Ridley Scott's Alien's fingerprints are evident throughout Prometheus. The film featured multiple nods to Scott's hallowed original, from shared narrative elements to haunting visual cues. However, while the movie (partially) answered where the franchise's iconic monsters come from, one Alien question that the film pledged to solve remains frustratingly open-ended.
When developing Prometheus, Ridley Scott set out some important parameters for its success. In an interview with address a major Alien mystery, fans were (and continue to be) disappointed.
We'll Never Know How An Engineer Ship Got To LV-426
This Aspect Of The Original Alien Remains Unclear
Although Prometheus revealed that the space jockey creature franchise fans had long puzzled over was, in fact, an Engineer – an alien race responsible for humanity's creation – the movie did not actually answer the main question about the space jockey posed by Alien. Namely, it's still a mystery how an Engineer ship, with a cargo hold full of Alien eggs, managed to end up on LV-426 in the first place.
By the movie's end, there were no alien eggs, and Shaw and David's ship was traveling to a completely different planet.
Prometheus featured all the elements necessary to answer this question. The movie explained what the space jockey was, introduced a proto-xenomorph in the form of the sinister Deacon, and showed how the Engineer ship could travel through space. However, none of these plot threads ever came together. By the movie's end, there were no alien eggs, and Shaw and David's ship was traveling to a completely different planet. Even Prometheus' sequel, Alien: Covenant, saw the first facehuggers bound on another ship, even further from LV-426 and the first movie.
All this means that audiences still have no clue how an Engineer ship laden with eggs ended up on the franchise's original planet. This creates an uncomfortable plot hole, given how the series has insisted on trying to unravel what had once been a satisfyingly enigmatic puzzle. However, while Alien: Covenant still left a sliver of hope that, having re-opened the case with two prequels, the franchise would at least offer some sort of resolution, the current state of Alien makes it clear that we will never get an answer to this central issue.
The Alien Series Has Moved Beyond Prometheus' Set-Up
Romulus And Earth Are Taking Things In A Different Direction
With its story set between Alien and Aliens, Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus represents a literal and metaphorical "moving on" for the franchise. While the movie was careful to acknowledge the Alien franchise's complete history (with the android Rook even explicitly mentioning "Prometheus fire"), the story has little narrative connection to the events of Scott's prequel. Not only does it not involve LV-426, but Romulus completely eschews the space jockey creature, making the Engineers seem much less central to Alien's overarching story.
It's clear from plans for the franchise's future that Romulus is not an anomaly. Noah Hawley's series Alien: Earth (which itself has pledged to rewrite aspects of the series' lore canonized in Prometheus and Covenant) will offer a new origin for the franchise, with its earthbound setting indicating a similar lack of space jockeys and "black goo". For fans who found Prometheus and Covenant's exposition unnecessary – even damaging – this is a welcome development. However, the inevitable consequence is that audiences will never know how the Engineer ship arrived on LV-426.
The Alien Franchise's Future Proves What A Mistake Prometheus Was
Trying To Explain Alien Made Everything Too Complicated
Given its status as one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, it's perhaps understandable that filmmakers and storytellers want to continually revisit Alien's lore. The 1979 movie's introduction to worlds and civilizations completely unrelated to our own was both haunting and awe-inspiring – highlighting humanity's insignificance in the vastness of the cosmos. The quest for answers around things we don't understand is a very human instinct, creating a neat metatextual parallel between Prometheus's characters and its creators. Wanting to know more about the space jockey is a natural instinct for both.
...Alien's greatest strength is its terrifying serendipity.
However, this inclination completely misunderstands what made Alien so powerful to begin with. The key to its success comes not from the rationality of its plot. Instead, Alien's greatest strength is its terrifying serendipity. There is no answer to how the alien eggs arrived on LV-426. As far as the characters know (at least, until the reveal about Weyland-Yutani's underhand involvement), it is a horrible twist of fate that brings them face to face with the perfect organism.
In seeking to give everything an explanation, Prometheus and its sequel undercut a core strength of the franchise. Alien no longer posed open-ended questions about the mysteries of nature beyond Planet Earth, and instead became disappointingly prosaic and artificial. It's telling that Romulus abandoned Prometheus' expository approach – instead opting to put a new group of characters in a horrifyingly alien situation. Considering Earth's pledge to rewrite the franchise's origins, it's increasingly clear that the determination to solve the original space jockey riddle was always hopelessly misguided.
Sources: MTV, Forbes
Prometheus
- Release Date
- June 8, 2012
- Runtime
- 124 Minutes
- Director
- Ridley Scott
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