Prometheus

I finally got around to seeing the acclaimed Alien prequel, Prometheus!  It's very interesting, and very good. There are incredible shots, some corny-but-hilarious jokes (featuring Stephen Stills, believe it or not), disgusting gross-ness, and even some real beauty.  So.  Prepare your chest, for here there be spoilers.

First of all, the year is something like 2094.  Humans have decided to track a star system and planet depicted in many ancient carvings and paintings.  The crew consists of 17 people, including a captain, a cold calculating bitch who acts as captain (great actress!  Apparently this actress is kind of typecast in this role, but she knows what she's doing), our two main-est characters, a robot, and a few other crew dudes.  One thing this film does have is a large cast--which keeps you from learning a lot about anybody.  Are they in on the plot?  Are they just random dudes?  Mostly.  This is also the first Alien movie where more than three people survive.  Two crew members die in the space-ruins, and three more die elsewhere (we may or may not get there), but there was no ship-wide blood bath, as one naturally would expect.
Just some notes on the characters--the main girl is named Elizabeth, and truth be told, she looks a little like Sarah Jane Smith.  Juuust mentioning that.
The robot, David is--well, he's jaw-droppingly gorgeous.  Which makes sense.  Robots are supposed to be the best kind of human.  Powerful, cool, maybe with guns coming out of their butts... Um.  Well, David is clearly an example of that.  He's perfect.  Hell, in the second scene you see him riding his bike in circles and casually tossing a basketball through a hoop and than catching it like it was no big thing (I wonder if he did that for real or if it was just CGI?)... I bring this up because in the other movies, the robots are very much every... everymen.  In the first one that was certainly no more than wanting Ash to be indiscreet so the audience is surprised when Sigourney knocks his head up--but yeah.  Ash is a dumpy robot.  The robot in the second one looks friendly, but certainly not a guy you'd expect to be a robot.  I don't really remember the third one, to be honest... But Winona Ryder... Well, no-one suspects that she's a robot, anyways, though she's less dumpy than previous robots in the series.  But she's nothing compared to David.
So!  Making the robots relatable?  More human?  There are still human/robot issues in the other movies (in the fourth one, set... Well, it's hard to know exactly without the aid of the movies themselves, but  I'd say that it's at least 600, 700 years after Prometheus.  (It's at least 400 years between the fourth Alien movie and the first, and possibly even the second.)  So that may have been the attempt, but it still failed.
As for the bitchy woman who acts as captain even though she clearly isn't--she's all steel--but if you look, she's human.  She's a tightly-wound bitch, but she goes to bed with the real captain--not that it ruffles her feathers at all.  But the example of humanity comes when the guy main character (who we learn nothing more about than the fact that he's dating the female main character and he's a scumbag to David) gets infected with... well, something they find in the alien ruins.  He entreats the woman to burn him alive with her flamethrower, and she does--and when it seems like she kills him, there's a split second where she kind of staggers back, and she has absolute horror on her face.
One thing that does throw me is that sometimes David refers to her by his name, and sometimes he calls her mom.  That didn't make sense to me.  Since she--well, was--heir to Weyland company, she'd be sister... Weyland himself refers to David as the "closest I'll ever have to a son".


Oooooof.  Sorry about that.  On to the plot!  So, they pick up, they find this planet.  One thing that impressed me is that even though the sets are obviously much more high-tech, they still looked like an Alien set--hell, for all I know, it's the same set updated--at least the dining area.  So how to explain why the Nostromo looked so low-tech in comparison, other than the fact that it was featured in the movie from the seventies?  Well, the Nostromo was just on a simple mining mission.  They didn't need anything fancy.
So, they touch down on this planet, and find strange structures--there are a few actually... But the structures are these big C-shapes with huge mounds in the middle.  Remember the spaceship that the crew of the Nostromo finds in the first movie?  Oh yeah, you better believe that it's buried underneath all of that.  They go in the ship, search around a little... (keep in mind, I'm condensing this a LOT.)
David accidentally sets off a strange holograph projector that shows giant creatures running into what appears to be a wall.  (They're very desperate--running from failures at the other ship sites?  Alien life?) David then opens it.

