Who would have thought that Prometheus, Ridley Scott's triumphant return to science fiction, is not necessarily designed to evoke the picture it shares the most connective tissue with? 1979's Alien, only Scott's second film, was a horrific variation on the traditional haunted house movie trope in which a small crew of seven miners slowly gets picked off by an indestructible monster in the outer reaches of space. Alien's grungy, shopworn technology, its motley crew of unlikeable and all too human antiheroes, and the emergence of the spaceship Nostromo's whiny, female second officer as the film's lead were among the movie's innovative twists, spicing up a once moribund genre. Eventually, Alien inspired so many copycats it all seemed kind of old hat again. While ostensibly a tangential prequel—explaining a few of the more mysterious elements of Alien—Prometheus takes off on a different course, one especially familiar to those of us around in the '70s.
