My weekend was peppered with some NCAA hoops (Go 'Cuse!), some Knicks (three in a row, baby), some 21 Jump Street (a hilarious, meta action-comedy), and of course some green beer and bagels. But my mind, my thoughts, my focus was elsewhere. For the last 72 hours, I’ve been unhealthily fixated on the slew of new Prometheus content slung onto the web.
There’s been such an overabundance of visuals, dialogue, and talking points to sift through. So in an effort to piece them all together in some king of satisfyingly comprehensive way, I figured it’d be best to break them all down into three categories.
What We Saw
Much of the hype around this film is centered on the question of “is Prometheus a prequel to Alien”? As I previously stated, I believe the answer is unequivocally yes, and much of the confusion is due to cleverly crafted talking points delivered from the film’s director Ridley Scott, Damon Lindelof (the writer), and 20th Century Fox (the studio). And why not? It’s hard to make a summer film stand out, much less one possibly (definitely) linked to a once-praised, but now irrelevant and mocked movie series. So I have no problem with these folks stoking the fanboy fire with vague and sometimes conflicting messages.
Build the hype, good on ya, the more attention the better. For me, Prometheus is probably the single most anticipated film of my moviegoing lifetime. I have a deep admiration for Alien, as I believe it to be one of the best suspense thrillers of all time, one on the level of Hitchcock. I poured countless hours of movie watching and have written numerous college papers on the original 1979 film.
Subsequently, I’ve chosen to build my anticipation for Promethus based solely on what I see in the trailers and viral videos, because even with snazzy editing tricks, an image doesn’t lie (especially when looked at frame-by-frame, over and over, as if it were the Zapruder film). So despite some interesting tidbits dropped by Scott and Lindelof at this weekend’s WonderCon, I’m only going to build my hypothesis based on what can be backed up in the trailers.
And to this, over the weekend there were three noteworthy Prometheus videos released. All of them revealing just as many details a they left questions.
http://www.grantland.com/blog/holly...uperfans-guide-to-the-new-prometheus-trailers