In the latest installment of Stained Glass Gothic, my intermittent column for SF Signal, I raise the question of whether director Ridley Scott’s forthcoming science fiction/horror film Prometheus will be, in effect, a hybrid film of ideas that invokes and resonates with themes previously explored by Stanley Kubrick (and Arthur Clarke) in 2001: A Space Odyssey and by Lovecraft in his cosmic-literary mythos of ancient extraterrestrials and other-dimensional beings who interacted with humans in prehistory and, as Lovecraft frames it in At the Mountains of Madness, may even have created human life. It’s a column full of film trailers, discussion, and speculative analysis.
Here’s an excerpt:
Itâs been a long time since Iâve so eagerly anticipated an upcoming film. Prometheus, which is slated for a June 8 release, feels to me like a cultural, psychological, and philosophical landmark even before Iâve seen it. And its profound resonance with two other cultural, psychological, and philosophical landmarks in the history of science fiction is become more clearly evident with each passing day and each newly released marketing item.
[…] It feels awesomely relevant, as if itâs set to channel the psychic energy of the epic Age of Apocalypse that we collectively entered with the dawn of the 21st century. To merge the Frankensteinian theme of Promethean overreach with the real-world crossover theme of the imminent discovery of human lifeâs ultimate origins, and to wrap it all in a horror-leaning take on the ancient alien hypothesis that channels the implicit but definite presence of H.P. Lovecraft and his mythos of cosmic monstrousness, seems, well, epic.
Full column: “Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’: A Lovecraftian ‘2001’?“, Matt Cardin, SF Signal, April 23, 2012
Here’s also wishing for a landmark sci-fi movie!