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The movie will feature Xenomorphs.

Despite Ridley Scott's denials, the presence of the Space Jockey from the original Alien hints that Xenomorphs will have to appear in some form or other. After all, in "Alien," the crew reports that the Space Jockey's chest was penetrated from the inside out. Really, what else could have happened to him? We may not see the classic scorpion-like Xenomorphs we know and love, but they have to appear at some point towards the end.

• • In the trailer, you can see what looks to be a Xenomorph or something similar at 1:38.
    • Oh, it will be a xenomorph. Only problem is that what was faced in the Alien series was the Mass Production versions, and in Prometheus, will be the Superpowered Prototype.
      • We can see more shots of some kind of threat - complete with some kind of Giger-esque styling - when Rapace's character is crawling around on the floor in the same trailer. Given the Alien takes on attributes from it's host, perhaps the ones from Alien onward only have the anthropomorphic appearance thanks to whatever goes on in this film. Which allows for more Giger designs without the need to use the original xenomorph.
  • That looks like a bas-relief, something carved on the wall. Considering it was widely speculated that the Space-Jockies were the creators of the xenomorphs, this is hardly surprising. Doesn't mean they will be the film though.
    • You forget that the xenomorph can look like something carved into a wall anyway. That's one of their best tricks, to just pop out of nowhere.
  • While the Xenomorph itself may not appear, there is some very strong evidence that some of Giger's other biomechanical horrors will show up, as this article theorizes (be warned, if this article is correct, then it contains HUGE SPOILERS about a beastie the Prometheus crew will be facing).
  • Scott may be lying so the xenemorph's appearance will catch us off guard. Like the original 1931 Dracula its image has become so ingrained that it's hard to take it seriously if we expect it up front. Chances are Scott's holding back so its appearance will catch us off guard in contrast to AVP where its image was splattered all over the posters. My guess is that in the last 30-20 minutes the creature will appear (probably with some subtle foreshadowing beforehand) to give the audience a serious Oh Crap moment and notch up the tension in the third act.
• Or it may be THE Xenomorph. As in the Queen Mother, as in A pureblooded Alien, and not some hybrid.
• Or it may be some failed prototypes. Of course, that's no consolation to what the Prometheus crew. Although it would get them asking, "If those were the failed models, what would the successes be like?"
• Bottom line: a proto-xenomorph appears only in the final cameo scene.
  • Well, we've seen in other films that a xenomorph's form can change slightly depending on what kind of life-form it hatches from (like the dog-o-morph in Alien³ or the Predalien in the AVP series). It's possible that the one we see in the final scene was the real deal, just looking slightly different because it hatched from an Engineer instead of a human.

The movie isn't just a prequel/pseudo-reboot to Alien...

Androids? Dark Future? "Off World Colonies"? Ridley Scott has made such a big deal about saying this isn't an Alien Prequel to distract us all from the real twist. This movie is (also) a sequel to Blade Runner.

• • Not possible at all. David is treated as a rather special development and is seemingly amongst the first artificial people developed; The film also takes place substantially later than Blade Runner's 2019, meaning that if it is a sequel, there's been some serious regression or controls put in place to stop something like the problems seen in the Nexus Six replicants, because David is nowhere near as advanced as Roy Batty or the others.
    • Actually, if you watch the Ted Talk video, Weyland says they've already got androids in 2023 -- its a slightly skewed timeline, but Blade Runner occuring in 2019 doesn't make the slightest bit of sense in 2012, and it would take a single edit to place it in 2043 or 2069 or whatever, which wouldn't do anything negative to that film.

The planet is really the same one from the first Alien Movie.

The Space Jockey will be defeated by being infected with a facehugger, the Villain Protagonist will get away with the core so that s/he will give Weyland-Yutani even more of an advantage, and several centuries later, the Nostromo will be sent to 'discover' the distress signal. Even if it isn't, the death of the pilot will cause its ship to crash onto LV-XXX to be discovered.