If you're not jumping out of your skin at this point, you didn't actually see the Alien movies--or you're very, very difficult to creep out.  What's even freakier is that the items in the chamber all appear to be organic, and are reacting to the light.  Murals on the ceiling change, those strange pods that are living stone start bleeding a thick, oily substance (which lands and eventually mutates little worms crawling unnoticed in the dirt below)... David shines his light on one and it starts developing four corners... It sort of reminds me of something, but what....
David takes a sample of what drips out unbeknownst to the scientists, who were busily collecting the head of one of the aliens that are believed to be humankind's forbears.  (Which is a hypothesis proved to be correct--the DNA sequences are almost 100% the same, but these humanoid aliens have a little bit more.)

So, the team leaves--I forgot to mention that they left so suddenly because a sandstorm/electrical storm/bad times were coming.  Two scientists were freaked out by the goings-on and had opted to leave beforehand, and became hopelessly lost within the tunnels, but the team that was in the chamber makes it out and back to the ship safely.  I should also mention that prior to discovering the chamber, the whole team was in a big room that was practically raining.  If you've seen your Alien movies, any place with enough hydration--especially if it's inside--will freak you out.  But no-one in this movie had Jonesy to warn them.  (Why do I know the name of the cat in the first Alien movie?)

So the team that's lost in the tunnels eventually stumble into the chambers, where the worms have mutated into three-foot-long and arm-thick udon noodles from hell.  One of them attacks one man, and his partner attempts to save him--but is sprayed with acid and the man's face melts.  The worm then forces its way down the man's throat, which is somehow more sexualized and horrifying than the face-hugger.  So the men die.

While this happens, David puts a single cell (look at his hand!  His fingerprint is the Weyland logo!) in a drink he makes for Elizabeth's boyfriend.  The man drinks it down, and later that night he and Elizabeth have sex.  The next day the man collapses, and the captain burns him alive.  But!  Around this time, David goes into the tunnels and discovers the alien's version of the human's resting chambers and unlocks another holographic security camera-like thing.  This scene in the movie is honestly beautiful.  I would see it in 3D just for this scene again--a gigantic map of the solar systems appears, and David holds earth--it's amazing.
And David reappears for Elizabeth, who had collapsed due to grief.  He checks her and discovers that she appears to be three months pregnant--impossible, because three months ago they were in biostasis--or, because the night prior was the first time they had ever had sex.  David attempts to put her into quarantine, but after she leaves she fights her way out, runs to a surgery machine, made only for men (we discover that the almost-dead Weyland is hiding on the ship)... Now!  This is where things get interesting!  If you'll notice, usually it's men who are impregnated with the alien babies.  At the very least, they are the first to be raped.
So, she is pregnant--but she programmes the machine and gives herself an abortion (she doesn't actually say "abortion", but it's god damn empowering).  That is goddamn amazing--as a twist on the usual and because she remains conscious the whole time.
The creature is squiggly white monster--showing that, like the Alien aliens, the black gunk will change whatever it is contact with differently depending on what it is.  (Giant sperm monsters are crazy.  Oh, and watch that one scene from Alien 3--the first one comes from a cow and is thus quadrupedal.  In a documentary I believe it was said that a greyhound in costume was used, or something like that.)

So David wakes up the alien that's left when they are in the chamber--it kills Weyland, and knocks David's head off (because it cannot tell the difference between him and a human--of course David survives).  The crew then escapes in desperation--David is stuck there, however.  This one humanoid alien, their forebear, plans to "take back" what he did for the humans--that is, something went wrong, and his next stop is earth, to destroy it.  This is where I nearly squealed, because his captain's seat folds itself open and a strange telescopic device comes down from the ceiling. (The picture below is from the first Alien, of course).  A lot of people are getting butthurt that it doesn't look exactly alike, but come on, they're pretty goddamn close.  Also, these events could have occurred many years apart--maybe there was one forebearer who was a little big.  Or maybe he was a little earlier or later in the evolutionary line.  Calm down.  And let's be fair, the original Space Jockey (yes, that really is what they called it) set was destroyed a few decades ago, so they didn't have the best source material.  (Originally it was outside of the studio after the first film's completion, but apparently several people destroyed it, thinking it was some Satanic symbol or something.)

