Potentially mild spoilers ahead, as Fox reveal a few tantalising details about the monsters, ships and sets in the forthcoming Prometheus…
At a time when most films are becoming increasingly dominated by computer graphics, the old practice of building big, physical sets appeared to be dying out. In the case of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s taken a traditional approach to shooting the film, constructing huge sets which can be augmented with a smattering of CG later, as opposed to shooting his actors in front of a flat green screen.
Keen to highlight this fact, 20th Century Fox has recently spoken a little more openly about the process of making the film, and mentioned aspects of its production which, until recently, weren’t officially confirmed. In an intriguing piece over on Screenslam (of which we learned thanks to Prometheus Movie News), production designer Arthur Max talks about the huge sets constructed for Prometheus, which required Pinewood Studios’ 007 Stage to be expanded by a third.
Most intriguingly, the discussion about the film’s progress threw up some tantalising facts about its story. The article mentions a structure on the alien planet called a Pyramid, which is the huge grey thing we’ve seen in Prometheus’ trailer – you know, the one with the big space face in it. Within the Pyramid, there’s something called the Juggernaut, described in the piece as “a ship similar to the crashed crescent shaped ship seen in Alien”. Again, we saw one of these Space Jockey ships flying around in the trailer, but this is the first time we’ve heard it referred to as a Juggernaut, and it’s interesting to note that it’s ‘similar’, rather than the same as the one in Alien.
Meanwhile, someone responsible for Prometheus’ creature and make-up effects, Conor O’Sullivan, spoke enigmatically about the film’s barely-glimpsed monsters. “Each stage of a creature’s life cycle has a distinctive purpose. For our xenobiology, we brought in new elements that are not necessarily backward from those in Alien, but are of a similar DNA […] Ridley’s references are derived from nature – plants, vegetables, sea creatures and other animals.”
All of this would suggest something quite unlike the now traditional facehuggers and chestbursters of the current Alien franchise, which leaves us in the happy situation where, although it seems as though the various trailers and images released for Prometheus so far have revealed a lot, there’s still much that we haven’t yet seen - a kind of intellectual carrot, like the one in The Thing From Another World, perhaps? The mind boggles.
We’ve seen from at least one of the Prometheus promos that something unpleasant happens to a cast member, who’s briefly seen strapped into a cryogenic pod with some sort of writhing abomination suspended just above their head. Of that scene, Rapace says, “What goes on there is simply the worst thing you can (or probably cannot) imagine”.
To finish, here’s one final morsel of intrigue: we know (again, from the trailers) that a segment of the film takes place in front of a waterfall – presumably, this is Earth, but that’s not yet a certainty. What the article reveals is that Ridley Scott shot two sequences at the same waterfall location in Iceland – a prologue and a climactic sequence. How does this location serve as both an opening and a closing to Scott’s interplanetary saga?
Does this mean the apparently incidental little bit of footage in the trailer, where a humanoid figure and a disc-shaped craft are seen in front of this waterfall, have far more of a bearing on the story than it first appears? The plot thickens…
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