San Diego Comic Con Footage [Spoilers!]

Wired's review of the Prometheus footage shown at the San Diego Comic Con:

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Here in Comic-Con’s Hall H, we saw a special featurette about Scott’s new alien movie. The featurette starts with a medley of past Scott films, and then the title card, “RIDLEY SCOTT RETURNS TO THE GENRE HE REDEFINED, WITH AN ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION EPIC PROMETHEUS.” At first, you see Scott standing in a studio, and then in a big open space with weird ribs on the walls, and Scott says, “So here we are, I’m back again.” He explains that it’s a James Bond studio (Pinewood) and he could fit seven and a half jumbo jets in here.

And then the actual footage from the film starts, and its a huge flood of creeptastic imagery that recalls Alien but also a bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are guys in pressure suits exploring an ancient chamber with weird hieroglyphs, and a guy in a spacesuit walking through a sliding door into a clean white chamber. And a guy (who might be Michael Fassbender) pulling a weird jelly-looking thing out of a canister. And as Scott’s voiceover notes that things that may look small in the film will turn out to be important, there is a shot of a drop of blood on a finger. There is Charlize Theron on a table with bandages wrapped around her breasts, as though she’s waking from hypersleep.

And then the footage gets faster and more furious, with a guy in a visor looking down at something, a woman in a suit walking into a red entryway, and a globe, and then Scott says, “The cast find an establishment which is not what they expected it to be, it’s a civilization but what we find in it is very uncivilized behavior.” And then there is insane carnage and people with goop inside their space helmets and someone shooting a flamethrower, and mayhem breaking loose in confined spaces. Meanwhile, Scott’s voiceover is saying that there will be biomechanoids and the film will “break new ground.” We see a giant pale planet with rings around it.

And then we see Charlize Theron doing pushups naked. Says Scott in the video, “There is a DNA of the original Alien, [but] that’s as far as it goes, everything else is completely different. It’s all about everything.” And now the people in the footage are crying and screaming and freaking out and the video is flickering like an interrupted signal. And Scott concludes, “Of course, what I want to do is scare the living shit out of you.”

Damon Lindelof, who was moderating the panel, talked about getting the call from Scott asking him to work on this movie, and the long process of the two of them sitting across the table from each other hashing out this movie. At first, the “$64,000 question” was whether this was an Alien prequel, but eventually they moved past that.

Theron came out on stage and talked about how the script had seemed really rough when she first came on board, and she worked with Scott and Lindelof to improve it. Theron plays Meredith Vickers in the film, and she described her character:

“She’s very different from anything I’ve done. She’s a suit, essentially. She’s kind of the machine that runs the machine, that takes this mission into space. At first, she comes across like a suit, very cold and frigid, it seems that it’s all about the economics for her — she doesn’t really come from one side or the other, she’s not a scientist or a believer. She runs a tight ship. But you can tell that she’s going to be a problem. And then later…. We had all kind of layered her and given her [hidden depths]. You think you know who she is [but she's an enigma]. Ridley started doing this interesting thing, where he would have me stand in corners and lurk all the time, and it wound up being really mysterious. In the third act, you really kind of strip her from her skin and see what her bones are about, and what she’s really doing there.”

And then we were patched into Scott and star Noomi Rapace via live video feed — Scott is in Iceland, near a waterfall, where he’s just been doing the final bit of filming for a sequence at the start of the movie.

Scott explained why he stayed away from science fiction for 25 years:

“I was actually too busy doing other movies and exploring other genres, so frankly I never actually thought about science fiction until I realized there was something in the first Alien movie that nobody had ever asked the question about … and I thought that could be the centerpiece of what we’ve just completed. That said, that is the only DNA loosely applied to the original Alien. We’ve gone in a different directions, but in the last few minutes of this movie you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

And Scott hinted that “there may be two robots in Prometheus,” not just the one android who’s rumored to be in the film. He added: “I think robots and androids and Replicants have become so much part of the actual science fiction scenario and landscape, that they’re no longer unique. [So] you’ve got to come up with those unique notions that make something fresh.”

