Some stuff just bothered me in the movie (the way Fifield and Millburn get lost and end up being victims, how can the guy who is mapping the place with his orbs and is in constant contact with the ship can be lost is just beyond me lol, that ravel and chance who have their great moment with janek are almost just shadows, that the hangar attack is just there to satisfy the need for action of the general movie audience) But i can forget and forgive them.
Eeverything is so cool around those that its ok.
I loved the movie until the Engineer is awaken.
One thing i understand now is that the surviving Engineer, is just a regular shmoe he's not a leader or anything.
He and all the dead engineers were on this planet creating weapon of mass destruction, this is a military base and he's just one of the many "soldiers" (remember Scott said the derelict was a bomber hence the military concepts).
When shit hit the fans on that base (this is important i will get back to it later) he and his crew were on their way to take off to Earth to wipe us out (the image of David in front of well stored urns, is actually the cargo bay of the juggernaut inside the urns, death either by complete desintragration of the body or by infestation).
So when he wakes up and start to go berzerk on David, Weyland, Ford and the Merc his agressive reaction do make sense.
He was ordered to destroy our race and he wakes up to find us there.
That is all there is to this first contact.
But i was expecting that our crew will get to meet an actual leader of the race, not just a grunt.
The one who has his face sculpted, he's their leader.
The movie forget about all the grand questions and goes into action, slasher, blockbuster territory.
But now i'm even ok with that, its not a problem anymore that we end up having just a classic horror slaher ending with a big bad monster stalking our heroine.
What still bothers me is the missed oportunity to make the events that lead to the massacre in the Engineer military base to payoff in the end. Especially now that i know what was supposed to take place in the end of the movie.
Bascally here is what happened in the military base.
An Engineer got infected by the same thing that killed/infected Holloway, the black goo that seems to either kill you in horrible pain or make you morph, mutate. That infected Engineer unleached a new form of life, probably like the one that Shaws delivers, a giant octopus like facehugger. The pile of dead Engineers (beautifull image btw) that Millburn and Fifield encounter at one point have their chest bursted (Fifield even states it) and the holes in the 3 sarcophagis leave no doubt that xeno like creature have been born 2000 years ago (that is the date Shaw gets when she carbon analyse the Engineer dead body they find) and killed almost everyone on the Engineer base.
What was the original plan for the final act was to have The surviving Engineer doing the same thing, going berzerk and kill the humans taking off but then :
1st script version, he would have been chestbursted by a massive xeno (wich growing was kept dormant thank to the Engineer being in cryosleep) growing very fast (like all the creatures of the movie) and been hunting down Shaw.
2nd script version, they (Engineer and Shaw) would have been confronted to the massive xenos or their spawns that were born from the Engineers 2000 years ago.
After killing it, Shaw would have took off with the Juggernaut with David just like she does in the movie.
Maybe Scott ditched these endings because they were too much ALIEN like, or maybe he wants to use this and adress the whole military base incident in the sequel.
Either way i would have prefered this than the Engineer stalking Shaw to the ship like Jason to be killed by a giant octopus.
