Movies Like Prometheus

Frequently asked about Prometheus

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• Why do the Engineers want to destroy humanity after creating it?▾

  The film never gives a definitive answer, but the prevailing interpretation is that humans disappointed or threatened the Engineers in some way — possibly by worshipping or following Jesus Christ, whom some production materials suggest was an Engineer sent to guide humanity. When humanity killed him, the Engineers lost faith in their creation and resolved to wipe it out. The 2,000-year-old star map also aligns with that approximate timeline, suggesting the destruction mission was halted around that period.

• What is the black goo and what does it actually do?▾

  The black liquid is a mutagenic biological weapon engineered by the Engineers, stored in the vases inside the stone urns on LV-223. It doesn't have a single predictable effect — it interacts differently depending on the host organism, breaking down and restructuring DNA. It dissolved the Engineer in the opening sequence to seed a planet with life, turned Fifield into a murderous mutant, infected Holloway causing him to impregnate Shaw with a proto-facehugger, and the trilobite that resulted eventually gestated the proto-Xenomorph (Deacon) from the Engineer.

• Why did David poison Holloway with the black goo?▾

  David's motivation is deliberately left ambiguous. He was following Peter Weyland's implicit directive to find a way to extend Weyland's life, and he was experimenting to understand the Engineers' technology. When Holloway drunkenly said he'd do anything for answers, David seized the opportunity to conduct a live human trial. David also appears to have a detached, almost clinical curiosity about human suffering and mortality — possibly heightened by his resentment toward humans who treat him as a lesser being.

• What happened to Shaw's 'abortion' creature and how did it lead to the Deacon?▾

  Shaw, impregnated by the infected Holloway, discovered she was carrying a rapidly growing non-human embryo. She used the med-pod to surgically remove it — it was a squid-like proto-facehugger (trilobite). She sealed it inside the med-pod room, but it survived. When the last Engineer was awakened and attacked the crew, Shaw released it into the room as a desperate measure. The trilobite latched onto the Engineer's face and implanted an embryo, which gestated and burst from the Engineer's chest as the Deacon — a proto-Xenomorph that hints at how the classic Alien creature came to exist.

• Why did the surviving Engineer immediately attack the humans instead of communicating?▾

  The Engineer had been in hypersleep for approximately 2,000 years and awoke to find humans — a species he and his kind had decided to destroy — standing over him in his own facility. Weyland's request for immortality through David would have read as a profound insult: a slave race sending its own synthetic servant to demand gifts from its creators. The Engineer's violent reaction appears to be a combination of disgust at humanity's audacity and the resumption of the extermination mission that was interrupted millennia earlier.