So the bitch captain ejects despite the fact that the real captain can get them out of there.  (He actually says she can stay with him or go on the "lifeboat" and have two years of life--what the hell!)  She crashes, runs out--the spaceship of the alien is intercepted by the Prometheus ship, and begins rolling on its curve.  The bitch is crushed, and our Elizabeth just barely makes it out alive.  She stumbles to the lifeboat (a very, very nice escape pod).  The alien survived and follows her in--only to be attacked and killed by the sperm-squid monster, who has grown to gigantic proportions.  It face-rapes him and kills him.

So Elizabeth is left on the planet alone.  She decides to pilot, with David, the ship back to the alien's home planet--to see what made them, or why they changed their minds about earthlings.  There is a teaser end a la an end that comes after the credits, where an Alien-esque creature (fully grown) breaks from the man's flesh.  Now, Ridley Scott has said that he would do a sequel if given the chance, if the film did well or whatever.  But!  We can still speculate on how this gets to Alien. 




Does this work with AVP?  I really want it to.  I wouldn't be surprised if they brushed it aside, but AVP is what got me into the Alien movies, so I want it to badly.  If AVP will be an accepted part of the universe, we can say that the Predators picked Alien eggs up from somewhere else--since according to AVP  they were gathered so Predators could engage in a rite of passage, and the humans could be all amazed at their "gods".  No-one says where the eggs came from.  The movie is set in 2004, and also features Weyland--but it turns out that it is not the same Weyland.  It could be the son of that in AVP.
OH, and this all took place during the earliest realms of human civilization, the latest being from the Mayans (or something), so it was possible that the Predators still could have been intimately involved.  To mention the time just occurred to me, and I'll have to think more on that...

Alien evolution?  The Aliens change depending on who they're in.  The black gunk could have landed on something else to make it change.  It could have a basic outline for a creature which it recreates.  Clearly it affects different creatures in somewhat similar ways--the worm went down the dudes throat, the wiggly sperm beast layed eggs in the forbearer alien which clawed its way out of him later... And the aliens have a basic hive society, with a queen and whatnot.  So... bugs from hell+proper hosts... And somehow you get Aliens.  I'm thinking Namekians. (They have Alien hands!)

Why were they going to destroy Earth?  I'm going to say that this whole line of events took place, and the forbears realized they messed up bad.  Obviously one died in this turn of events, as we've seen on the Alien home planet.  We've seen in Prometheus that there was more than one ship per site (I'm curious about the other ship, but not overly so)--so someone could have left to send the distress schedule, or it was just this one guy and they had a transmission from him that ended with something bursting from his chest.  The forbears got scared that the same thing was happening on earth, and the few that were left decided that they had to end it.

Are there other forbears left?  Maybe.  It's possible.  They could have all died, or there are a few on the planet that are destitute, or they figured earth was gone... I'm figuring they're all dead for some reason.  I don't think the Alien home planet was their home planet, so it was a different disaster--or someone carried eggs back by accident!
(Also the Predators may have observed this disaster and that's how they learned about the Alien eggs?  Well, even if they were infected with the aliens, they are best suited to deal with them...)



Wow, I... I think that's it.  I think those are all of my theories.  If I... if I think of anything else I'll add it in the form of an "EDIT"...
(Also, this post was apparently so long it broke Blogger's spellchecker, so sorry about any gross errors.  I'll fix them if you point them out!)


EDIT: Aliens (second movie) was supposedly set in 2179.  Does this affect anything at all?  Maybe not, but it would be interesting to see how far the Prometheus series goes, if they ever occur over the same time period... They are only 100 years apart (a little less, actually).
As it turns out, what I forgot about when originally writing this is that Elizabeth is barren.  That was my bad.
AND, in the chamber where they find those strange containers--the room that looks exactly like the egg-filled chamber of the spaceship in the first Alien movie--the mural on the wall (one of them) looks like an Alien in a crucified-esque position.  Those are some scenes I'd like to get better looks at though, because even on the big screen with my glasses, it was hard for me to really tell what they were showing.
Okay, this is the last edit, maybe.  So.  Why did the worms that killed the geologist and that other dude not make little worm babies crawl out of their corpses?  Well, that squid monster was sperm.  Sperm gets people pregnant, that's the point of it.  Like I've mentioned, it's well-established that Aliens live in a hive community.  All it would take would be one drop on one queen space-bug--she would mutate, and the babies she lays during that time (because I don't think they have sex all that often--my understanding of bugs is that they are constantly just popping babies out--okay, so I only know that from Antz and Aliens) would presumably change with her, and those would get cooler and cooler, till another Alien queen was born and cemented this awesome yet horrifying change.

