preservation of life. We also discover, through hints, exactly what the nature of the clash between the Engineers and humanity entailed.
The crew of the Prometheus discover an ancient chamber, presided over by a brooding solemn face, in which urns of the same black substance are kept. A mural on the wall presents an image which, if you did as I asked earlier on, you will recognise instantly: the life giver with his abdomen torn open. Go and look at it here to refresh your memory. Note the serenity on the Engineer's face here.
And there's another mural there, one which shows a familiar xenomorph-like figure. This is the Destroyer who mirrors the Creator, I think - the avatar of supremely selfish life, devouring and destroying others purely to preserve itself. As Ash puts it: 'a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.'
Through Shaw and Holloway's investigations, we learn that the Engineers not only created human life, they supervised our development. (How else are we to explain the numerous images of Engineers in primitive art, complete with star diagram showing us the way to find them?) We have to assume, then, that for a good few hundred thousand years, they were pretty happy with us. They could have destroyed us at any time, but instead, they effectively invited us over; the big pointy finger seems to be saying 'Hey, guys, when you're grown up enough to develop space travel, come see us.' Until something changed, something which not only messed up our relationship with them but caused their installation on LV-223 to be almost entirely wiped out.
From the Engineers' perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren't entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.
If you have uneasy suspicions about what 'a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago' might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:
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.
Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.
So, imagine poor crucified Jesus, a fresh spear wound in his side. Oh, hey, there's the 'lifegiver with his abdomen torn open' motif again. That's three times now: Prometheus, Engineer mural, Jesus Christ. And I don't think I have to mention the 'sacrifice in the interest of giving life' bit again, do I? Everyone on the same page? Good.
So how did our (in the context of the film) terrible murderous act of crucifixion end up wiping out all but one of the Engineers back on LV-223? Presumably through the black slime, which evidently models its behaviour on the user's mental state. Create unselfishly, accepting self-destruction as the cost, and the black stuff engenders fertile life. But expose the potent black slimy stuff to the thoughts and emotions of flawed humanity, and 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. We never see the threat that the Engineers were fleeing from, we never see them killed other than accidentally (decapitation by door), and we see no remaining trace of whatever killed them. Either it left a long time ago, or it reverted to inert black slime, waiting for a human mind to reactivate it.
The black slime reacts to the nature and intent of the being that wields it, and the humans in the film didn't even know that they WERE wielding it. That's why it remained completely inert in David's presence, and why he needed a human proxy in order to use the stuff to create anything. The black goo could read no emotion or intent from him, because he was an android.
Shaw's comment when the urn chamber is entered - 'we've changed the atmosphere in the room' - is deceptively informative. The psychic atmosphere has changed, because humans - tainted, Space Jesus-killing humans - are present. The slime begins to engender new life, drawing not from a self-sacrificing Engineer but from human hunger for knowledge, for more life, for more everything. Little wonder, then, that it takes serpent-like form. The symbolism of a corrupting serpent, turning men into beasts, is pretty unmistakable
Refusal to accept death is anathema to the Engineers. Right from the first scene, we learned their code of willing self-sacrifice in accord with a greater purpose. When the severed Engineer head is temporarily brought back to life, its expression registers horror and disgust. Cinemagoers are confused when the head explodes, because it's not clear why it should have done so. Perhaps the Engineer wanted to die again, to undo the tainted human agenda of new life without sacrifice.
The Watchers and the Nephilim
The Book of Genesis mentions the presence on Earth of beings named Nephilim (the King James version uses the term Giants). These beings are described as hybrids that are the result of procreation between human females and “sons of Gods”.
“When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. (…) The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.”
– Genesis 6:1–4 (New International Version)
In Numbers 13, the Nephilim are mentioned again, described as giant destructive beings that appeared quite different from regular humans.
“And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendents of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them”.
– Numbers 13:32-33
The apocryphal Book of Enoch greatly expands on the Nephilim and their originators, the Watchers. According to the text dating from 300 BC, the Watchers were a group formed of 200 “sons of God” who disobeyed God and descended to Earth to breed with humans. They were said to have taught humans advanced skills such as metallurgy, metal working, cosmetics, sorcery, astrology, astronomy and meteorology. Because the Watchers disobeyed God, they were also called the Fallen Angels.
