20th Century Fox is doing an epic job of promoting Scott's sci-fi return, and the latest trailer and viral video give us more clues about its Alien connections
At a time when movie marketing is in the spotlight following the disastrous efforts of Disney to promote John Carter, it's pleasing to see a campaign which is genuinely helping to engage filmgoers by enhancing the main event rather than undermining it. Prometheus, Ridley Scott's return to science fiction after more than three decades, continues to look like a bright and shiny, epic and panoramic take on what was originally a claustrophobic, grimy slasher flick-in-space premise, but 20th Century Fox is doing a great job of tying the new film to the best bits of the previous instalments.
The good spaceship Prometheus may glitter with silvery CGI and beautiful faces in stark contrast to the stark, blue-collar ennui of the Nostromo, Scott's rundown cargo vessel in the first film, but the latest trailer and viral videos add to the sense that we are once again looking at a scenario in which greed, avarice and ambition are heralds of future disaster. The only difference is that this time around, there are potentially billions of lives at risk, rather than dozens. I think that rather moves Prometheus firmly out of the horror genre into "event movie" Independence Day or even Contagion territory. Not that this necessarily spells disaster.
First up, the new trailer gives us more clues as to the nature of the archeological discovery unearthed by scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), which inspires the Prometheus' mission into the cosmos to meet those who may have created us. We see our good-natured heroes' transition from wide-eyed awe to dread-ridden horror over the course of the promo, and though it's not yet clear quite what's terrifying them, there are flashes of hideous gloopy organic matter, what appears to be some sort of facehugger, and I think I may even have caught a proto-xenomorph at one point. Whether the slick Avatar-style super-futuristic interior of the ship and all those fancy guns and gadgets will undermine the sense of brooding menace, or enhance it, remains to be seen.
The Alien series was so defined by Sigourney Weaver's performance that it's hard not to wonder which of the crew will turn out to be the Ripley figure this time around. The latest trailer suggests Rapace's good-natured Shaw may be the character we most end up identifying with, though don't be surprised if Scott plumps for a last-minute switcheroo to show us the decent side of apparently cold-hearted corporate type Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron). The 1979 film worked because the audience did not know which crew member was going to wind up the survivor: will Prometheus be brave enough to kill off an Oscar-winning actor early on? It seems unlikely.
We can probably assume that Vickers is ultimately in the pay of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), founder and head of Weyland Corp, which presumably morphs later on into the Weyland-Yutani company introduced in James Cameron's Aliens and which Scott last week revealed is the major link between Alien and Prometheus. This viral video shows Weyland espousing the virtues of an approach to future technological development unrestricted by moral concerns, including the creation of artificial humanoids indistinguishable from the real thing. No Alien film would be complete without some sort of artificial lifeform to follow the iconic performances by Ian Holm and Lance Henriksen in the early movies, and this time we have Michael Fassbender as David, an android which apparently begins to develop "its own ego, insecurities, jealousy and envy". Other crewmembers include Idris Elba as captain Janek and Logan Marshall-Green as Shaw's "love interest".
Hang on a minute? Love interest? I don't remember Sigourney Weaver having all that much time to worry about romance in amongst all the carnage of the earlier films. The most intense relationship in the series so far has probably been Ripley's with poor little Newt in Aliens, with the closest thing to sex being the rather phallic nature of the xenomorphs themselves. It's strange to see Scott adopt such workmanlike Hollywood tropes, given that he created the series' most unorthodox, game-changing film, but the intervening three decades have left him a different kind of film-maker. Is this why Fox has been so keen to suggest that the new movie is something more than just an Alien prequel?
I'll leave you with some new shots from the movie, as unlocked by fans accessing the new ProjectPrometheus.com site. With the studio marketing operation for the film in overdrive, we can probably expect to see a lot more clues emerging in the runup to the film's 1 June release.
• The name of the spacecraft Nostromo was misspelled in the original article. This has now been corrected.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/mar/22/ridley-scott-prometheus-fox-ship
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