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

Whoo! Last post before I'm off to college! Yayyyy.

Let's get down to this. First off, I admit at first glance this book looked like it was going to be a cross between Tommyknockers and It, which are pretty much my two least favorite Stephen King books. It doesn't end up that way, thank goodness--it's actually more like... well, aliens are involved, but it has more of a feel like The Thing (the eighties remake) or Alien than anything else. Kind of like a Derry version of The Thing I guess, with some of the Yeerks thrown in. He lucked out actually, because that's probably my favorite sort of horror movie--they're there, but where and anyone could be them--a little less of that, but still it had that nice flavor to it.

Quick summary: Four friends, best buds through middle and high school. One day they meet and befriend a boy with Down's syndrome, Duddits (Douglas), and have a really great rest of school experience. Fast forward twenty or so years. All of the boys have gone their separate ways, all of them face separate problems. However, once a weekend in November they go on a hunting trip together. So this time is no different except a stranger with severe gas and strange mannerisms comes into the cabin they stay in. All is kind of fine till an alien creature claws its way out of his body via his butt and kills Beaver (one of the four friends). A different alien takes over another friend's body--Jonesy's--much like a Yeerk would, that is, drives him like you would a car, only a car that is still alive and functioning but trapped. (However, Jonesy has more freedom than a human-controller would.) And Duddits is the key to making everything right again too--that is, stop the alien in Jonesy's body from spreading his parasitic aliens across the tri-state area! I mean, the world. He is the dreamcatcher of the title, because he drew all four even closer and kind of made those years with him their greatest. I... guess. I'd be lying if I said I ever completely understand whatever Stephen King is trying to make me understand.

"To say that Beaver's marriage didn't work would be like saying that the launch of the Challenger space shuttle went a little bit wrong" (15).

A semi-interesting note: Stephen King apparently wrote this book while being laid up as a result of a car crash. Jonesy, very early on, before the start of the story really, is hit by a car and breaks his hip. Yeeeep.

The animals in the forest instinctively try to get away from the aliens and they go walking through the woods a la Fantasia during the Rite of Spring segment to do so. Beaver tries to scare off one of the deer by telling it to get "'Make like an amoeba and split!'" (111), which is a phrase I'm totally going to use more often. By the way, I totally pictured Beaver as Jeff Goldblum. They described him as a nerdy looking guy who you think would be a math whiz, has shoulder-length hair, kind of dorky, even the way he talks... I refuse to believe that Stephen King was doing anything other than taking a poke at Jeff Goldblum when he was writing about Beaver.

"Henry put his head down and jogged a little faster" (136). Oh shit, Henry--the mummy's after us.

A lot of the things in the book that would remind me of something else are discussed later on--Peter and Henry run into a lady while Beaver and Jonesy are dealing with their gassy guest who looks at the sky and yells "They're back, they're back!" Of course I thought of Poltergeist. This connection is made later on. The aliens that are parasites aren't dissimilar to the aliens from the Alien series either--at least when they've just broken from their human hosts--and the fungus that the aliens spread (think of Creepshow!) is referred to as the 'Ripley' after Sigourney Weaver's character from that series.

Duddits is a huge fan of Scooby-Doo. He has the little lunchbox, and when Henry first sees it his only comment is: "'I hate that f---in show... They never change their clothes, did you ever notice that? Wear the same f---in thing, show in and show out'" (140). I don't know... I just thought it was sort of funny....

