Prometheus (re)Bound; Scene Four

(Return to Scene Two)
You haven't missed anything. Scene Three - which shows David moving through the ship alone - is one best, and most consequential of the movie  - which is precisely why I've left it untouched, and I see no reason to lay it out with images. If you care to read the scene, the full (re)Bound script is posted here, it begins with line 23 and ends at line 40. Or better yet, track down a copy of the movie (00:09:30 - 00:11:53), the scene is not just brilliant, it provides the key to David's deportment, if not his motivation: "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

Prometheus (re)Bound; Scene Two

(Return to Scene One)

There are large swaths of the original Prometheus script I left untouched. I don't plan to repost those scenes, they are easy enough to track down and watch. Scene Two is almost identical to the original, but I change the end, "Because that is what I choose to believe" is trite Hollywood theology, and I am fanfixing this film to be theological horror. So rather than asking if heaven is beautiful, Shaw asks her father something I remember discussing with my father: Can the dead see see the living? While my father was also talking to a child, unlike Shaw's imagined father, his response was adult and lacked all sentimentality. I also changed the arrival date.

Prometheus (re)Bound; Scene One

(Return to Prologue)

It bugged me that in the original version, Shaw and Holloway were searching for cave paintings of star constellations. Finding undiscovered cave paintings in the year 2089 is already an near impossibility, a once in a lifetime find that alone would have insured these two young scientists life long fame and fortune (of the academic variety). Instead, we are to believe that these two have been circling the globe like the Scooby Gang finding a series of finds on the level of the Chauvet Cave. I can not. Noticing the constellation is sort of discovery would be made by a diligent researcher hunting through an archive, noticing a pattern that had escaped others. So this scene was rewritten, no to deepen the theological horror, but just to make Holloway man-splainy, and Shaw the student of the archive.

Prometheus (re)Bound; Prologue

If you have not seen Ridley Scott's Prometheus, what follows won't make a whole lot of sense, and even if you have this may be a head scratcher. This Introduction will help explain the why-for of it. The what-of-it is fanfiction. In 2012, after seeing Scott's film I decided to gently rewrite the screenplay; to bolster what I felt was the movie's greatest strength: the 'Cosmicism' of Weyland and David. The artist, and hardcore Alien and H.P. Lovecraft fan, William Powhida corresponded with me a great deal while I worked on this, and helped to give what follows a Cthulhu pedigree, but also supplied a number of suggestions to help make the story fit squarely within the original Alien cannon. 

What follows is just a reworking of the film's opening. Rather than drop the entire screenplay - as I did the first time around, I'll serialize it, posting scenes as I rework them. 

Spoiler Alert: What follows is a word for word reworking script of the film's dialog and stage direction. What remains of the original is in black, my changes are in red. [The illustrator PJ McQuade, whose Prometheus fan art project inspired me to tackle this rewrite, originally illustrated the revised opening sequence. This time around, I am using images harvested from the web, most of which were taken from Terrence Malick films.]

Prometheus Delayed: A Foreword

Drones: Stanley Kubrick, 2001; A Space Odyssey (1968); Ridley Scott, Prometheus (2012)

  

Writing about the counterfactual histories of Cowboys & Nazis got me thinking about my very first foray into FanFic, I rewrote the screenplay of Ridley Scott's Prometheus. Not a Shaw/Vickers story (although I'd read that), I rewrote the whole thing. My aim was to right what I saw as wrong with the film. Call it FanFix. It was only as I looked back on that early project that I realized that I had never published a long introduction I written for it, or a conclusion I had prepared. I also remembered how unhappy I was with the way I presented the screenplay. I've decided to remount the Prometheus project from the beginning. I've reworked the intro, below, and in the coming weeks I'll serialize the screenplay, this time with a lot more imagery - which is what I regret not doing the first time.

Cowboys And Nazis; Alt-FanFic

Men In Black and Brown

I watched both HBO's Westworld and the second season of Amazon's Man in the High Castle with deepening ambivalence. Formally, I found both productions entertaining and visually exciting; real pleasures to watch. The casting, acting, cinematography, sets and costumes are the best any fan of scifi could hope for. And while I could nit pic some of the writing choices, my misgivings about both shows are political. Because of our political moment, shows about mega-rich rape tourists and a Fascist ruled America ARE disturbing. But the problem with both shows isn't their subject matter, it is that they treat their subjects like fan fiction - they uncritically except the exact fictions that crony-capitalists and white nationalists want and need to believe about themselves - the fictions our current kakistocrats want and need us to believe.