• • The space jockey was fossilized. That craft was there for millions of years, not the decades/centuries between Prometheus and the first Alien film.
  • Its only said the space jockey "looks fossilized". For all we know, the body was just a skeleton that had hardened and decayed and was covered in rubble.
  • Scott's already said that the space jockey might not be so much an alien species, but some kind of armour or a suit.
  • Hell no, that was totally an alien.
    • The suit/armor rumor is true. Space Jockeys/Engineers are completely humanoid up to and including their DNA structure. The ship is not the same one, just the same model.
• Jossed. Neither the planet nor the ship are the same. No one gets away except for the main character, and she's not bringing back samples.
  • Although as it turns out, the Space Jockey is defeated via facehugger.

One (or more) of the crew are turned into the Space Jockey

Freeze-frame the latest full-length trailer and you can see what appears to be the Space Jockey being locked into that big chair thing. This would also explain the infection/whatever that the trailers have been strongly hinting at - the crew are not being burned by acid or anything like that, they are being transformed into this big biomechanical creature. The reason why the Space Jockey in the first film had a big hole in its chest was because the last surviving crew member did that with a weapon/explosive to stop the ship from going to Earth.

• • Given the puncture hole in the Alien space jockey's chest is suspiciously similar to the sequence on board the Nostromo, I think it's always been canon that whatever the thing was, it was killed by the xenomorph hatching. It doesn't discount the idea that the crew are being converted into space jockeys (which, given Scott's suggestion about what he feels is the biological warfare intention of the xenomorph on the jockey's behalf, would be a great twist - they all died out but have means of coming back when the time is right), but it could also maybe tie into some of the other stuff we see in the trailer - if they discover how to get to the alien world from clues left on sites on Earth, perhaps the original space jockeys were humans.
  • Remember - if the Space Jockey from Alien was indeed killed by an Alien hatching, which subsequently laid the eggs that caused such difficulties for the crew of the Nostromo, then what happened to the hatchling in between killing the Jockey and the arrival of the Nostromo? Is it now loose on the planet? Was it onboard the ship when John Hurt and co got fachugged, and it was just dumb luck they didn't run into it? Did it die of starvation? Perhaps Prometheus will fill in the blanks between the chestbursting, the egglaying and the arrival of the Nostromo.
  • A Facebook freezeframe has a humanoid person with oversized eyes looking at the interface as the head of the space jockey splits open. What we think is the head of the Space Jockey may be actually a biomechanical suit for the the altered infected human to better control the ship. The nojohnyouarethedemons theory of the space jockeys being humans seems much more plausible, considering one of the characters is known as the cacooned man. [1] ^{[dead link]}
  • If this is indeed the case, the crew member that turns into a Jockey will most likely be one of the following: Fifield (In the trailers, we see what is presumably him clapping his hands to his acid covered helmet), Milburn (In the most recent trailer, he is seen being confronted by a small, chestburster-esque creature that apparently gets into his suit), David (Coinciding with the below theory, he'll have a A God Am I moment), or Holloway (Something appears to be up with him, judging by the shot of him sitting on a bed with his head in his hands).
    • My bet is it's going to be Charlie.
    • Charlie? Do you mean Charlize?
    • Jossed. No one turns into an Engineer/Space Jockey.

David will, predictably, malfunction and begin exhibiting emotional issues...

