Why were all the murals sending us to the "Death temples" on LV-223?

Some of us are of the impression that the Militaristic Engineers (Body Armored) took the moon over from another race or different kind of Engineer (Non-Body Armored like the ones you seen in the beginning of Prometheus).  

This is a whole lot of pure speculation. We can infer that there was an Engineer war about 2000 years ago. We can infer that the engineers on LV-223 were one side of that war. So I have two possible explanations

1: The LV-223 engineers (reapers from now on) were rebelling against the other engineers who seed human DNA on planets (sowers from now on). This because the sowers beckon to LV -223 to give them Xeno eggs to take home and start a new hive. The reapers have to go collect eggs, but occasionally they get facehugged and they are sick of that shit. They make a daring play to capture LV-223 and succeed. They develop their black goo doomsday weapon and are about to send it to earth to prevent another xeno infestation, but hilarity ensues, and they mostly all die... Mostly.

2: the sowers were going to welcome us into the intergalactic family until the Reapers decided they hated us and took over LV-223 to find develop a way to wipe out all the seed planets. Cuz they are assholes. 

I lean towards 1 making more sense. 2 is a bit less likely.

Oh shit don't get me started on this one....

Did I mention how badly written Prometheus was? 

If there are 2 separate races of Engineers, it could be assumed that the cave paintings/murals were designed as a warning for future humans to stay away.

As it is with most things in history, the message may have just gotten lost in translation along the way.

Rarely would I point TO something I wanted someone to avoid. 

*Friendly Engineer - "Look, if you guys ever find a way to space travel, stay clear of this area. There's only death there."

i don t buy the 2 faction thingy yet.

I buy time travel.i buy theory of a race that is higher then engineers. But engineers arent rebels or have 2 factions.

Intergalactic war is not the path i want alien to go.this is about the alien not the engineers..they cant expand something that has already huge questions and holes to fix

Well, the war is long over. The two faction thing is heavily implied in a lot of ways that I've gone over in too many other threads.  Time travel is 10 times worse, and a cop out. If there's time travel I'm pretty sure I will punch out and not spend theatre money on another of these movies ever.

Hicks/Hudson I think the war happened AFTER all the cave paintings.

Why would they get in a war if they seed life and also destroy it.

Why would there be different factions if in the apocalyptic view we dont see them fight each other but rather suffering together..and theres big muscle ones too wich for me are the warriors.

Why would they create the bioweapon and put them in urns to kill humans

Where is it implied there are 2 factions and one rebelled?

How do you explain the derelict having 2000 years old..yet they transport eggs as cargo..in a total unsafe manner..by a single space jockey...how would it be tossed upon the planet? Unless you crash it towards earth...such inteligent being dont have a better way figured out?

How do you explain the eggs spawning classic xenow bio mechanical...but they worship a mural that has a deacon in it and not a traditional xeno its not bio mech but bio only.

How do you explain david creating a proto in AC yet 2000 years ago in lv426 full of eggs there was a derelict emitting a signal and david didnt know about it? Yet he knows about paradise?

So they had the biomech xeno figured out and used it as cargo and david creates a protoxeno with what purpose?

Do you understand what im getting at?

How would a rebellion in lv 223 makes sense...if the ones that were the most advanced tec engineers were there and the other faction is the one that renounces technology supposedly..nope.

Engineers are not a race who would rebel against each other. They create and destroy life.

Theres no proof or hint whatsoever the engineers fight against each other or rebelled against each other.

Not to be a smart @ss, but maybe the Engineers thought that if we became so advanced and stupid to think it was an invitation then we would deserve to die.

Sometimes Prometheus is criticised for low exposition when in fact it is there in the dialogue :-

1) The Engineers who had visited earth pointed out to early, and not so early man, that they came from a "system" not a planetoid. That exposition is contained in the briefing by Charlie.

For Elizabeth to then jump to the conclusion that the Engineers were offering an invitation was hubristic projection because of her Promethean preoccupation with finding Paradise because of the early loss of her mother. It was, as explained to David in her dreams, a child like preoccupation which gave Sir Peter his excuse for his own agenda. if you let go of the idea that it was not an Invitation but it was showing off to early mankind some of whom would then be taken back to LV 223 (explicit in the concept behind the story) it makes much more sense.

I hope we will see Elizabeth finally get the point in Covenant (Do not go off looking for answers which will come when we die, accept creation, mortality as it is) and when she does it will be ugly.

2) Janek was, like David, crucial to offering signposts in the dialogue. When he spoke you were meant to pay attention. In Damon's (and Ridleys) mind in 2012 LV 223 (check out the Leviticus connection in the bible L 22 - 3) was an outpost where the Engineers experimented with sub creation. What he says to Shaw was telling us a story he understood from his own career.

The Engineers experimented off world with the catalyser  to protect themselves. Unlike the purity expressed at the beginning of the movie they had become obsessed with self and sub creationism, it is represented in their appearance blending mechanical looking functionalism (their armour) which was probably the equivalent of a laboratory suit warn by humans. That does not mean a schism has occurred and the guys on LV 223 were at odds with Paradise. Janek is telling us there is testing going on in the desert a long way from downtown Los Angeles.  

The question we do not have a specific answer to is, when did this fall start from tear drop acolyte to revisionism. All that matters for the story is it did and it had consequences.  

The guys on Paradise thought they would be fine and could live with the blessings the creator provided for them whilst all this s... was going down on LV 223. Clearly the creator had other views it gave up on them, either by pursuing Noachian retribution on them or more ironically allowing the product of sub creation to destroy them. Check back after mid night on the 05.18.2017 for an answer to that one. 

@ Tiago_Miami_la - I think there's plenty to imply Engineer factions. I think, also, this is NOT about the alien at all (as per Ridley's repeated comments of this and other sequels moving away from the 'beast').

In Alien, the Space Jockey, as intriguing as it was, was not the main aspect of the film - it served as a set up (Derelict, Space Jockey, eggs). Ridley's not remaking Alien, he's moving away from that direction. So the alien/neomorph etc are there to set up other story arcs - David's quest for God-like status; the Engineers/Space Jockey etc.

Also, I'm not sure the mural depicts a Deacon. Like Lindelof's writing, the mural was stylised just enough to imply a number of things, but confirm nothing.

All the characters in Prometheus were positively hateable. So their deaths and manner therein were very satisfying. Too bad Shaw got away, she was frankly irritating.

I think we should follow Occam's razor and simply say that Liz and Charlie got the mural address wrong! In a galaxy of 300 billion known stars (and a universe of several trillion), a 2D pattern of 5 stars cannot be unique.

So instead of finding the real paradise, they found the real hell. They chose... poorly.

Yep and it was costly to say the least, a total waste of money, the destination based on such shoddy evidence is laughable.

When it comes to Occam's razor, Liz and Charlie must have been RIGHT about the location because there were engineers there.

It strains credulity that they got the location COMPLETELY wrong, but magically hit a planet where engineers were working on a doomsday weapon.

While it is true that they didn't use a credible method to locate LV-223, the story writers chose to validate that method. 

Yeah point taken. You inevitably have to pad out yet more assumptions to make it credible...

e.g. 1: the Engineers are actually present most places so it'd be hard not to bump into them;o r

e.g. 2: the Engineers reside on all star systems that match the mural pattern -- it's like their 'habitable zone'. It's just misfortune Liz and Charlie picked the nasty outpost.

@Tiago_miami_la.

If someone can find anything in Damon, John and Ridley's Prometheus commentaries and in all the remarks that Ridley has made, however elliptical, since he began working on an Alien Prequel that they were attempting to create a "monster wars" narrative where the Space Jockey race turned out to be in an inter species war I would be exceptionally surprised indeed I would go as far as to say they will not find it. 

The closest by a mile that you can get to it is that Ridley has for many many years considered the cargo in the derelict a weapon. Could your argue this weapon was created as a WMD  to be used by one element of the Engineers to wipe out the other, you could but there is nothing in the entire thrust of the narrative to suggest such a course. Indeed when Prometheus was conceived with a follow up in mind what Ridley explicitly said was when E & D arrive at Paradise they find something very different from the usual concept of Paradise and he described the Engineers they would find as "Aggressive ....ers". So there was never an intent to have a hippy and military faction. 

It is only since mid to late 2015 that the New Zealand version of Paradise has emerged with a seeming group of victims. 

So as of right now with the one film published that one film was never conceived with the idea of Engineer Wars. 

Those are the facts but if you actually consider all of Ridleys pre occupations creationism. mortality and immortality they do not get close to the idea of a Geo Political Mythos he is and always discusses the saga in terms of its philosophical ideas. "The Engineers are not gods just a superior species so if they are not gods who is .. it is quite a complicated story with layers" thus spake the man. 

Its a hierarchical story not an inter species one. 

Put simply I am with you.

Absolutely great discussion here, thank you all. One of the beautiful things about Prometheus is---love it or hate it---that it "opens up" with repeated viewings. I.e., while other movies are stale, even after just one viewing---even the really good ones, Prometheus invites analysis and thought and...wonder.

I think the seeds have been sown for an entire mythology, and that was the point. Thank goodness for all us Alien fans.

Yes, why did the engineers give us their home address (which is something that Hawking warns us from doing)? Could it be an evolutionary limit? When the seed has progressed to the point where it challenges its makers, the end station is reached? What’s the point? Children always get to this point in relation to their parents.

@Michelle Jonston

"I hope we will see Elizabeth finally get the point in Covenant (Do not go off looking for answers which will come when we die, accept creation, mortality as it is) and when she does it will be ugly."

Exactly. She said she "derves" to know. I suppose she will get what she deserves.