Prometheus movie who are engineers. Creators - Engineers - Space Jockeys

The blockbuster "Prometheus" is a landmark film project not only for the director of the film, Ridley Scott, but also for all fans of Hollywood cinema. Firstly, with this film the British director again turned to the genre that made him famous: we all remember very well (1979) and (1982), which have already become classics. Secondly, “Prometheus” is firmly connected with the universe of the cult film series about Aliens, which left a noticeable mark on popular culture. So, no matter how you approach it, “Prometheus” promised to become an event in the world of cinema and largely lived up to expectations. The film performed well at the global box office, earning over $400 million against a budget of $130 million. Representatives of the 20th Century Fox studio were pleased with the financial performance and have already made a statement regarding the sequel, which will be released no earlier than 2014-2015. So Ridley Scott will have the opportunity to answer all the questions he asked in Prometheus. In addition, the film did not go unnoticed in the professional community and received several nominations for prestigious film awards. "Prometheus" nominated for Oscar and BAFTA awards for best visual effects, Ridley Scott's film is also up for three VES Awards and an Artists Guild Prize.

The trailer for the film "Prometheus", which fueled the audience's expectations of the upcoming spectacle.

Ridley Scott has always been famous for his ability to make beautiful, spectacular films with stylish visuals. We have compiled a hit parade of spectacular scenes from the blockbuster “Prometheus” that will remain in the memory of everyone who watches them, thanks to the direction and high-quality special effects. This article contains plot spoilers.

Scene of the Creator's self-sacrifice

The creators were played by actors wearing plastic makeup based on three-component silicone, but in the shots with the character breaking into pieces, the performer was replaced by a three-dimensional model, which was animated on a computer.

Stills from the film "Prometheus"

Demo video from Weta Digital studio, which worked on the scene of the Creator's self-sacrifice. The trailer included footage of a virtual model of an alien.

Scene with a holographic map model of the Universe

Still from the film "Prometheus". Holographic model Universe

Some plans with a model of the Universe and a star map took one to two weeks to render and contained up to 100 million polygons.

Scene of extraction by caesarean section

On the site, the device took out a silicone doll of a monster in the placenta from a fake belly. But in some shots where the creature behaved aggressively, visual effects specialists replaced the dummy with a computer model of the creature.

Fragment from the film "Prometheus". The heroine Rumi Rapace performs an operation on herself and removes an infected embryo. The scene looks great big screen thanks to a brilliant combination of physical and computer effects.

Fight scene between the Creator and the Beast

Still from the film "Prometheus"

Based on Manzello’s sketches, the modelers sculpted a life-size clay sculpture, which served as a magnificent example for 3D artists who had to create a frightening-looking creature in graphics.

Sculpture of a giant facehugger. The film features a 3D model of the creature

A demo video from the Weta Digital studio, which clearly shows three-dimensional models of the monster and the Alien’s ancestor.

The fall of the Juggernaut - the ship of the Creators

The design of the vessel was invented with the participation of Russian illustrator Alexey Kozhanov, who modeled the model in a three-dimensional editor, after which specialists from the British studio MPC took over it.

Still from the film "Prometheus" BEFORE and AFTER post-processing

Demo video from MPC studio that introduces the process of creating the scene of the collision and fall of the Juggernaut.

On February 24, it will become known whether Prometheus will win the Oscar for best visual effects or lose to one of its competitors, including “Snow White and the Huntsman”: http://site/movies/15186383.

The film "Prometheus", gaping with plot holes, was just one step away from becoming a real star, a true prequel to the very first, classic Alien. And it could be quite coherent and logical, and not look like just a series of poignant moments strung on top of each other on the fly without regard to the sanity of the narrative. I could, if not...

Has old Ridley Scott really lost his ground that much? It looks like it. Because otherwise he would not have made a film for one and a half hundred million dollars based on a crazy script. But Ridley has a partial excuse: it turns out that he is not solely responsible for the absurdity of Prometheus! Together with the creator of the plot of the series “Lost,” Ridley Scott thoroughly shredded a completely different, very good script, unexpectedly strong for its young author...

At the end of 2009, aspiring screenwriter Jon Spaihts wrote the script for a science fiction film called Alien: Engineers. It became his first work of this scale. Speights created it "on a whim", trying to work out the backstory of the first film in the Alien series, directed by Ridley Scott in 1979.

This plot is much more harmonious and logical than the script of the film “Prometheus”, which eventually hit the screens, and disappointed many with its obvious far-fetchedness and incoherence. There are many examples of the superiority of "Engineers" over "Prometheus".

The original script did not state that the Engineers "created life on Earth." In it, they only pushed people to develop by purposefully changing human DNA several thousand years ago. It was after him primitive hunters, which previously had practically not developed for tens of thousands of years, embarked on the path of rapid progress, which led them to space flights and the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial civilization.

In Prometheus, scientists somehow identified a scattering of dots on ancient paintings with a specific constellation, which seems like a stretch. In "Engineers" it is said that the coordinates of the star were encrypted in writing next to the constellation diagram.

Further: letters with star coordinates were not created by Engineers, who did not leave rock messages to people, if only because they were infinitely far from scratching stones with a chisel. These hieroglyphs were carved by people who blindly copied the signs from the images in the ships of the Engineers, which they saw during regular visits to Earth by aliens. This partly explains the fact that the letters did not lead to the homeland of the Engineers or to one of the worlds they inhabited, but to an eerie abandoned planet, which in the end turned out to be a base for the production of biological weapons.