So the little parasites--well, Beaver traps the thing in a toilet, but it breaks loose. It kills him, and before it can attack Jonesy he slams the bathroom door on it. Immediately he gets worried about if it can figure out the mechanics of the doorknob and it says "as if it had read his mind" (179) it starts trying to turn the doorknob. Of course, it's revealed later that the creatures are telepathic, but still... They can open doors. That is bad news.

Stephen King makes a Pokemon joke, too. I really think there's no better way but an 'lol' to express my amusement at this fact.

"Did they think that maybe he wouldn't be interested, that maybe he'd just go Ho-hum, been there, done that, got the tee-shirt?" (275). This is probably a very common saying, but I'd like to think that Stephen King is making a reference to Space Jam.

Stephen King name drops War of the Worlds--no huge surprise, it's another book about an alien invasion. But, I should just say that these aliens spread via a fungus that if ingested are what cause the parasites to form and be incubated. In War of the Worlds, HG Wells kind of has this foreshadowing about a 'red weed' that withers and dies, meant to be a hint that the martians eventually fall. (Actually, to be honest, it works so well that I always get a little confused when I read that part and think the martians have been killed already.) The fungus the aliens in Dreamcatcher spread is red--ohhhh! You see what Stephen King might have possibly done there?

Jonesy compares the alien controlling his body to what Gollum said of Bilbo--oh, forget it. This is worth a quote. "'...Reminding himself to be wary... because, as Gollum had said of Bilbo Baggins, it was tricksy, precious, aye, very tricksy" (382). Hahaha what. Talk about unexpected.

Because this book is set in the same fictional town as It, it would be a surprise if there are no references to It... Of course there are. Jonesy--the alien in Jonesy--goes to the standpipe in the hopes of releasing a parasite into the water, however, the book is set after the events in It--so the standpipe is destroyed. There is a memorial dedicated by the 'Losers' Club' in its place (they were the kids who eventually defeated It) and across it "PENNYWISE LIVES" (386) is spray-painted on it. Interesting, mostly because it implies at the end of It that even though It has been destroyed, It laid eggs shortly before its destruction, that the 'Losers' club' don't know about. (Fight to the death between Pennywise and the Ripley!?)

Oh, and while I'm thinking of it--remember the HP Lovecraft story, 'The Colour Out of Space'? Well, there was a well in the farm it was set on, and the area was to be opened for a reservoir. If that was done, the disease or whatever the alien matter was would be integrated into the water--it already was--and whomever drank it would be infected as well. Like if the parasite in this book.... Hey, it's not impossible. We know King is a huge Lovecraft fan...

Stephen King name drops another book of his, The Dead Zone. I don't remember much about it, other than that I didn't really understand it and that it appeared to be a post apocalyptic sort of deal.

One last note on the book itself--I have the hardcover version, and the author's photo looks suspiciously similar to the set from Creepshow. (The one involving the meteorite; see the HP Lovecraft post for more information regarding this.) In that story, the alien matter made a horrendous fungus grow over and eat away at everything, kind of like the Ripley. (The fungus didn't cause any alien impregnation, however.)

As for my feelings regarding the book: I really enjoyed this. It feels very different from a lot of his other books, less... less shaped, I guess, kind of like he just spit it out, but not in a bad way. Parts of it are confusing--like I said, I understand about 1/10th of why Duddits was so important, exactly and how he fit into it at the end especially--but Stephen King has his own logic that I've learned to just accept instead of try to figure it out rationally. It's better wrought than Pet Sematary, and I'm okay with the fact that I read this instead of that even though I was really in the mood to reread that*. But okay.

While we're talking about Stephen King books, apparently he's thinking of making a sequel to The Shining. That's pretty cool, I guess. And, let's see.... They might remake the Pet Sematary movie, and the It movie. Cool. And a movie adaptation of this book exists as well, though I've yet to see it.

MLA citation information: King, Stephen. Dreamcatcher. New York: Scribner, 2001. Print.

Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Live to Tell the Tale by Passion Pit

This post's cryptic song lyrics for Emma: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids... In fact, it's cold as hell

*The local library doesn't have much, but they do have quite a bountiful collection of Stephen King books--yup, just about everything but Pet Sematary. That's cool, I guess. So I took out A Man Without A Country instead and went back home to this.