Two different types of black goo.

Man you guys are obsessed with the whole Xeno thing let it go, this is about a new type of alien intelligence. I love the Xenomorphs too but its kind of getting old talking about Xeno this Xeno that. Maybe the goo was never a pre-Xeno goo to begin with maybe they designed it later only to become a terrifying creature. Lets take a new speculation about how this stuff was genetically engineered during the their war and how they created the darn thing from pre existing DNA.

Two goos, yes. One in the begining, a very fast acting DNA disperser. The other is the weapon found on the moon. The unweaponized goo used by the sacrificial Engineer may require drinking and the black goo on the moon is a weapon developed from it. I think Halloway and Fifield had the same exposure with slightly different results. The main difference was Halloway staying clearer headed and choosing suicide while Fifield went nuts in the alien installation alone. In the end they'd both have been bulbous headed zombies. The engineer was probably past his expiration date despite such good preservation. The goo from the moon seems to the true universal bioweapon. What we know as xenomorphs are just a relatively stable bioproduct. Possibly the ultimate goal given the wall sculpting we see. The goo take anything organic and kills it, weaponizes it, and/or makes it breed monsters. So when we see goo at its source with a variety of lifeforms the results are quite varied. There are similarities in the Prometheus creatures and the xenomorphs seen elsewhere. Patterns programmed in to the goo, it applies the ones best suited to the host and situation. I'm still not convinced that the Deacon is anything but the cousin or aunt of the ancestors of the LV-426 hive. I imagine the poor thing starving quickly on the moon unless it can find a lot of worms. In fact I wonder if the Xenomorphs ancestors were just big bugs. Giant ants, maybe livestock. Exposing them to the goo lead to the form we know today. The Aliens keep some of the genetic plasticity the goo gave them which explains A LOT in various sources. Consider the drone who hatched from LV-426's behavior in the director's cut of Alien. Without a queen or access to the eggs it was exposing the captives to what weaken microbes it carried. The microbes seem to be trying to make eggs or something out of the humans. Finally knowing that both the aliens and humans have a common creator and see how the goo works almost makes Resurrection seem reasonable.

@Shambhala I want to commend you on the screen shots posting. I don't recall in my DVD version of the movie seeing such clarity in the scenes you posted.

Taking into account that much of the backstory we are asking for is being developed decades later as is often the case with successful properties...

I think the opening scene is critical in differentiating between two different types of Engineers.

1.  Ships

A:  Smooth and natural-looking like a river stone.

B:  Militaristic/Bio Mechanical Giger Aesthetic

2.  Engineer Aesthetic

A: Smooth Cloth, light colors, suggesting a pious sacred nature.

B:  Biomechanical, dermal armor resistant to firearms; prominent Giger aesthetic.

3.  Black Goo

A.  Carefully handled, honeycombed, an ounce for the entire planet...importantly shows the entire destruction to creation double-helix process. A  genetic catalyst/accelerant.  It cannot be understated how important it was that the ship departed prior to.

B.  Thousands of Silo/Warhead-like containers of pure-black soup.  Genetic chaos/death/cancer.

The theme reminds me of Robert Frost's "Great Unanimal Man" and the Bible's inherent "sins of the flesh".

Whether two warring factions, or simply scientific vs military branches, I'm beginning to suspect that the "Xeno" mural suggests the military Engineers have some part of Xeno DNA both in their goo warheads AND  in their own make-up.

4.  "Mortal after all..."

Beyond the obvious, the deeper meaning here is that the Military Engineers cannot escape the predatory violence of the evolutionary process.

They are as tainted as humans.

I wonder if the pathogen that caused the exploding head/Engineer deaths was a fast-acting genetic nuke to contain the Xeno-goo breach and stop it from spreading.

Fin