• But they manifest initially as a sense of humor, mild eccentricity well within the bounds of what would be normal (if charming) in a flamboyant human shipmate, and a rather funny sense of fun. Over the course of the film his quirks escalate badly as things go pear-shaped. It'll still result in plenty of death and destruction (because again, T.E. Lawrence, whose depictions he seems at least partly based off of performance-wise, wasn't a "dangerous man" because he was a G-rated pacifist hero who never did anybody any harm) but it won't be the whole "somebody accidentally pushed David's 'kill all humans' button!" routine.
  • The promotional material given out so far regarding David, including Ridley Scott's own comments, suggest that David wants to be more then what he is, to become a higher life form. Now, consider this promo about him. Notice how he talks about what makes him sad. What if, in wanting to become more then what he is, he wants to take humanity along with him, to make them leave all their destructive tendencies behind them? He gets the chance to evolve into a higher being (a space jockey), and then decides to force the crew of the Prometheus to go along with him...for their own good, of course.
    • Jossed. David does not malfunction.
      • We mustn't forget he is an even earlier model than the "twitchy" Ash-model from the original Alien however this earliness usually manifests as a sense of childlike curiosity and wonder Which directly results in one person's death, indirectly leads to the impregnation of another person (And if you know anything about Alien, you know impregnation isn't good in this universe), the reawakening of an an ancient example of God Is Evil which leads to another person's death and arguably the creation of the Xenomorph race

Neither the planet nor the spaceship is the same one that is seen in Alien.

• Rather, the 'temple' or whatever it is, is the Space Jockey equivalent of a bio-weapons lab. This explains why the crew come in contact with whatever it is that's infecting them. Likewise the Space Jockey ship seen in the trailers is one of their ships, but not the ship from Alien. They're similar, but not the same, which explains the discrepancies between what was shown in the trailers and the original Alien film. What I think happens is this: the crew sets down on the planet, gets into the Temple, and figures out it's where the Jockeys made their bioweapons, because genetic engineering is the new nuke. One such creation is the Xenomorph, however there isn't one actually in the film. There was one of their ships left, which was to be sent to Earth to attack it for whatever reason. Everyone ends up dying and destroying the Jockey technology, but the crew manages to send some data on the Temple back to Weyland-Yutani. Some of the data includes details of their other weapons and enough information to decipher the Space Jockey language. The company decides to keep their eyes and ears open to see if they can find any other Jockey tech, but there isn't a trace to be found. Fast forward to the time of Alien, the company receives a distress/warning signal from a different downed Space Jockey ship, the one carrying the Xenomorphs. I'm willing to bet the transmission said something like: "Help, the Xeno's are loose and killing everyone. We can't self-destruct and it's too late for us. Send someone to blow up the ship as soon as you get this, these things are too dangerous." Eager to finally get their hands on some Space Jockey bio-tech, the company sends the Nostromo in, and the rest is history.
  • Confirmed almost literally. The Space Jockey/Engineer language, though, is deciphered even before Prometheus lands.
    • The latter is technically not true. The language which David learns is proto-Indo-European, reconstructed from language samples of different eras, extrapolated from recurring models of language shift over time. It's presumed to be a language closest to that which was spoken on Earth when the Jockeys were visiting last time, and just possibly derived from what the Jockeys spoke. Just how David can read the Jockey hieroglyphs is not explained, since the language has no written form, but maybe he's just that good a code-breaker. It's unknown whether the sole surviving Jockey understand's David's attempt to communicate in this language, since it only seems to have interest in killing all humans, and tears his head off.
  • I'm not entirely certain, but I'm inclined to disagree. For one thing, the scene with the Engineer looking through the "telescope" is almost an exact replica of the dead one on LV-426 that the Nostromo crew found. There's very little official information about the planet in Prometheus (its official name is LV-223) to compare it to LV-426, but considering what we do know (they're both one of three moons orbiting a ringed gas giant, they're both sites containing active Engineer bio-weapons, etc.) they could easily be the same planet. The only official difference is the fact that the stars that they orbit have different names, but those are just names. The Company could easily have changed the official names of those stars to cover up evidence of what happened to the Prometheus, and it's not like someone without access to a completely comprehensive star-map would notice.

