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Yes, More ‘Prometheus’… Did We Kill Alien Jesus?! Also, Viral Campaign Continues…

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Before I go deep into the mythology of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, website Movieviral has uncovered an image in the film’s end credits that leads to yet another viral website and video. You can click to link above to read all about it or just go directly to said viral site whatis101112.com.

Now onto the show!

For every well-crafted, yet comical (in a good way) negative review (as well as a handful of memes and mock graphics), there’s an equally well-written positive one. The juxtapose between the love and hatred for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is so extraordinarily polarizing, and yet even most naysayers end up giving it a mixed to positive score. So what’s the problem? Last night my buddy coined the term “Lindelofing”, or for lack of a better term, introducing thought-provoking, high-concept ideas without ever explaining them. “What’s the sound of one hand clapping,” Damon Lindelof may ask. Thus, his scripts lack enough clarity and precision that it’s hard to use the word “brilliant” alongside “Damon”.

But one thing that has me continually writing about the film (when I previously swore I was done. Shame on me.), is this astounding blog, a site that carries an in depth article that proves without a shadow of a doubt that the ideas behind Prometheus are in fact high concept and unique, while also shrouded in the obvious religious motifs. Technically speaking, it’s both brilliant and completely moronic. The best of both worlds!

The biggest idea missed by, I want to say nearly EVERYONE, is the actual timing of Prometheus, which leads to the answer as to WHY the engineers want us dead. Read on to explore!

MAJOR SPOILERS:

Is Elizabeth Shaw the Virgin Mary?

The ‘Caesarean’ scene is central to the film’s themes of creation, sacrifice, and giving life. Shaw has discovered she’s pregnant with something non-human and sets the autodoc to slice it out of her. She lies there screaming, a gaping wound in her stomach, while her tentacled alien child thrashes and squeals in the clamp above her and OH HEY IT’S THE LIFEGIVER WITH HER ABDOMEN TORN OPEN.

And she doesn’t kill it. And she calls the procedure a ‘caesarean’ instead of an ‘abortion’.

Here’s where the Christian allegories really come through. The day of this strange birth just happens to be Christmas Day. And this is a ‘virgin birth’ of sorts, although a dark and twisted one, because Shaw couldn’t possibly be pregnant. And Shaw’s the crucifix-wearing Christian of the crew. We may well ask, echoing Yeats: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards LV-223 to be born?

Consider the scene where David tells Shaw that she’s pregnant, and tell me that’s not a riff on the Annunciation. The calm, graciously angelic android delivering the news, the pious mother who insists she can’t possibly be pregnant, the wry declaration that it’s no ordinary child… yeah, we’ve seen this before.

Cavalorn also answers the major question: Why do the Engineers want to kill us? This portion of the dissertation explores the idea that the Engineers sent Jesus (the alien) down to save us and we in turn killed him.

From the Engineers’ perspective, so long as humans retained that notion of self-sacrifice as central, we weren’t entirely beyond redemption. But we went and screwed it all up, and the film hints at when, if not why: the Engineers at the base died two thousand years ago. That suggests that the event that turned them against us and led to the huge piles of dead Engineers lying about was one and the same event. We did something very, very bad, and somehow the consequences of that dreadful act accompanied the Engineers back to LV-223 and massacred them.

If you have uneasy suspicions about what ‘a bad thing approximately 2,000 years ago’ might be, then let me reassure you that you are right. An astonishing excerpt from the Movies.com interview with Ridley Scott:

Movies.com: We had heard it was scripted that the Engineers were targeting our planet for destruction because we had crucified one of their representatives, and that Jesus Christ might have been an alien. Was that ever considered?

Ridley Scott: We definitely did, and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.” Guess what? They crucified him.

Yeah. The reason the Engineers don’t like us any more is that they made us a Space Jesus, and we broke him.

But this is all just the tip of the iceberg. If you click on over to Cavalorn you can read about the Engineers, the Engineers’ Gods, the Elders, and presumably what that black ooze is. To say Damon Lindelof is a bad writer is one thing, but to say he’s lacking ideas and originality is another. Prometheus, while shrouded in religious motifs, breaks new ground by implementing critical thinking into an other words generic sci-fi adventure.

Horror movie fanatic who co-founded Bloody Disgusting in 2001. Producer on Southbound, V/H/S/2/3/94, SiREN, Under the Bed, and A Horrible Way to Die. Chicago-based. Horror, pizza and basketball connoisseur. Taco Bell daily. Franchise favs: Hellraiser, Child's Play, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Scream and Friday the 13th. Horror 365 days a year.

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’28 Years Later’ – Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson Join Long Awaited Sequel

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28 Days Later, Ralph Fiennes in the Menu
Pictured: Ralph Fiennes in 'The Menu'

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (AnnihilationMen), the director and writer behind 2002’s hit horror film 28 Days Later, are reteaming for the long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later. THR reports that the sequel has cast Jodie Comer (Alone in the Dark, “Killing Eve”), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kraven the Hunter), and Ralph Fiennes (The Menu).

The plan is for Garland to write 28 Years Later and Boyle to direct, with Garland also planning on writing at least one more sequel to the franchise – director Nia DaCosta is currently in talks to helm the second installment.

No word on plot details as of this time, or who Comer, Taylor-Johnson, and Fiennes may play.

28 Days Later received a follow up in 2007 with 28 Weeks Later, which was executive produced by Boyle and Garland but directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Now, the pair hope to launch a new trilogy with 28 Years Later. The plan is for Garland to write all three entries, with Boyle helming the first installment.

Boyle and Garland will also produce alongside original producer Andrew Macdonald and Peter Rice, the former head of Fox Searchlight Pictures, the division of one-time studio Twentieth Century Fox that originally backed the British-made movie and its sequel.

The original film starred Cillian Murphy “as a man who wakes up from a coma after a bicycle accident to find England now a desolate, post-apocalyptic collapse, thanks to a virus that turned its victims into raging killers. The man then navigates the landscape, meeting a survivor played by Naomie Harris and a maniacal army major, played by Christopher Eccleston.”

Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) is on board as executive producer, though the actor isn’t set to appear in the film…yet.

Talks of a third installment in the franchise have been coming and going for the last several years now – at one point, it was going to be titled 28 Months Later – but it looks like this one is finally getting off the ground here in 2024 thanks to this casting news. Stay tuned for more updates soon!

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