May 6, 2012

SciFi Summer 2012

Thanos.
Here we are in the weekend of the US launch of The Avengers, Men in Black 3 is still about three weeks out and Prometheus will follow soon after.

Alien Invasion. Mr. Thanos is your evolutionary cousin, one of the branches of humanity that was created by the Celestials about 5 million years ago. As an Eternal, Thanos might be expected to protect Earth against the Deviants, but some how his mother was unable to pass the correct genes to him and so Thanos has some Deviant genes. Thanos is in love with Death, and is apparently involved with the alien invasion that forms the basis for The Avengers movie.

Men in Black 3
Is there any chance that future Marvel movies will expand on the exodemic-like plot elements of The Avengers (humans originated from the work of aliens who carried out genetic engineering on proto-human apes) or will those movies simply give us more conventional Hollywood good guys vs bad guys who run around blowing up things and each other?

Men in Black 3 has a time travel plot in which evil aliens must be thwarted. Apparently there are some interesting constraints on time travel such as a 24 hour limit when going back in time. I wonder if there will be any attempt to explain who gets to travel through time and for what purpose or if this will just be yet another example of someone in Hollywood saying, "we wanted to have a story back in the past so we just did it." In the Exodemic Fictional Universe the Huaoshy control all time travel and they only use it for special problems that arise on primitive planets.

Star map.
Last Summer I was titillated by the possibility that Hollywood might be catching on to the possibility of making movies about sneaky extraterrestrial visitors to Earth who would be here for reasons other than those depicted in typical alien invasion movies. I had high hopes for Prometheus, but it looks like little more than a re-do of Alien. Possibly a miracle will occur and there will be some explanation for how it was possible for "ancient astronauts" to leave a "calling card" (a star map) on Earth and then have nothing to do with Earth for thousands of years.

So there we have it, three Summer SciFi movies for 2012 that will be scooping up hundreds of millions of dollars, and all three of these movies had/have a chance to tell us something interesting about alien visitors to Earth. So far, The Avengers only has an evil dude using mind control to launch an alien invasion of Earth. Of course, the good guys beat back the attack....leaving room for the next movie in the $erie$.

Alien life from Prometheus.
Two chances remain for something interesting to slip out of Hollywood this Summer, but I'm not holding my breath for anything but more of the same tired old $tuff from Prometheus and Men in Black 3.

Here is my best-case scenario for Prometheus: maybe the aliens (for lack of a better name I'll call them the Slime Masters) who long ago visited Earth, have spent the past several thousand years developing their own entertainment industry. Fascinated by their own horror movies, the Slime Masters abandoned space travel and devoted all their creative energies to a genetics program resulting in the creation of armies of slime-dripping alien creatures that are good for thousands of years of Hollywood-type horror movies. When the Prometheus arrives at the home world of the Slime Masters, the aliens recognize a great marketing opportunity and rush back to Earth to license their slime-dripping creatures for use as props in Hollywood. To their great dismay, they realize that Hollywood has its own armies, thousands of geeky CGI programmers who do nothing but dream up new monsters for Hollywood productions. Dismayed and demoralized, the Slime Masters go back to a time (1975) when they can sell their slimy creatures to the highest bidder...resulting in the inspiration for the original Alien movie. Writers for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes will write long articles about the deep significance of Prometheus as social commentary about capitalism. The movie will become required part of business school curricula across the country. The Occupy Movement will make use of the slime-dripping aliens of Prometheus as icons of the super rich.

Have a nice Summer!

This (above) is the first of a series of blog posts about my Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens (SIHA). Here are links to the other SIHA 2012 blog posts:
Disney and Entertainment and Science Fiction, Oh My!
Horror, Comedy and SciFi in the Woods?
Aliens in Drag
Ancient Aliens
The exciting conclusion to the 2012 Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens
Promethean Rorschach Test

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