Monday, March 5, 2012

'Prometheus' Fever Dream Inspires Crazy Talk

This is going to take a while before it makes sense (if it ever does), so bear with me. But... I had a dream. Not a metaphorical dream, a literal one: all about "Prometheus," in fact! In it I was a member of the science team sent on the Prometheus to research the mysteries of mankinds beginning or whatever. To be honest, I really had no idea why we were there, the dream just sort of started -- something that anyone who saw "Inception" will understand. On the planet, we found something. No, it wasnt a crashed Space Jockey mothership filled with alien eggs. In fact, we didnt even see Space Jockeys. But what we did find was a mysterious machine of utmost mystery and machineriness. It was massive, and was clearly Space Jockey tech. We did the only thing we possibly could do: we turned it on. We quickly realized this was no mere machine, but a repository of all of the DNA of every creature that the Space Jockeys had ever come into contact with -- an Ark if you will, almost like that underground seed bank they have in Norway. But not only did it store all this information, it was also able to reconstruct any of these beings near instantaneously... and it would butcher all of these creatures and turn them into packaged meats for the Space Jockeys to consume. It behooved us to destroy this thing, clearly. We found a self destruct button, and when we pressed it, a cute little egg popped out. Then it hatched, and facehugged the nearest living thing, and within a day, we had an army of ten thousand aliens at our backs, hunting us down. The End. As you can see, I have crazy dreams. But what was the point of that long story, you're asking? Well, the dream got me thinking. Word has it that the new Ridley Scott film tackles big, heavy hitting issues, potentially of the universe-defining variety. Did aliens visit us at an earlier time? Are we descended from them? Were we created by them? None of these answers came to me in the dream, but one thing was certain: I believe that the xenomorphs that we know and fear from Scott's genre-defining film were in fact created. Engineered would be the perfect word. They are the perfect weapon. Drop some eggs on a planet of your enemies, and watch them wilt before your eyes. I believe the Space Jockeys created the aliens as the ultimate weapon, the fail-safe switch if everything went to hell. Obviously as we learned, even the Space Jockeys couldnt control their own creation. In my dream, at least. None of this is real, of course, but a fan can dream... and dreams are sometimes more real than they seem. Anyway, while we're thinking about "Prometheus," go check out Guy Pearce's TED talk from 2023. That's no dream: that's just pure "Prometheus" awesomeness. When Talk Nerdy co-host Brian Phares gets an idea in his head, Crazy Talk is bound to ensue. Watch this space as the mad hatter of fandom takes impossible ideas and spits out Hollywood gold (or so he likes to tell himself). Get angry at him on Twitter at @pharesvswild.