11 Interesting Facts About Prometheus!

 

As every geek on this planet is quite well aware of, Ridley Scott's Prometheus hits theaters this Friday.  Originally conceived as a straight up prequel to a little film he made in 1979 called Alien, Prometheus eventually became its own standalone film, set in the same universe but ultimately separating itself from the Xenomorphs and Face Huggers which have in recent years become a bit tiresome.  How much the film will actually feel like an Alien film is what we're pretty much all wondering at this point, which is no doubt a huge part of the genius marketing that has left us salivating anticipatory acidic juices for what seems like forever now.

Sooooo, with Prometheus FINALLY soon headed our way, I thought it quite appropriate to list off some fascinating facts about the film tonight, things I've discovered in my endless quest to fill myself with as much knowledge about the movie as possible.  You may already know some of this stuff, hell you may know all of it, but these are just some little fun facts I wanted to share for anyone who maybe hasn't read everything about the film there is to read.  Some people have real lives, or so I've heard.

On with it!

1) A prequel to Alien originally began to take shape way back in 2002, when Ridley Scott decided he wanted to explore the origins of the alien creatures seen in 1979.  He discussed the idea with Aliens director James Cameron, and Cameron began working on a script.  When 20th Century Fox approached him with the Alien vs Predator script, which they told him they were going forward with, Cameron disregarded his script and prophetically declared that such a film would "kill the validity of the franchise."  Say what you will about James Cameron, but there's no doubting that he's one smart dude.  And that the studios are run by fuckin' idiots.

2) In December of 2010, it was announced that the film would be called Paradise.  A month later, it was changed to Prometheus, a reference to the Greek god of the same name who represents, among other things, scientific knowledge and the negative effects that can come along with such knowledge and advancement.

3) The film was shot over the course of more than six months in several different locations, including England, Iceland, Spain and Jordan.  Two of the most interesting locations used for filming were at the base of an active volcano in southern Iceland and at the 007 Stage in England, named as such because it was originally built for 1977's James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me.

4) The astronauts in the film wear helmets made completely of glass all the way around, a design choice which was inspired by late Apple founder Steve Jobs.  In Jobs' biography he talked about building an office out of an incredibly strong glass called Gorilla Glass (a technology from the 60's which he put into use for Apple products), which inspired the thought from Ridley Scott that if he was going into space, he'd want a helmet made completely out of a similar material, so that there were no blind spots.  Thus, they were created for the film.

5) Original Alien creature designer H.R. Giger designed several extraterrestrial murals that are seen in the film.

6) Ridley Scott filmed the movie in such a way that it would be possible to be either rated R, his personal preference, or cut down to PG-13, without compromising the film itself in any way.  Thankfully, the more adult oriented R rated cut is what 20th Century Fox decided to go with.

7) The android characters in the Alien films have always been named in a sequential alphabetic pattern.  In Alien the name of the android is Ash, in Aliens and Alien 3 it's Bishop, and in Alien : Resurrection it's Call.  Keeping in line with the pattern, the android played by Michael Fassbender in Prometheus is named David.

8) Prometheus has been encoded for D-Box, a fairly new technology where motion seats in certain theaters shake and rumble according to specific cues given by the movie as it's playing.  Select theaters in the USA, Canada and New Zealand support the technology, which was first utilized for 2009's Fast & Furious.  The technology can also be used in home theaters, in conjunction with Blu-ray discs that are encoded for it.

9) The Prometheus DVD, Blu-ray & 3D Blu-ray can already be pre-ordered from Amazon, with cover art that has already been revealed.  As a special offer, the first 5,000 people to pre-order the Blu-ray received free tickets to see it at the theater.

10) Guillermo Del Toro recently talked about how the creation of Prometheus essentially brought about the death of a passion project of his, that being an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's book At The Mountains Of Madness.  Though Del Toro had been planning to make a movie out of the book for nearly a decade, he realized that Prometheus shared too many similarities with the movie he had in mind, which led him to put the project on the back burner, perhaps forever.

11) In March of this year, Ridley Scott revealed that the plan is to eventually make a sequel to Prometheus, which will even further distance itself from Alien.  Whether or not that happens is presumably all about how well Prometheus does at the box office.  Soooo.... 

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