Prometheus
As a birthday celebration, a bunch of us went out and saw Prometheus late last night (early this morning.) While I don't mean to do a real "review," exactly, I thought I'd write about some of the ideas that the movie brought up.
First off, Prometheus is a prequel to Alien. One could potentially make the argument that it's more of a "piece set within the same science fiction world," but my interpretation is that it's very closely related to Alien.
The reason for a prequel is often to bring new information into the series, and Prometheus certainly does this. Now, I've actually only seen Alien once, and that time was broken up, on TV, and I kind of came in and out of it. However, there's an important element from that film that this one is pretty much entirely concerned with, which is the "Space Jockey." In Alien, they find the eggs in a large semi-circle shaped ship where a strange-looking, large alien lies dead with an alien exit wound coming out of its chest. We make some major discoveries about these creatures, mainly one: they are human.
Well, genetically, they're human. Over the course of the film, we discover that the canisters in their almost temple-like facility (with its engravings and giant head statue) that are arranged very much like the alien eggs in Alien contain a deadly black fluid. The fluid seems to mutate any life form that comes into contact with it, turning it into something far, far deadlier.
The space jockeys (named by the film's scientists as Engineers) apparently seeded life on Earth, and guided people to the planet where this weapon is stored. There is a fundamental mystery to their motivations. In the opening sequence, we see one wearing almost monastic robes, who then ingests something (either the black fluid or some other alien substance, which then causes his body to deteriorate as he falls, dead, down a waterfall. His DNA then flows into the water, becoming new life. Now, this sequence is certainly open to interpretation, but what it looks like is an act of self-sacrificial creation - the act of a benevolent precursor.
Yet when the Prometheus touches down on the Engineers' planet, their goal certainly seems to be to wipe out humanity with the black fluid. (Super-nerdy side-note, if you've ever played Magic the Gathering, the biggest recurring "villain" is something called Phyrexia, which is a kind of infection that twists people and creatures into horrific and strange bio-mechanical monsters that look, for the most part, totally at home in these movies.)
I think that there are a few extremely important conceptions of alien life in fiction that I think about a lot. HP Lovecraft had the notion that, because space is so incredibly large, and that human experience has been limited to the surface of this one planet (though since then we've gone slightly farther, the Moon being our farthest manned journey,) we should not be surprised if what we encounter out there is beyond our comprehension. In fact, his fiction argues that we would seem like single-celled organisms to some of the things that are probably out there - and the horror inflicted on us by such beings might not even be intentional. On the other hand, Arthur C Clarke looks at this same idea - that in the vastness of space there, logically, probably are completely incomprehensible and god-like beings, but that in their vastness, they would have the capacity to regard us with some appreciation.
The thing I find interesting about Prometheus is that the Engineers are, truly, Lovecraftian aliens - their motivations and their minds are, depending on your interpretation, completely unknowable. It's a strange thing to think that those truly alien thoughts could exist within a human brain. In Lovecraft, half the horror comes from the signal coming on the wrong frequency - that we simply can't understand what we're looking at - but in this, it's the mixture of the alien and the familiar, the "uncanny valley" that makes the Engineers such a threat.
I'm not sure everything in the movie makes sense, and while I generally liked it (the art design and Michael Fassbender's performance were amazing) it did have some extraneous or flawed bits. One thing I found a little bizarre was the "sequel hook" at the end - the enormous face-hugger that Shaw had extracted from her abdomen face-hugs the Engineer, whose body then produces what, I guess, is the very first Xenomorph (the name for the aliens in Alien.) I understand trying to link the movie to the series, but I also wonder if it just serves to throw another theory into what is already a fairly inscrutable film. Were the Xenomorphs the intended final product of the black fluid? (There was a xenomorph engraving in the temple/storage facility.) Even though the planet does clearly wind up with an Engineer with a chest-burst, it's clearly not the same one as the one in Alien.
Well, Ridley Scott, you've got me thinking, and that's success in art, I think.