The Engineer at the very beginning of the film is "Prometheus"

Naturally you'd assume the ship and crew represent the mythical Prometheus and his actions, but after thinking about it, the cloaked Engineer could very well be the Prometheus of this plot. We see an Engineer craft hovering in the sky as the cloaked Engineer derobes and drinks the black goo (the same substance seen later on LV 223). My theory is Cloaky was supposed to pour the goo into the waterfall or use it in some other way; possibly as a starting point for another weapons factory/base on Earth. Instead he drinks it, dies and creates life on Earth, thus pissing off his race (and possibly their 'Zeus') and leading to them weaponising the goo in order to eventually deal with humanity.

• While the idea has merit, some details are wrong. The Engineers spent a long time interacting with humans peacefully, judging from the fact that they left us a star map to follow. They presumably also directed the formation of life on our planet from a fairly early point on, considering that they eventually produced humans, who are genetically almost identical to them, but still native to Earth, closely related to all the other life-forms living here. We can't be a complete accident in all this, when these factors are taken into account. They could have set up any kind of facility they would have liked in the prehistoric times, regardless of "Cloaky's" actions. All signs point that the Engineers were preparing us for something important, only to change their minds, convert the planet of their invitation into a bioweapon factory, and prepare to send a fleet of exterminators to wipe us out for reasons unknown. All this happened about 2,000 years ago, a very short time considering the length of their project thus far.

Shaw inadvertently created the Xenomorphs via her actions in the film.

Kind of a vague theory, but bear with me here. Okay, we all know how the true Alien doesn't appear in any form until the end of the film, right? And how, in its place, we see a variety of other monsters running around the Engineers' base that seem similar to, yet different from it, right? Now, a lot of viewers seemed to have jumped to the conclusion that the black goo, hammerpedes, etc...are all simply heretofore unseen parts of the Xenomorph life cycle, and from there, decided that this was a plot hole (often citing how the hammerpede/snake-thingies just slither off and are never seen again). However, I thought differently-- note how we don't see any kind of onscreen progression of life stages until the squid-thingy is taken out of Shaw. From there, it evolves into the giant proto-facehugger, impregnates the Engineer, and from there spawns the goblin shark-like proto-Xenomorph. My theory is that the monsters seen prior to the squid are all unconnected (possibly failed) "prototypes", which embody specific traits (entering through orifices, contagiousness and ease of transfer, acid blood, etc...) of the final product (eg., the classic Alien). By becoming impregnated with the black sludge via Holloway's corrupted genetic material, Shaw inadvertently "completed" the formula by biologically processing it within her womb, refining it into the proto-facehugger, who in turn gave birth to the first "true" Xenomorph through the Engineer.

• And as David pointed out, Shaw has a very strong survival instinct. Perhaps that quality rubbed off on the child.
• Given that larval xenomorphs take on some of the characteristics of the host (as seen canonically in Alien 3 and semi-canonically in Alien vs. Predator), it is likely that the Engineers designed their initial biological weapon to be highly adaptable and versatile; the classic xenomorph was the result of the base weapon passing through two humans, an Engineer, and probably another human, whereupon it reaches the form we all know and love. This also explains the discrepancies between the xenomorphs' appearances in different movies; a variety of hosts causes slightly different morphologies.
• Well if we're blaming Shaw we could easily blame Holloway for engaging in...intimate activities with her...when he knew there was something wrong with him. And then we could blame David for infecting Holloway. And then we could blame Weyland for programming David. So playing the Blame Game just gets complicated...
• Why is this labeled as a theory? This is pretty explicitly shown to be the case in the movie's plot. Who on Earth walked out of the theater thinking something else?
  • That's what I thought, but as I said, a weird amount of viewers seemed to miss the point. Granted, perhaps Deviantart wasn't the best place to gauge reasonable viewer response, but still.
• Why are we assuming that everything at this facility was dedicated to the Xenomorph we all know and love? The cobra-thingie looks like an entirely different product to me. Its also entirely possible that the black goo they were developing or storing there just got out and all kinds of unintended things were created, including the octo-hugger and the Xenomorph.
  • If I'm not mistaken, that's the canonical explanation for the snakes; they were originally harmless worms indigenous to the planet that were mutated by the bioweapon.
    • That's exactly what they are. If they weren't then the worms we see crawling around in the black goo earlier would have been a Red Herring.
  • It seems really unlikely that the creatures produced within this film had anything to do with those found in the original Alien. That was a different ship that most likely crashed long before Prometheus took place. It's likely that the xenomorphs are simply the "ideal" form which the black sludge aims to produce, even though it creates all kinds of side-products along the way.