All scenes with billionaire Weyland in original script are limited to his short conversation with the main characters at the beginning of the film. He agrees to finance the expedition in exchange for alien technology, in particular, the secrets of terraforming, that is, changing the climate of planets (his corporation has just begun terraforming Mars). Weyland does NOT fly secretly with scientists, does NOT seek the secret of immortality, does NOT create a conspiracy out of the blue, and in general the entire huge plot hole of Prometheus associated with this shriveled subject is absent as a fact. A huge plus.

The unnecessary scene with spying on the dreams of the sleeping heroine is completely absent.

The most glaring plot holes of Prometheus disappear like smoke when reading Engineers.

The most striking example: in Prometheus, scientists who fly to the planet turn out to be fantastically unreliable and illiterate people, making many fatal mistakes that ultimately lead to disaster. They don't even know why Weyland brought them to the other side of the galaxy! Instead of doing their job masterfully, these types just screw up for no reason.

There is an explanation for this in the “Engineers” script: Weyland specifically hired specialists “blindly” in order to maintain the strictest secrecy of the entire mission! He reasoned that if the mission for "alien technology" had been discussed on Earth before the flight, the information would inevitably have leaked to competitors who could have gotten ahead of him and gone to the planet earlier. Therefore, the suspicious old man decided to hire people for a long mission, without telling them a word about what it was, and as compensation for this oppressive uncertainty he offered TRIPLE PAYMENT.

Of course, not a single real specialist did this, and Weyland was able to hire only adventurers, hunters of fortune, who could only partially be called scientists (some, like Fifield, with his Iroquois and boorish behavior, were even simple prospectors who had previously sought for Weyland Industries for a piece rate, planets rich in valuable resources). Isn't that a good explanation for the incompetence of the crew and ignorance of the purpose of the flight? AND IT WAS DIRECTLY WRITTEN IN THE SCRIPT. Vickers even expresses frustration with his boss and his paranoia.

One of the advantages of “Engineers” is that a film based on this scenario would be an honest prequel to “Alien” - in fact, this is exactly what all fans of the franchise were waiting for. “Prometheus” is quite officially NOT a PREQUEL, but simply a story “based on”, in which anything may not correspond to the original concept without the slightest explanation of the reasons.

Proof? Easy: we know that in Prometheus the planet on which the action takes place is designated LV-223. And this is definitely not LV-426, on which the first Alien film in 1979 took place. Hence the discrepancy between the ending of “Prometheus” and the beginning of “Alien” - for example, the ship in “Alien” bears no traces of a collision with “Prometheus”, and most importantly, a dead Engineer is sitting in the pilot’s seat, while the pilot of the ship in “Prometheus” died in a fight with a squid in a Vickers escape capsule.

In Engineers, the planet is designated LV-426.

In Prometheus, the ship stumbled upon the Creators' base by accident, and very close to the point of entry into the atmosphere. In "Engineers", the ship previously released many probes that began to explore the surface of the planet, and even with their help, it took quite a long time to detect man-made objects.

After the researchers learn that the air inside the alien structure is breathable, in Prometheus Holloway immediately takes off his helmet and deeply inhales the aroma of an unknown planet. Before this, he did not analyze the air for the presence of bacteria, which means he was taking a big risk. The others followed suit. This behavior seems strange for real scientists, and more like the trick of completely illiterate people.

In the “Engineers” scenario, scientists not only DO NOT take off their helmets in a cave even after they learn that the air is breathable - they are still wary, careful and do not touch anything, as befits real explorers of an unknown world.

(HOLLOWAY

Move slowly. Stay together. Don't touch anything. Things may be more fragile than they seem - or more dangerous. They may contain technologies unknown to us.)

Nothing in common with the “let’s paw everything around” style attraction we saw in the movie “Prometheus”.

When Fifield and Millburn got lost on their way back from the cave, this is not explained at all in Prometheus. In "Engineers" it was directly stated that, breaking away from the general group, they did not take navigation devices with them, relying on each other. Such an explanation is better than no explanation at all!

When these two encountered an unknown creature in the catacombs (in “Engineers” it was a half-meter centipede), Millburn took it in his hand solely because he relied on the strength of his bulletproof spacesuit (and not because he was delighted with its beauty). Fifield was terrified the whole time and begged him “not to touch this creature.”

The mysterious dark substance in Prometheus, the purveyor of ridiculous plot twists, the liquid that acts in such a variety of ways that it makes no sense, was completely absent from the original script of Engineers. No octopuses, transparent snakes or long-skulled gollums. There were good old facehugger crabs hatching from eggs and xenomorphs original design Giger. The only deviation from canon is the centipede that attacked Millburn.

In Prometheus, the Creators, as seen in the holograms, ran for safety into a room that was a dead end. In "The Engineers" it is clearly stated that they ran to the ship to fly away from the planet, but did not manage to get there, being killed by monsters.

In Prometheus, the head of the Creator, brought to the laboratory, was preserved almost perfectly, and this is not explained in any way, although two thousand years have passed since his death. In “Engineers,” this head has dried up and become mummified; it literally crumbles to dust at the first touch. Its remains can hardly be preserved in the preservative liquid. And even more so, no one sent an “electrical impulse” to the head, as a result of which it first began to make faces, and then completely exploded.

The original script was replete with some pretty creepy moments - for example, the Alien, which main character extracts from his stomach in “Prometheus”, in “Engineers” he breaks free completely independently. A woman with a hole in her stomach uses her last strength to crawl into a medical capsule, which saves her life by performing a series of emergency operations. The monster, in the few hours that she spends unconscious in the capsule, kills almost all the crew members on board the ship, devours them, and as a result of this increases in size many times over. Thus, the plot hole of “Prometheus” with the miracle of Yud, who grew up in a confined space without food to the size of an elephant, is also absent.

