Prometheus
Out of context: Reply #121
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Ridley Scott has been widely reported as saying in interviews that he wanted to get away from face huggers and all the baggage of Alien.
Pardon me if I'm wrong, but isn't that press-on-towel with wings and a vagina just a re-designed face hugger? It does exactly the same thing. It lunges and hugs face. Later on we see a glass helmet dome melting inwards towards the wearers face under an attack.
This means that either the film is actually not as original as they were initially claiming it was going to be, or they are reacting now to the fear that the film could flop ( I don't think our enthusiasm here actually plays out as representative of the mainstream audience ) by re-thinking what they reveal to make it seem more familiar to the original.
I was intrigued the other night when UK showed the TV premier trailer for the movie in the ad break for The Bridge (or Homeland, can't remember which but it was a popular show with large adult audience ratings). It was great to see the trailer, and a narrator introduced it and made it all seem like a big deal... but then at the end they said "Now, get on your computer and tweet about how excited you are, and in the next ad break we'll show a selection of your tweets" and to me... that just seemed like the kind of desperate marketing initiative that's usually reserved for movies that are stinkers and destined to fail.
Usually these are movies where a rich white girl from the Hamptons finds herself suddenly orphaned by a freak tragedy and has to go and live with her raucous black aunt in the ghetto. At first she struggles to survive the culture shift, but her classical ballet training proves to be a big hit amongst the hip hop community who start to appropriate her moves and learn to respect her despite her uppity seeming manners and her grace.
She, simultaneously finds their outlaw dance possé manouvres dangerous and exciting and meltingly sexual, and in many ways she recognises their spasticated lurches as being the real embodiment of dance... primitive and wild, not structured and cultivated.
She also falls in love with a troubled, but handsome (in an oddly european way) young black man, and despite this being the 21st century, that attraction still largely stands as the tension point around which the film is spun (white & black disguised as rich & poor in order to be 'politically correct'), culminating in a much anticipated dance challenge where the perfect synergy of classical ballet and street dance prove victorious over the rival gang, and the young couple then seal their love with some very provocative after-competition bogling and a few meaningful stares at each other. No kissing though. There are racial boundaries to respect.
In the final scene, the parents show up. They didn't die after all, it was an elaborate life insurance scam that went wrong and now they're off to prison. The young classically trained white virgin flips them the finger and shouts "Yo!" as they get carted off to prison. The street kids all high five her because now she's finally made the gangland grade thanks to having incarcerated parents.
Titles roll.