“Familiarity breeds contempt”

Alien just looks fantastic on Blu-ray and this is what Dan O’Bannon said on the Alien Anthology: “If it’s new and you haven’t seen it before, it has impact. Once something becomes familiar, no matter how well it’s done, if it’s familiar…Well, you know the old saying, familiarity breeds contempt.” This is probably why Prometheus doesn’t work for me, apart from the fact that it’s too bright ( because they shot it in 3d, I know), too clean and not gritty enough ( just a matter of taste, I might add) and definitely NOT scary, and it was supposed to scare the living shit out of us, right? O’Bannon took the words out of my mouth, bear with me: It’s been almost a year now since Prometheus’ release and let me tell you, when the lights faded in the theatre and the audience became quiet, I had this massive grin on my face from ear to ear…not even Joker could smile like that. I was like: OMG… it’s finally happening, the wait is over! YES!! Let’s see what all the fuss is about and what the big secret is… It begins fantastic: jaw-dropping scenery combined with some pretty amazing “epic score” although I didn’t pay much attention to it, because I was overwhelmed by the image quality and the effects of the 3d. One word: right!! The questions that raced through my mind: Are we finally going to see their civilization ? How do they live, eat, procreate? How do they make war and what was that cargo was about? Is there a third species they’re in war with? Are we going to see a really cool Alien-SJ breed in the last 15 minutes? Is that humanoid head going to come alive and begin to trash the place? How will the crew react when Shaw walks in and drops to her knees covered in blood? Why is Vickers so scared in that one scene and why is she doing push-up half-naked looking like she’s possessed? Why did they show us the derelict falling from the sky? That’s a major spoiler… There must be 30 minutes or so after it falls that we haven’t seen yet, right? ( I was so wrong, I just knew we weren’t getting anything when I saw that scene in theatres.) And above all: how will this tie in with Ripley’s adventures? Am I going to look at Alien(s) and go: “OH, now I get it” or ”I never looked at it that way” or to the extreme “JESUS, what a mind-blowing revelation, WAUW, genius…” Then suddenly, like a bolt from the blue ( I still remember going like: WUT?? You’ve got to be kidding me!!) this character walks in like straight from a lord of the rings movie, dressed in an “elfish cloak” and he looks at the audience with those big black eyes… like doll’s eyes… lifeless eyes…ahum …and then it hit me like a freight train: THAT IS OUR SPACE JOCKEY ? I must be seeing things…I really, really thought, believed, wished the big blue bald guy from the trailers was some android from the Prometheus whose job was taking care of some of the more difficult, heavier chores the crew couldn’t, like a self-operating power-loader…or maybe he was an infected human… anything but our beloved SJ. So, I took off my 3d-googles to check for ANY deviation of the glasses, scratches, ANYTHING to convince myself that it was just me and the audience was seeing another version. I actually raised my hands towards the screen like a little child who wanted an explanation: “Why did they have to make him look like a humanoid?” Why, why why… In Alien it worked somehow and it worked great actually. But in Prometheus…. the universe is so vast and immense, what are the odds that they even have the slightest resemblance with us humans? That is just so unoriginal and too familiar to be scary…not to mention they look exactly like doctor Manhattan…I never got that idea out of my mind during the entire movie. They could have made an alien species for this movie that was so vicious, relentless, brutal, intelligent, sadistic, indifferent, and more than anything else :ELEPHANTINE-like, that it would make the “xenomorph” look like some pet you’d like to…pet. That you would almost beg to be quickly disposed by the secondary jaw of the xeno, rather than this horrifying , somewhat humanoid, but still undoubtedly elephantine BEAST who is 5 times our size. THAT would have been the movie I would have loved to pay for again and again to watch it in theatres. The fact that they decided to make them looking like us killed the movie-experience instantly for me. I just can’t appreciate this new direction, even though I really want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve finally come to accept Prometheus for what it is: an average movie that looks great and has a hell of a lot of potential. It will go down in my book as one of the most anticipated and most disputed movies of all time, that can make someone bitter and twisted because it failed to deliver, or make someone else wonder in what order they should watch the other Alien films, because they never bothered to. But, Prometheus imho was made for the masses and the average Joe who knows very little about this universe, and not for the hardcore fans, the niche who watches alien(s) over and over again to soak in the next missed detail (the sets in alien are in a class of their own, absolutely gorgeous), because those movies (and especially the first one) are just brilliant and almost flawless, and to put it simply: works of art. Prometheus will always be (to me) that missed opportunity to properly resurrect the franchise. I seriously hope Paradise will be that movie that we can all be proud of instead of this love-hate situation that is Prometheus. I really do. But they will have to pull out all the stops to get me THIS hyped again for paradise, and I doubt if they can achieve that, now that we know there wasn’t an outlined plot at all and that the SJ’s are smurfs on steroids… Anyway, I’m having a ball with Aliens: colonial marines. Glitching and teleporting your way across the map as a xeno with a hollow carapace towards unsuspecting marines and flurrying them to death is extremely satisfying haha. Well, I had to get it off my chest…or out….GAAAAH *chestburst* Is there anyone else who felt like this during their first viewing? It would be nice to know that I’m not alone on this one