The fact that the main character runs and jumps with a hole in her stomach is also explained: before that, she spent several hours in a medical capsule in “intensive regeneration” mode. These few hours in the story were similar to SEVERAL DAYS of normal healing. Yes, and the capsule, of course, did not engage in idiotic gender discrimination, and operated perfectly on both women and men.

It is even explained why the Engineer, rising from suspended animation, tore off the head of the android David. There is quite a coherent backstory there. It turns out that the sleeping Engineer was infected with an Alien larva, but it could not be surgically removed on the ship because the necessary equipment was not there. And this Engineer, the only survivor, managed to go into a hypersleep capsule, sending a distress signal to his home planet. That is, he was going to wake up surrounded by his relatives, saved and unharmed. When he realized that it was not other Engineers who awakened him, but an enthusiastic biorobot with a bunch of pathetic people, and he was doomed to a painful death, the guy, quite expectedly, became a little upset. Who wouldn't get angry in his place?

By the way, David’s behavior, so ambiguous in Prometheus, has an excellent explanation in the script for Engineers: at first David faithfully served Vickers and honestly represented the interests of his master Weyland, but then, having penetrated the secrets of the Engineers by deciphering their database, he went astray crazy, out of control ( - "Now I'm free"), imagined the Engineers as the only gods worthy of worship, and decided to serve them until the end of time. And he awakened the Engineer to be his faithful slave (though he did not appreciate the aspirations of his newly made admirer).

After the Engineer took off on his ship, heading to Earth, in "Prometheus" he was rammed in his ship by Captain Janek, and the pilots Chance and Ravel did not hesitate to follow him to their deaths, as if they did not value their lives in the slightest. It looked stupid. In “Engineers,” no one even thought about ramming the ship - it collapsed on its own when the Alien burst out of the pilot’s chest. Having lost control, the ship fell back to the surface. And yes, when he rolled on the ground like a huge donut, the main character (the only one, Vickers died earlier in the story) ran not ALONG the trajectory of his movement, but TO THE SIDE. Actually, that’s why I was saved. And when the horseshoe-shaped ship rested on the surface of the planet, it remained almost undamaged, with the dead pilot with a hole in his chest, fused with his bizarre seat. This is how the Nostromo crew found him in Alien.

Besides being logical and thoughtful, the script was full of great moments. For example, in the finale, after the Engineers' ship crashed onto the surface of the planet, the Alien that escaped from the Engineer began to pursue the main character, and she killed him with a powerful circular saw with a diamond blade! This could be realized in the most enchanting way.

Finally, the story of the murky relationship between the Engineers and earthlings, which was left behind the scenes in Prometheus, was revealed. Here it is: 12,000 BC, a group of Engineers discovered an Earth inhabited primitive people, which remained in a stably undeveloped state for hundreds of thousands of years. By deliberately changing human DNA, Engineers pushed humanity toward progress, after which they regularly monitored its development. Around the 3rd century AD, the aliens stopped liking what was coming out of humanity, and they decided to destroy it. For this purpose, on a remote planet they created something like biological weapons - terrible monsters, specially bred to kill all living things. Brought to Earth in 300 AD, during the time of the barbarians, these creatures were supposed to quietly eliminate our species as a fact. But the Earth was saved by chance (some call it “instant karma”) - monsters created to destroy people attacked their creators, and killed them all. As they say, don't dig a hole for someone else...

That is why, on an abandoned planet, several dozen ships remained forever in giant underground hangars, filled to the brim with Alien eggs with facehuggers inside.

Engineers from the home planet of the aliens in the 2000 years that have passed since their death did not fly to LV-426 to see what had happened there, since the renegades who were breeding all sorts of evil spirits on this remote planet were doing their dirty work in secret! Their occupation was nothing more than the production of weapons of mass destruction, which was contrary to the high morals of the noble race of Engineers. And when they all died there, it went unnoticed by the others. The engineer, who was waiting for help from his relatives with the Alien in his chest, waited in vain: his signal for help did not reach the target, no one would have come for him.

In general, the entire scenario, in terms of its sanity, was very similar to the plot of Cameron’s brilliant “Aliens.” The ship was not launched by the flute. “Magellan” (that was the name of the spaceship of earthlings in the original scenario) landed on the planet not a few kilometers from the object, but several hundred meters. The line of the malicious Weyland corporation was revealed very well: in “Engineers,” the android David sent information about Aliens to Earth, and from that moment on, the Company sought to obtain a sample of the “perfect organism.” It was for this purpose that in “Alien” the ill-fated workers from the cargo tug “Nostromo” were brought out of suspended animation... In general, the events of “Engineers” were very carefully adjusted to the film “Alien”, which took place several years later.

Everyone who has read the script for Alien: Engineers is unanimous in their opinion: it is much better than the misunderstanding that ended up on the screen. In “Engineers,” almost everything from beginning to end was carefully linked into a fairly coherent system.

What happened next? Damon Lindelof.

Ridley Scott, with whom Jon Speights worked on his creation, for some reason stubbornly did not consider “Engineers” worthy of film adaptation. Over the course of four months, he again and again returned his work to the author with notes on changes - in the end, John honestly wrote as many as four versions of the script, each time moving further and further away from the harmonious concept described above, and more and more sliding towards all sorts of squids and other things. Finally, Speights began to argue with the maestro, trying to prove to him that the script was at least not getting better. What did Ridley Scott do? That's right - he suspended Speights from work.

