Few movies have sparked as much speculation, excitement, and unease (just think of the potential disappointment!) as Ridley Scott‘s upcoming “Prometheus,” which promises to return the famed director to the “Alien” universe that shot him into the directorial stratosphere. What, exactly, “Prometheus” is remains something of a mystery, but these new images, set to appear in next week’s Entertainment Weekly, sheds a little bit of light. At the very least, they just upped the intrigue factor, at least for us.
Thanks to Entertainment Weekly (and scanned and stamped-to-fuck by Bloody Disgusting and Dread Central via Bleeding Cool), we now have a better, more tantalizing picture of what “Prometheus” has in store for us. The first photo shows weary space travelers Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace, from the original “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo“), her lover Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), and her faithful robot butler, er, android companion David (Michael Fassbender). They’re wearing space suits that carry with it the same worn future aesthetic that made “Alien” so transfixing, and they’re all goggling at…something.
That “something” seems to be the giant mythic head in “The Ampule Room.” For those of who didn’t major in science, an ampule is a small glass vial used to preserve a sample, usually of a liquid. Both the title of the movie and the cryptic messages that have leaked out from those close to the movie suggest some truly cosmic, how-we-all-came-to-be overtones to the movie, and this could be a clue — what exactly is the Ampule Room keeping in? Besides that giant head?
A quote from Sir Ridley Scott about fans of the original “Alien” seeing things they know and love towards the end of the movie (echoing earlier sentiments), accompanies a photo of Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and Captain Janek (Idris Elba), and the caption makes note that the ship in the film is called The Prometheus, which we’re pretty sure is the first official word that the title refers to the ship. When we chatted with Theron over the weekend during press rounds for “Young Adult” and she said that, while she couldn’t tell us anything about the movie (“Men would pop out and do bad things to us,” she warned), she did make note that she and her “Young Adult” costar Patrick Wilson (who’s also in “Prometheus”) don’t actually share any scenes together. “He’s all in flashback,” Theron said.
The other two photos are a close up of the Ampule Room head and a shot of our characters walking through a misty field dotted with small columnal shapes that should look eerily familiar to fans of the original fillms — this is “Alien” egg imagery to the max. And that concludes our very early, very watermarked look at next summer’s highly evolved “Prometheus.” The images look saturated with atmosphere and mood but we’ve never doubted Scott’s ability to take a pretty picture. Where he’s stumbled recently is to sustain those pictures into a compelling narrative that also takes the time to be thematically unique. We’re hoping for the best from Sir Ridley’s return to the science fiction genre. At the very least it couldn’t be worse than “Robin Hood.” Update: A clearer image from EW has arrived. Check it below.
