The Prometheus Theory That Has Horror Fans Scanning The Script

The Alien franchise started off simple enough with the original film essentially being a haunted house movie featuring a deadly alien making its way onboard a spaceship. As the series has gone on, the mythology behind the xenomorphs has grown with audiences seeing a colony of the creatures in Aliens while Alien 3 includes a plot for the Earth-based company Weyland-Yutani to find a way to utilize the xenomorphs as biological weapons. 

After a handful of films watching the aliens go toe-to-toe with the monsters from the Predator franchise, director Ridley Scott returned to the series he helped create by directing the origin story, Prometheus. The film received a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences alike (via Rotten Tomatoes), and even Scott eventually went on the record, saying he didn't include enough horror elements in the prequel. 

Another common criticism lobbied at the film is that it was too confusing, with many believing it raised too many questions without providing sufficient answers, particularly when it came to the huge, daunting Engineers. We learn in Prometheus how they're planning on traveling to Earth to unleash the xenomorphs on humanity, but it's never explained why they hate humans so much. Looking over on Reddit, it appears movie buffs are turning to the screenplay for answers and finding a key explanation that would've allowed the movie to make a lot more sense. 

With the version of Prometheus we have, the general explanation for the relationship between humanity and the Engineers is that they created us simply because they could, and they had the power to destroy us just as easily. However, an original draft of the film, which was originally supposed to be titled Alien: Engineers, delves further into the beings' reasoning. Redditor u/Johnny_Mc2 posted a portion from the script, which has since been scrubbed online, to reveal that the Engineers actually sent a "chosen one" to Earth who would become what we know as Jesus Christ. In the initial version, an Engineer even explains, "We took a [mother's] child back to Paradise and educated him, taught him the meaning of life and creation. We put him back into Eden to educate your kind. But your kind decided to punish him. We gave you the fruits of life and you repay us by leaving it to rot." 

There you have it; the Engineers are mad because they sent someone to teach us about peace, and we killed him. You can even see remnants of this idea in the finished product when the team stumbles upon a suit that's carbon-dated back 2,000 years ago, which would have been around the time of Jesus' birth. 

By looking through the Reddit thread, it's clear that a more explicit explanation would have divided fans. There are people who like the explanation while others think the movie works just fine with basic generalizations as u/CocoMarx explains, "The movie is enough of an allegory for our relationship with religion and creation, this dialogue feels like Ridley going way too overboard and it seems like he & his editors knew that."

Alien: Covenant pretty much dropped the whole Engineer plot line and got back to the basics by focusing on xenomorphs wreaking havoc. It'll be intriguing to see if any of these ideas become incorporated into the future Alien TV series coming to FX from the mind of Ridley Scott.