Aliens and Predators

I honestly don’t think Ridley or Lindelof intended it to be a queen; the queen was an addition to the mythos after “Alien”, and so I’m not expecting Ridley to support it.

My take is that it is a xenomorph-like creature, but clearly a different strain than the one we see in “Alien”.

You’re going to have trouble keeping the AVP storyline with the new films.  Directors like Ridley Scott aren’t exactly motivated to preserve the AVP canon.

But this one is easy, and I’ve answered it before; the ship discovered in “Alien” crashed after the engineers first abandoned their installation millenia ago.  That is plenty of time for other beings to encounter the eggs and spread them around.

Exactly. You’re probably right.

Ridley Scott said from the start that it would be about the space jockeys, and not about the xenomorphs. But although it was not a direct prequel to Alien, it was very clearly related. It is virtually impossible to not consider it canon with the Alien films, given the precise similarities of the space jockey, pilot chamber, and derelict ship. 

But I like the way you say “xenomorph lifestyle”; the mutagen does seem to turn things into those kind of creatures.

The mutagen seemed to do different things to each creature exposed to it.  The worms in the chamber turned into snakes.  One of them looked like it went into Millburn’s mouth, but didn’t seem to implant him with anything.  Fifield was just turned into some kind of super-strong caveman dude.  We’re don’t know what (if anything) Holloway in the process of becoming when he died, but his mutated sperm became the facehugger-squid inside of Shaw. 

Everything appeared random to me.  My conclusion is that the engineers designed the mutagen to re-combine DNA segments randomly, when they wanted to “shake things up” on a world that they had previously seeded, to see what kind of new creatures would arise. 

Other people have varying opinions.

The pods were clearly intended to be a visual link to the eggs from Alien, but they are really just storage canisters of mutagen, so not quite equivalent to the eggs. 

I didn’t notice the facehuggers in the murals.

I’m still not sure if the xenomorphs were meant to be a proper creation of the engineers, or just one of the random, freaky creatures that happen to result when something is exposed to the black goo.

Certainly not.  But people do love predators and the AVP movies & comics, so they will always try to reconcile the two worlds. 

There are no “eggs” in Prometheus; only canisters of the black mutagen. 

The snake that attacks Millburn does not appear to impregnate him, true. It seems that each creature exposed to the mutagen mutates differently; not all result in a facehugger or xenomorph.

My assumption is that the eggs found on the ship in “Alien” were not the intentional cargo of the ship, but laid by whatever creature that burst from that space jockey’s chest. Prometheus seems to imply that the space jockeys use the black mutagen to destroy/create, not xenomorphs.  I could be wrong here, but that is what I took away from the film.

It’s not the same space jockey.  The planet in Prometheus is LV-223; in Alien it is LV-426.

Presumably the space jockey from Alien embarked 2,000 years ago when they were first abandoning their installation, and fell victim to his mutagen at that time.   But given the similarity of the creature from the end of Prometheus to the one depicted in the mural, the space jockeys had seen/created xenomorphs before.

(For you AVP fans, this 2,000 years of the derelict ship lying on LV-426 is more than enough time for predators or anyone to discover the eggs and spread xenomorphs throughout the galaxy.)

I don’t agree with the premise that no film could have satisfied Alien fans.  I don’t think my critiques of the film are nebulous and whiny; if Prometheus had felt more realistic and characters consistent and had better creature design, then I would have liked it much more.

You make a good point; Ripley doesn’t have a whole lot of depth in Alien.  Most of the characterization goes to Brett and Parker, although you do learn that Ripley is smart, professional, and cool under fire.  Alien is really just a story about a woman struggling to survive.  It is a suspense/thriller.  Any larger themes are subtle.

Maybe my deal with Prometheus is that it just tried to hard.  It wanted so hard to explore these large themes of creation, God, myth and death that it just felt too convoluted. This, combined with what I felt were unrealistic & unbelievable characters, left the film hard to get into.

True enough.  I really don’t want to anger anyone out there.  I am genuinely delighted that some people enjoyed it, and I honestly respect people who saw through the flaws and observed the major themes that I missed.  I, for one, am enjoying the discussion!

I am a person; this is my blog.  If you don’t want to hear my opinions, you’re more than welcome to unfollow.

Exactly.  No one in the movie behaves like a scientist; they behave like teenagers in horror movies.  This is why I couldn’t get into it.

Likely.  But perhaps they’ll contain some extra character moments that make our heroes a little more 3-dimensional

Very true.  I also saw that that conversation between David and Holloway was poignant; man created David “because we could”, and that is supposedly why the engineers created us.  This implies they had no “grand plan” or emotional reasons for creating us, and so they had no qualms about wiping us out.

So to be fair to Ridley, this scene did help a lot to make sense of the movie. I should redact some of my criticism in that regard.

Well I learn something new every day! Done

Fair enough. But it’s hard to do, as the question precedes my answer in tumblr’s layout.  For future reference, any questions I answer may very well have spoilers, so avoid if you haven’t seen the film!