Lovecraft and Prometheus

Tyvm for the link. Very interesting read. :)

That is a great link. Thanks! I'm quite curious how much Prometheus will tip its hat to Lovecraft. It would be a rational assumption that the big blue guys have little interest in 'Victorian fictions' such as morality. There is a possibility that (just maybe) the bones of story are heavily inspired by [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness]At the Mountains of Madness[/url]: A team of explorers "discover fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret." (Given.) Could the big blue guys be The Elder Things - "the creators of life"? Something Xenomorph-ish be Shoggoths - "biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought"? And something we haven't seen yet be our dark lord Cthulhu? I'd be totally cool with that.

I yesterday watched his great film [i]The Call of Cthulhu[/i] , 2005, by Andrew Leman. Its only about 40 minutes long and designed in an early expressionism-style, really great.. http://vimeo.com/9405378 [i]The Call of Cthulhu is HP Lovecraft's most famous story. It is the only story to feature the celebrated monster Cthulhu and in many ways it encapsulates the ideas that went on to permeated Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The film follows the story's three-part narrative construction, and it moves from the 1920s to 1908 to the1870s and back, as the story does. The story embodies HPL's nihilistic world view, his cosmic perspective, and his sense that mankind is doomed by its own insignificance. In the story, a dying professor leaves his great-nephew a collection of documents pertaining to the Cthulhu Cult. The nephew begins to learn why the study of the cult so fascinated his grandfather. Bit-by-bit he begins piecing together the dread implications of his grandfather's inquiries, and soon he takes on investigating the Cthulhu cult as a crusade of his own. As he pieces together the dreadful and disturbing reality of the situation, his own sanity begins to crumble. In the end, he passes the torch to his psychiatrist, who in turn hears Cthulhu's call.[/i]

Oddly enough one of the reasons I hope Prometheus ends up rated "R" is because we need an epic, R-rated, big budget genre film to do well at the box office so that the studios will give Guillermo del Toro the budget to make "At the Mountains of Madness" his way. They pulled the plug on the project a year ago because they weren't willing to let him make a big budget horror movie (and that was with James Cameron as his Executive Producer and Tom Cruise willing to play the lead). Maybe if Prometheus does well at the box office they will change their minds (the fact that they might have similar themes could help too).

So I've finally "discovered" Lovecraft:) He was the first to connect the idea of extraterrestrials to ancient history - just WOW <3 I guess at this point I'm just left wondering why - if ATMOM was the ready-made blueprint for Alien, and thus, Prometheus - why it took 30 freakin years for Ridley to finally "find" a story that "answered the question" of who the sj was? It seems to me there never was a question of who the sj was (lovecraft! cthulhu! alien "gods"! duh lol) I've read that Lovecraft was an atheist, and developed cosmicism as per the op, yet Ridley is agnostic, and from what I gather, a humanist. Also, I've heard him speak a lot about Clarke/Kubrick's 2001 as an inspiration for Prometheus, but I have yet to find a single mention of Lovecraft & ATMOM with regard to Prometheus (if anyone has an explanation for that, or can point me toward some Ridley qutoes about Lovecraft, I'd love you forever! :) I guess the only thing I can think at this point is that maybe Ridley wasn't totally satisfied by the classic Lovecraftian mythos to explain the engie's backstory? What does everyone make of the 30 year delay in adapting ATMOM/Lovecraft into an Alien prequel?