Warning: Contains scenes of mild spoilerness, but nothing you couldn't guess really.** Get the latest from the Prometheus red carpet**
I was lucky enough to get to see the new film Prometheus on Wednesday, the first day that preview screenings were happening. That was actually a worry. It can often be the case that a film gets late previews when it's utter rubbish. That's to stop the bad word spreading before it can make its money back on its first weekend.
That wasn't what was going on here. The late previews, the sparse trailers, the extra featurettes that weren't in the film, were all parts of a lesson in film promotion. By the time I'd seen Charlize Theron doing a press-up in the TV trailer, I knew I wanted to see the film (as did loads of other people – Prometheus is set to break the record for highest IMAX pre-sales).
They say it's not really a prequel to Alien. Well, it is. They're saying it's not because they want people who haven't seen that sci-fi film from 1979 to still fancy seeing this new one. If you haven't seen Alien there are some scenes in Prometheus that you won't understand why everyone else in the cinema is saying, "OMG, that's the spaceship they find..."
The effects are amazing, and it's a film that's done on such a large scale it makes Alien look like it was filmed on a camera phone. This film has none of the claustrophobia of Alien. Agoraphobia is a bigger worry.
The performances are spot on, with Michael Fassbender freaking me the heck out. Noomi Rapace, giving it her Girl Who Kicked The Aliens Nest vibe, is great. And I'm glad to see that in the future the bandage bra and pants catch on. 5Th Element got it right.
It definitely is an Alien franchise film because it teaches us the same lessons. Big business is bad and will screw people over for its own selfishness. And you don't want to be a bloke in an Alien film, you don't stand a chance.
And there's another way that it fits in with Alien, its fear of technology. I know that in Aliens and Alien Resurrection the robots are the good guys (and indeed good girl in Resurrection, which helped her longevity) but they weren't Ridley Scott ones. If you only look at the Ridley ones you'd have to conclude he doesn't like tech. Did he have an iPhone that deleted all of his contacts once? That kind of thing can he hard to forgive.
It answers many questions that makes an old nerd like me very happy. If you're not the kind of person who loves their sci-fi you might find yourself wondering why you should care about some people trapped on a planet. But I enjoyed it. It was lovely to go to such a high profile screening. They make you hand in your phones, you know. They said it's to stop people filming it. I think it's so Ridley Scott can vent his techno-anger and take a whizz over them. I'm glad I had wet wipes.
You can hear me talking about Prometheus on The Sunny And Shay Show on BBC London 94.9 this Saturday between 8pm and 10pm.
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