The Dark Furie

A while back I heard about a film called Prometheus that caught my interest almost straight away due to its simple premise; a return to the universe of the Alien franchise but without the aliens themselves. The film also marked Ridley Scott's return, not only to the franchise he started but to sci-fi as a whole. I can think of two Ridley Scott sci-fi films (Alien and Bladerunner) off the top of my head and they're both widely regarded as being the top echelon of the genre so this is kind-of a big thing. Of course he also had his hand in the abomination that was Legend, but even that afterbirth of a movie has some cult following (on the record, if you do like it you're wrong and I can prove it with four words - it stars Tom Cruise).

So yeah, Ridley is returning to sci-fi with this film and it is set in the Aliens universe. The film started out as a prequel to the first Alien film and would have focussed on the first alien seen in the film (the xenomorph stars being the second). In that first film an alien spacecraft was found on LV-426 containing the eggs that birthed the facehuggers. Inside that ship a fossilised alien is found seemingly grown into the chair where he pilots the ship (although this has been hinted at as being the alien chitin secretion) and he has obviously been infected with a xenomorph due to the chest having exploded outwards. There are many unanswered questions surrounding the "space jockey", as it has long been referred to, and Ridley Scott saw the opportunity for an interesting story in the character. A prequel was planned which would first have seen humanity encounter the race and then go into the events that saw the ship and its pilot crash land on LV-426.

I always thought of this guy as the navigator. Something about the way he was posed and the instruments he used said that to me.

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That idea has officially gone out of the window now as the scope of the film grew while writing and the focus of the movie switched to more interesting events. Now the film focusses on a group of humans hoping to find the origin of our own species and life itself on a distant planet at the other end of the galaxy. Obviously something goes wrong and they'll spend a lot of time running away and being killed off in nasty ways. Such is the life of a sci-fi character it seems, plus the recently released trailer pretty much confirms it.

The trailer confirms a few other things. Firstly, the film is definitely set in the Alien universe thematically and that universe looks great using modern day effect techniques. Secondly, the film definitely has the original alien in it as you see a flash of that chair rise up around 44 seconds in. And thirdly, my life sucks as my web was down when this was released and I missed out on days of nerdgasmically watching it over and over after so long waiting for the slightest glimpse of the film. Still, the film is certainly looking like it should live up to its promise. The talent involved are some of the best in the business, and the actors are at least capable. This is one of my picks of 2012 and, without seeing the film, I'm predicting it should get at least an 8/10. How well it fares in my eventual review we'll see later this year, but for now put it on your one to watch lists.