I had a longer post but I watched the last video down below and it seemed to hit on a lot points of explanation. It also does a good job of putting to rest a lot of “Hey, why would they do that? That’s stupid,” kind of criticisms. Lifehack tip for people that watch movies: the news about town is that stories are always filled with people who don’t act as they should or how we’re expecting. Pointing it out as a flaw is a non-sequitur.
I wasn’t concerned too much with the symbolism and allegory/myths that Ridley Scott used—the first two videos go into detail about that. I was focused more on the practical plot aspects of the engineers vs. humans and what the black “life goo” is.
The life goo, probably a invention or discovery by the engineers, reacts to life. We notice this in the beginning before the engineer drinks it, and when the crew opens the sanctuary on LV-223. When the engineers drink it, or some version of it, it destroys them but it provides habitable planets with the correct proteins and what not for life to happen.
But with humans and other organisms, it enhances them but turns them violent, like what happened with the worm in the sanctuary and the infected Fifield. That an engineer was about to go to earth with a bunch of the life goo probably means he was going to turn them into insane weapons, but it’s not definite. The life goo effects are unpredictable. He could have just as easily intended to help us out.
We’re lead to believe the engineers aren’t fond of us because of the scene where the awakened engineer gets all huffy when he sees Wayland and the rest of the crew. There could be other reasons for that, though. Maybe he figured out that they had accessed the sanctuary and defiled it. Or that they posed a threat. It’s hard to say.
Really important thing to read that I haven’t seen mentioned: The engineer that awakens from stasis is not the same kind of engineer from the beginning that sacrificed himself. The sacrificial engineer was nearly naked and we could tell he had more or less a human physiology. The LV-223 engineer, along with all the other ones seen in the hologram, was enhanced in some way because their suits were not completely “their suits”. Part of their body was their suit.
Compare the body of the engineer in the opening scene here…
…to the neck and forearm of the LV-223 engineer here:
Clearly a change happened to at least some of the engineers. The “genetically enhanced engineer” scenario makes some sense if we look at Shaw’s Trilobite and the LV-223 engineer’s deacon. We know that the xenomorphs borrow DNA from its host organism which is why Shaw’s facehugger looked beige-y and organic. The engineer’s deacon-baby, had the engineer been prosthetic and not organic, would not have had all the Gigery proto-xenomorph physique that it did have.
I’m really hoping Scott doesn’t go the “humans are defective” route for Prometheus 2/Paradise. It’s the standard advanced-alien sci-fi story element and it invariably leads to the “yeah humans suck but we have hearts of gold” nonsense resolution.