Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Prometheus is not a good movie. It’s a bloated, pretentious, incoherent mess of a film. However, I thought the aesthetic aspects of the movie were great, and that’s where this figure comes in.

I had high hopes for Prometheus. I’ve been a fan of the Alien franchise since I was eight or nine years old, and one of my favorite mysteries of that universe was the story behind the so-called “Space Jockey” (Prometheus calls them “Engineers”) in the chair on the derelict spaceship.

This unexplained and yet crucially important part of the Alien universe was so compelling to me. What was that thing? Was that long nose the trunk of an elephantine alien, or simply a breathing mask of some sort? Why was its bio-mechanical body, particularly its ribs, so similar to those of the xenomorph? What was that giant cannon-like structure it was sitting in, and why did he seem to be organically fused to it? Prometheus promised to answer some of these questions. And it did, I guess, but in an at best incomplete and at worst completely unsatisfactory way. And it was really poorly written, too.

But no matter – I’m not here to review the film. The fact is, regardless of how it got here, I now have an action figure of the Space Jockey – something I’ve always wanted but never imagined I’d have. Now that I’ve got him, I can imagine he’s whatever I want him to be.

(more…)