Is Prometheus Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot
Yes, 5.5 out of 10. It's mostly space-mission unease, with one surgery scene that people remember for a long time.
🐱THE SCARE SIGNAL
SCARE SCORE
5.5 /10
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
DREAD LEVEL
Medium
The surgery scene lingers for a night or two. The rest fades with the credits.
DOG
Dog: fine
fine, no dog dies.
Ruling: Most adults can handle it, but skip the middle if body horror bothers you.
Prometheus runs two hours and four minutes. A crew of scientists flies to a distant moon to meet the people who made humanity, and nobody on board stops to ask whether those people would want to be met.
The premise, briefly
In 2089, two archaeologists follow an ancient star map to a distant moon, hoping to find the beings who created humankind, and bring a crew and an android along.
How much do you want to know?
🐱
The verdict above is spoiler-free. Everything below, including the ending, stays hidden until you pick a depth.
🐱CUT TO THE CHASE
How it ends
Almost the whole crew dies. Shaw survives, loses the ship, and sets off alone with David's remains to find the Engineers' home world. In the last shot, something bursts out of a dead Engineer's chest.
The scene you're dreading
The surgery scene, in the middle of the film: Shaw learns she is far along in a pregnancy she should not be able to have, climbs into an automated surgery table, and has a squid-like creature removed from her abdomen.
The dog
No dog dies in Prometheus.
It is a slow expedition with a few jumps and one very memorable body-horror scene, and it is a lot easier to watch when you know that scene is coming.
THE SHORT VERSION IS HIDDEN
How it ends, the scene you're dreading, what happens to the dog, and the bottom line. About twenty seconds to read.
What actually happens
A star map and an expensive invitation
The movie opens as a spacecraft leaves a planet and a tall alien of humanoid shape swallows a black liquid. Its body dissolves into a waterfall, and its DNA falls apart and starts to recombine. Then the story jumps to 2089, when archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway find a star map in Scotland that matches maps from several ancient cultures that never met. They decide it is an invitation from the "Engineers," the beings who made humanity. Peter Weyland, the elderly head of Weyland Corporation, pays for an expedition on the ship Prometheus to follow the map to a moon called LV-223. The crew sleeps through the trip while the android David watches over them.
The Prometheus lands near a huge artificial structure, and the team goes inside. They find stone cylinders, a giant statue of a head, and the headless body of an enormous alien. Shaw works out that it is an Engineer and carries the head back to the ship. The crew finds more bodies and decides the species has died out. Millburn and Fifield get nervous and try to leave but lose their way inside. A storm sends everyone back to the ship, and David quietly pockets one of the cylinders. In the lab, the Engineer's DNA turns out to match human DNA. David then puts a tiny sample from the cylinder into a drink and hands it to Holloway, who has said he would give anything to get answers. Not long after, Shaw and Holloway sleep together.
Things are not going well
Millburn and Fifield meet a snake-like creature in the structure, and it kills Millburn. The corrosive fluid it sprays melts Fifield's helmet. Elsewhere, David finds a control room with a living Engineer asleep in stasis and a holographic map that points to Earth. Holloway gets sicker by the hour. When he is carried back to the ship, mission director Meredith Vickers will not let him on board, and at his own request she burns him with a flamethrower. Then comes the scene people warn each other about. A scan shows that Shaw, who was previously infertile, is in an advanced pregnancy. She gets onto an automated surgery table and has a squid-like creature taken out of her abdomen. It comes in the middle of the film, after Holloway's death. Afterward she finds out that Weyland, Vickers' father, has been on the ship in stasis the whole time, because he wants to ask the Engineers how to avoid dying of old age.
The Engineer wakes up grumpy
A mutated Fifield comes back to the ship and kills several crew members before Janek, the captain, kills him. Janek guesses that the structure was a military base for the Engineers, and that a biological weapon got away from them. Weyland, Shaw and a team go back to the structure, where the Engineer's ship is also kept. David wakes the Engineer and tries to explain what Weyland wants in Proto-Indo-European. The Engineer's reply is to behead David, kill Weyland and everyone with him, and start up the ship. Shaw runs and warns Janek that the Engineer plans to take the weapon to Earth and wipe out everything living there. Janek and the rest of the crew ram the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship to stop it, launching the lifeboat first. The disabled ship falls to the ground and crushes Vickers.
The ending, explained
Shaw reaches the lifeboat and finds that the creature taken from her has survived and grown enormous. An Engineer forces the airlock open and attacks her, and she lets the creature loose on him. It pushes an ovipositor down his throat, which ends the fight. Shaw collects David's remains and decides to travel to the Engineers' home world and ask why they wanted humanity gone. With David's help she launches another Engineer ship and leaves LV-223. Weyland, Vickers, Janek, Holloway and nearly everyone else on the expedition are dead. The final shot returns to the lifeboat on the moon, where an alien creature tears its way out of the dead Engineer's chest.
The post-credits ruling
There is no post-credits scene. You can leave when the credits start.
✓ Spoiled safelyDog status: fine, no dog dies.
Questions people ask at 1am
Is Prometheus scary?
Prometheus is a 5.5 out of 10 with a medium amount of lingering unease. Most of it is the unease of an expedition going wrong, with some jump scares and one body-horror surgery scene that stays with people.
How does Prometheus end?
Almost the entire crew dies. Shaw survives, takes David's remains and an Engineer ship, and heads for the Engineers' home world. In the last shot, an alien creature bursts out of a dead Engineer's chest.
Does the dog die in Prometheus?
No dog dies in Prometheus.
Is there a post-credits scene in Prometheus?
No. Prometheus has no post-credits scene, so you can leave when the credits start.
Who are the Engineers in Prometheus?
The Engineers are the tall humanoid aliens that Shaw and Holloway believe created humanity. The one David wakes up on the moon kills Weyland and his team, then plans to take a biological weapon to Earth.
BLURRED FOR YOUR PROTECTION
The whole plot of Prometheus is hidden, ending included. It stays that way until you ask.
You don't need two hours on LV-223 to know how Prometheus goes. Install Scaredy Cat and it will blur the trailers for you while you read the plot.
