The Link

I do know one thing - was Prometheus set on a moon by Saturn? or a planet that looked like it? - in Alien (had to put it on after watching Prometheus) - the planet they land on has Saturn in the background (or a planet that looks like it) too.

True but probably only because the special effects department like doing ringed planets

I appreciate that fact but of the planets we can currently identify many seem to be gas giants like Saturn and Juptier - added to this is the belief that if life still exists elsewhere in our own solar system it is likely to be on a moon orbiting a gas giant. So it's not a huge leap to concede that there may be millions of |Saturn like planets in the Universe which have habitable or prime terraforming moons. It will all be explained in the sequel anyway - just makes sense to me that this race of engineers may have created throusands of hugely diverse species spread out across the universe. To take it a little further - there was a post asking why the Nostromo was redirected to LV426 30 years or so after the Prometheus incident - perhaps it took almost this long for Weyland Corp to decode and understand any information gained from the original expedition - the engineers were also alien to us! Perhaps having found details of the seed program and the engineered species for each ship they acted as soon as they could. Don't forget it took us hundreds of year to decode ancient Egyptian and we'd still be guessing now if the Rosetta Stone had not been found!

I know where you're coming from but it seems almost irrelevant, the two seem unconnected and I think the major planet is just like he said, they look good when analysed on screen. You, see, I'd always 'read' the DNA reference to mean it would have some sort of the look and feel and concept behind Alien but that was wrong I think. It seems more literal but the Engineers are ambiguous, you don't learn that much and I don't think he's sacrificing himself,maybe he is, but it looks like he's being dropped off and has to do what a man has to do..dunno, maybe he designed the dinosaurs, screwed up and has to pay the price for fixing it! :) enjoy the movie and don't be put off by the reviews, or some of them anyway. It will polarize our community though, I can see why!

Thank you for the replies - just wanted to get involved as I won't be able to see the film for a couple of weeks - got a stupid broken ankle to deal with first but I am such a fan that, like all of us, having been waiting so long for this that I couldn't help myself! A view without viewing the film gives another perspective - probably not! Dinosaurs lol - love it!

I like how you bring up the LV426 Engineer as also being a "sacrificial" character. But perhaps in a different light. The Earth Engineer who sacrifices himself for the development of mankind and other species sacrifices himself to create. While I have a feeling the LV436 Engineer sacrifices himself to destroy. The Alien species (eggs/facehuggers/chestbursters) is without a doubt (now) an experiment gone bad. A mixture of close DNS structures which create an abomination species which we witness in the final scenes of Prometheus. I suspect that in the following sequel(s) to Prometheus we see this species evolve (as Alien always does going by the other films) and we see the Engineers take note of its danger it poses to the universe they are attempting to "create" with life. So, that being said, I think in a later sequel, we see an Engineer go back to LV223 - to gather up the remaining Alien eggs and take them to a neighboring planetoid (LV426) and deliberately crash/land the ship there to stop the spread of the Alien species. The beacon the Nostromo picks up is without a doubt a warning to other Engineer vessels to steer clear, that this is a quarantined planet and should be avoided at all costs. But then you can ask - why not kill the Alien species all together on LV223? Why not simply quarantine that planet instead? Maybe because now the Engineers know the humans have a map to that planet and will undoubtedly attempt to revisit the planet and risk spreading the Alien parasite further throughout the galaxy? All fantastic theories which should be dissected more thoroughly as more people see Prometheus.

Spoony and Bughunter: I like both posts, and the ideas in them, but RS said, in an interview, that the derelict did not crash land on LV 426 ,but was "parked" there. He did indicate that something in the cargo was out of control, but beyond that he gave no specific indication as to why the space jockey "parked" the derelict on LV 426, nor what he hoped to achieve by doing so. Matters for further speculation.