Okay, I added the eldritch green misty bits.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things - mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness

I recently visited Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, and in one of those odd little coincidences happened to be reading a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories as we flew over the astonishing panorama offered by the Coast Mountains - specifically, At The Mountains of Madness, a story of antarctic exploration, horrifying discovery, and distant, alien ranges of mountainous terror.

- Sid

Future Shock.

I've just finished reading The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner - it's a dystopian novel in which government has devolved into an amoral end-justifies-the-means system based around totalitarian control over information.

The protagonist was recruited to a government think tank as a child, but escaped after discovering the hidden agenda behind the group.  A master programmer, he conceals his true identity under a variety of aliases - he's skilled enough that he can program a new persona into the net using just a phone screen.  His ID hacking is safeguarded by a worm that circulates through the Net eliminating any traces of his previous identities.

At this point, you're probably thinking, "Okay, well, that's somewhat plausible, but not excessively imaginative."

It's more imaginative than you think.  The Shockwave Rider was written in 1975 - for the children in the audience, the original IBM PC was released in 1981, one year before the introduction of the standardized TCP/IP system that allowed for the development of the Internet.  On that basis, Brunner's novel is insanely prescient.  Not only does he predict the global Net as an everyday part of life, he introduces the idea of viral worms that would circulate through the sea of interconnected data deleting information.  (Not to mention being able to interface with the Net using a phone.)

And then he throws it all away by having the hero set up a referendum-like program that offers everyone on the planet the option of voting in favour of eliminating poverty, disease and inequity, and also having him create the tools to make that change possible.

Now THAT'S an unlikely prediction - unfortunately.

- Sid

"I admire its purity."

I was in the middle of developing another project, and this script dropped on my desk.  I read it in forty minutes...and bang!  The script was simple and direct:  it was the reason I did the film."

Ridley Scott on the script for Alien, The Book of Alien

In the wake of my disappointing experience with Prometheus, I decided to revisit Alien:  the original ten-little-Indians-on-a-spaceship movie that started the franchise.

On paper, the two movies are very similar:  enigmatic alien spaceships, bad planetary weather conditions, hidden agendas, villainous androids, and, of course, slime-covered alien monsters.  However, that similarity is deceptive.  Alien is a much more elementary film - as Ridley Scott says, simple and direct.

The movie is a beautifully crafted piece of work.  The art direction had input from some of the top fantasy/science fiction illustrators of the day:  Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) and of course Hans Rudi Giger, whose biomechanical illustrations provided the perfect starting place for the design of both the alien spacecraft and the Alien. 

The script, as Ridley Scott points out, is simple and direct, but it's also full of little moments of realism - of humanity, one might say.  Ripley's panic when the dead facehugger falls on her; the awkward sick room camaraderie when Kane has regained consciousness; the moments that Brett spends letting the condensation drip on his upturned face just moments before his death; Dallas momentarily knocking his headset loose in the air duct, and fumbling for a moment to get it right way round when he puts it back on.

I've always thought that the most brilliant of those moments is at the end, when Ripley is undressing in preparation for hibernation, only to discover that the Alien is in the lifeboat with her.  (It's easy to classify that scene as gratuitous, but I see it as a tactic designed to make Ripley as vulnerable as possible in her final confrontation with the creature. Ideally, she should have been naked, but you can't have everything.)  Ripley's responses are exactly what you would expect under the circumstances, making the ending much more effective than the sort of heroic dialogue-driven posturing that most action films are prone to.

I think that Prometheus wanted to have that feel of realism, of actual life, and that may well explain some of the odd little diversions in the plot.  Unfortunately, those diversions ended up feeling artificial, rather than part of the natural flow of events.

Of course, both movies share the basic lack of judgement that always predicates the action in this sort of science fiction horror thriller.  Doesn't anyone ever decide to disobey protocol in favour of common sense?  Think how much shorter these movies would be if the captain's log read as follows:

Stardate: 43205.6 

Discovered alien spaceship - no signs of life, crew died from unknown causes, cargo hold full of unidentified organic cocoons.  

Took one look and buggered off at warp nine.

- Sid