Prometheus Review With Spoilers

This is a picture of Shaw's baby (the tentacled monster) taking out the lone
 space jockey on the planet that the crew awoke from a 2000 year-old hyper sleep.
 When the space jockey woke up, he was pissed and started killing everyone.
There was no explanation. He shares the same genetic code as a human, but
 clearly was very unhappy that humans had landed on the planet and had
 one thing in mind: pilot a ship filled with biological weapons to destroy Earth. Shaw
stopped him and basically opened a door that had the monster tentacled creature
 behind it that grabbed the space jockey that would have killed her. This was the biggest
face-hugger I have ever seen. It was really impressive.

Well I saw Prometheus at the midnight showing last Thursday, and I absolutely loved it. Here are the elements that fired my imagination:

1) The 3D was stunning. It wasn't too dark or too light, and it didn't feel like they were purposely going out of their way to make trick shots for a 3D audience. This is definitely a "big screen" film, and I feel that if you are a fan of these movies, you definitely want to invest the money to see it in IMAX if you can.

2) Michael Fassbender as David was the most interesting android ever. There are parts where he is on the spaceship, engaging in sports by himself to clearly wile away the time and then he also emulates Peter O'Toole's character in Lawrence of Arabia (by the way Fassbender looks a lot like a young Peter O'Toole, and I had previously not noticed this connection). Anyway, why would an android need to use old movies and sports to entertain himself unless he was bored? And this begs another question...can computers be bored? I have no idea. But it's an intriguing concept. Roger Ebert pointed out in his review that Peter Weyland referred to David as the "son I never had". Charlize Theron plays the daughter of Peter Weyland and there was definitely sibling rivalry there as well as a startling physical appearance (both blond, both tall, etc.). But Peter Weyland strips David of humanity by declaring him soulless. Is this statement true though? I don't know.

3) The concept of parents. David the android says in one scene that "all children secretly want their parents to die". I thought this was fascinating that someone would even say this. I for one don't want my parents to die. I kind of feel that having my parents die will be the thing that makes me really aware of my mortality--that I too can and will die. And I kind of wonder if David said this because he's essentially immortal and wants to know what it will feel like to die and doesn't believe he can do so UNLESS the ones who created him perish.

Additionally, in Prometheus, one of the characters named Shaw is obsessed with finding an explanation of "where do humans come from?" She's Christian in the movie, which suggests to me that she already has an answer. So why then is she doing all of this searching? Does she want proof? Is belief not enough for her? Maybe there is something to the statement "All fanatics hide a secret doubt". What do you think?

Basically, I see Shaw's quest as a search for parentage of some kind and when she finds it, the parents are not what she was expecting. In fact, they're pretty terrifying. Physically, the "space jockeys" look like the most muscular humans on earth, only half again as tall. Take the offspring of NFL superstars like Eli Manning and Tom Brady and couple that genetic code with really tall supermodels for about three hundred years and then smack that offspring with an ugly stick, and you'd probably end up with a space jockey. So really...not all that far-fetched.

And the gist of Prometheus is that this "super race" created humans (basically destroying all of her beliefs in one fell blow) and to top it off, they're jerks. They offer no explanation for what they did, and it looks like they changed their mind about humanity. In other words, the stuff on the world that the Prometheus visits is a biological weapon. The alien xenomorph is a creation manufactured in a lab somewhere and meant to deploy against the human race to wipe us out. But why?

4) The unanswered questions. The end of the show has Shaw zooming off in a space jockey ship with David along for the ride and she isn't going back to Earth. She's going for the Engineer's (space jockey) homeworld. But what does she hope to find there? They clearly wanted humans dead. However, it's been 2000 years since the engineers on this world were in touch with their core civilization. Did something happen to them? Did they get wiped out by their own biological weapons? Or maybe they were designing a weapon to take out their own parents (the ones that created them).