This isn't the first time the Engineers have attempted to wipe out all other life.

It happened at least once before, several millennia in the past. On that occasion, it brought them into conflict with the Predators. A war ensued, out of which the Predators emerged victorious; most of the Engineers were killed, but a few survived in suspended animation.

During the war, the Engineers turned their biological weapon on the Predators. It didn't win the war for them, and the Predators got a brand new, very challenging group of monsters to hunt for sport. They went to one or more Engineer-seeded planets with a collection of proto-xenomorphs, where they set themselves up as gods and used the xenomorphs as a rite of passage.

And that's how Alien vs Predator can still fit into the Canon.

• Why anyone would try to fit that garbage into either canon, I have no idea, but in any case, the Predators seem ridiculously primitive compared to the Engineers; their only way to deal with a xenomorph infestation is to blow up the entire region. It really seems unlikely that they'd come ahead in any kind of conflict.
  • The Predators weren't exactly primitive compared to the Engineers, they just had an entirely different kind of technology. From what we've seen so far, we know that the Predators were experts in close combat, metallurgy, and plasma-based weaponry, while the Engineers appeared to have been scientists who specialized in biological warfare.

The engineers absolutely hate something about humanity.

And judging from the opening scene and their less then enthousiastic response to Weyland wanting to prolong his life, no matter what this something must be humanities fear of death.

The Engineers made humanity to farm us.

We were created, and then left alone, so we would breed for however long they decided, and then they would come back to throw these weapons at us, to create the Xenomorphs (and other nasty things) so they could use them to sick on other planets. Seems excessive when they have so many other types of weapons to use, but maybe the types of enemies they face need this kind of swarm attack to take out. And they use us because maybe they have the best body/brain type, (fast learning/moving) but don't want to kill themselves off doing it.

Something went wrong though, and they all got killed before they could come back to harvest us.

Perhaps the star map was a safety net. If something went wrong, we would eventually discover space travel (like they did) and use the starmap to find the way to our own doom.

Elizabeth Shaw is the Space Jockey from Alien and Weyland Corp continued searching for the ship she left in after receiving her last transmission.

Theory is pretty simple (major spoiler ahead). At the end of the film we see Elizabeth Shaw take off in another Engineer spaceship to go find the Engineer homeworld. Since the first ship we saw was carrying biological weapons, its likely that the ship she took was also carrying *something* (namely xenomorph eggs). At some point during the trip something goes wrong (maybe the ship hits something and is damaged, releasing the creatures, or maybe Shaw explores a bit and finds the cargo hold with the eggs) and the ship ends up crashing on LV-426. Shaw is infected by a facehugger and last thing she is able to do before dying is activate the warning signal to try and keep everyone away from the planet. She dies in the chair with the control armor stuff on, obscuring her from being recognized as human when finally found. Meanwhile, Weyland Corp receives her last log entry and spend the next few decades searching for the ship, finally discovering its location and sending the Nostromo to it in Alien

• What I think actually happened, is that David, not wanting a very unstable Shaw to attract the attention of an alien race that could easy have destroyed earth with one of their bombers, decided to give Shaw botched directions, which resulted in her crashing into LV-426. The reason she both didn't just maneuver out of the way AND had a chest-burster hole was that she was still infected and had a relapse, resulting in her crashing the (extraordinarily durable) Space Jockey ship into LV-426, with the rest of David being lost or destroyed in the crash

The Engineers hate humanity because we killed Jesus Christ

The corpses were about 2,000 years old. Also, Elizabeth's cross was emphasized. Then there is her belief in and search for a Creator. I predict that she finds the Engineer homeworld, and they are about to kill her when they notice the cross and then decide to accept her.

