OK, first thing: Ridley Scott’s original Alien is one of my all-time favorite pieces of film-making, from the direction, to the script, to the casting, to the acting, to H. R. Giger’s uber-innovative art direction and genre-defining ship-and-alien-concepts/designs. The Nostromo was a greasy, leaky, working man’s industrial spacecraft; that idea/imagery alone changed SF permanently. I mean, even the crew non-uniforms were breakthroughs, for cryin’ out loud. If you search back to see what SF movies in general were LIKE when Alien came out (1979), the competition that year was Star Trek: The Motion Picture (their uniforms? Leisure suits). And while I’m an unrepentant Trek disciple from way-back, when it comes to comparing these two films…
Note the early-model shuttlecraft in background.
…well, let’s just leave it there.
Of course, Star Wars premiered two years earlier, and its genre-shifting originality was right up there with our little chest-bursting amigo. But, with its softer, borderline science-fantasy elements, SW was a different animal, IMHO. So now, the point of this little ramble: Angry Robot Books author, game designer and Viking berserker-afficiando Chuck Wendig gives us an alt-view chewing-over of Ridley’s gleamin’ new protoplasmic leviathan, Prometheus. Mr. Wendig’s angle addresses what we can learn from the storytelling, good/bad/evil/indif, that the movie serves up. Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the flick yet. Also, klaxon-sound-effect-alert: Chuck’s site is for adult-level humanoids only. And even they may come away curled up into a little ball. Not my fault that he wields the language like an off-duty Procyoni warp-catalyst pipe-fitter downing his third sky-stim hi-ball. And, of course, feel free to weigh in with your own opposable monkey-digit rating of the movie. We’re all ears….