Ridley Scott's biggest sin

Rating: 6/10 (1 July 2014)

First and foremost: ALIEN is my favorite film and yes I do love ALIENS but loathe ALIEN Resurrection and the AVP films (actually loathe and hate are not strong enough for the AVP films).
Secondly, I enjoyed Prometheus though grudgingly probably because of Ridley Scott's production values and attention to detail and the acting except for the unseemly behavior for scientists.
The biggest sin committed by Ridley Scott and the screen writers of Prometheus is that they took the alien out of the ALIEN franchise. And to be clear I mean "alien" as in foreign, strange and unknowable.
The imagery of the original 1979 film by now has been imitated enough to seem familiar but back in 1979 ALIEN was more than just a title and a reference to the titular creature; it was a short and to the point description of what you were going to see and experience. The world conjured in one's mind of the derelict space craft, the space jockey, the xenomorph with its lack of eyes and acid for blood truly stood out as something completely alien especially when compared to earlier attempts at alien creatures and civilizations which were laughable when compared to "engineer" culture. Even Lucas' cantina scene in Star Wars, while very popular, was still depicted in a totally familiar setting with the aliens reduced to bar patrons engaging in typical bar patron behavior and with biological systems not too unfamiliar to our own judging by the fact that seem to be drinking human compatible alcohol.
In choosing to make the space jockey's race nothing more than a race of giant snow white humanoid males which, in retrospect, thanks to the above mentioned imitations look a little like the Borg Queen but without all that messed up stuff on their heads, Scott whisked away the mystery and a good chunk of the horror that would have gone into contact with a civilization that is totally unrelated and un-relatable. Like it or not there is a tendency in us to feel a heightened sense of fear when life is on the line at the hands of a foreign and unknowable agency and that was as much a central part of ALIEN as any other important horror element.
The one area in the original film where there was something familiar to grasp onto was the vaguely sexual overtones found in engineer design: the trio of orifice openings in the derelict ship which itself resembles the bottom half of some massive alien female creature pregnant and with deformed legs splayed as if ready to birth and of course there is the very phallic shaped head of the alien. The inclusion of these familiar archetypal features on such an alien design coupled with the fact that Kane was forcibly sodomized served to make it even more unsettling.
The design of the derelict stood in stark contrast to what we perceive as a space going vessel as represented by the Nostromo. One can easily imagine several dozen blue collar ship builders cranking out the Nostromo and other sister ships with familiar materials and tools but the derelict looked like it was grown in some strange, weird alien manner. The fact that prior to Prometheus the space jockey was perceived as growing out of his chair suggested that individuals of the engineer species were designed for specific tasks, but now, no, it's just, a suit a helmet and a special chair that somehow connects with the suit.
Back then, I personally pictured a widely variant species in design, suddenly fearful of this new upstart primate hominid with a propensity for violence. Indeed, the art of HR Giger would have been a veritable goldmine for engineer variants. In my imagination they kidnapped and experimented on humans in order to craft a bio-weapon that is itself a variation of their own species (like the space jockey mentioned above) but modified to pattern itself with human genes in order to be able to ingest the kinds of food we eat and even to sometimes eat us in order to grow, subsist and multiply in a human environment. It was through this activity, I imagined, that "The Company" became aware of the species and the derelict ship which caused them to reroute the Nostromo.
Sadly not only are the engineers no longer "alien", they're familiar. Heck they're actually related, perhaps they're our 15579th cousins twice removed.