Jan 16 2012
Are these the alien Engineers from ‘Prometheus’?
“The movie is definitely epic in its scope. One of the filmmakers that we ended up talking about to a fair degree of redundancy was David Lean, who directed ‘Lawrence of Arabia. We wanted to make the movie feel big by having the characters be small in big spaces. That connected to the larger themes we were talking about — that we’re all just these little gnats crawling around on our little planet.”
–Damon Lindelof in an interview with The L.A. Times.
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus has come a long way since it was initially announced as a prequel to the Alien films. Still sharing some connective tissue to the Alien films—thanks to the trailer, we know that tissue also includes the original’s foreboding look—Prometheus promises something grander and more ambitious (in scale if not in execution) than the previous films in the series.
I wasn’t sold particularly sold on the idea until I saw the trailer last month, which confirms the epic sweep that Scott and his writers have been promoting. Lindelof’s quote above makes comparisons to David Lean, and whether that’s founded or not, shots like this one do suggest there’s a visually expansive scope to the imagery and sets.
There’s a great sense of H.R. Giger’s design in that image, and I’m most interested in the statues that sit in the background just to the left of Noomi Rapace’s scientist. I’m assuming these are likenesses of the ‘Engineers’, the alien geneticists who presumably jumpstarted life on Earth.
One can also see they are the same form as the ‘Space Jockey’, the pilot that Hurt and co. discovered when they entered the crashed spacecraft in the original ‘Alien.’
Although Ridley continues to stress the distance between this film and the franchise he jumpstarted, I believe that he’s demonstrated enough difference in the stories that it’s not a negative now to emphasize the ways in which the two will ultimately intersect.
If anything, should Prometheus live up to its building hype, it could provide a rich mythology to the Alien series. I continue to be intrigued.
Click the picture above for a closer look at the Engineer statues.
Click here for a frame by frame analysis of the trailer that debuted back in December.