MovieChat Forums > Alien: Covenant (2017) Discussion > Fan theory: Prometheus and Alien movies ...

Fan theory: Prometheus and Alien movies tie together as a religious allegory


Okay, so we have the Engineer who first arrives on earth, right? And he takes the black oooze and it destroys him, and in his act of self-sacrifice, he sows the seeds for the human race. Later on, Elizabeth Shaw and her crew track down the Engineers and land on a planetoid where they are readying bioweapons. They find out that the Engineers had decided to end the human experiment due to some unspecified incident that occurred roughly 2,000 years ago (*coughs* the crucifixion of Christ). What could be worse than finding out your God finds you unworthy, an accident that should have been aborted? Flash forward to the time of the first Alien. The crew of the Nostromo are rerouted to LV426 (an unsurveyed planet at the time), because Weyland-Yutani wants to investigate and bring back a dangerous alien life form for use in its bio-weapons division. Naturally, they keep this information to themselves and allow the crew to suffer and die in the name of profit - aka, business as usual, just another way in which human beings have proven unworthy, as the Engineers have discovered. Ellen Ripley manages to not survive the ordeal and destroys the beast, before going into hypersleep, along with a cat (!) that she risked life and limb to save from being destroyed on the Nostromo. She awakens fifty-seven years later to find out everyone she has known and loved has died. She is, naturally, traumatized, and awakens in a panicked sweat every night from nightmares about her encounter with the xenomorph. No one could blame her for wanting to move on, and spending the rest of her life, quietly, running loaders down in the docks, and living with her cat. But when Lt. Gorman and Burke inform her that a colony on LV426 has mysteriously cut off all communication, she makes the difficult choice to join a troop of Colonial Marines and investigate the disturbance. She finds herself face to face with her worst nightmare: an entire HIVE of these monsters. She finds a sole survivor of this disaster...

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A young girl, named Newt. They form a bond in the midst of their ordeal, and towards the end, Ripley once again makes the decision to risk life and limb to save an innocent life, before leaving behind the soon-to-be-vaporized, alien-infested planet. She not only made a heroic struggle for the sake of destroying a deadly parasite, she learns the value of non-human life, as well, in the person of Bishop (you'll recall that David seems to seethe with resentment at the fact that human beings have created him, seemingly just because they could, and see him as a soul-less inferior...which of course, contributed to the creation of the aliens, in the first place!). Ripley and the other survivors go to sleep in their cryotubes and it seems everything has worked out for the best. Not so, in the Alien universe. A facehugger was left behind on Marine's ship, and it has caused an electrical fire that causes the ship to shoot out the survivors' cryotubes in an EEV. She crash lands on a prison planet and once again finds that everyone she knows and loves has died. She then makes the difficult decision to help the religious fundamentalist prisoners fight and defeat an alien (despite the fact that a few of them tried to rape her). Ripley could easily walk away and wait to be rescued. But she knows this decision will put the fate of the alien in the hands of the greedy Company and that would be a threat to all of humanity. So they kill the beast, but the nightmare isn't over, because she has one gestating inside of her, a Queen. There is no other option for her - she must sacrifice herself to preserve humanity. The creator of Bishop tries to tempt her with the promise of a normal life again, just as Satan tempted Christ in the wilderness (the creator played by Lance Henrikson, who also played a character named John Milton!). But Ripley does not succumb to temptation; she knows if she allows herself to be operated on, the Company will keep the alien and spread its Evil.

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She does the only thing she can to stop it from spreading: she hurls herself into the fiery prison furnace, taking the last remaining alien down with her. She has led, as far as we can tell, a blameless life (she is without sin), she has forgiven those who sinned against her (androids, rapist prisoners), and so the redemption arc in the film is not on her behalf, but ours. In this final act of self-sacrifice, she has redeemed the sins of mankind, as embodied by the greed and indifference to human/synthetic life of the Company. She has proven mankind worthy of not being destroyed by their creators, who first sowed the seeds of human life through a similar act of self-sacrifice. It's telling that the next film, although not very good, begins with her resurrection. Prometheus completed the saga's reconfiguration into a re-telling of the Christ narrative.

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Is the character limit that harsh here?

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nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...Well actually it might be

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apparently so!

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I like your theory

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Thank you. I tried to tie together the various thematic elements into something cohesive so I could "explain" the meaning of the movies to myself.

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>> And he takes the black oooze and it destroys him, and in his act of self-sacrifice,
>> he sows the seeds for the human race.

Right there ... that is idiotic. We know how to sow life, but they even show this engineer's DNA destructing ... that did not sow anything, plus - why did he kill himself ... no point. It was crazy idiotic.

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Okay, but let me just stop you right there. You "sow" seeds for life. You "sew" clothes.

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Thanks, corrected.

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Exactly my point as well. I believe that this franchise follows the big bang theory and the theory of evolution. All science. No religion.

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