The offspring of the Watchers were the Nephilim, described as giants who lived among humans. They ultimately became a destructive presence on Earth and were said to have consumed “all acquisitions of men”. In order to rid these beings from Earth (along with the humans who mixed with them) God created the Great Flood. In order ensure the survival of humanity, however, Noah was forewarned by God to build his ark.
Another ancient Jewish text, The Book of Jubilees, states that ten percent of the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim were allowed to remain on Earth after the flood, as demons, to try to lead humans astray until the Final Judgement. Is this why the occult elite is so bent on corrupting the masses with materiality and perversion?
So who were the Watchers and the Nephilim? Many different researchers have proposed many different interpretations, including a class of rich humans, demons or an ancient super-race. Proponents of the Ancient Astronaut theory believe that they were actually aliens that were sent to Earth to oversee the evolution of humanity – hence their name “the Watchers”.
The premise of Prometheus is greatly influenced by this theory as the aliens in the movie are giant beings who came to Earth to create and teach humanity.
The crew finally meets one of its “Engineers”, a giant alien. Unfortunately, the alien didn’t feel like having a discussion on the origins of humanity and ripped David the Android’s head off (the guy on the left).
Discovering that aliens were part of human evolution is not important from a scientific standpoint alone, but also from a spiritual one, as it could potentially render many religions completely obsolete. All belief systems would be thoroughly questioned, or at least revised to include the “alien angle”.
Spiritual Dilemma
The spiritual implications of the space mission are subtly reflected in the movie, through various scenes questioning the relevancy of Christianity in this alien-engineered context.
At the beginning of the trip, the Captain of the ship installs a Christmas tree. He is asked by his superior “What the hell is that?”, to which the Captain answers: “It’s Christmas!”. The fact that this history-altering space mission takes place during Christmas time (the holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ) gives it a religious meaning.
Elizabeth, the hero of the movie, proudly and prominently wears a Christian cross around her neck. This pendant becomes symbolic of the spiritual dilemma that results from the findings of the mission.
When the ship arrives at its destination, the crew discovers a deserted building built by an alien civilization containing … dead aliens. After running tests on one of the bodies, the crew realize that aliens are indeed the originators of human life on Earth. In other words, the Ancient Astronauts theory is correct and being from another planet were indeed the “Engineers” of humanity. Once Elizabeth confirms this discovery to her boyfriend Charlie, he immediately questions her on the validity of her cross pendant:
“- OK, I guess you can take your father’s cross off now.
– Why would I want to do that?
– Because THEY made us.”
Elizabeth then gives a “whoa”-worthy reply:
“- And who made them?”
She therefore does not see a contradiction between believing in Christianity and in the Ancient Astronauts theory simultaneously. She still believes that God is the first creator of everything … but now she has to add aliens to the equation.
After this profound discussion, Elizabeth and Charlie get horny and have spaceship sex. What the couple doesn't know is that Charlie was injected with alien DNA by David, an android.
Before Charlie visited Elizabeth in her quarters, David, a robot with an inquisitive mind, tricks Charlie into drinking a beverage containing alien DNA, knowing that he would copulate with Elizabeth and she would therefore give birth to a half-alien child. Notice the Christmas tree in the background.
The couple copulates without protection and Elizabeth soon learns that she is pregnant. She immediately realizes that her pregnancy is very, very wrong, as her child is not human and very hostile. Considering the fact that the mission takes place during Christmas time, Elizabeth becomes a kind of anti-Virgin Mary. Instead of giving birth to the Christ, she will give birth to a half-alien creature … not unlike the Nephilim.
Upon discovering her pregnancy, Elizabeth’s cross pendant is removed and stored away, symbolically meaning that her Christian faith is not valid anymore.
Elizabeth manages to “abort” the monstrosity. Then, the mission goes terribly wrong and everyone dies except her. After almost giving up, Elizabeth apparently has an epiphany and becomes determined to discover the truth about the aliens. Apparently, they abandoned humanity a long time ago and they were even planning to destroy earth. Something must have gone very wrong with human evolution.
At the end of the movie, she puts the cross back around her neck, signifying that she did not lose faith and that her quest for truth is now greatly spiritual. It is not about science anymore, but about the basic human need of having existential questions answered.
Elizabeth puts back her cross and is determined to find the truth about the alien Engineers.
The entire movie can be interpreted as a spiritual metaphor – a quest for enlightenment. The title of the movie itself, Prometheus, is greatly indicative of the underlying esoteric meaning of the movie.
