Music ... the soundtrack of my life:

My introduction to Pink Floyd’s music was in 1979, when the song Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2], made the charts. The lyrics: “We don't need no education. We don’t need no thought control.” became my anthem at school and was often heard sung by many kids of my generation. The song inspired me to buy the album it came from: The Wall, a rock opera and concept album.

I also recommend Alan Parker’s brilliant 1982 movie adaptation:

Apocalypse Now - Redux [1979]:

Apocalypse Now - Redux [1979].

Conex Container scene.

Kurtz reads articles to Willard: 

INT. CONEX CONTAINER – DAY

Willard is passed out, lying on the floor of a metal CONEX CONTAINER. Stifling heat.

Kurtz, and a group of children, are peeking in at him. 

The two front doors of the container are opened. Light floods in. Kurtz is standing there with the children. He holds a bunch of magazine articles.

He sits down on a dirt step, surrounded by children. He looks down at a magazine article and begins to read it to Willard.

KURTZ (reading): 
"Time magazine."

"The weekly news magazine. September 22, 1967, volume ninety, number twelve. The War on the Horizon."

"The American people may find it hard to believe that the U.S. is winning the war in Vietnam."

"Nevertheless, one of the most exhaustive inquiries into the status of the conflict yet compiled, offers considerable evidence that the weight of U.S. power, two and a half years after the big buildup began, is beginning to make itself felt. White House officials maintain the impact of that strength may bring the enemy to the point where he could simply be unable to continue fighting." 

(to Willard) 

Is this familiar?

Willard reacts.

KURTZ (reading): 

"Because Lyndon Johnson fears that the U.S. public is in no mood to accept its optimistic conclusions, he may never permit the report to be released in full. Even so, he is sufficiently impressed with the findings, and sufficiently anxious to make their conclusions known, to permit experts who have been working on it to talk about it in general terms." No date, Time Magazine.

"Sir Robert Thompson, who led the victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya, is now a RAND Corporation consultant, recently returned to Vietnam to sound out the situation for President Nixon."

"He told the president last week that things felt much better, and smelled much better over there."

He looks over at Willard.

KURTZ (to Willard): 

How do they smell to you, soldier?

Willard doesn't answer.

Kurtz rises.

The children are laughing and giggling. Kurtz drops the magazine articles in Willard's lap.

KURTZ: 
You'll be free. You'll be under guard. Read these at your leisure. Don't lose them. Don't try to escape, you'll be shot.

We can talk of these things later.

Kurtz turns and exits, closing one of the doors, leaving the other open.

Willard watches him go. The children stay, looking at him, laughing and giggling.

Willard slowly and painfully pulls himself to his feet. He stands there a moment looking at the children, then collapses to the floor.

DISSOLVE ...

Prometheus (2012):

Big things have small beginnings.

– Michael Fassbender, as David, in Prometheus (2012).

***** SPOILER WARNING – DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY SEEN THE MOVIE *****


The enduring appeal of Prometheus may depend on how (and if) this movie is followed up by a sequel that answers all the open questions left at the end of this one.
The original 1979 movie, Alien, is an undisputed classic; good enough to have created a new species of sci-fi bursting from the tired chest of the genre, a thinking man’s sci-fi with a sweaty, gritty, working environment feel, albeit with a formulaic horror/thriller plot of potential victims stalked and slain down endless dark corridors, while others share an even worse fate: becoming hosts to a terrifying parasitic organism.

I was 11-years-old in 1979 and Alien was rated X certificate (the equivalent to today’s 18 rating). I had no chance of getting into the cinema – any cinema! – to see it back in 1979. Luckily for me, I matured early and when I was 14, I was shaving regularly and able to pass for an 18 – 20-year-old. Alien was eventually double-billed at a local cinema with The Entity, in 1983. With an unshaven stubble on my face, I paid my money at the box office and was allowed entry with no problem. Seeing both those movies on the big screen was a treat to a young movie buff. Back in 1979, I bought two movie magazines promoting the release of Alien. They were A4 sized and folded out into giant posters. The first was of the “Space Jockey” with one of the astronauts standing in front of it. The other poster was of the alien itself.

The Space Jockey intrigued me more than the alien: the colors and design of the fossilized skeleton, looking as if it had either been fused to its giant chair – or even grown out of it, the ribbed walls behind it, the sheer size and scale of the set that dwarfed the actors. Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger’s bio-mechanical designs knocked me out. In the movie, the Space Jockey is only in one scene, an enigma to the characters as well as the audience, but I always hoped we would learn more about it in subsequent sequels.

Thirty-three years after his original movie, director Ridley Scott, returns with a kind of indirect prequel that gives us into an insight into what came before the chest-bursting Xenomorphs and background into the origin of the Space Jockey. All the staples of the original movie are evident in Prometheus: the team of explorers landing on a barren world to investigate something they don’t have all the facts on; severe weather conditions assailing them as a precursor to the greater threat they’ll eventually face; searching down long dark corridors; creatures spewing corrosive blood when wounded.
Prometheus begins with a prologue sequence of a powerfully built alien humanoid standing atop a waterfall as an alien ship moves through the clouds above. He drinks a dark liquid that immediately affects a painful physical transformation. As his body shatters and bursts, he tumbles into the water and his DNA strands flow through the water, reconfiguring into a new life form. Like the proverbial Phoenix, his sacrifice results in birth of a new species: humans. The timescale then jumps to 2089. Archaeologists and lovers, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover ancient cave drawings leading to a star map and other evidence that mankind was created by alien “Engineers”. An expedition is then funded by the elderly and frail Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) and the couple find themselves aboard the vessel Prometheus with a team to investigate what may have invited them to the planet of LV-223. Another regular plot element comes in the form of android David (Michael Fassbender). The main difference being that the androids in the previous Alien movies were indistinguishable from the other characters until their true identities were purposely revealed during the course of the story. In Prometheus, David is conspicuously stiff and mechanical in his movements, cold and aloof in his exchanges, although he seems to have developed his own emotional responses through studying old movies; Lawrence of Arabia in particular, mimicking Peter O’Toole’s mannerisms, speech and hair style. David even displays pain at being reminded about his lack of humanity and soul. Another plot similarity occurs when the assumed invitation turns into something malevolent after they uncover the Engineers intention to wipe out the human race.

Questions are posed to the characters and viewers: Did the dark liquid the Engineers intended to unleash on the human race cause their own extinction? Why, after creating mankind, did they then choose to wipe us out? What will Shaw and David find as they venture to the engineers homeworld for their answers? As already stated, Prometheus is set on the planet LV-223. The original Alien movie (and the 1986 sequel, Aliens) was set on LV-426, so where did the crashed ship with the relic of the Space Jockey come from? Will this turn out to be the ship commandeered by Shaw and David? Was the original warning message that Ripley deciphered in Alien another message left by Shaw?

As a life-time fan of the Alien movies (with the exception of Alien Resurrection, released in 1997, which I hated and don’t own in my DVD collection), I’ve been asked if I like Prometheus and I do. I like it a lot … but with reservations about the seemingly intentional open-ended questions. That aside, cinematically Prometheus is a joy to watch, the special effects are seamless, performances are excellent and there are impressive set pieces, but the ending leaves too many loose ends hanging which would render the movie uneven without another sequel to fill in the blanks this one leaves.

The tagline on the Prometheus poster read: “The search for our beginning could lead to our end.” What will the characters (and us the viewers) discover in the next instalment?

For many of the characters like Kane in Alien, and Newt’s father in Aliens, curiosity may have killed the cat … but satisfaction brought it back. Time will tell how the next movie in the series satisfies.