Scott's main idea was that the viewer needed "something new." For some reason, the director was absolutely sure that an honest, full-fledged prequel would seem “too predictable,” and that there would be too many parallels between the main characters of “Prometheus” and the Alien series. Scott believed that it was necessary at all costs to show people something they had not seen yet, to develop some completely new ideas, even if this would make the film cease to be a prequel and go somewhere completely different. In addition, the director also kept in mind a possible “Prometheus 2,” which would have been difficult to create if “Prometheus 1” had ended at the point where “Alien” began.

And so, at the end of 2010, about a year before the start of filming, the venerable screenwriter Damon Lindelof was invited to refine the plot from the “obstinate newcomer” - the same one who wrote the script for the mega-popular series “Lost” (and, incidentally, the wobbly blockbuster “ Cowboys vs. Aliens"), and had no bad habit of arguing with his employers.

Lindelof took Scott's ideas about a “total reboot of the franchise” with a bang, and went all out. He took Speights' neat, measured story and turned it inside out. You can imagine what John Speights was going through, watching how his creation, which he sold to the studio “20 Century Fox”, along with all the rights to “refinement with a file,” was being disfigured.

Lindelof fully supported Ridley Scott's disastrous idea that the film shouldn't be a prequel, insisting that "audiences don't care." It is his merit that all the characters began to behave like fools, and the film turned into a gloomy carousel of universal absurdity of galactic proportions. It was Lindelof who invented the “black substance”, under the influence of which one creature falls apart into fragments, another grows hundreds of times in size, and the third mutates into a mad acrobat. And it was Lindelof's idea to include a decrepit senile man in the story, looking for salvation from death on the outskirts of the universe without any regard for the polished aesthetics of the best Alien films. Actually, after all this, the screenwriter’s idea that it would be necessary to make the Aliens “more diverse” is already calmly accepted, turning them, say, “into squids or dolphins” (thanks, not scaly chimpanzees).

After the premiere, Lindelof was attacked with criticism, pointing out to him all the absurdities that he had come up with, honestly trying to improve the script (and ultimately ruining it irreparably). Lindelof's response to spiteful critics was remarkable in its own way. First, he said in all seriousness that all the script inconsistencies were added by him to make the film “more mysterious” (an excellent explanation), and then... he apologized, admitting that he had greatly let down the fans of the franchise. Yes, and he justified himself by saying that he had “too little time” to rework the script. He had about eight months to finalize the hundred-page script. Tight deadlines, to say the least. However, the director should not be blamed either - the monster called “Prometheus” was created by at least two people.

The script for "Engineers", from which Lindelof carved out a misunderstanding called "Prometheus", became public by accident. After it was “leaked” to the Internet, there was no doubt left: if the original script had not been rejected, today, instead of a controversial and disappointing project, the world would have, if not another masterpiece, then at least one of the best films in the franchise...

More than a year has passed since the death of Hans Rudolf Giger, which means that it is time to remember his main brainchild. Next, the complete canonical history of the Alien Universe will be written.

Creators

Note that in the movie Prometheus it is made clear that it was the Engineers themselves who created humanity. In the original script, the Engineers only pushed people towards progress, which should be considered more canonical, because in this case the secret of the origin of humanity is not revealed, which is only good for science fiction.

After this, for thousands of years, the Creators controlled the development of humanity and those ancient writings and sketches of an alien race that can be seen in Prometheus show that humanity treated “their gods” with respect and reverence.

It should be noted that these sketches were made by the people themselves, and not by the Engineers (as you might think from the film).

However, soon control over humanity became remote, the Creators themselves stopped visiting the Earth and gave humanity the opportunity to develop on their own without any external help.

This continued until about the 3rd century AD (the rise and subsequent crisis of the Roman Empire), when the Creators, having visited Earth, decided that humanity had ceased to meet the expectations of the aliens. What exactly these expectations were remains a mystery. However, after visiting Earth, a decision was made to completely destroy not only humanity, but also all other life (apparently, irrational life was not regarded by the Engineers as having the right to exist).

It was for this purpose that on a distant planet, in secret from the rest, biological weapons were created - xenomorphs (Aliens), which were ideal for killing all living things. It seems that people were not the first to be destroyed by the Creators, but history is silent about this.

However, the terrible plan was not allowed to come true. Several dozen ships transporting xenomorphs to bombard the Earth were, through the negligence of the Creators themselves, attacked by xenomorphs. As a result of this incident, all the Creators on board the ships were destroyed. Apparently, this is how the Lord decided to show the “Creators” who God really is and who has the right to decide the destinies of entire races...

In the original canonical script for Prometheus, there was no liquid at all, which plays such an important role in the resulting film. The biological weapons were precisely the xenomorphs sleeping in the vessels, and not an incomprehensible liquid.

But one Engineer still survived. It was his fate that the film “Prometheus” was supposed to tell, but Ridley Scott’s overly ambitious plans ruined the idea.

It turns out that that group of Engineers, who imagined destroying the Earth, made this decision alone, being arrogant and without consulting the Supreme Council of their race. Apparently pride, vanity and the desire to be “gods” did not allow this group of aliens to seek advice from their race, since the noble race of Engineers would not agree to destroy entire humanity.

As a result of their pride, the Engineers were destroyed. In Prometheus, we see a hologram showing a group of several aliens speeding away from an unknown danger. In fact, they are running to the ship on which they were supposed to escape, but they failed to do this; they were all killed by xenomorphs.

The last surviving "Cosmic Jockey", already infected with the facehugger, ran away from the xenomorphs and, realizing his imminent death, lay down in a suspended animation capsule, having previously sent a distress signal. The engineer hoped that his signal would reach his home planet or the Engineers' spaceship and his fellow tribesmen would be able to save him. So he waited for salvation in his dream for 2000 years. Until “help” came from an unexpected direction.

