The Ending Of Prometheus Explained

Ridley Scott's space-horror classic "Alien" doesn't exactly cry out for a prequel. The plot is pretty simple: the crew of a spaceship encounters a vicious alien that proceeds to kill most of them; it pretty much explains itself. So no one was quite prepared for the science fiction epic "Prometheus." Set decades before "Alien," it takes a detour to the dawn of humanity before recorded history. It's essentially Scott's "2001: A Space Odyssey": a visually stunning, epic space opera but replacing Stanley Kubrick's cold depiction of the vastness of space with squirm-inducing horror.

A beautiful film with some committed performances, "Prometheus" won favorable reviews and made a decent return at the box office even though it's kind of confusing the first time through. Expanding the scope of the "Alien" franchise well beyond the continued human vs. xenomorph run-ins (and the non-canonical "Alien vs. Predator" movies), "Prometheus" contains big ideas about the origins of humanity, evolution, and faith that Scott had been mulling over for years before finally getting to make it. The result is as complex as a lecture and as opaque as a cave painting, but let's take a decoder ring to it as well as we can. This is the ending of "Prometheus" explained.

If we are supposed to take the guesswork of lead archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and captain of the Prometheus Janek (Idris Elba) at face value, we're left with a confusing picture of the Engineers and what their motivations ultimately were.

Some billions of years ago the Engineers sacrificed one of their own to create humanity, and then visited Earth several times to check in on them, somehow communicating to several primitive civilizations and leaving behind a star map to their base, which Shaw and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover in ancient cave paintings. As such they initially appear to be benevolent creators, who gave birth to humanity and then left us an invitation to the stars.

However, when the crew of the Prometheus arrives at LV-223 (the inelegant name given to the habitable moon in the system the star maps seemed to indicate), all they find is a base that seems more like a military installation than the Engineers' homeworld, and records that indicate they all died right before they returned to Earth to destroy humanity with several vials of a black-goo-based "weapon of mass destruction." Why? If they found humanity to be unworthy, it would presumably have something to do with humanity's penchant for wanton destruction like mass war and genocide, so it seems a little hypocritical to decide to wipe us out. "Prometheus" can only hint at the answers to these questions, as the only living Engineer with a chance to speak in the movie goes on a murderous rampage instead. Typical. 

The Engineers have achieved stunning feats of technology and space travel. They are shown to have created entire populations, piloted massive ships, and based on the navigational map in their ship, they have explored countless untold star systems. But their greatest achievement might be the Swiss-Army-knife-esque mysterious black goo, which can accomplish basically whatever the plot of "Prometheus" needs it to at any given point. To begin with, it has the ability to break down Engineer DNA to enable it to recombine and grow an entirely new species (humans), as we see at the opening of the film.

Next, when Holloway has just a drop of it in his drink, it more or less instantly combines with his DNA and enables him to impregnate Shaw, who was previously infertile. The goo serves as the basic building blocks of humanity, and when combined with human DNA gives rise to Shaw's terrifying monster child. This in turn attaches itself like a huge face-hugger to an Engineer and results in a familiar, classic xenomorph-like chest-burster. 

So the goo can evolve humanity over centuries, but can also recombine into entirely new hybrid species overnight? If that's not impressive enough, it also turns Fifield (Sean Harris) into a terrifyingly strong, rage-filled zombie. It's a source of life and evolution, but also seemingly the weapon the Engineers were planning to wipe out humanity with. Truly a remarkable, malleable substance.

As briefly explained by Peter Weyland in hologram form, it's worth exploring how the Greek myth of Prometheus relates to the events of the movie and the fate of the ship that bears his name. Prometheus was one of the Titans, the gods that reigned before the much more well-known gods of Mount Olympus. His central myth is stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity, although in some myths he's also credited with creating humanity itself out of clay, which seems to have been Weyland's motivation for the name of the expedition he financed to meet the Engineers.

It's worth noting, however, that much like the movie, the story of Prometheus isn't just a creation myth, but a story with eternal consequences for Prometheus and humanity. In punishment for giving humanity the light of fire (associated with wisdom and civilization), Prometheus is chained to a rock for all eternity, where an eagle eats out his liver every day. Humanity was punished with the creation of Pandora, who came along with her well-known "Pandora's Box" that contained all the evils in the world, essentially an earlier version of Eve, the snake, and the apple. "Prometheus" uses all of this as subtext, as man's desire to meet its creators, and for knowledge and understanding in general, is punished severely with violence and death.

One of the more frustrating and underdeveloped elements of "Prometheus" is the relationship between scientific discovery and religious faith. Like Darwin's discoveries regarding human origins and evolution before them, Shaw and Holloway's discovery that humanity itself was created by alien beings has enormous implications for our self-conception as a species and the foundations of our faith. However, this is more or less met with a shrug by the team of contractors and scientists that are along with them on the mission. Shaw herself is the only character that maintains her faith, making it a point to hold on to a crucifix at different key moments.

Granted, she spends a lot of the movie just trying not to get killed by various alien monsters, but she also never has a chance to explain how her faith remains unshaken despite her research upending everything we've previously believed or imagined about the origins of humanity. There are vague allusions to Shaw's faith in her philosophical stance that if the Engineers created us, "who created them?" but there's not a real sense of how the Christian faith specifically, (or any other religion for that matter), can accommodate the Engineers and their ability to create entire other races of beings into its theology, and how that keeps her moving forward in the face of literal and existential horrors.

As "Alien" movie heroines go, Elizabeth Shaw is more of a reactive sort. She is behind what's happening a lot of the time, nearly gets killed in a silica storm, runs away from the Engineer twice and gets bailed out by her alien offspring, and generally is more of a survivor than an action hero. By far her most badass moments come when she programs the MedPod to perform a horrifying emergency alien caesarian, and in the film's dramatic conclusion, when she chooses to commandeer another ship to the Engineer's homeworld to "get some answers" instead of returning to the safety of Earth.

As impressive as Shaw's gumption is, there's really no reason to think this will go particularly well. The only living Engineer that she's encountered declined to answer a single question, and his immediate actions of decapitating David and murdering nearly all the humans in the room speak for themselves. It's unclear what reception she thinks she will receive upon arriving on the Engineer homeworld, piloting a ship full of the destructive bio-weapon that wiped out one of their entire bases. If you're curious, you can spoil Ridley Scott's follow-up "Alien: Covenant" for yourself, or watch the movie and see what becomes of her and David.