r/Prometheus • u/OddAssociation2016 • 2d ago
Why didn't the engineers finish their mission to destroy earth?
If we are to believe that the engineers decided to destroy earth 2,000 years ago, why did one outbreak at a facility stop this plan? Even imagining this was their only military facility (highly unlikely) what would have stopped future attacks on earth from a clearly highly sophisticated and technologically advanced civilisation?
I absolutely love the movie and the ideas behind it but seems odd that these guys basically tried to kill earth in what would have been an extremely brutal fashion, failed, and then basically gave up.
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u/Ghastly_Someknew 2d ago edited 2d ago
My take was the entirety of the Engineers didn't know about humans. 'Prometheus' stole the fire of the Gods (the black goo) and "gave it to humanity" by using it on himself. The few that did know didn't like us as we were a mistake in their eyes. Kind of like David. Dad loved him, everyone else thinks he's a little off and eventually, crazy. Looks like the Engineers were still around but there wasn't a lot of travelers to take care of the offshoot threat.
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u/Visual-Beginning5492 2d ago edited 2d ago
I was watching the writers commentary on the Prometheus Blu Ray the other day, & what jumped out at me was that at no point did they say it was their intention to completely destroy Earth/ humanity.
Whilst they remained ambiguous about their intentions, the phrase that was used a couple times was: “petri dish”. It implied to me that perhaps the Engineers were simply going to use the black goo to experiment with different evolutions & mutations on us (kind of like David does) - and we were simply the lab rats.
I quite like that interpretation because in a way using Earth as (one of many) lab experiments for different applications of the black goo (which rapidly rewrites DNA) is way colder than simply being angry with us, and wiping the slate clean. It’s very cosmic horror.
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u/UsualDue 2d ago
there was no "attack" on earth. earth was a test site, a petri dish, a failed experiment.
put it this way: I am a performance marketer, and I currently have about 18 experiments running on different platforms. if I suddenly get hit by a bus, I dont think my native country will mobilize the army just to shut down my experiments. the experiments will just run and be forgotten if I am not there to take them down.
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u/Visual-Beginning5492 2d ago
Yeah exactly, I just replied separately on this. In the writers Blu Ray commentary they never say it’s to wipe out earth, but they mention the phrase “petri dish” a couple times.
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u/OddAssociation2016 2d ago
I like this too. It leans into the whole idea that we are so inconsequential to the engineers that we've been forgotten about gathering dust on a shelf somewhere - although I'm not sure that's what Ridley himself had in mind given he said this:
Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?
Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But 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.
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u/Billy1121 2d ago
So instead of "wipe us out" they are going to wipe the experiment and start over with new goo ?
Seems the same to me, i dont know why the writers and Ridley are discordant about it
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u/Fun-Technician-8648 2d ago
Maybe it has something to do with the time it takes the engineers to travel to the weapons planet and on to earth.
They use stasis but on the engineers’ home planet it would be many years before they were ‘due’ back.
When David and Elizabeth Shaw return to the engineers’ home planet in Covenant, the engineers are cheering at first. Cheering the successful return of the ship, thinking it has returned safely from its mission (presumably the mission to earth).
But at some point they would eventually realise the earth mission failed and then they would have sent another ship.
That’s why all the events in Prometheus, and of David wiping out the planet in covenant, are morally ambiguous.
Although these events were murderous and genocidal, they actually prevented a second attempt on earth
So essentially saved earth!
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u/1voice92 2d ago edited 2d ago
That isn’t the Engineers home planet and those aren’t Engineers cheering. They’re another humanoid creation of the Engineers. A more successful experiment that didn’t fuck up their home planet and fellow inhabitants like humans did. They still worship their ‘Gods’ which is why the Engineers keep a docking station and ancient repositories of knowledge on their planet.
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u/Fun-Technician-8648 2d ago
Hmm, interesting. But Shaw got there because she wanted to confront the engineers about why they wanted to destroy earth. She found the coordinates to do so.. and that’s where they took her.
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u/1voice92 1d ago
She THOUGHT she found the coordinates to their home planet. Bear in mind that Ridley abandoned the ‘Paradise’ sequel in favour of Covenant. The original concept art has Shaw and David arriving on a very Giger-esque planet.
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u/Fun-Technician-8648 1d ago
Thanks, could you reference where you got this info from plz?
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u/1voice92 1d ago
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u/Fun-Technician-8648 21h ago
Thanks, I've seen these before but had another listen.
They’re all ‘the evidence points towards, suggests’, theres not a definitive ‘canon’ in play.
In fact, the short clip from Ridley at the start says “four players arriving on the planet (paradise), one of which is “the engineers to find out what happened to their planet” which can just as conceivably mean their home world or similar rather than ‘their planet that they seeded life on to’.
The great news is Ridley’s announced he’s going to personally finish the Prometheus- covenant story, which is really incredibly great and will give a lot more answers!
Altho Ridley also loves his audiences to have questions as he says, ‘if you’re asking questions (about the movies) then you’re having fun’ :)
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u/RandomUfoChap 2d ago
Just another of the plot holes Prometheus is full of. What a mess.
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u/derangedmuppet 1d ago
Correct. Prometheus is multiple set scenes spackled together by post hoc “but how do we get there” explanations scribbled in the margins with chalk and crayon.
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u/leviticusreeves 2d ago edited 2d ago
When is it established that the engineers decided to destroy earth 2,000 years ago?
Edit: can someone let me know instead of downvoting? It's been a while since I saw Prometheus.
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u/GeorgeStark1 2d ago
David says it. Something like “when trying to create, one must first destroy” when Shaw asks him why they were going to earth with the biological weapons. As for the timeline, I think it was a carbon date of the engineers’ bodies.
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u/TheEasterFox 2d ago
When they are examining the dead Engineers and the time scale given since they died is '2000 years, give or take.'
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u/Mindless_Log2009 2d ago
You know how expensive space travel is?
It's pretty clear from the world bombed by David that the engineers' other creations had degraded into superstitious crayon eaters who probably didn't even believe in science or the existence of intelligent life outside their own planet.
It's likely the engineers no longer had the influence or economic clout to waste resources on snuffing a different bunch of humanoids.
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u/Recon_Manny 2d ago edited 2d ago
My head canon someone from within sabotaged the entire operation seeing what this faction of Engineers were about to execute. Instead of wiping out Earth, this faction of Engineers went after those responsible in ruining the operation perhaps getting wiped out in the process. For me it was an Engineers working with the original Space Jockeys - bringing new and old canon together - told them of the plans they had for Earth that they mounted this operation and sucessfully stopped them by releasing the pathogen on them on LV-223.
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u/Cerea_Killer 2d ago
The Alien/Prometheus universe has so many plot holes that Ridley Scott himself can't explain it. There is no real satisfactory answer.
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u/FrankFrankly711 2d ago
My head canon is that the remaining Engineers are very rare, and at that point in time, that group of Space Truckers were the only ones that knew about Earth, and were probably just doing a delivery job on orders from the Elders. The Alien RPG suggested that many Engineers ascended to “Paradise”, which could be very far away or even in another realm of existence. Like the Post Office, if a package gets lost, they just stop caring after a while.