Watching: Prometheus

When I saw a couple of the trailers on YouTube a couple weeks ago, I knew this would be the movie my brother would be most likely to take me and Mom to see. And so it was. And so this is "the Space Jockey movie" (using the big guys' nickname from Alien; here they're called "Engineers"). I was warned (by online reviews, not my brother) that some people didn't like it. But I did, and I can see why it has a 74% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. My brother thought it was brilliant. I have different standards; I thought it was at least good enough, though not as brilliant as, say, Alien and Aliens. And even though I'd already read all the spoilers on the TV Tropes page, I still managed to find myself surprised by that last Space Jockey. There were a few predictable things. The guys who panic and flee being the first to die? Check. There were also some weak points, mostly involving characters carrying the "idiot ball" (there's a whole list on the TV Tropes Prometheus page under "Idiot Ball" At least Fifield and Milburn have an excuse (their panic robbed them of their reason). Weyland is similar in that he's a corporate "king" (the word is actually used, though not in any official sense) whose desire to defeat death overrides his reason. But Janek (the pilot) has no excuse but picks up the idiot ball anyway and runs with it. The unpredictable part involved Vickers, Shaw, and a certain director, but I won't spoil that one. There were some very clever reveals involving Vickers, Weyland, David (the android, whose nature this time is revealed almost immediately), the surviving Space Jockey, the nature of his Engineer faction's mission, and — the stinger at the end, right before the credits. I did notice they used the Alien Astronaut theory (as in Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin) as the movie's starting premise. Back to my opinion. I did enjoy it, enough that I plan to get the Blu-Ray to play on that 50+ inch TV I intend to get.

Thoughts While Reading: Idea for a Thriller Movie Script

Reading: The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock by Charles Derry

So I was reading chapter 5 ("The Thriller of Murderous Passions"), and, sure enough, my muse went into action. Intersecting love triangles? How about a full-blown Love Dodecahedron? Did Claude Chabrol make slick thrillers about repressed French bourgeois exploding into murder and then trying to repress all over again what exploded out? Well, I'm American, not French, so my upper-class intersecting love-hate triangles involve the far more predatory corporate-raider class, with much more pyrotechnical results. Of course, a thriller of murderous passions must include the tropes Love Makes You Crazy, Love Makes You Evil, Murder The Hypotenuse, and other jealousy tropes.

So here's the story concept for the script I have in mind, with the working title "Triple Cross". The players:

• George Sasser, tycoon in the defense industry.
• Evelyne Lee Sasser, his highborn Southern-belle wife.
• Gary Pace, hitman.
• Starla Pace, his sexy and amoral gold-digger wife.
• Hugo Wells, Sasser's chief engineer.
• Roy Larkin, Wells' predecessor turned Sasser's bitterest competitor.
• Lina Strange, exotic dancer and the story's Only Sane Person.

The plot goes roughly like this: Evelyne is sleeping with Hugo, and they decide to hire Gary to kill George. Well, turns out George is sleeping with Starla, and they're plotting to kill Gary. Chaos and nasty plot twists ensue. Roy decides to secretly encourage the others to kill each other and manipulate the stock market so he can scoop up Sasser Engineering at a discount. Lina gets caught in the chaos by being the one all the guys and Starla sleep with and ends up being the one who survives to tell the tale.

Right now this is just a concept and needs to be worked out into a full script. The specifics aren't written in stone, so some things could change as the plot (or my muse's whim) requires. But I do think this sounds interesting enough. Maybe I could even find a way to turn it into a movie myself...