Prometheus Analyzed: Facehuggers

This week we're dropping a selection of analyzations of the upcoming blockbuster science fiction of the summer Prometheus, and it all starts with the demon spawn that always comes first in an Alien film: the facehugger. This creature was the last being expected to pop up by fans of the original Alien as Ridley Scott himself several times noted that this film would be an entirely different entity, but lo and behold the newest trailer has revealed a new iteration of that animal once more. Let's have a look at what we can infer from what we've seen so far.

What we've seen in the trailers released for the movie Prometheus already are several clues that lead us to believe that the lifeform that will be antagonizing our heroes will indeed be taking over their bodies ala Alien. What it appears to be this time as opposed to the whole rest of the Alien series is a more microscopic entity than the chicken-sized baby xenomorphs of old. For the lay person in the crowd, that means there's no chest-bursting beasts here in 2012.

Where the original Alien film series had a baseball-mitt-sized facehugger creature starting the process of terrorizing the crew of the ship in the film as well as the audience forced to behold, this new monster is tiny. You only get a glimpse of this much cleaner-looking spatula-looking entity in the trailer, but it's very clear what it's meant to portend.

Here we see a creature that's a bit more subtle than the double-hand sized facehuggers of the rest of the Alien series. Instead what it appears to be is a snake with a face that's ready to insert eggs (or whatever else it's got to deliver) anywhere on the body of the soon-to-be-infected host. In this case, that's the human and humans we're following on the Prometheus mission, and it's shown in just a couple of instances in the trailers released thus far. First you'll see one of these beasts enter the space suit of a crew member here:

Then you'll see another possibly more evolved version of the beast being picked up inside a chamber we can expect will be used for brain salad surgery in the film:

There are of course several scenes where we see infected humanoids, including quite possibly our main woman as well as several (probably all) of the men. What we're thinking this means is the following: the humans here will no longer be hosts to a being that uses them as an incubator. Instead, the humans will be used as a symbiont with the entity that will eventually simply become them. Whether or not these beings are the Space Jockey race we know from the original Alien film, we cannot yet say.

[vms 05a09d33779a17adf170]

Stay tuned for the rest of our quick flips through the film as it exists today and of course head back to every one of these posts to see how accurate they were as the film is released this summer! You can follow our [Prometheus Portal] or our brand new [Entertainment Portal] to get all the action as it drops down upon you!