Page - 10 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

Gods Creating Gods The case of the Alien saga is very revealing of this interaction between science fiction and religion. It is composed of six main movies, Alien (Ridley Scott, GB/ US 1979), Aliens (James Cameron, US 1986), Alien 3 (David Fincher, US 1992), Alien Resurrection (Jean Pierre Jeunet, US 1997), Prometheus (Ridley Scott, GB/ US 2012), and Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, US 2017). All of them, and particu- larly the last two movies, directed by Ridley Scott, question how humanity and hu- mankind are to be defined when humans are simultaneously confronted by their past and future deities, through the prism of scientific and technological develop- ments. The plot of the 2012 movie is about a spaceship called Prometheus, sent to a dis- tant moon discovered in an ancient star map by archeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charly Holloway. The mission is to find and connect with the Engineers, suspected to have been humankind’s creators ages ago. Once on the planet, the crew discover a large artificial structure, where they find a monolithic statue of a humanoid head, near a corpse of a beheaded alien, supposedly one of the Engineers. Other bodies of aliens are discovered, leading the team to think the species has been totally de- stroyed. After analysis, the aliens’ DNA is revealed to be a match for human DNA. This planet seems to be the cradle of humanity and the Engineers the Gods / Dark Angels of an advanced civilization that created humans and later destroyed them for an unknown reason: “They created us”, confirms Elisabeth Shaw in reply to a question from a member of her team. The movie tries to answer the eternal questions “Who am I?” and “Who created me?” by exploring the myths about the creation and genesis of the universe. One of the main characters, the old and dying Peter Weyland, responsible for the expe- dition and secretly onboard the ship, claims in the first part of the movie, “I have spent my entire lifetime contemplating the questions where do we come from? What is our purpose? What happens when we die?”, echoing the original interroga- tions about the origins of man: his purpose with the expedition is to set Gods and humankind on an equal footing. The myth of the creation has been a central theme since the first scene, when one of the Engineers, sent to Earth, is drinking a dark and strange liquid: it trans- forms its body, causing its dissolution and sending small seeds and DNA all over the world and in the sea. Later we understand that this DNA is rehabilitated into a human DNA, creating human beings on earth. Ridley Scott, the director of Prometheus, said in an interview that he “was in- terested in Greco-Roman and Aztec creation myths about gods who create man Editorial | 9www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 7–15