Prometheus and the Quest for Enlightenment
In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan, the primeval race of deities that came before the Olympians. He stole fire from the gods in order to give it to humanity – an act that enabled progress and civilization. For accomplishing the act of bringing fire (a symbol of divine knowledge) to humanity, Prometheus became an important figure in the mythology of Mystery schools, such as Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, which are based on the usage of occult knowledge in order to achieve godhood.
Prometheus, a favorite figure of the Illuminist elite, is prominently displayed in the Rockefeller Center.
The Judeo-Christian equivalent of Prometheus is Lucifer, a “fallen angel” of great intelligence who, once a favorite of God, then defied him and brought a new form of knowledge to mankind. The name Lucifer is Latin for “light-bringer”, which is exactly what Prometheus accomplished by bringing fire to man. This “light” is said to be the occult knowledge taught in Mystery Schools, as it allows “enlightened humans” to ascend back to godhood.
The story of the Watchers and the Nephilim described above also appear to follow the same archetype as it tells the story of “sons of God” rebelling against his rule and descending to Earth, teaching humanity important knowledge. Also, like Lucifer, the Watchers are dubbed “Fallen Angels”. Where therefore see that there’s a lot of inter-connectivity in these mythos and in the movie’s symbolism,.
At the beginning of the space trip, the president of the corporation funding the mission holds a briefing and gives a speech regarding the importance of the mission:
“The Titan Prometheus wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods and for that, he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return”.
In the movie, Prometheus is the name of the spaceship that transports humans to their alien Enginneers. It symbolically represents humans using the “fire” (knowledge) that was given to them to ascend back to godhood (their alien creators) by their own means. This metaphor of spiritual initiation is reminiscent to the many mythological stories found throughout History that hide a similar esoteric meaning.
However, Mystery Schools believe that illumination is not given to all, but only to a chosen few and this is aptly reflected in Prometheus. In the movie, all of the people who were on board for selfish, monetary or insincere purposes died. Only the one that was there for the truth and with a strong spiritual faith survived. This type of narrative is on-par with allegorical stories of spiritual illumination stating that only the true of heart will reach that higher state of being.
Other than Elizabeth, another non-human character survived, David the Android.
Towards the end of the movie, David gets his head cut off but, since he’s a robot, he stills functions. Elizabeth takes the head and continues her journey, symbolically meaning that she needs pure intellect and technology to reach enlightenment.
David has great intellectual capacity, making him believe that he is superior to his human colleagues. Despite this fact, he is nevertheless crucial to Elizabeth’s quest – a subtle message stating that transhumanism is important in human evolution.
At the end of the movie, David does not understand why Elizabeth desires to continue her search for her creators. The difference is that she has a soul and he doesn’t. It is for this reason that she put back the cross around her neck. Her quest is not simply a space mission, it is a spiritual pilgrimage to discover where she comes from.
In the final scene of the movie, Elizabeth decides to not go back to Earth (representing materiality and the lower self) and continues to search for the Engineers (representing illumination and godhood). Her quest is therefore not over … and there might be a sequel.
Conclusion View
Maybe I'm crazy or just very cynical with major films but I don't see how or why people go to see a movie like this and then get caught up on the film's premise or some details not meshing with reality. I tried to offer explanations, as I came to understand them, for some of your main points. Some of the small stuff, like the slime makes more sense if it was explained as "sin" in physical form. If we're going off the Christian undertones and parallels, the black slime is literally the mud that created Adam and Eve (AKA the Primordial Soup), and the Apple that Eve took. In the hands of the creator, the slime creates life. In the hands of someone who is self interested, the slime takes on its own creation and evolution, until it leads to death incarnation.
In that case, the worms which have no motivation beyond "survival," which would be considered neutral motivation. When David introduced the slime to Holloway, he showed no immediate signs of the slime's effects (supposing that the slime in the beginning was the same slime that they found) until after he had sex; which by some accounts of the bible is 'lust.' After that, his body began to destroy itself and Shaw became pregnant with a beast that did not resemble humanity, but resembled the act that created it, I.E. Lust/Sex.
