It is the year 2089 when Elizabeth Shaw, an archaeologist with a spiritual bent, chips through a wall in a cave in the bleak mountains of Scotland and finds out that the human race is not alone in the universe. Illuminated by her torchlight is a 35,000-year-old painting of people worshiping a giant, who is pointing to a small cluster of stars.

"I think they want us to come and find them,' she says, eyes alight.

The words "we're not alone" can be a doorway to either salvation or terror. That is the knife edge on which the British director Ridley Scott has balanced "Prometheus," his long-awaited return to the universe without mercy or comfort that he first created in the 1979 movie "Alien."

"Prometheus" is the first science fiction directed by Mr. Scott since "Blade Runner" in 1982 and the first he has made in 3-D. The movie, with a screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, follows the adventures of the archaeologist Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace. Aboard the hubristically named spaceship Prometheus she uses an ancient star map to guide her to an obscure moon of an obscure planet in the hope of meeting her maker.

Exactly what happens out there, neither Mr. Scott nor anyone else will say. Web sites have been devoted to frame-by-frame analyses of trailers, images and whatever clues Mr. Scott and cast members have let drop.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that things don't go well. In Greek mythology Prometheus, after all, was chained to a rock and had his liver eternally pecked out for the crime of stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans.

On the phone from London, where the film was mostly shot, Mr. Scott described it as "'2001' on steroids." He said he liked Stanley Kubrick's notion of "a police agency in the universe that will give a ball of dirt a kick."

"God doesn't hate us," Mr. Scott added ominously. "But God could be disappointed in us — like children."

The star map leads to the same planet that the ship in "Alien" will visit 30 years later, but Mr. Scott said "Prometheus" was not a prequel to that 1979 movie, which was a kind of haunted-house story featuring the crew of a space freighter being picked off by a monster that makes its debut by bursting out of someone's belly. Moviegoers, he has said teasingly, will be able to discern the DNA of "Alien" in the new movie, but whether he means the gritty dystopian setting or the gooey stuff of life itself — or both — time will tell.

After five sequels and a series of comic books, Mr. Scott said he figured the franchise was finished, comparing the monster with a joke gone flat from too many tellings. Three years ago, eager to get back to science fiction, he thought there might be a way back into the "Alien" world, to "rescue" the franchise, as he put, it by picking up a loose thread from the original movie that had been neglected.

In the first film the unlucky freighter crew finds a derelict spaceship, and in the pilot's chair is a giant humanoid being with an exploded chest. In the very next scene a strange egg opens up and wraps itself around the face of a crew member, played by John Hurt. "Once John Hurt looks into that egg, the film took off," Mr. Scott said. But he was surprised nobody ever asked him about the "space jockey," referring to the being in the pilot's chair, which he called a "very obvious and glaring question."

"Who was he? Why did he land there? Was he in trouble?" Mr. Scott wondered. And why was he carrying a cargo of such "wicked biotechnology"? Mr. Scott acknowledged that he himself did not know the answers and thought that James Cameron, who directed the first sequel, "Aliens," would address the question. "Jim is more of a logician."

But the enigma remained. He pitched the idea to Fox, but in the process of developing it, he said, "a grand new mythology" emerged.

That mythology is Mr. Scott's own particular mash-up of high and low culture. On the one hand, he said, he was inspired by the current quest to look for life beyond Earth, under the sands of Mars and in the oceans beneath the ice covering Jupiter's moon Europa.

"I think, wow, this is a pretty useful basis for my film," Mr. Scott recalled.

At the other end of the credibility scale is the pop archaeologist Erich von Daniken, who argued in books like his 1968 "Chariots of the Gods" that there was archaeological evidence in the form of things like the Nazca lines in Peru that we had received visitors from outer space. His claims gained no traction among professional archaeologists, but, Mr. Scott said, "to me it all made sense."

In news conferences and in conversation Mr. Scott has evinced sympathy for the notion — popular in some circles, including the Vatican — that it is almost "mathematically impossible" for life on Earth to have gotten to where it is today without help.

"It is so enormously irrational that we can do this," he went on, referring to our conversation — "two specs of atoms on a carbon ball."

"Who pushed it along?" he asked. Have we been previsited by gods or aliens? "The fact that they'd be at least a billion years ahead of us in technology is daunting, and one might use the word God or gods or engineers of life in space."

And would we want to meet them again? Mr. Scott's countryman the cosmologist Stephen Hawking has suggested that we should be careful Out There. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," Dr. Hawking said.

Mr. Scott agreed: "Hopefully they won't visit."

Behind the Prometheus legend is the idea that "the gods want to limit their creations; they might want to dethrone God," said Mr. Lindelof, best known as one of the creators of the television series "Lost." (He wrote the final "Prometheus" screenplay, revising a script by Mr. Spaihts.)

Mr. Lindelof said he had almost driven off the road when Mr. Scott first phoned: He was given two hours to read Mr. Spaihts's script while a guard waited outside. He described the process of working with Mr. Scott as "you do everything you can to prevent him from thinking you're an idiot."

"I hope no one thinks we are overly pretentious," Mr. Lindelof said. "We set out to make something entertaining and thrilling to watch, not a band of people sitting around talking about the meaning of life."

In keeping with its Promethean theme the movie is laced with generational conflict, Mr. Lindelof said. There is, for example, the robot David. "Hey, a bunch of humans seeking out their creator," Mr. Lindelof explained. "David knows exactly who created him, and he is not impressed by his creator." He can see, hear and think better than humans and is stronger than they are too.

Nor are all the humans so impressed with David: Vickers refers to him as "a toaster," ordering him out of the room. But Weyland describes the android as the son he never had, saying David has everything he would ever want in a son, except for a soul.

David smiles.


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