History of Weyland-Yutani Corporation

Corporation logo

In a classic adventure story English literature Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1902) takes place in Central Africa, where the sailor Marlow is sent on behalf of the “Company”, on whose behalf the story is told. He is tasked with sailing to a remote station and taking with you one of the company’s agents named Kurtz.

Before Alien, Ridley Scott had directed only one major film. These were “The Duelists,” based on Conrad Joseph’s story “The Duel.” Scott carefully studied the Englishman’s work and remembered well a certain unnamed “Company” from “Heart of Darkness”, which was later given a name Weyland- Yutani Corporation.

The history of the Weyland-Yutani corporation is contradictory, just as the versions of its creation and development in the version of “Prometheus” and in other films about the Alien universe are contradictory. Ridley Scott didn't consider the Alien vs. Predator films to be canon, so he ignored how the corporation was created according to those films. However, Ridley himself, as we know, completely violated the canons of the universe in the film “Prometheus”.

According to this description Only the first two films, Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), can be considered canonical. "Alien 3" and "Alien: Resurrection" cannot be considered canonical, since the commercial basis of these films is a huge amount ridiculous inconsistencies knock these films out of the canon. Also, the Alien vs. Predator franchise cannot be considered canonical at all. The plot of the film "Prometheus" can be considered canonical only with the reservation of the original script, which involved a prequel to "Alien" (1979) and the events in which took place on the planet LV-426, as in the original "Alien" (and not on some LV- 223, as edited by Scott).

Below is the most canonical version of the creation and development Weyland-Yutani Corporation(you can always look up differences in versions on Wikipedia).

In 1990, Peter Weyland was born into the family of an Oxford University professor of comparative mythology.

In 2012, Peter Weyland, at the age of 22, founded Weyland Industries. Through talented and at the same time aggressive business management, Weyland Industries becomes one of the most successful and valuable corporations on the planet.

2029 Weyland Corporation wins a years-long patent dispute with its main Japanese competitor Yutani Corporation, confirming the intellectual property rights to the android David.

2073 Weyland Corporation, combining the efforts of many scientists from the most different areas, deciphers ancient images and writings that were made by people who had contact with the Creators. These images replicate a star system that appears to have been carved into the alien spacecraft. Along with the images were letters written, as follows from the film, in the Proto-Indo-European language that the Engineers taught to people. However, these writings and images, which scientists deciphered, will lead seekers in the future not to the home planet of the aliens, but to that same LV-426 in the constellation Zeta 2 Grid, on which the events of “Alien” (1979) unfold.

The Prometheus project is launched.

2093 Peter Weyland's 103-year-old expedition lands on planetoid LV-426. The mission is kept in the strictest secrecy: practically no one, including a significant part of the crew itself, knows about its purpose.

Events of the film "Prometheus". Death of Peter Weyland and the entire expedition.

After Peter Weyland went missing, Weyland Industries teams up with Japanese giantYutani Corporation. The largest mega-corporation on Earth is being createdWeyland-Yutani Corporation.The corporation continues to search for foreign civilizations. She knows nothing about Weyland's mission or discovery.

2122 "Weyland-Yutani" located a distress signal from the planet LV-426 and sentto study the crash sitespaceship-tractor "Nostromo", which transported 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore from the mine on Tedus to Earth. The plot of the film "Alien".

The origin of the signal remains a mystery to the viewer. Or this is a signal from the lost Prometheus expedition. Or this is the same signal that the last surviving Jockey gave.

The entire crew of the Nostromo dies, with the exception of Ellen Ripley (who, in the original version of the script, was supposed to have her head bitten off at the end of the film).

2179 Events of the film "Aliens". 57 years later Weyland-Yutanidiscovers Ellen Ripley's ship. As the corporation expected,LV-426 found a sample of the alien civilization that the Company had been looking for for so long. However, in order to preserve the Company's reputation, Ripley herself is declared crazy and deprived of her pilot's license. After losing contact with the colony on LV-426, the Company equips military group, which goes with Ripley to a mysterious planetoid. The entire crew of the ship "Sulaco" dies. Only Ripley, the rescued girl Newt, Corporal Hicks and the android Bishop remain alive.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\/////////////////////////////////////

According to the canon, further history Weyland-Yutani Corporation unknown .

The philosophy of the Weyland-Yutani corporation would become archetypal for a whole range of different companies and evil corporations in literature, cinema and computer games.
Based on Conrad's story "Heart of Darkness", Ridley Scott was able to accurately convey the spirit of the devilish "Company", which sends its charges to distant places, without caring about their safety. But the main thing is that the corporate monsters that were long predicted in the movie “Alien” already exist.

Corporation name Weyland-Yutani comes from a combination of the British car manufacturer Leyland and the surname of Nostromo designer Ron Cobb's neighbor. It is also interesting to note that Weyland is also a blacksmith god in pagan northern Europe. Later, like other pagan gods, Weyland began to be considered a hypostasis of Satan. This is how he entered Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” under the name “Woland”. Logo Weyland-Yutani Corp also used by industrial group :Wumpscut:, whose music could serve as a good soundtrack to the Alien Universe.

The films especially emphasize the immoral side of the corporation. For my own sake information security and the search for alien civilizations, the corporation is ready to sacrifice many human lives.