How do I reach that conclusion? Two reasons:
Take it as you will, the monster that came from Shaw after it evolved, looked extremely...sexual. The exact phrase my friends and I used to describe the monster was "the giant vagina monster." Go back and watch the scene and tell me that did NOT look like a giant scary vagina. Not only that but the only act that the monster performed was violent insertion of it's reproductive organ (i.e. giant phallic tube, aka penis) into the Engineer's mouth, which spawned the Xenomorph. Thus, the black slime, which had no form until it was transferred in an act of lust, became lust incarnate.
Let's say you didn't buy any of the stuff above. Well, then there's a better explanation. The genetics of the Engineers and the Humans were a perfect match. The movie made this extremely clear, and wanted to make this known. Lets assume that the black slime is still "sin". The act by which it was transferred from Holloway to Shaw was sex, and it took on the form of the giant gross vagina monster. The monster, attacked the Engineer and it was implanted and it embodied the sin of "rage" thus taking on the form of an early xenomorph. Thus, combining "lust" and "rage," two of the 7 sins, creates a newer version of a Xenomorph, which the article indicates is the "destroyer."
So, all of this seems like a jumbled mess, but let me explain. The Xenomorph is an anti-creator. It is death incarnate. It is the grim reaper. It is created from sin, and once it embodies all the sins, it takes on the ultimate Xenomorph form. This explains why at the end of the movie, the Xenomorph is not a perfect evolution. It has only reproduced in two ways, lust and rage. This explains why the mural of the Xenomorphic figure was on the wall of the Engineer's ship. The xenomorph is death and is the anti-creator; Satan if you will.
So how do the worms fit in with this? They have no sins. They only exist to survive. Note that the worms killed the two scientists; but that the scientists showed no chest busting. The worms did not reproduce, they only killed. They did it to survive, and this is where the worms DNA comes into play. Remember when they cut the mutated worm in half? Yeah, the worm REGREW itself just like a worm does (this may be a Ridley Scott fuck up; only some types of worms can do this, not the common earthworm). Worms mate asexually, which means that they could reproduce that way, but the one thing to take away from this is that the worms do not reproduce in the same manner as the giant vagina monster. Not only that, the more that the geologist struggled, the harder the worm tried to kill. It has no self-awareness and no consciousness. It retained some of the properties of the Xenomorph, but not a pure form of the xenomorph. Thus, it only leaped in evolution; and didn't embody sin.
So, The black slime is sin. If one contains no sin, the slime will either cause you to evolve genetically or destroy you to create new life (thanks engineers). However, if the slime is used in a sinful manner, the new life will eventually take on the form of death, which is the xenomorph.
Edit: Added some stuff about the worms evolution (alternate evolutionary non-Christianity undertone stuff).
I also believe that the xenomorph can only be created from a higher thinking life form. Because the DNA of the Human and Engineer are almost exact, the xenomorph couldn't evolve from the worms. Mixing the DNA of the xenomorph and the worms produces a basic functioning, kill everything worm monster. Xenomorphs, if everything above is true, represents and embodies death. So taking a dumb-as-fuck worm and mixing it with xenomorph DNA would produce nothing more than a worm that kills everything for no reason and doesn't evolve further than that.
It could also very well be that the black shit is just Xenomorph DNA and mixing it with anything that is not a pure engineer will result in a bastardization of the Xenomorph until it gets to an evolutionary Xenomorph form (since we never really saw whether or not the worm reproduced when it went into the scientists stomach). Hence when it mixed with the human, it created a creature that looked sorta like a super facehugger, leading to the queen Xenomorph, since it mated with the Engineer, which is the pure form.
Edit 2: There is one actual edit I want to make to this that is separate from the worm issue. The one thing that bothered me was the fact that the Geologist came back to the ship "some how." I do believe that this is a parallel to 1 Corinthians 15:13, or "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised." If we assume the article is true, then Elizabeth's impossible birth parallel's Christ's birth, and Christ has returned in some crazy vagina monster form (I want to believe that maybe its the Anti-Christ, but that's just...not right). It's an odd assumption, BUT I do believe that this is what Ridley Scott was going for. I just don't know how or why the dude came back to life since there was nothing that could have caused it to have happened. He just got Xenomorph Worm Blood on him.
Edit 3: I took a swipe at answering the "Abortion" vs. "Cesarean" debate; I think if we buy the whole Space-Jesus argument this somewhat further proves the analogy. It could also very well be he just didn't want to piss off the anti-abortionists, but the large over use of religion makes this a bit hard to ignore.
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