Quote from: Cvalda on Sep 24, 2012, 05:47:49 PM
Quote from: SpeedyMaxx on Sep 24, 2012, 05:41:33 PM
Actually, I never made that association myself. I was just commenting on my not being much of a fan of the series.
And that was relevant how?
Forgive me, I'm searching for the appropriate Oprah gif to continue the discourse. Please hold.
QuoteIt's not quibbling, it's pretty much the exact same thing--the purpose of it, the function, the visual look, everything. Moreover, it was something that was done fairly recently on a very visible scale by a wide audience. For something like Prometheus, that was supposed to be some kind of "creative rebirth" and a work of visionary science fiction to just go and lift wholesale an entire concept from The X-Files just smacks of creative laziness at its most extreme.
I don't think it even remotely resembles
The X-Files beyond a cursory glance at that oil - an old trope - and to be very frank, while I respect that the show has its place in pop culture history and its many fans, I think the inescapable truth is that only hardcore fans or sci-fi buffs remember or care about that dense mythology today. It's been gone awhile. And I was forced to sit through quite a bit of that show in the name of love and friendship, including the first film which IIRC wasn't bad but wasn't genius either. (I don't want to talk about the second one. I feel like the showrunner was trying to stave off unemployment and maybe hoping to rebrand the show as a
Criminal Minds spinoff. That was just embarrassing.) But the later seasons, dear God.
My point, though, is that that whole gigantic plotline that evolved, particularly in the show's latter years, with its consortium or coalition or whatever it was, and the various men in dark rooms, the Native Americans, all the clones, poor Veronica Cartwright - I don't see what on Earth any of that has to do with
Prometheus or the Engineers. I don't see what it has to do with
anything, and obviously, at least 95% of the moviegoing audience didn't see any real connection to
The X-Files either. I think it's apples and oranges at best - and the idea of aliens seeding the world, harvesting humanity, all of that predates
both this film and that television show. And Ridley, certainly, has been banging on about the space jockeys being terraformers of life and planets since at least the early '80s. No one's accusing
The X-Files of ripping him off, nor would they; it's nonsense.
It may mean very much to you, and that's fair. But I think we can both acknowledge that this is, at best, a comparison that has come up pretty rarely even online, and it's possible, just possible, that for both the filmmakers and most of the larger audience, the mytharc of
The X-Files may not have even remotely come to mind re:
Prometheus.