The company (which "builds better worlds") wants to bring the Alien to Earth because, as Carter Burke, the company's representative in the second Aliens film, says it will "bring millions to the biological weapons division." The company will sacrifice everyone and use any means to achieve its goal. In the movie Aliens, there is a corporate meeting scene in which Ripley is reprimanded for not appreciating " monetary value» of the alien-infested ship and allowed it to crash. This same statement is repeated later in the film as an explanation for why the Alien settlement on planet LV-426 was not blown up. Burke's attempt to artificially inseminate Ripley and a little girl with an alien causes Ripley to angrily denounce his corporate morality: "You know, Burke, I don't know what kind of creatures are worse. They don’t kill each other over for a goddam percentage.” Cold-blooded, crazy people Those working for Weyland-Yutani appear as real monsters in these films. It is no coincidence that the ship in the first film is called “Nostromo” - this is a reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel, in which “nostro homo”, our man, is betrayed for the sake of the interests of the corporation. The Alien is simply following its nature, killing people, while "our people" sanction the killings, following Weyland-Yutani's instructions.

In the movie "Prometheus", when Hollway asks if androids are really that similar to people, David jokes: "I hope not too much."

Meeting with another life form

In 2093, the Weyland expedition lands on LV-426. The crew knows nothing about the expedition's true mission. Extreme secrecy was needed in order to minimize any leakage of information, first of all, to the main competitor - Yutani Corporation.The old man hired specialists blindly, promising them triple pay. The extreme secrecy and long duration of the mission did not inspire confidence among serious specialists, so the team mainly consisted of adventurers and enthusiastic scientists. It was, in many ways, the unprofessionalism and incompetence of the expedition members in extreme conditions that led to their early death.

Getting onto the Jockeys' spaceship, the expedition discovers a significant number of capsules containing the same biological weapon that was supposed to destroy life on Earth 2000 years ago.

Passing in main hall on the ship, scientists discover the very hypersleep chamber in which the last surviving infected Engineer lay down. In the chamber, all chemical reactions practically stop, so any Living being, located there, can remain in a state of hypersleep almost indefinitely. This is what the Engineer’s cunning plan was designed for: when his fellow tribesmen save him, they will have time to carry out the necessary operation before the xenomorph rips his chest apart.

Weyland asks to open the capsule in order to personally meet with “God”.

Of course, when the Engineer’s sleep was interrupted and he saw his “saviors,” he was confused. Those who were supposed to be destroyed 2000 years ago fly onto his ship and wake him up from hypersleep.

The engineer asks in Proto-Indo-European who they are and what they are doing here. David explains to him that they flew here because Weyland wants to gain immortality. The engineer asks why he needs immortality. Weyland replies that he created David, the immortal android, out of nothing, and now he himself stands here before him "because they are gods, and gods do not die." After this, the Engineer realizes that his signal did not reach home world and humanity was not destroyed. Moreover, it had evolved so much that it was able to reach his ship and awaken him from his sleep. Furious at the realization of what had happened and at the old man's insolence, the Engineer tears off David's head and kills everyone who awakened him, including old man Weyland. After that, he sits in the pilot's seat and goes to Earth to complete his mission.

But as soon as he lifted the ship into the air, a xenomorph burst out of his chest, which also awakened from sleep in his body. The ship lost control and crashed back to the planet's surface. And the Engineer remained lying in his chair until, 29 years later, he was discovered by the crew of the Nostromo.

In the original version of "Alien", created by Giger, the Creators were huge, about 5-7 meters tall and significantly superior to humans. In Prometheus, the Engineers look much more modest, standing about 3 meters tall.

According to canon, the Alien bursting out of the Creator's chest should have killed the rest of the crew of the Prometheus. But in the original script, in which the logic of the ending suffers, we can read that in final scene the main character (who escaped from the Engineer) kills him circular saw. Therefore, this ending cannot be considered canonical, because otherwise the logic and history of the Universe would be violated, since the Prometheus crew would have reached Earth safely.

Having killed all the participants in "Prometheus", the xenomorph (which, let's not forget, is an intelligent creature) infected all people by opening containers with face-huggers. As a result of one such infection, the Alien's uterus is born, which lays the very eggs discovered by the Nostromo crew almost 30 years later.

After the eggs are laid, all xenomorphs, including, apparently, the queen, die during the time until the ship finds the Nostromo.

Having discovered an unknown signal, the ship issued instructions according to which all crew members were to follow the signal and investigate its source. The crew awakens from hypersleep and finds themselves instead native land, towards which the cargo ship was moving, in the unknown constellation Zeta 2 Reticulum.

The Nostromo lands on a planetoid called LV-426 and guides the team in search of the source of the signal.

A few hours later, the group finds the alien ship and examines it. In the pilot's seat sits the very last surviving Engineer with a broken chest.

A group member named Kane, driven by interest, independently descends into the room in which thirty years ago the Alien’s uterus laid eggs. As a result, one of the facehuggers, emerging from the egg, attacks Kane.

Kane is brought aboard the Nostromo, and, violating the security instructions, according to which no one can come on board within 12 hours after infection, the android Ash opens the hatch and lets the group with Kane on board.

After this, the xenomorph that escaped from Kane kills all members of the Nostromo. Only Ellen Ripley survives.

At the end of the film Alien, the Nostromo is destroyed by Ripley and all data from it is lost. Ripley, along with the cat, falls into hypersleep, in which she is discovered 57 years later by Weyland-Yutani.

It turns out that during this time, on Acheron (that’s what planet LV-426 is called in “Aliens”), a human colony called “Hadley’s Hope” was built, whose inhabitants did not encounter what Ripley was talking about.

But, a few months after saving Ripley, the Creators' ship is finally discovered by a family of colonists, who become the first victim of the xenomorphs. After several xenomorphs escaped from the infected bodies of three family members (only a little girl managed to escape), they attacked the colony and over time, all the inhabitants of the colony became biological wombs for bearing xenomorphs. It was after communication with them was lost that Weyland-Yutani sent the ship "Sulaco" along with Ripley to find out what caused the long lack of communication with the colony. The crew of the Sulaco discovers thousands of xenomorphs that were carried to the bodies of the colony's inhabitants. As a result of an attack by xenomorphs, the entire crew of the Sulaco dies. Ripley and Corporal Hicks survive. Together with the rescued girl Newt, whose parents discovered the ship of the Creators, and with the android Bishop torn to pieces, they escape from the planet.

