Giant Freakin Robot

With the success of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, the notion of franchises existing within a shared universe is very en vogue right now. (They’re giving the classic Universal monsters the treatment.) The same thing has been happening to a much less ambitious degree with the respective universes of Alien, Predator, and Prometheus. The Alien vs. Predator movies were the biggest direct crossover so far, but they’re also very much the black sheep of the bunch, typically not regarded nearly as well as the standalone films. Whether future movies in those franchises will tie together closer or not, Dark Horse Comics is about to take this notion and run with it, rebooting their Alien, Predator, and AvP titles in 2014, then launching an ongoing Prometheus series to form a cohesive shared comics universe.

Dark Horse has been publishing licensed comics for titles such as Aliens, Predator, RoboCop, and others for decades now. That’s a lot of years of stories shifting into the rearview mirror, but the nice thing about Dark Horse’s Aliens/Predator/Prometheus reboot is that it isn’t a reboot in the traditional sense. The movies still stand as canon, this is just making a fresh start for the comics side of things.

The folks over at io9 conducted some great interviews with Chris Roberson, Paul Tobin , Joshua Williamson, and Chris Sebela, the four series writers. We’ve sifted through the lot and picked out the biggest take-aways that should leave you excited for Dark Horse’s grand experiment.

When combined with the global outlet that is the Internet, passion for our favorite movies and TV shows can inspire people to translate that passion into a thousand different, unexpected creations. We here at GFR regularly feature fan-created artwork and short films that can rival Hollywood when it comes to creativity and unique vision. But this one, this is one of those things where trying to figure out how they came up with the idea is enough to give a guy a headache. The left half of the image above is obviously pulled from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. But before we spoil the how or why, you’re just going to have to take our word for it when we tell you that the right half of the image? That’s Blade Runner too.

That multi-colored barcode comes from the MovieBarcode Tumblr blog. It was created by taking frames from the film, squeezing them down into digital strips, and then assembling them in sequence to create…well, barcodes. And while these images don’t tell you much about the story or characters of your favorite films, they do simply demonstrate one visual quality of films that it sometimes overlooked: the color palate, and how it changes over the course of the movie. Knowing that and looking back at the Blade Runner image up top, it makes sense. You can see the film’s mixture of dark imagery peppered with bright neon flashes, a concise summary of the visual world Ridley Scott created.

There were a lot of reasons to be excited for Prometheus back before it hit theaters. It was legendary director Ridley Scott’s return to the science fiction genre, expanding upon a resume that already included Blade Runner and Alien. Moreover, we soon learned that Prometheus would also have Scott revisiting the universe of that latter film, exploring a new chapter of the Alien mythology and shining new light on the origins of the vicious xenomorph aliens and the mysterious “Space Jockey” from the first movie. Unfortunately, the finished product left many fans cold and frustrated at wasted potential. But take heart: the characters of Prometheus may be getting a second chance to shine, this time on the comic page.

Bleeding Cool cites unnamed sources in revealing that Dark Horse Comics, which has been publishing Aliens comics for decades now, will be expanding that universe a bit more by incorporating characters from Prometheus into upcoming releases. There are literally no more details than that, and it’s not been officially confirmed yet, but the folks at BC suggest we’ll likely hear more at next week’s San Diego Comic-Con.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been more than a year since Ridley Scott’s Prometheus underwhelmed science fiction fans worldwide. That may be a bit harsh. It’s a deeply flawed film to be sure, and we could spend all day debating and yelling about various plot holes, inconsistencies, and the crew’s ability to make the absolute wrong decision in every single situation. Still, I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Prometheus.

But we’re getting sidetracked. Today The Wrap has learned that the Prometheus sequel, strangely enough known as Prometheus 2 at this point, is moving forward. Screenwriter Jack Paglen has reportedly been given the Herculean task of writing a part two that doesn’t suck. At the end of the first film we see Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and Michael Fassbender’s android David blasting off into space to continue the search for the mysterious Engineers. Presumably those two would be back for a sequel, but at this point it’s unclear what exactly the story will entail.

Paglen is relatively young blood in Hollywood. In fact, he only has one credit listed on IMDb. He penned the script for Transcendence, the sci-fi directorial debut from Christopher Nolan’s principal cinematographer, Wally Pfister.

From Serenity to Prometheus; from the Millennium Falcon to the U.S.S Enterprise; have you ever wondered which spaceship from science fiction is the fastest? Most star ships in science fiction are quite speedy, so the characters can get from one place to the next without missing a beat. Now the good people at Slate have put together a very impressive list, pitting many famous spaceships against each other in a race for hyperspace bragging rights. The results may surprise you. Although there are some inconsistencies in various science fiction mythologies, the list is based on computer simulations and fan speculation.

The starting point for all of the ships is Earth, and their include Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star to Earth at 4.2 light years away, and the Andromeda Galaxy, which is about 2.5 million light years away.

It seems like the fastest vessels in all of science fiction are the TARDIS from Doctor Who and the Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The travel time for both is almost instantaneous. They have the ability to travel from one end of the galaxy to another in mere seconds, if that. The Heart of Gold runs on the infinite improbability drive, which is “a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second,” according to Douglas Adams.

If you think about it, Prometheus and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull have quite a lot in common. Both concern a hunt for ancient, mysterious beings who seem to have left clues behind as an invitation for us to follow. Both involve a legendary filmmaker returning to a fictional universe they helped create. Both were disappointments to many of their devout fans. And both made me want to stick a broken bottle in Shia LeBeouf’s neck. (He doesn’t have anything to do with Prometheus, so that urge may just be about me.)