It’s really shaping up to be one amazing genre summer at the movies.
We’ve got The Avengers right around the corner, The Dark Knight Rises, and the film a lot of my genre friends are really looking forward to, Prometheus. It’s pretty much believed to be a prequel to Alien, and with Ridley Scott at the helm, it promises to be a terrifying trip back into space.
Prometheus is also Scott’s first foray back into science fiction since Blade Runner thirty years ago.
Like most of us, he fell under the spell of Star Wars when he first saw it in 1977, and was dying to make a sci-fi film himself.
With the success of Star Wars taking everyone at Fox by surprise, they also wanted another sci-fi flick in the pipeline, fast, although where Star Wars was the Beatles of science fiction, Alien was The Rolling Stones, the darker, nastier side of the genre.
Scott went to art school with David Hockney, and in a recent interview with the L.A. Times, comparisons were drawn between painting and making movies.
Scott said he “never truly finishes a canvas,” obviously referring to going back to the world of Alien.
Yet he doesn’t like the talk of a prequel, telling the Times, “This takes place in the same universe as Alien, but it stands on its own as a story. There’s moments where you see connections if you’re looking for them, but the story is not leaning on what came before. There are strands of Alien DNA in there, if you will.”
As we’ve also reported on TG, there’s a possibility that Prometheus may be coming out with a PG-13 rating, which will certainly leave at least a few fans disappointed.
But as reported on Collider, Tom Rothman, the CEO of Fox, said, “I can assure the fans – I’m very aware of their concern – absolutely they can take it that the film will not be compromised either way. So if that means that the film is R, then it’ll be an R. If it’s PG-13, then it’ll be a PG-13, but it will not be compromised.”
