Call me crazy, but does this slimy little creature in the new Prometheus trailer look like an angel to anyone else? With wings, bowed head, hands pressed together in prayer?

As mentioned previously, I’ve been obsessing unhealthily over every tiny detail of this movie for years now, so it’s entirely possible that I’ve gone off the deep end and am reading way too much into this. However, I think it’s possible that Ridley Scott has put some religious imagery into the design of the aliens in this film, the same way he put sexual imagery into the design of the creatures in Alien.

Scott has brought up God and religion in a few different interviews for Prometheus recently, as has Noomi Rapace, who said of her character Elizabeth Shaw: “I feel like my character is the heart in the movie. … In the beginning, she’s a believer. She believes in God and she has a very strong faith.” She might be seen praying in the trailer, too.

There’s also the Peter Weyland TED Talk, in which Weyland concludes, “We are the gods now.”

And in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month, Scott said of Prometheus:

[I]t is about the beginning of life and “what if.” It’s a giant “what if.” Has this ball that we’re sitting on right now been around here for three billion years or one billion? Either way, it’s a long f—ing time. It’s only our kind of arrogance that says “We’re the first ones.” … [I]t’s something we don’t know. Something that we really, really don’t know. Is there a guiding force into this process? Is it a much larger idea and much larger entity that we can’t really fathom? Because it’s as if, if you stand by an ant, it doesn’t see you. It doesn’t even know you’re there. I think it’s different, because we’re intelligent enough to go, “oh, that’s a very large fellow,” but that’s a good metaphor. …

Is there a God or is there not a God? Are we a petri dish here or not, and if we were a petri dish, of whom? What was the force, what is the entity that we can’t possibly even fathom, because it’s something we haven’t crossed that line yet? The story of Prometheus is the idea that if you’re given a gift from the gods, do not abuse it and do not think you can compete. He stole fire and they had his entrails torn out everyday in perpetuity by an eagle as a punishment. Every night they’d repair and then the eagle would come back in the morning and rip his liver and his kidneys out again. It’s perpetual purgatory. Basically, don’t f— around with gods.

And while some of what Scott has said about Prometheus veers a little too close to Ancient Aliens territory for my taste, I still have faith that he’ll approach the idea in an interesting way.