Prometheus - from the viewpoint of Greek mythology

 

Please do not continue reading unless you have watched the movie. Spoilers ahead!

 After watching the much-hyped prequel to the Alien series, Prometheus, I will attempt to explain its storyline by drawing parallels to the original Greek myth of Prometheus.

(Elementary Greek mythology - please skip if you know it)

In the original Greek myth, humans once lived in a time where there was no fire, so were forced to eat cold food and shiver in darkness. The demigod Prometheus took pity on them, so he stole fire from the flame of Olympus and gave it to mankind, improving our lives greatly.

When Zeus found out about this he was infuriated. To punish Prometheus he chained him to a rock and had an eagle tear his liver out every day, being immortal, Prometheus' liver would regenerate at night, thus he would suffer eternally. In the end he was freed by Hercules (or killed by Kratos in God of War 2).

To punish mankind for receiving fire, Zeus sent the first woman to mankind, Pandora. Together with her was the famous Pandora's box, which contained all kinds of evil and pestilence. One day she opened it out of curiosity and all these calamities were unleashed on humanity, which has been suffering ever since. Only hope was left in the box in the end, which has provided the strength for mankind to live on.

(end of Elementary Greek mythology)

 In the movie, the gods were the Engineers, who started the evolution process on Earth culminating in humanity. Initially they guided us, as can be seen from the cave murals around the world showing us worshiping them.

Perhaps along the way a rogue Engineer gave us something we were not supposed to have, perhaps the spark of intellect necessary to proceed on our current path of development. This displeased the other Engineers, who then got ready to give us a gift of death - the vases containing the black liquid of doom.

Incidentally, the original shape of Pandora's box was actually not a box, but an urn as shown below:

Doesn't it look like the vases which contained the black liquid?

The vases never reached Earth for the Engineers themselves were overrun by some kind of outbreak, possibly some of them got infected and Aliens emerged. So when the last Engineer was awakened and he saw humans standing around him, he must have realized that we were not destroyed as per their plans, thus he instantly reacted to complete the original plan and wipe us out.

The question remaining is: what was the trigger for them to decide to extinguish humanity? My personal theory is that an Engineer came alone to uplift us from an ape-like state; the figure shown in the cave murals is a single Engineer, our teacher. The gift of fire is actually an intellectual spark which we were not supposed to get, hence the preparation to wipe us out once our progress was discovered by the other Engineers around 2000 years ago.

Another theory I have seen online is that around 2000 years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire, an Engineer patrol came by and observed us fighting among ourselves fiercely, so they decided to send down another teacher to guide us back to peace.

Unfortunately, we crucified him...