Alien was pitched as "Jaws in space," but it might actually be a Christmas movie the more you think about it. Let's find out why.
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00:00Alien was pitched as Jaws in space, but it might actually be a Christmas movie the more
00:04you think about it.
00:05Let's find out why.
00:07In Ridley Scott's Alien, the sinister android Ash describes the killer creature loose aboard
00:11his spaceship as a perfect and violent creation, admiring its purity.
00:16Little else is revealed about the xenomorphs in that original film, with the murderous
00:20alien remaining, well, alien.
00:22The one detail that Ash seems to drop is that the creature could be harvested as an invasive
00:26species intended for combat purposes.
00:29The notion that the xenomorphs are a pure destructive force and a life form that only
00:32exists to take lives is one that runs throughout multiple Alien sequels.
00:36In James Cameron's follow-up, Aliens, Paul Reiser plays a suspicious figure for a mysterious
00:41company that aims to gather and weaponize one of that film's many monsters.
00:45Don't let that fool you, I'm really an okay guy.
00:47The film proves that no military force, no matter how confident or well equipped, will
00:51be able to stand up to the xenomorphs.
00:53Aliens also introduced the notion that the xenomorphs were a naturally pervasive semi-intelligent
00:58species that are born of an insect-like queen.
01:00David Fincher's troubled Alien 3 and the whimsical Alien Resurrection each took the series in
01:05its own direction, one being a delightfully depressive look at the futility of fighting
01:09a pervasive and undying alien death machine, and the other being a kooky Aliens rift full
01:14of goop, clones, and space pirates.
01:16It wouldn't be until Scott returned to the series in 2012 with Prometheus that the true
01:20function of the xenomorphs would be revealed.
01:22Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, I see, whoop, stupid me.
01:27Prometheus takes place many years before the events of Alien, and involves no common characters.
01:32It also ignores all of the continuity laid out by the films made since 1979, including
01:37the pair of movies where xenomorphs engaged in battle with everyone's other favorite
01:40alien species, the Predators.
01:42Prometheus begins millions of years in the past with an enormous, white-skinned humanoid
01:46known as the Engineer.
01:48Drinking a mysterious black substance on a primordial Earth, the alien's body breaks
01:52down, its DNA seeding Earth's waters.
01:55Fast forward to the year 2089, and a group of space explorers have found a cave painting
01:59on Earth that may clue them into the origins of the planet.
02:02They trek out into the galaxy with a very human-like android, and land on a planet called
02:06LV-223.
02:08On LV-223, the astronauts discover an enormous, mysterious alien edifice that contains a host
02:14of mysteries.
02:15They find a dead alien body and Lovecraftian chambers full of unusual ancient symbols.
02:20Through various misadventures, the crew learns that the structure is actually a ship containing
02:24vials of a liquid bioweapon that can spawn a variety of destructive animal species.
02:29Eventually, the lead astronaut, Shaw, surmises that the large, white-skinned Engineers artificially
02:34grew a killer menagerie specifically to be let loose on Earth.
02:38Given the amount of time it takes for information to travel from Earth to LV-223, she finds
02:42that the Engineers began their project some 2,053 years before.
02:46And what significant Christian event occurred on Earth back in AD 33?
02:50And how does that relate to the fact that Prometheus also takes place at Christmas time?
02:55Ridley Scott seems to heavily imply that Jesus of Nazareth was an Engineer.
02:59Just as humankind's ultimate creator was an Engineer who sacrificed his body, so too
03:03was Jesus.
03:04It seems that Jesus was a being sent to Earth to check up on this little human experiment
03:08that the Engineers had been running for the past 3.7 billion years.
03:12One might even infer that the Messiah Engineer was sent to Earth to spread a philosophy of
03:16pacifism and togetherness.
03:18When humans rejected those philosophies by crucifying the visiting Engineer, the rest
03:22of our alien overlords declared us a failure and began making organic weapons to wipe us
03:26out.
03:27In so doing, however, they lost control of their creatures and were wiped out themselves.
03:32This proves to be doubly true when the android David hijacks an alien craft and uses the
03:36Prometheus spores to lay waste to the Engineer homeworld in Alien Covenant.
03:40The Engineers made humans, were upset with the result, and tried to make monsters to
03:44kill us.
03:45Meanwhile, humans made suspicious androids obsessed with purity, and our own creations
03:49wiped out our creators.
03:51The levels of meaning are endless here.
03:53Prometheus ambitiously attempts to blend science with the divine, all using iconography from
03:57Scott's 1979 Creature Feature.
03:59Effectively, the aliens were demons, living weapons that only served to kill.
04:04It's why they were made.
04:05That is why they are obsessed with killing humans.
04:08It's in their very DNA.
04:09That's it, man.
04:10Game over, man.
04:11It's game over.
04:12The f*** are we gonna do now?
04:13What are we gonna do?
04:14What are we gonna do now?
04:15What are we gonna do?