Ridley Scott, you crazy bastard.

[trashcanman]

Now, everybody knows what Scott's two sci-fi masterpieces are: Alien and Blade Runner. Both shared a bleak, realistic, gritty, dystopian view of the future that seemed not only possible, but almost inevitable. When I heard he was doing a prequel to Alien, my heart leapt to see a bonafide genius back on the franchise. Then that prequel turned out to be Prometheus. My reaction:


A very enjoyable film that had a genuinely interesting hypothesis regarding the origin of life on Earth, but good god it had some random half-baked bullshit in it. Basically, it nailed the fiction, but flunked the science portion. Anyways, this Scott was clearly not the same guy who put so much thought and detail into his previous sci-fi classics. Bummer. I'm over it.


"What if I told you that Blade Runner and Alien took place in the same universe?"



www.toplessrobot.com/2012/10/ridley_scott_just_merged_the_alien_and_blade_runne.php

Yeah, so the tagline to the recent DVD/Blu-ray release of Prometheus was "Questions will be answered", and given the only questions anyone really cared enough to ask was "What the fuck is this shit?" and "Do you have even the slightest notion of biology?" due to the film''s questionable science (see below), I wondered what exactly that meant.


Apparently the question is one nobody really asked ("Could Ripley have made out with Deckard?", and Scott's answer is "Meh, why not". So now it seems we are saddled with a Prometheus sequel that is also a Blade Runner sequel. This could have been amazing if it had happened in the 80's, but Scott appears to be going George Lucas on us, but instead of raping our childhood, he's fucking with conceptual science fiction cinema and classic horror AT THE SAME TIME. This better be good, man.

[The Curmudgeon]

Well.... shit. I did not see that one coming.

I went to the cinema to see Prometheus, and I'm in the same boat as you, Trash. I liked it, but it wasn't the genre defining moment I was waiting for (and Mrs C didn't care for it at all), and a lot of it just didn't make much sense.

The idea of "questions will be answered" on the Blu Ray is a bit of a cheat, in my book. Tagging on endings and beginnings so the movie makes fucking sense? When did that become the work of a world class director? And some could argue this very public knowledge Easter egg is just a way to shift more copies.

When the movie came out originally, the people behind the film were adamant that it survived in its own universe, that it didn't really have anything to DO with the Alien franchise. The day the movie is released on home formats? A giant, £100 boxset containing Prometheus and the Alien franchise, with the tagline "see how it all began!" Not cynical at all.

I wouldn't read too much into the Blade Runner thing, Trash. A few throwaway mentions to further fan fiction perhaps, but it's not exactly going to turn into Alien vs Predator.

[trashcanman]

I don't know, man. Why mention it at all with no plans whatsoever to pursue the connection between the two in future films? I haven't seen the DVD yet, although I will likely buy it when the price drops and then I'll see for myself what questions are answered and yeah, I will probably go see the next installment when and if it happens.

[The Curmudgeon]

I definitely think it WILL happen, and now we've got the story set in place the sequel could be all kinds of great. The Bladerunner link just seems like a fairly tenuous reach to try and sell a few DVD's. Well, we're all talking about it, and when was the last time you ever talked about an extra feature on a DVD?

[trashcanman]

Good point. Special features have had a real downgrade in the past few years. They used to be worth the price of the DVD by themselves sometimes. The massive character documentary on the Elektra director's cut edition certainly was. The FF films had some pretty great docs on them as well. Arguably better than the films.

I'm actually pretty pissed right now because they are stripping a lot of special features from DVD releases to pressure people into buying blu-ray right now. The Avengers DVD has jack shit on it and the blu-ray has like half an hour of deleted scenes and a bunch of other stuff to boot. Fuck. That. Shit. No sale. They did a similar thing for Sucker Punch when they released the extended cut exclusively for blu-ray. Assholes. If they don't want my money enough to put the version I want on the format I own, I'll just wait for it to hit Netflix Instant and find something else to buy in the meantime from a company who is willing to cater to me.