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/07/prometheus/

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And Bleeding Cool's description:

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Damon Lindelof is on stage speaking with Charlize Theron about Prometheus and her character Meredit Vickers (a chief executive at Weylan Yutani, according to info gleaned at the press conference earlier). This chat is engrossing stuff, but still my mind is still racing from the footage from the film they’ve just shown.

Starting with a montage of clips from Ridley Scott’s previous films, including Alien, the video package soon went into a mixture of interview clips with Scott and shots from the film. The interview pieces were telling us that this isn’t really an Alien prequel, that the only connection is this oft-discussed Alien DNA.

On the other hand, the footage confirmed completely that this is an Alien film. The production design was familiar and, not to put too fine a point on it, there were glimpses of bits and pieces of the alien biology we recognise. Something like a full size humanoid alien was seen in the burn of a flamethrower, tail and all, and if you were looking in the right place, you could see something like the alien eggs.

Michael Fassbender’s character does look like the Android characters from the previous alien films but in one shot, we see him cry; in another, he appears to prick his finger and draw blood.

Scott is currently on screen via link-up to Iceland and has confirmed that “there may be two” robots in the cast of Prometheus.

As Lindelof has noted on stage, there is a shot in the clip that appears to show a naked Charlize Theron doing press-ups. There’s also another of Noomi Rapace dropping to the floor in a smilier pose – but she’s allowed the dignity of wearing something a bit like Leeloo’s bandage outfit from The Fifth Element.

Darius Khondji’s cinematography is absolutely stunning. We have just watched it in 2D, but Scott has described his commitment to getting the 3D correct. He’s said that he’ll never shoot in 2D again, not even for “small dialogue scenes.”

There are several shots in the footage which appear to show characters meeting sticky ends, including some of the big name stars, but I wouldn’t want to spoil that. These are painful images, though, and I can’t see that Scott is flinching under his commitment to a PG-13 rating.

Talking about the footage, Scott has said that he hasn’t held back and has covered stuff that might not make the PG-13 cut, but that he and Tom Rothman “will watch the footage in that big theatre at Fox” and decide what is the best way to go with the film.

On the link-up, Scott has said that Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Logan Marshall Green and Guy Pearce are the main players. This means that Idris Elba, for example, is a supporting player.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/07/21/live-from-the-prometheus-panel-footage-described

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And Slash Film's:

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What exactly was shown? How about Michael Fassbender crying, Charlize Theron seemingly doing naked pushups (something Damon Lindelof referenced on stage a few times), a shot of a giant head, some very beautiful images of space-suited characters in various states of distress, and a lot more...

What we saw wasn’t a trailer, but more like a behind the scenes featurette. Ridley Scott is seen on the massive 007 stage at Pinewood studios, with some of the very Alien-like production design in the background. (Think of the look of the interior of the derelict spaceship in which the characters in Alien first find the xenomoprh eggs and you’ll get the idea.)

There is quite a lot in the footage shown that looked very specifically Alien: a giant open space that looks like it is missing only a huge fossilized Space Jockey; other massive spaces with curved striated walls and floors covered with ordered rows of what look very much like xenomorph eggs. The tone of Alien was there, too — the environments we see aren’t quite as blue-collar and run down, but the feeling of dread and atmosphere is there in spades. Oh, and when the title screen came up at the end, letters in Prometheus formed in much the same way the title for Alien forms in that film.

The footage we see of Michael Fassbender seems to support the rumor that he plays a Bishop-like android. He’s got a slightly stylized look that isn’t quite human. (Ridley Scott said there might be two androids in the film.) Other elements of the design depart slightly from the core Alien template, but don’t feel out of place. Keeping with the sense that this isn’t taking place on the same sort of working-class ship seen in that film, the space suits are a little nicer and more pretty, the environments are more clean and gleaming. Some of the shots bear a rather stylized look that is somewhere between the clean, symmetrical aesthetic of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and a slightly different ‘clean space’ vision that is a little bit Blade Runner and a little bit Mass Effect.

http://www.slashfilm.com/prometheus-footage-description-ridley-scott-crossbreeds-alien-kubrick-mass-effect/