In anticipation of the release of Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, I suggest you refresh your memory of the contents of the film Prometheus and look for hidden meanings there.

To formulate the main idea that Ridley Scott expressed in Prometheus is quite simple, it will sound something like this:

“There are no gods who once created man. There is no Heaven as a place of bliss where the souls of the dead go. Humanity is the result of a biological experiment by another civilization. Our creators are not good at all from a human point of view; they have no similar moral principles, and they are not going to answer our questions. Those whom people revered as gods are mortals like us. And Paradise is the planet from which they came.”

In his film, R. Scott painted a rather pessimistic and gloomy picture, in which there is no place for our usual cultural values ​​- the uniqueness of the individual, the priority of creativity over destruction. In the Prometheus universe, everything exists exactly the opposite.

“This is a civilization, but it is based on completely uncivilized practices.”

Any culture and civilization has a certain collective attitude of consciousness, which is dominant. Other, alternative attitudes are repressed, forming a collective Shadow. The film "Prometheus" is nothing more than an expression shadows our culture. A culture that has absorbed the heritage of antiquity and Christianity.

The central idea of ​​our worldview is the uniqueness and value of the human person.

Accordingly, the reverse, shadow side of this idea will be the idea of ​​an individual as something non-valuable, as a consumable material. The scene of the Engineer’s self-sacrifice speaks precisely of this: in the Engineer civilization, an individual is a biomaterial for future living organisms.

The film contains a reference to the image of the crucified Christ, significant for our culture. In the civilization of Engineers, he is contrasted with the image of a crucified alien. Although the meaning of this picture remains unclear, a definite association emerges: if people worship Christ as the embodiment of good, then the Engineers probably worship the alien, who, from our point of view, is the embodiment of evil.

There are many such allusions to inverted cultural stereotypes in the film.

According to biblical legend, Eve was created from Adam's rib. According to the authors of Prometheus, the DNA of Maridith Vickers was used to create David.

The ship arrives on the planet on Christmas Day, and the captain decorates a Christmas tree - a symbol of the Tree of Life. But in this shadow world, the celebration of life turns into a celebration of death.

“I want to open gifts” 26:43

They wanted to open Christmas presents, but they opened Pandora's box (with all human misfortunes). 26:43

Creativity in the Prometheus universe is associated with the need for destruction.

“To create something, you must first destroy it” 1:37:45

This can be regarded as a contrast to the biblical idea of ​​​​creating the world out of nothing.

Process of creation fantastic work- This is not just the activation of the creative imagination, but also an immersion in the unconscious. If the director is faced with the task of shocking or frightening the viewer, then he must look for motives that are unusual for the dominant mindset of our culture. Consequently, he must dive into our cultural unconscious, into the shadows, and bring out from there the contents that we repress and which therefore frighten us or at least cause us discomfort.

"I want to scare you"

Motives for meeting with the creators

The main focus of the characters’ actions is expressed in the first part of the film’s slogan: “They were looking for the cradle of humanity...”

Let's find out the motives why the characters go on a journey to meet the creators.

What is the point of searching for the cradle of humanity? Why do you need to meet with the creators?

"Find out why they created us"

This answer is too superficial and indicates simple curiosity.

In fact, the characters in the film have more compelling motivations. In the film we find four options:

1. Infantile desire to return to the mother's womb. Moving away from struggle and suffering into a world of peace. The desire to receive ready answers to all questions.
2. The victorious return of a warrior or hunter to his home. Return with enrichment.
3. The intention is to discover the restrictions and regulations set in childhood in order to understand and correct them.
4. The intention to kill his creators in order to free himself from their oppression.

The first option - infantile striving - we find in Elizabeth Shaw. She cannot accept such phenomena of our world as illness, untimely death of parents. She believes that she deserves the love of her creators and expects them to accept her for who she is. She is sure that Paradise is a wonderful place and wants to receive ready-made all the explanations about the world and life.

At the end of the film, her intention changes. After the suffering she has experienced, she is no longer looking for peace, but wants to meet with the Engineers to understand their attitude towards people. She wants to assert her dignity and restore justice. For this she is ready to kill the creators.

Weiland. I am sure that he has borne fruit in this life - he has the second option of motivation. He has collected enormous resources in his hands and is going to multiply them. But his growth is hampered by cultural and biological limitations, and he wants his creators to free him from them. Therefore, he also has a third option of motivation - liberation from restrictions and regulations.

As a result, he himself becomes a victim of what he wanted: he dies from a force that is not restrained by the boundaries of morality.

Holloway

"overthrow all religions."

This is a real militant attitude. It can be formulated as a desire for the symbolic murder of the creators. He is somehow depressed and worried that there are people in the world who believe in gods, and he wants to free himself from this painful feeling.

David. Although this android only fulfills what Weyland intended for it, it also has its own secret motive for meeting its creators. He wants to look at the immortals, because... considers himself similar to them. But the Engineers disappoint him.

"After all, mortals"

The remaining crew members are flying either out of purely scientific interest or for selfish reasons.

Creators

The creators, or engineers, with their appearance and functions reminiscent of ancient Greek gods.

The hierarchy of “black sludge - god of engineers - engineers - people” resembles a fragment of Greek theology, in which everything begins with primeval chaos, and then differentiates into various forces of nature.