All in all, Prometheus is the magnificent film that I was hoping for, so I'm pleased. I just hope it makes enough money to warrant a sequel. I want answers that the film didn't provide. And I would also like to see how the first Alien movie and the events in Prometheus connect. Where did the derelict spacecraft on LV-426 come from as well as the huge cargo of eggs. The end of Prometheus showed the birth of a xenomorph, but that's basically a harmless lifeform as the planet had no indigenous population really (unless the alien could learn to pilot an empty ship).

Xenomorph

Because Prometheus is just around the corner (days are counting down) and I need to talk about something that begins with an "X", I'm choosing to write about the Alien xenomorph.

Most people who have seen the movie Alien find the xenomorph itself pretty disturbing. There is also something totally and undeniably horrifying about the derelict spacecraft in which the eggs are found. The details shown in the sketches of the book "Giger's Alien" imply that the spacecraft (that we see in the Prometheus trailer) has a design and function related to something unimaginably malignant by any human standard of the definition of "malignancy". Perhaps "malignancy" is not even the right word here. The derelict goes beyond that. It encompasses an entire system of systematic obliteration of life which goes beyond any human definition of evil. 

I think it's a good thing that this object (and creature) exists only in our fantasies. I think it would be disturbing to share the universe with a species as terrible and horrific as the one envisioned by H.R. Giger (the creator of the Xenomorph creature).

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As a writer of science-fiction, I've taken many cues from Mr. Giger in my own work. In "Slipstream" I have a god-like being who went insane when his personality split down the middle. The evil side of this god-like being wanted nothing to do with the good, law-abiding side. So much so, that it cut itself in half and replaced the human aspect of itself with machine. Horrific as that may sound, both sides of this avatar survive independently of one another. To know more, well, I hope you'll invest in my book.

Generally speaking, however, it's this sort of characteristic that's a trait of Giger's biomechanical style: I don't think there are many (intelligent) people who would like to see Giger's worlds being realized, because if such was the case, they would be in a heck of a lot of trouble. And the same goes for the dystopian world of Avalon in my book. It's been described as a dark fantasy filled with exciting and original monsters, if not a bit horrific.

But I bow to the master that is H.R. Giger. I wonder how this man (H.R. Giger) even sleeps at night, with the thoughts that must occupy his head.

H.R. Giger's Alien movie concept art revisited in Prometheus

H.R. Giger is in my opinion, a mad genius. I own a couple of his "coffee table" art books, and they are scary stuff. I own Biomechanics, H.R. Giger's Alien, and his Necronomicon. In reading about him, I discovered that within his lifetime he has rubbed elbows with just about every major artist in the world including Ridley Scott and Salvatore Dali. He's had a girlfriend that committed suicide, is the atypical primadonna with huge demands and uncompromising work ethic, and is notoriously difficult to work with.

But his art captures my imagination the same as artist Michael Whelan (if you don't know who this is, you could google his name). Or, you could just visit my post that I wrote on Michael Whelan HERE. I also talk about him extensively on a post on general cover art featuring books by Patrick Dilloway, Cindy Borgne, and Andrew Leon. You can find that post located HERE.

In my ever growing excitement for this summer's Prometheus, I revisited the afore-mentioned H.R. Giger's Alien, and it looks like to me, from the trailers that are now available for viewing online, that Ridley Scott is revisiting the ground-breaking artwork that this crazy guy created for 20th Century Fox (that was scrapped from the 1978 film). Here are my comparisons.

First off the Alien Pyramid concept in which H.R. Giger originally wanted 20th Century Fox to use on the planet LV-426 (NOTE: You can click on these to make the picture bigger for your viewing pleasure).

Contrast this image above with the one that I pulled from the Prometheus trailer below:

And then there is H.R. Giger's Alien Heiroglyphics which also got scrapped from the original 1978 film:

Compare this with the heiroglyphic sequence that I captured from the theatrical trailer in which Michael Fassbender utters "Tell me that you can read this..."

