Okay, so let’s talk about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. I don’t normally put this much thought into needless speculation, but I can’t recall ever being this excited about a film, other than maybe Revenge of the Sith. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Scott’s Alien for the first time, and then Cameron’s 1986 sequel. (My folks were pretty lenient about what I could watch, and I’m thankful as hell for that. Imagine if I’d been limited to watching children’s programming; probably I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. Besides, nightmares ain’t so bad.)
Anyway, I’ve had my theories for a while about what might happen in the flick, based mostly on watching the trailer ten or so times. I watched the 2003 Director’s Cut of Alien on Blu-ray just last week, and today I watched the original ’79 theatrical version with Scott’s 1999 DVD commentary track. Between the two viewings, I’ve noticed quite a few things that lead me to some conclusions about what Prometheus might entail.
The first viewing, years after I’d last seen the film, I noticed that the xenomorphs’, or Giger creatures’, eggs are veiled not only in an atmospheric “mist,” as Kane calls it, but also by a kind of barrier. Then the action that triggers the first facehugger’s actual hatching is when Kane physically touches the top of the egg.
After listening to the ’99 commentary track by Scott, he seems to confirm my conclusion, which is this: the eggs are in a kind of containment field — or, as Scott calls it, a kind of “placenta” — that has kept them preserved and sustained for quite some time.
Furthermore, Scott offers his basic explanation of the relationship between the xenomorph eggs, the Space Jockey and the Derelict. He feels that the Space Jockey must be one of a once larger crew who have obviously been dead for a long time, but jokes that he has no idea what happened to the others (this, I think, was probably the creative impetus for doing this pseudo-prequel in the first place, but I digress). The eggs, then, must have been — according to Scott’s explanation — weaponized creatures on board as military cargo.
So: While I don’t think we will get to actually see any Giger aliens on-screen in Prometheus, I certainly think we’ll see a facehugger or two, or at least the eggs themselves. If I recall correctly, there is a hole in the deck of the Derelict’s bridge, which looks to have been eaten away by acid prior to the Nostromo crew’s arrival; that suggests that someone in Prometheus will probably get attacked by a facehugger. My partly unfounded estimate, though, is that no one in the film will actually get a xenomorph embryo successfully implanted inside them.
Scott has said that the film contains a scene comparable in effect to the infamous chest-birthing scene from the original film, and elsewhere mentions something about a character performing a C-section on herself. This doesn’t sound like something that would work for ridding oneself of a xenomorph, since it hatches from the chest, rather than the uterus.
My theory, purely speculative, is that the Space Jockey is . . . either Charlize Therone’s character, who we see little of in the trailer, or David, the android played by Michael Fassbender. His character feels ominous and morally ambiguous in the various viral campaign videos that have cropped up online, and moreover, the trailer seems to suggest that the antagonist in this film will be born from a sticky green goo of sorts, which might lead to a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style symbiosis, which in the arena of science-fiction cinema could radically alter a character’s appearance.
If David’s body is composed of Gigeresque “biomechanical” components, or even synthetic DNA, then it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to think that the Space Jockey might be the result of alien DNA meshing with humankind’s synthetic biotech work. (Plus, I think it would be cool to watch an android merge with an alien symbiote and then rebel against its human creators.)
I imagine Fassbender serving as a stand-in for the similar Ash character, or even the chilling “Archos” from Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse, who remarks:
You humans are biological machines designed to create ever more intelligent tools. You have reached the pinnacle of your species. All your ancestors’ lives, the rise and fall of your nations, every pink and squirming baby — they have all led you here, to this moment, where you have fulfilled the destiny of humankind and created your successor. You have expired. You have accomplished what you were designed to do.
Chilling, right? Almost as chilling as Fassbender’s one-liner, “Big things have small beginnings.” Again . . . I don’t think I’m stretching this too far. Besides, the original Scott film begins with the Nostromo answering a distress signal of unknown origin, which leads them to the Derelict, where they conclude that it was sent by the Space Jockey itself. I could see Scott ending the film with an android-alien abomination dying, perhaps at the hands of a facehugger or one of the main protagonists, sending one last cry for help across the stars, toward Earth and humanity — who send the crew of the Nostromo and Ash, years later, on a suicide mission to bring home an unstoppable militarized alien . . .
I know that it’s maybe more logical on the surface that the Space Jockey is the intended pilot of the Derelict, but I don’t think so. That the film takes place on LV-223 instead of LV-426 suggests the Derelict may originate underground in LV-223 and later get commandeered by either a protagonist or David-in-Space-Jockey-form. Talk in the trailer implies that the sticky green goo invited humankind to LV-223, so I’m thinking the goo needed a biological host in which to rise again. David, unfeeling for humankind, would probably be more than willing to show them the way home — to Earth.
Anything else is either too obvious to mention or too nebulous to back up with anything resembling even the flimsiest of evidence. What y’all think? Is this movie gonna kick ass or what?
