Ridley Scott Answers to Prometheus

Prometheus is a film filled with questions, and several of them go unanswered in the storyline. Forums have been filled with film geek theories about why the giant albino non-nipple thing (aka an “Engineer”) sipped on that black goo and fell into the river at the beginning, why the Engineers want to destroy Earth, why were the Engineers creating big blubbering, vagina-octopus creatures, and more.

Ridley Scott has the answers! Kind of.  Actually, he dances around them, maybe to keep us intrigued and maybe just because he doesn’t fully know them either. The questions aren’t meant to be answered clearly, because we don’t know them and there will always be questions. Many viewers seek closure, but this film just raises more questions (which probably could be answered through your own interpretation of the film). How about that? A film that makes you think.

Anyways, here’s some interesting things that Ridley Scott said to the fine folks at The Playlist:

On the Engineer doing his dive at the beginning:

“…[the] sequence at the beginning of the film that is fundamentally creation. It’s a donation, in the sense that the weight and the construction of the DNA of those aliens is way beyond what we can possibly imagine”

Is it happening on Earth?

“No, it doesn’t have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history – which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas – he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, et cetera.”

Did we do something to make the Engineers hate us?

“We definitely did… if you look at it as an ‘our children are misbehaving down there’ scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, ‘Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.’ Guess what? They crucified him.”

Prometheus 2 in the pipeline:

“Well, from the very beginning, I was working from a premise that lent itself to a sequel. I really don’t want to meet God in the first one. I want to leave it open to [Noomi Rapace’s character] saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I want to go where they came from. I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God.”

What is an Engineer?

“In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, they’re tall and elegant … they are dark angels. If you look at ’Paradise Lost,’ the guys who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God. So boil it all down, and humanity was the offspring of some dark/rogue angels? That would seem to be the gist of it, and we guess that’s where a “Prometheus 2″  would go if/when that should ever happen. Now ‘Prometheus’ is ready to go off in its own direction on its own entirely different tangent that is not going to be reliant on the things we’ve seen a thousand times before.”

Prometheus 2 is on its way (most likely).

Here are all the viral videos so far for Prometheus: