ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the sequel to the Alien trilogy, a hovering spacecraft departs our Earth deep in prehistoric times, while a humanoid alien who remained on the Earth drinks a dark bubbling liquid and then disintegrates – when his remains cascade into a waterfall, his DNA triggers a biogenetic reaction which led to the rise of humans. The story then jumps to 2089, when archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discover a star map in Scotland that matches others from several unconnected ancient cultures. They interpret this as an invitation from humanity’s forerunners, the ‘Engineers’. Peter Weyland, the elderly CEO of Weyland Corporation, funds an expedition to follow the map to the distant moon LV-223 aboard the scientific vessel Prometheus. The ship’s crew travels in stasis while the android David monitors their voyage. Arriving in 2093, they are informed of their mission to find the Engineers. After long battles with the Engineers, the last of them forces open the lifeboat’s airlock and attacks Shaw, who releases her alien offspring onto the Engineer. It thrusts a tentacle down the Engineer’s throat, subduing him. Shaw recovers David’s remains, and with his help, launches another Engineer spacecraft – she intends to reach the Engineers’ home-world in an attempt to understand why they wanted to destroy humanity. In the film’s last scene, Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) desperately shouts at the homicidal alien: ‘I need to know why! What did we do wrong? Why do you hate us?’ Is not such a cry for meaning or purpose an exemplary case of the Lacanian Che vuoi?, of the impenetrability of gods of the Real? (Ehrenreich 2012: 132–37).
