20th Century Fox has released a pair of new featurettes for its upcoming sc-fi thriller Prometheus.
This first video offers us some brief behind the scenes footage, but mostly seems to be an excuse to laud Ridley Scott, the film’s veteran director.
I like Ridley Scott as much as the next genre geek. I mean, what sci-fi fan doesn’t recognize the significance of Alien and Blade Runner? It also makes me wonder how seeing it would make all the other directors these actors have worked with feel, especially Charlize Theron’s comment “He’s amazing. He’s my fantasy director.”
I know there is a certain amount of promotion for the film in this, and that actors seem to always say the director they’re working with is the best ever, but the way this is all cut together for this video feels like Fox thinks they have something to prove, as if we don’t already know Scott is an amazing director, or as if we’re afraid he’s lost it sometime in the last decade or two.
It also makes me a little weary hearing Scott talk about the focus on ‘scaring’ the audience, but, at least judging from the trailers, it doesn’t seem like he’s allowed that to dilute the great sci-fi world-building he’s known for.
This second clips comprises shorts from an interview – with the film’s co-star Logan Marshall-Green talking about his character, interspersed with some new footage.
The film is about a team of explorers who follow an ancient map, which they find in various archeological dig sites around the world, to an alien complex of some kind, where they awaken a long-dormant race with ill intent toward humanity. The story takes place in the same story universe as Ridley Scott’s previous original science fiction films, but deals with a different alien race at a different time, though still a first-contact story of sorts.
The synopsis is thus:
Visionary filmmaker Ridley Scott returns to the genre he helped define, creating an original science fiction epic set in the most dangerous corners of the universe. The film takes a team of scientists and explorers on a thrilling journey that will test their physical and mental limits and strand them on a distant world, where they will discover the answers to our most profound questions and to life’s ultimate mystery.
Here is the theatrical trailer, for reference:
Prometheus, which also stars Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, and Charlize Theron, hits theaters on June 8, 2012.