And of course, they are still going with the original design for the derelict spacecraft, the space jockey pilot, and the interior of the ship--all of which was designed by H.R. Giger. Since the derelict spacecraft features so prominently in the trailer, I'm not including screen captures of it. But it is identical to the drawings below. Note the odd shape of the portals that lead into the derelict spacecraft from the original Alien movie. They are intentionally shaped like a vagina because H.R. Giger uses a lot of phallic symbols and vaginas in his artwork (and I mean tons).

Interesting, eh?

A King has his reign, and then he dies.

Those are the words spoken by (I believe) Noomi Rapace's character at the start of the amazing second trailer for Prometheus, which was unveiled at Wonder Con just this weekend. Knowing just a smidge about this film, I think that the words are chilling because the context may be a double entendre.  The "king" may also refer to man's domination of the universe and how it may eventually end:

And here is the viral Weyland Industries birth of David the Android

that was also released this weekend.

For those of you who are new to my blog, ‘Prometheus’ is a sci-fi film based on the Alien universe. It stars Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace and was shot on the RED Epic cameras and the Element Technica ATOM 3d rig. It releases in June 2012.

Director: Ridley Scott
Producer: Tony Scott
Cinematographer: Dariusz Wolski

Dariusz Wolski had this to say about the Epic camera and his work on Prometheus:

"In my opinion, the new Red Epic camera is about to revolutionize all spectrums of the film industry.

I am amazed with the quality of the image and the fact that you can shoot 5k at 120fps without compromising resolution, and...most of all...the size of the camera. 

Combined with the Element Technica Atom 3d rig, we will be able to shoot a 3d movie with the flexibility of a conventional cinema camera. 

I don’t see anything that comes close to it at the moment. I can’t even imagine the potential Epic will have on the big blockbuster industry as well as independent cinema."

HERE is my post on the TED video wherein Peter Weyland explains the myth of Prometheus.
HERE is my post showing Prometheus fan art.
HERE is my post of the entire Prometheus plot. Warning: SPOILERS! But it's epic.
HERE is a link to my Christmas Post wherein I embed the first Prometheus trailer.
HERE is my first post on Prometheus.

Prometheus is coming...

One month after my book comes out in 2012, I will be going to the first available showing to see this movie.  For those of you unfamiliar with Ridley Scott's roots, the Academy Award winning director made a name for himself by teaming up with legendary artist H.R. Geiger to create the most original science-fiction alien probably ever to grace the screen.  And now, he's returning to those roots to give us a science fiction fable that speaks to the originality of the Weyland-Yutani universe that brought us such quotes as, "I think we should nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure."

Here is a synopsis.  The film is set in space for the most part, similar to that of "ALIEN"; the jumping off point to this project. The film's name "Prometheus" is that of the space vessel used by a crew of select individuals who set off to explore and investigate fragments of "Alien DNA" that provide tantalizing clues as to the origin of mankind on earth.

This is the Space Jockey creature from the original Alien ship
where the crew of the Nostromo reported seeing "thousands of eggs".

The film itself revolves around the Space Jockey creature; as seen in the original film ALIEN (1979). When a team of scientists embark on the aforementioned journey, they get stranded on an alien world which tests their limits; both mental and physical.  In Ridley Scott's own words, the human crew ends up in the darkest part of the universe in a chilling battle of life and death that some describe as absolutely "terrifying".

Prometheus involves a team of scientists known as "The Company".  Their representatives and robot/synthetics investigate and search for keys to unlock man's ultimate mystery. But in the process, they threaten the future existence of mankind and are faced with unimaginable horrors.

The Aliens themselves are said to be much larger than the original "Xenomorphs" we are used to. However, their overall construction will be easily noticable to that of the original Alien canon.

The genius, Ridley Scott.  I humbly bow before you sir. You are a true visionary.

Prometheus will be much more than just an Alien sci-fi horror. Ridley Scott is digging deeper for this project and Prometheus will unlock many questions and will touch on many aspects of life and existence. A true masterpiece.

Filming has already finished. I bet a trailer will be here soon. I did a YouTube search for one because the Wall Street Journal article I read hinted that there was one that got pulled by 20th Century Fox, but all I could find were fakes.