The spaceship takes off, full of optimistic crew members who have starry eyes and hopeful hearts. The team of explorers are on a mission to explore the darkest realms of the universe, previously untouched by any other man-made craft or even the digital fingertips of Earth’s technology. Aboard the craft are Dr. Shaw and Dr. Holloway, a couple who each has their own reasons for wanting to play the role of the groundbreaking explorer. Shaw wants to believe that there is something bigger than humanity and wants to meet these supposed entities so that she can prove that they are benevolently intelligent beings who want to help Earth. Holloway does not believe in anything else than the present world of humanity, but his skepticism drives him to accompany his wife to prove her wrong. When one encounters existence that is more advanced and complicated than its own, it cowers in submission and tries to run away, often unsuccessfully. This is the crew members’ fate, as they encounter forces to terrifying to reckon with. 

Alien Prometheusis a rollercoaster of a sci-fi horror film, containing many elements of advanced technology of the year 2084 and paying homage to its grandfather, the classic 1979 movie Alien.  In this film particularly, we meet the Engineers, intelligent extraterrestrial beings who have a very sophisticated system but who have a deep desire to erase humanity completely. Contrasted to these beings is the billionaire corporation who sent a bunch of their crew members aboard the ship, their intentions unknown to the other scientists. Dr. Weyland, the CEO, has the intention of meeting the Engineers to figure out a way to extend his dwindling life, and while he was on to that, to also find the key to immortality. With one crew member seeking answers to her burning question of what life means, one crew member seeking to prove her wrong, and the rest of the crew seeking the elixir of immortality, it makes for a perfect storm of confusion and chaos as the Engineers aren’t all the crew made them out to be. In all transparency, I had to view this film twice to get a better grasp on what the multiple perspectives were that tied together, like various tiny threads all being knit together in to one huge, complicated mess. The mess isn’t pretty to look at, but it takes weeks to untangle and unpack it. Let us begin with each thread, so we can better examine how they together can form a complicated, messy ball. 

One piece of thread that this film pulls out in to the open is the discussion of artificial intelligence, an extremely relevant topic today. Technology is incredibly advanced to the point of it being almost unrecognizable in the movie, except for the artificial intelligence robot named David. Programmed by the billionaire space company run by the scheming Dr. Weyland, David’s sole mission is to help Weyland stop the aging process and achieve immortality by talking to the Engineers, who he hopes will just give him the answers if they are as benevolent as the humans make them out to be. David pretends to be cordial to the rest of the crew members, but all the while hiding different motives. This element presents the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence, of how it can get so advanced that it thinks entirely on its own, even ignoring the destruction of human beings to achieve its own goals. Highly advanced technology always comes with its benefits and consequences, and one of the consequences is seen in the humanoid robot who slyly plots how to carry out his programmer’s orders all the while pretending to help the rest of the crew members on their mission. 

Another piece of thread in this film is the important question that Dr. Shaw brings up with seeking to meet her potential makers, since she believes that the Engineers created humanity. With her belief in them as a deity, she has a sort of wondrous fascination of finding out how humanity came about. Her answer to that question led her to endless confusion, and also turned out to be the messiest aspect of this film. Dr. Shaw suspected there was a higher presence greater than humanity, and whether that was God or some other higher entity, she wanted to find out. As we realize in the film, the Engineers are real beings who have created a vast, highly civilized structure of a technological world. Dr. Shaw wanted to believe them to have good intentions, creators of a good world who loved humanity. But we also realize that her feelings of them being the good creators were entirely wrong: they in fact were not good, but evil beings who wanted to erase Earth, not sustain it. Dr. Shaw went looking in the wrong place for the answers to her important question of who created humanity: it did not lie in her own intelligence and prowess of putting on the explorer hat to uncover the hidden truth, nor her trying to put on her scientist hat to dissect exactly who the creator is. These efforts simply won’t work, and we watch this unfold as she encounters malevolent beings who leave her just as confused as before. The ending is where the film falls short: there is no glimmer of hope, no hint of redemption for Shaw’s search. The film simply just ends, with her search being in the wrong place and thus resulting in fruitless endeavors that cause mass chaos. If anything, it is a cautionary tale, one that illuminates the reality that we will never find the answer within ourselves or within our own intellectual minds, no matter how smart we may be. Higher power in this film is demonstrated to be subjective truth, the Engineers are who you want them to be… intelligent beings, or malevolent destroyers of humanity. This subjectivity only creates more complicated threads to be woven together in a big ball of mess, and if there is no objective truth to cut through the entanglement, the ball of thread will only get bigger and bigger. 

The last obvious piece of thread to be drawn out of this movie is the juxtaposed position of Dr. Holloway, the skeptic. He doesn’t necessarily believe that there is an objective answer to the question of who made humanity, but he is willing to tag along with Dr. Shaw to prove that science can do just about anything…. well, just about. Throughout the film, Holloway presents as someone who, because they do not believe in a creator, is willing to become the creator and make their own version of humanity. He travels with Shaw to discover new realms of the universe because he says he can, he’s human and thus that makes him equal to a god. One conversation in the film that stood out to me highlighting this theme is the conversation between the AI humanoid David and Holloway: David asks, “How far would you go to get what you came all this way for- your answers? What would you be willing to do?” Holloway answers, “Anything and everything.” Holloway sees the world as something to be mastered and conquered, and the thought of something being more powerful than himself, the wielder of advanced technology, is practically unheard of. Unfortunately, his egocentric view of forging his own humanity ends poorly when the AI humanoid himself turns on Holloway and poisons his drink with alien goo, killing him in the classic original Ridley Scott Alien fashion. The film displays that humanity does not hold the keys to the universe at unlocking its depths, it is not meant for us to play miniature deities as its makers and creators. 

In the Greek myth, Prometheus was a titan who was told by the gods not to give humanity the keys to power and destruction, he was instructed to not bestow them the gift of fire. He defied the orders and gave humanity the gift, and in turn was doomed to suffer eternal punishment. The film, named after this Greek myth, displays the tragic events that unfold when we elevate ourselves as the maker, creator, and bestower of power and intellectuality. The danger of humanity becoming like deities and seeking to conquer the mysteries of the universe bleeds out from the insides and spills out in to the open, displaying objective truth: we do not have the capability to pretend to be gods, and we never will. Like in the film, everything crumbles apart when the fate of humanity is left into the hands of humans themselves. What I believe this film could do better in is despite this dark message of an intense theme, there needs to be a hopeful answer. Despite the chaos of humanity doing whatever it wills, there needs to be belief. And no matter what lies on the outskirts of the universe, there needs to be trust that we are in the hands of a God who cares for and loves us, sovereign and omniscient in His eternal glory.