And so it was with Prometheus. Scott was hell-bent on constructing, in reality, as much as possible, quite literally extending the largest soundstage in Europe — found at Pinewood Studios — by an extra third, to maintain the same sort of texture and realism found in his original. For similar reasons, many of the creatures and gore effects were done in camera as well — the infamous med-pod scene featuring a fully realized animatronic alien.
But having laid that foundation and established that connective tissue visually and aesthetically, the most fantastic aspects of Prometheus — like the aforementioned sequels — were what it then did differently. They were humans in confined spaces, battling Xenomorphs. Consequently, what the director wisely chose to do with Prometheus was open up the world, visually, narratively and thematically. Looking at the designs of the ship interiors or planet exteriors, for example — especially as compared to those found in the Alien — they were so distinctly open and vast.
If you've seen the AvP films, then you'll know it's best we move on. January 7, to be precise. The ship is destroyed and Dr Shaw and a severely damaged David leave on an Engineer ship to find the Engineers' homeworld. He uses their ship's toxic black-goo payload to destroy the entire population. There the crew discover David and a new species, the neomorph.
After the incursion on the planet, where the majority of the crew are killed, David is revealed to have bio-engineered aliens as we know them. He brings their embryos on board alongside the human embryos. The ship continues its journey to Origae After being infected by an alien face-hugger, executive officer Kane played by John Hurt in Alien dies when an alien bursts through his chest. It picks off the crew one by one, leaving Ripley Sigourney Weaver and Jones, the ship's cat, alive.
Arriving with a military squad, they find the sole human survivor, Newt, more face-huggers, a swarm of aliens and a pretty badass Queen. But the titular creature of Alien is very much confined to the shadows and is not at all the focus of Prometheus, which is driving in a new direction.
With Prometheus , the origin of the menace and forces that our heroes encounter is essentially the central mystery of the tale itself. So the story is very much about people prying into the shadows and trying to shed light on these mysteries.
As with any science fiction film, technology sets the tone by establishing the film's look and to a large extent determining what the film's characters can and cannot do. What was your vision for the technology in this film? That it should look real. One of the things that Ridley Scott has done as a director is pioneer for us a grungy vision of the future. His films Alien and Blade Runner plus the original Star Wars directed by George Lucas taken all together showed us a future in which everything was well used, rusted and battered.
And that was a real leap from the gleaming and spotless future of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Prometheus likewise wants to feel like reality.
So the vessels, vehicles and tools in the movie are designed to be things that are somewhat familiar to us while also representing an optimistic vision of future technology. Given that Prometheus is set prior to Alien , how did you devise a set of technologies that would appeal to an audience in without making Alien 's vision of the future seem outdated? There's an inevitable trickiness around the chronology just because technology in the real world and technology in filmmaking have come so far in the years since the original Alien.
But for me a lot of that is easily rationalized by virtue of the fact that the Nostromo , the original ship in Alien , is an industrial tug. It's a rust bucket that itself might be or years old at the time that we see it.
The Prometheus is a state-of-the-art scientific exploratory vessel. So it's only reasonable that it be sleeker and technically vibrant. Along those lines, how did you invent David, the android in Prometheus? Did you take into account that he would not be as advanced a piece of technology as the robots from the Alien movies? As with any archetype that's been touched on in previous films, you need both to honor its place in the canon and at the same time find some new insight, some new approach to it.
The exciting thing about David is that perhaps there isn't yet a habitual place in society for machines like this at the time Prometheus takes place. In the sequels to Alien it's more normal to have an android on a starship crew as a matter of corporate protocol. But perhaps that's not the case in the new film. Perhaps David doesn't quite know his place in the universe, how humans will interact with androids and what's expected of these robots.
And perhaps the human members of the crew are not yet accustomed to working and living with a crew member who is artificially intelligent.
Larry Greenemeier is the associate editor of technology for Scientific American , covering a variety of tech-related topics, including biotech, computers, military tech, nanotech and robots.
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