Did I mention SPOILERS? I'm not sure. But, if you haven't seen the movie yet and are planning on it, you may wish to stop reading here. Because. You know. SPOILERS.
Alright, so last week Ridley Scott sat down and had a rather candid interview with movies.com, in which he elaborated on some speculation that under any other circumstance one might consider waaay out there.
And quote:
Movies.com: You throw religion and spirituality into the equation for Prometheus, though, and it almost acts as a hand grenade. We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered? Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him.
In other words, as this rather extensive deconstruction of the film puts it so eloquently:
Yeah. The reason the Engineers don't like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him. Reader, that's not me pulling wild ideas out of my arse. That's RIDLEY SCOTT.
Prometheus (and by extension the entire Alien franchise), then, is based upon... Space Jesus.
Space Jesus:
So, yeah. Ladies and Gentlemen?
Of course, that origin story doesn't really allow for the modern Christian image of Jesus - by the film's own logic, Jesus should have been very bald, literally white, and built like some cover model for Maximum Fitness.
But, well, I don't even know at this point.
All that aside, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and I had a great time watching it. Quality entries in the Science Fiction/Horror genre are somewhat rare, and in those terms, it was fantastic.
Still... I mean... Space Jesus.
Share This Article
