Not Every Flowering Dream May Bloom (A Prometheus review)

I imagine by now that all of you interested in Prometheus probably know how it's going to go down, who will die and what the big mystery is because the promotional campaign for this pretty much tells you everything. Say what you will about The Dark Knight Rises' lacklustre marketing; at least the trailers preserved some degree of intrigue.

So don't go into Prometheus expecting to have your lid blown off by some big epoch-shattering reveal that will change how you perceive life as you know it. Also don't go into Prometheus expecting a straight-up prequel to Alien, because while it slides into the overall continuity well enough and shares some similar themes, it's a different beast and makes its own territory, for better or worse. It's in the Alien universe, in the same way that The Avengers is in the same universe as Thor and the Iron Man films, but it shouldn't be compared to Alien. It should be judged on its own terms. How does it hold up?

Well...

Poster by Ibraheem Youssef.

Loving the Alien (A rambling appreciation of Alien)

With Prometheus coming out this week, it seems now would be a good time to review where the germs of the film started, in what is definitely not a shameless attempt at ratcheting up my blog's traffic several notches. I know there are countless other reviewers out there who broke out their copies in time for a retrospective, but this doesn't apply to me. I'm not a horror film fan - I'm ridiculously easy to startle, and just a casual glance of the horror shelves at HMV reveals countless direct-to-video schlock where gore is spilt and beautiful women are disfigured.

So when I sat down to watch Alien on Blu-Ray (£6 for a new copy, no less), this really was virgin territory for me. Considering that sci-fi and horror media don't usually occupy large spaces of pop culture, the impact this film has had is impressive - it made names of Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver and arguably H.R. Giger. It birthed a truly iconic movie monster, one that would still captivate and horrify even to this day. It is the Little Film That Could - what started as a humble B-movie became one of the most influential films of all time.

Let's see if it holds up after the jump. (Warning - one of the images here may be NSFW. You'll know it when you see it.)

Normally there'd be an alternative poster, but why bother when the official poster is this damn good?