Engineers create new forms of life from the “black slurry” and, in essence, like the gods, are the design principles that bring order to the primordial chaos. Their difference from the gods lies only in their mortality.

WITH psychological point point of view, they symbolize the pagan religious worldview, which was supplanted by Christian culture.

Main conflict

If the world of Engineers represents our cultural shadow, then the events shown in the film can be interpreted as an attempt by our collective consciousness to go beyond the boundaries of cultural stereotypes, followed by an inevitable meeting with shadow. Accordingly, we can see the possible result of this meeting, given in symbolic form.

It is important to take into account that, unlike those science fiction films where aliens are the first to invade our space, i.e. the unconscious breaks into consciousness, in Prometheus the opposite happens: cultural consciousness deliberately awakens the “ancient evil” for its own personal interests and provokes the contamination of conscious functions with the contents of the unconscious.

The main characters - Weyland, David and Elizabeth Shaw - personify the main collective attitudes of consciousness.

Weiland

Peter Weiland is a masculine dominant attitude. He has all the resources in his hands, which he directs where he sees fit. The ship was created at the expense of his corporation, which means that it is this principle of consciousness that provides vital energy to achieve the goal.

Weyland's lack of a wife, as well as the fact that he does not love his daughter Meridith and does not want to transfer his power to her, indicates that the feminine principle is suppressed in this culture. And the very type of Meridith Vickers indicates suppressed femininity, its capture by the male principle.

The aging Weyland wants immortality; this means that this cultural attitude has already lost its former power, but is still trying to fight for its dominant position.

David

Represents pure intellect, reason, and rationality. In theory, the mind should serve to preserve human life, which means it should turn off in time, giving priority to the life instinct, but an android is a mind that has become detached from its carrier, it is an alienated mind, it is a technique that has been set free.

When a person loses contact with any function of consciousness, this function plunges into the shadows, into the unconscious, and begins to behave in a completely unexpected way. This is why in the film David behaves ambiguously and puts people's lives in danger.

By the way, the very idea of ​​the uprising of machines appears in our cultural consciousness precisely because of the alienation of the rational function and endowing it with shadow features.

David's loss of his body after meeting the Engineer means that he loses his independence and again submits to the dominant conscious principle, which has now become Elizabeth Shaw.

Show

Elizabeth Shaw personifies the feminine principle. And an attitude of consciousness based on irrational functions, faith and intuition. At first, this attitude is undeveloped and obeys the masculine and rational principle, but eventually becomes dominant.

At the end of the film, Shaw and David's head fly away on the Engineers' ship. That is, the feminine principle prevailed, became dominant and subjugated the rationale. And he now receives his life energy from the deep shadow layers of the psyche, which are symbolized by the Engineers’ ship.

Metamorphoses

Thus, the content of the film “Prometheus” can be interpreted as a possible scenario for the development of our culture, based on the principles of patriarchy and rationalism, and in which religious consciousness is present mainly in the form of unclear intuitions.

The dominant cultural attitude, for the sake of self-preservation, undertakes the risky enterprise of violating traditional prohibitions and tries to integrate with the shadow. Reason and science are given unlimited powers in this enterprise.

The result of integration is ugly and aggressive monsters, which consciousness, at the very least, copes with with the help of a subordinate function.

Ultimately, the feminine principle wins, intuition becomes the dominant function of consciousness, thinking becomes the subordinate function, and Vital energy drawn from sources that were once suppressed.

Alien

Origin of Aliens. It is believed that Aliens were a type of biological weapon that was developed and used by its creators. A version was also put forward that the alien is an organism that for millennia inhabited some unknown distant planets of the same Zeta Grid.

Stages of development: The Alien goes through several stages in its development.

I. Face grabber. So named because it attaches to the face of the future host and deposits the embryo (larva) of the future alien into it. In the carrier (the role of carriers are: people, animals, creators) vital activity is maintained until the facehugger lays a larva. Once the embryo is inside, the facehugger detaches and dies.

Facehugger

II. Chestbreaker. It's clear from the name. This is an alien, albeit a very small one. The chestbreaker develops within 24 hours, after which it breaks the host’s chest and climbs out. The carrier dies. The grudolom is practically unprotected, so it usually hides for some time.

Breastbreaker

III. Adult. A fully formed alien. Reaching a height of approximately 2 meters. A stranger passes into it in a few hours. After which it begins an active search for food.

Adult

Deacon

Deacon. The creature is from the film "Prometheus", although its connection with aliens is not clearly shown in the film. However, as we see the main similarities are obvious. The Deacon received its name because of its head, which is similar in shape to the miter of a priest. It is believed that Deacon is also a subspecies of an alien, but one that evolved from the creator and borrowed part of his DNA. It also has humanoid limbs and walks on two legs.

Facts: The creators of the film "Prometheus" considered several options for what the Deacon should look like. In the image below we see Deacon looking even more like a variant of the Space Jockey mutation. Then this once again confirms that it is unknown what the alien initially looks like. Here we see the characteristic skin color, physique (even if it is more frail) inherent in the creator.

Space Jockeys

Space Jockeys(Creators, Malaaki, Engineers) - creators of life on the planets. According to some theories, it was they who created man on Earth (copying their appearance). The planet where Jockeys live is called Paradise. The level of their technology is very high, they have been developed over thousands of years. The lifespan of a Jockey is unknown, however, they are mortal and subject to aging. Jockeys have their own ancient language, which is practically impossible for the common man to understand.
Facts: The creators, for some reason, wanted to destroy man, or rather replace the form of life on planet Earth, using biological weapons. Perhaps these very weapons were aliens. Also, the Jockeys have some kind of religion, or rather, if self-worship can be called this concept.

Fifield mutation