Prometheus: A Review

I think it’s standard to tell everyone that this is filled with spoilers.  I’ll leave the spoilers under the cut.

However, I just finished watching Prometheus.  As a fan of the Alien series, Prometheus was one of those movies that was supposed to answer some of the questions about that planet.

The main plot is that a pair of scientists find several markings around Earth that point to a star system light years away.  Interested, and with the help of Weylund, a team goes off to explore this and find out it’s secrets.  Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charliez Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce and several others, you almost knew right away who was going to die (let’s face it, it was a prequel to Alien, people were gonna die).  When they get there, all hell starts to break loose.

Though, in a rather slow paced way.

Mind you, if you look at the pacing of Alien, Prometheus was pretty dead on the mark.

The characters themselves all had certain flaws, and I was really not shocked that Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) played the Ellen Ripley role of the film.  Michael Fassbender’s take on David, the synthetic of the voyage, was interesting, and creepy all at the same time.  Theron played the ambitious, though cautious executive for Weylund, while Guy Pearce played the CEO of Weylund who was well aged (though, not well in the sense that he looked good, he was just really freakin’ old).

For those of us who have seen the Alien series (me, including all of the Predator and Alien vs Predator movies, though the last AvP was pretty awful), we all knew what was coming, we just didn’t know the events that took place.  Think back to Alien; the Nostromo finds a derelict ship, they find an organism on the ship that infects one of the crew, and one by one, they’re all picked off save for Ripley (and a cat).  They find a dead pilot of the bridge of the ship, and something burst out of his chest.  Surrounding him are eggs, all over the place.  So the questions become, how did all of that happen.  Prometheus does answer some of those questions.

As the movie progresses, we discover that the Engineers, those who the researchers were trying to find, created the human race.  But something went wrong.  Now, time for the spoilers.  Click the link if you want more.

 

31 Days of Ghosts: It Came From Space

When we often think of ghosts or haunted places and even horror movies, a gothic castle or some old Victorian mansion or even a location in Eastern Europe is the first thing that springs to mind.  Sometime ghost stories, at least for the Western World, are told about African locations or Asian locations (which, I’ll try to look into for future).

But rarely do we have a truly horrifying story that takes place in space.  Science Fiction is often thought in the same sentence with Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or Buck Rogers.  Even Flash Gordon comes to mind, which came about during an intense interest in that genre of pulp fiction.  But there have been sci fi stories that have taken place in space.

The first one came in 1958.  Instead of giving my own review of these, as I haven’t seen them all, I’ll use the accompanying write up about the story, found originally here.

It: Terror From Beyond Space

At last, a film that might have actually inspired Alien instead of ripping it off. A space ship is sent to Mars to investigate the crash of another ship, and when the new crew rescues the lone survivor, they accidentally leave their hatch open, allowing an…”it” to climb aboard. In mid-flight, the creature begins to kill the astronauts in typically bloodless ’50s fashion. Despite the outlandish title, it’s one of the better, more serious-minded monster flicks of the decade.

While a film like this may be more akin to something that resembles the creature from the black lagoon, it still was an early attempt at horror mixing with science fiction.  Horror stories don’t have to always be about ghosts.  Monsters, in particular incredibly terrifying ones, really add to that scare factor.

And one of the most famous sci fi monsters came almost twenty years after It: The Terror Beyond Space premiered.

Alien

When a spaceship responds to a distress signal on a nearby planet, it unexpectedly picks up an alien life form that hides on board the ship, killing the crew one by one. The outer space horror movie that all others are measured against, Alien is one of the most influential horror movies of all time, spawning multiple rip-offs and three more space-set sequels:Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection.

Alien is considered the best of the sci fi movie monsters to come out in a while, and one of the reasons was for how Ridley Scott originally presented the alien on screen.  We saw very little of it, or if we did, it was in shadow with few details visible.  Since then we know very well what the creature looks like, with the three sequels along with two tilts against the alien hunters the Predators.  And now, we’ve seen what even came before Alien with the recent release of Prometheus.

While most of these films that take place in outer space include some terrifying alien monster, such as Critters, Dracula 3000, Doom, Creature and the Japanese film The Green Slime.  But one film had Hellraiser like effectiveness.  It didn’t deal with just a monster, it dealt with terror of the mind.

Event Horizon

Oft-maligned director Paul W.S. Anderson (AKA Mr. Milla Jovovich) delivers this dark, disturbing tale of a space ship, the Event Horizon that pops up in the year 2047 after disappearing for seven years. When a rescue ship is dispatched to investigate, the crew discovers that theEvent Horizon has been to another dimension, bringing back with it an evil presence that makes people’s fears materialize.

Event Horizon was chilling.  It had a jump in your seat factor that did scare the crap out of the viewer (not literally, mind you).  Even when the movie came to it’s conclusion, you were sure if the nightmare was really gone or not.

Even the standard slasher movie has made it’s way into space, as we’ve seen with Jason X and Leprechaun 4: In Space.  Jason X keeps it’s formula but in a new place as we learn the machete wielding undead was captured by the government, frozen and forgotten until a group of 25th Century students find him and do the one thing that you never do in that situation.  They unfreeze him.

Movies aren’t the only place to find good sci fi horror fare.  Books have been producing a lot of this cross genre story telling for over a century, with one of the best known being Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  More recent is Scott Sigler’s Infected and Contagious.  A complete list of user suggested sci fi horror can be found at Goodreads, though there are some which might be considered questionable to put into either the sci fi or horror genres.  One such would be George Orwell’s 1984, though that could be seen more as dystopian future instead of horror or sci fi.

Even somic books have taken a stab at the sci fi horror mix, with so many titles and stories that have been about creatures from space or some alien invasion by a horrifying force.  Before the Comcis Code Authority kicked in, there were some truly on the edge stories being created.

So if science fiction is more your liking, but still want to have some scary Halloween viewing, these may be of interest.