PROMETHEUS script floating around answers a lot of plot questions...

[JasonPratt]

Supposedly (I'll emphasize since this is the internet after all, and it might be a hoax), Damon Lindelof's original script for the Alien prequel Prometheus got released somewhere and then retracted but not before various people made copies of it for wider circulation.

The script doesn't explain some of the dumbasseries of the plot, but it does go into a lot of detail about what's up with the Engineers, including the remarks from Scott about how their backstory ties into Christianity somehow with Jesus being an Engineer. That's because (again, supposedly) Lindelof wrote down what the various spoken and written languages seen and heard in the film really meant, which he explicitly intended to be hidden behind the android's partial obfuscation (and even then some of David's dialogue got cut).

Taking this report with whatever grains of salt -- if you don't want to watch the script report, you can click the spoiler tag below.

[spoiler]The Engineers are themselves an engineered life form of some kind. At some point in their development, their ability to breed with themselves was "stripped away" from them, so although individuals of their species can live hundreds of thousands of years they started slowly going extinct.

At some point in their travels around the galaxy, they ran into a Xenomorph (looking currently like an octopus werewolf thing) who did the usual facehugging chestbursting thing on one of them. This popped out a fairly typical Alien. Instead of freaking the hell out and nuking the site from orbit (they may have done that, too), the Engineers saw this as the way for them to finally start breeding again. They captured and semi-crucified the Xeno/Engineer hybrid, and started culturally worshiping the poor Engineer explorer who had died for their "lord", also called the "Deacon", to be born. This deacon/lord was the alien-esque engraving in the film, and the big face guy was who got chestbursted.

The Engineers were able to milk the blood of the Xenomorph Deacon, which at the time didn't have acid for blood, and with some genetic tweaking they used it to sacrifice young individuals of their race to effectively 'breed' by seeding primed but still dead worlds with genetic life -- this is what's happening in the opening scene. They leave markers around for any sentient species which develop, to work their way back into space and find the Engineers as their children.

Unfortunately, they hadn't been very successful with this plan before Earth.

Also unfortunately, the deacon died or was slain, and so they're naturally running out of its blood. (They can't just go back and find more Xenomorphs, so maybe they did nuke the planet just to be sure. ;) ) They've been working on artificially producing a synthetic version of it, and that's the black goo, and why it's stored in a temple dedicated to the Engineer Xenomorph victim, and to the Deacon that chestbursted from him.

The black goo also unfortunately didn't work out well.

All this was frustrating the Engineers when news reached them that their Earth experiment had worked out great, finally, at last -- but that the humans had murdered the advanced human/engineer who had evolved up to lead them back to their sires in space. That was Jesus. (They took him back to the home planet of Paradise to teach him whassup, and so he passed on the language and concepts in a coded whatever when he got back. The implication is that the instruction happens during the 40 days in the wilderness. Obviously no resurrection in this film.)

In their frustration the engineers at the temple decided to load up a ship with the black goo, converted to release it as a spray bomb in the atmosphere, and then go back to Earth to wipe the humans out with their failed black goo. However, something went wrong in the final transfer protocols, the black goo started infecting the engineers, and most of them were slain.

The Engineer near the end of the film is the last remaining one -- so the lumpy ones slain by David between films might be construed as a prior experiment that hadn't succeeded as well as Earth's did (but up till then they were the best result so the Engineers had set up a ship receiving station near one of their cities.) The sequel had a different writer so there's some guesswork as to whether or how the original plot is being continued here.

When the Engineer wakes up from stasis after all this stress, to find that the descendants of the murderers of Jesus have arrived and have succeeded in creating artificial life (i.e. David), wanting to be immortal like gods, yet still violent (Shaw is being held captive and she's smacked around for interrupting Weyland with questions pertinent to their survival) he freaks the hell out. The cross worn by Shaw doesn't entirely help.

None of this explains yet the connection of the ship in Alien and its space jockey to this film, but Scott has hinted recently that he's going to reboot that story to fit the new story rather than try to tie it in. Or something like that.  ::)

Again, this script has no verifiable provenance trail. It may seem unlikely a fan might fan-fix up a purportedly earlier draft just to add a dozen lines or so to explain what the aliens are doing and saying and writing, but keep in mind how fast I type... ;)

Of course this story, hoax or actually the film's plot, is pretty insulting to Christians, but eh, we get that a lot.  O:-) Scott and Lindelof both have long-established habits of playing around with Christianity in ultimately insulting ways, so at least that detail fits. 

[/spoiler]

[Gusington]

Say what

[JasonPratt]

Essentially a Xenomorph somewhere was our lord and savior while just going about doing its facehugging chestbursty thing, and so some hypocrites think we all have to die.

It's a little more and a little less straightforward than that, but that's what it amounts to.


...I repeat, the plot is that Christianity was invented by aliens who worshiped a Xenomorph and its victim because they couldn't have sex anymore. And when humanity rejected that as dumb beyond words, they decided to kill us all.

There are several layers of insanity to this plotline, as you may notice. 

Weirdly, if this script isn't legit after all, I suspect Scott/Lindelof's actual plot was more insane and made less sense.

[Gusington]

So the xenomorphs were, ultimately, antisemitic...

[Nefaro]

Meh.  Methinks it's the usual internet postulation.  Certainly sounds that way with the hokey Jesus references & such.

Frankly, I didn't think Prometheus was bad.  Other than a couple three action situations which were a bit stupid, but that's not unusual for such a film.

The general backstory seemed pretty simple to me.  Maybe because they left a lot of interpretation up to the viewer.  I don't need to be told every little detail; they can just show me bits and the thinkmeats will fill in the rest.  Actually prefer it that way, to some extent.

[Steelgrave]

I liked the whole damn franchise better when it was simply, "hey, there's a monster on our ship/colony and it's trying to eat our faces"......

When it's that simple, there are no damn plot questions 

[OJsDad]

But then what would you have to bitch about Steelie.

[mirth]

But then what would you have to bitch about Steelie.

[Steelgrave]

No worries there, the world provides me with new bitching material every single day   O0

[Gusington]

Matt Groening got the Old Man Yells at Cloud idea from Steelie.

[Steelgrave]

Yes he did. And I'm also mad I didn't get any residuals        8)

[BanzaiCat]

I liked the whole damn franchise better when it was simply, "hey, there's a monster on our ship/colony and it's trying to eat our faces"......

When it's that simple, there are no damn plot questions 

The comics (Dark Horse) are pretty good along those lines, as are the books. For the most part.

[mirth]

I read one of the books way back when. It was a decent genre story. Probably not anything I'd read today, but there was a time when I read a lot of sci-fi.

[BanzaiCat]

I have Out of the Shadows on my desk right now. I want to read it and the next one in the series, because the third, River of Pain, is about the colony on LV-426 before the events of the movie Aliens, and I'd really like to read that first...but it's a trilogy, so.

[mirth]

I read the one where the Aliens show up on Earth and we nuke Jakarta before we're forced off world. One of the Steve Perry books I think. Been a long time.