Alternatively, they hate us because we disposed of them in favor of monotheistic religion. They are being worshiped in all the BC glyphs and cave art. So now we're a species that both doesn't revere them and is a possible massive threat. So wipe us out.

The reason the proto-alien from the ending of the film is more advanced than chestbursters from the original

At the end of the film a proto-xenomorph bursts through the chest of the Engineer after the giant proto-facehugger infects it. However, it's black and nearly fully formed, unlike when chestbursters (small and white) were born from human chests in Alien. This can be chalked up to the Engineers being bigger, stronger, more advanced humans. Because they're more advanced than us, the creature that comes out of them is more advanced than the chestbursters.

Vickers really is an android

She never shows any emotion (at least none that couldn't be faked); her every action is dictated by cold logic; she speaks in precise, clipped sentences; her coiffure stays perfect throughout with nary a hair going astray even during the action sequences. She is tall and Aryan-looking just like David. She calls Weyland "father". We see her and Janek leave the bridge, presumably to have sex, but we never see the sex actually happen. Even if the sex does happen, it's quite possible that the Vickers-bot was designed to have working ladyparts.

As for the hypersleep, well, Ash hyperslept in the first Alien. The theory only makes sense if she was an android undercover, much like Ash. Perhaps as a failsafe in case David malfunctions, or perhaps to try out the upgraded technology. It's quite possible that even David doesn't know her true nature.

• This is also supported by the fact that Vickers woke herself up, and we saw no signs of her being nauseous. She got up and did push-ups where everyone else was too sick to stand. We also saw no signs of her needing to drink and rehydrate like everyone else after waking.

The Engineers trying to wipe out humanity were a renegade group

Admittedly, I have only seen spoilered reviews, but think about it: if they were so dead set about wiping out Earth, why wouldn't they send another bunch of ships? Instead, the guys that got sent got stuck for thousands of years and no one seemed to go check out why Earth isn't gone. It's not like there aren't fractious groups of humans, so why can't the Engineers have multiple factions?

The alien squid was Holloway's mutated sperm

The reason that thing was in Shaw's womb in the first place was due to sexual intercourse with Holloway, but since Shaw was barren, there was no way this could a case of a corrupted human fetus since she had no eggs to fertilize. Even if the bioweapon was involved, it wouldn't suddenly give her eggs since all we've seen it do is mutate anything it comes into contact with into hyper-aggressive killing machines. No, the only thing that could possibly be in her womb would be her lover's sperm. Furthermore, the squid's only purpose was to impregnate the Engineer at the end of the movie; it's only purpose was to fertilize something else. This, as we know, led to the birth of the proto-xenomorph. When you take into consideration that the xenomorphs were deliberately designed to invoke strong sexual imagery, this origin story starts making alot of sense.

The Engineer's did not purposefully start life on earth

The Engineer in the beginning looked like he was practice a religious right or sacrifice not like a scientist come down to a primitive planet to experiment. Or if it was an experiment the ship taking off in the distance was the science vessel and the experiment was the effects of the black sludge on Engineer physiology. The way we follow the black sludge thru the cells down to the DNA level then back up to animal style multi-cellular life seems to suggest that the rise of intelligent life on earth was an unforeseen consequence of the black sludge and Engineer DNA mixing with existant primitive animal DNA. The Engineers left before this consequence was discovered and only came back age's later to discover primitive humans They stayed long enough to trace the origin of a species so similar to themselves and upon discovery that they were the ones who had made us however unintentionally decided to destroy us as we were neither natural nor purposeful.