About the Jockeys...

I am unsure on the design purpose of the Engineer look, but I do know that from the original SJ concept art, basically 0% of the drawings were really big people with white skin, black eyes. The awe inspiring thing about H.R. Giger's design for the SJ's was the WTF factor. We looked at the thing in the chair and thought, "were does the chair end and the being start?" And he had what appeared to be a trunk like an elephant. I do not like the retrofitted design work, that somehow what we saw in ALIEN was a suit rather than his actual body. It does not appear to be a suit. Just my thoughts.

Im not even going to speculate this time around As a biologist the Xeno's have occupied a corner of my brain for the last 3 decades wondering what environmental factors could selectively create them Why would a species as aggressive as this require a defence mechanism other than to defend themselves against even more aggressive predators (yep, something that tends to eat xenos for breakfast) God forbid After 30 years of speculation to find out that they are probably created from scratch in a lab rather than occurring naturally according to Darwinian principles is a tad frustrating. So as for Engineers i dont care, i'm not going to waste my time thinking about it

I get what you are saying, I always thought that the Jockey in Alien was a half man-half gun kind of creature and always wondered what his purpose was. But I still liked how he was handled in Prometheus, he looked nearly like perfection of a sort, he could have been black, Asian, etc, but the features looked godlike nearly beautiful which was a good touch. For plot reasons he could not have looked elephantine, an the trunk could serve as a breating apperatus so it's not really a stretch. But anyway they have taken an enigma from Alien and given us even more enigmas with Prometheus, its quite fitting when you think about it. Great things have small beginnings, how fitting.

Prouty99, good point, but as a biologist , surely you have seen what we are able to do with dogs and how many differant forms we have made them become, now what about the mice and rats that we can make glow in the dark? Its hardly such a stretch to imagine a species more advanced than us could go that bit further, and add acid for blood etc, provided you splice the right genes from the right creatures. There is much we don't know. Also the Alien is a creature designed by an artist with a warped imagination, I don't think that warrents 30 years of speculation in all due respect. The Alien is a penis headed machine looking creature with no eyes to make it seem less human and more alien with retractable jaws like a penis with teeth that taps into our subconcious fears of being sodomised and killed especially for men, then you just add the male fear of being impregnated and you have a terrifiying beast that requires no evolutionary exlaination.

@Prouty99 I thought it was well flagged in Alien that the backstory for the Xenomorph suggested it was engineered. Firstly, they weren't indigenous to the planet, they came on a ship, secondly the way the eggs were arranged under that blue light was suggestive of some kind of storage rather than infestation. I do think it was too much of a sop to make them humanoid though. The great thing about Alien was how 'alien' and unkown it was. A cold uncaring universe with cold uncaring aliens, so perfectly adapted to lethal parasitic behavior in extreme environments, outside of its home planet, that it suggests design. Making that designer a relative of humans brings us backwards into mythology rather than forward into discovery which the first two did. If you consider the plots of the first two films, there is no mythology. It's all about coping with reality of hostile presence from the alien, and the greedy corporation wishing to make a profit from it. There was a perfectly plausible universe there with no need to hark back to long discarded mythologies. We've had enough sci-fi about those, and especially with the 2012 doom myths of mayans and super beings, it felt like a weak decision to me. There were avenues to go down of intelligient, malicious beings, that required no link to humans whatsoever. They could just as easily be interested in colonising by wiping out pre-existing (and competing) dominant species. It wouldn't reduce by one bit the curiousity to seek them out. Wishing to kill them and eliminate the risk posed to us would be enough.

They came out of the future in the Wellsian universe... [img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_CdocFnegjE0/TPGnewSPA5I/AAAAAAAAB6o/3P48LtKsFdQ/s320/timemachine02_jeremyirons.jpg[/img] :)

@Hadley´s Hope... Exactly!!! Lame and a desecration of Giger´s design by all counts.

If Lindelof writes it, itll prolly be the Predators, only not the same predators we've seen but in the same Predator universe... his predators will be all the same, but have a single horn extending from their foreheads.......sarcasm