Prometheus:
Daily Mail's Baz Bamigboye talks to Ridley


a) Words from Daily Mail's Baz Bamigboye (Daily Mail.co.uk)

"Ridley Scott told me he has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the script of his new epic science fiction film from leaking out.

His ensemble cast, which includes Oscar-winning Charlize Theron and hot actors Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Sean Harris and Kate Dickie, not only had to sign secrecy clauses, but were only allowed to read the story if they visited Ridley's production office. (One exception was made, when a security courier flew to an actor's foreign location and stood guard for two hours while the screenplay was perused.)

'I was insistent that the script not leak onto the internet, where it gets dissected out of context, which spoils it for everyone,' Ridley told me during cocktails at a pre-Oscar tribute to Harvey Weinstein, hosted by Dior at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard.

The film's called
Prometheus and starts filming in three weeks. ...

'It's the story of creation, the gods and the man who stood against them. It's not a small film,' Ridley joked.

'I'm using the giant James Bond 007 stage at Pinewood and six other sound stages to film it,' he added.
Prometheus, Ridley declared, was not - as some have suggested - a  prequel to his classic sci-fi shocker Alien. But he refused to divulge more."

 
 
 
b) The Alien Harvest script
It remained a hope that the script called Alien Harvest that found its way onto the internet as a leaked script is supposed to have been scripted by Jon Spaihts which features the space jockeys as a race of beings named "The Growers", and despite some points of curiosity , it had nothing to do with the actual one written by Jon Spaihts.

On July 26th Anthony Spring as asked Jon Spaihts on Twitter "Hi, could you tell us if you wrote the Alien Harvest script that is all over the Internet? Thanks"

John Spaihts at a time when it was not really known whether it was really him or not on Twitter at replied "I have neither written nor read "Alien Harvest," despite the charming addition of my name to the cover page."

 
 
 
c) Space Jockeys as gods
This puts the entities known as the space jockeys possibly back under the label of gods, since he questioned in the Alien laserdisc 20th Anniversary commentary (26 minutes in) about the possibility space jockeys were as the gods of war (in the manner of the Roman god Mars) 
 
Then also in the Prometheus interviews the idea that they are the gods as if they were the people who engineered life on planets many aeons ago.
 
 

 
d) What's the reference to Prometheus about then?
This begs a question about who or what Prometheus is.  
 
It is the name of one of the titans in Classical Mythology who rebelled against the gods and passed on the gift of fire to mankind and as a result was punished.  
 
In the context of the movie thought, is it the name of a man to be remembered as a Titan who is indeed fighting against these God like extra-terrestrial foe perhaps in the ancient times that are recorded in fragments in Classical Mythology. 
 
The other possibility was about whether it referred to the name of a terraforming space craft brought over from Spaihts script Shadow 19.  
 
The Shadow 19 script can be found on the internet reviewed over the last couple of years since Spaihts' name has been connected with the Alien Prequel project, here is one review from the website corona coming attractions by Patrick Sauriol 
 
Here Prometheus is a "man" and in the Wall Street Journal interview he is a "higher being", a term that he had used earlier in the interview for the Swiss news article Blick

 
 
 
e) Peter Weyland talks of the myth of Prometheus
In the TED.com viral video featuring the character Peter Weyland. 
 
He reveals talks about the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and giving it to the human beings as their first form of technology.
 
He also talks about mans technological discoveries over the millenias coming to a point where man can create cybernetic humans indistinguishable from humans leading to the declaration that now the humans are the Gods (See: The New Weyland)

2 comments:

  1. so do you think that weyland in the film will be "prometheus" and the jockeys unleash the xenomorph / plague on the humans? from the trailers you can tell there are little creatures which appear to infect and change the crew members. great insight on here - thanks for the blog!

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  2. Thankyou. We're now told by Damon Lindelof in the May 2012 issue of Empire with a big article on Prometheus, that "Weyland sees himself as Prometheus in many ways" and talking about Prometheus defying the gods "what happens when you defy the gods? It's not good". Well, that now looks like the way the story is going. We'll see what new information pours out.

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