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Prometheus (2012)
Prometheus is yet another sequel to a popular series, Alien(s). The movie is actually a prequel of the original Alien (1979) movie. While previously every Alien movie had a different director, this one is directed by the same person as the original Alien, Ridley Scott.
The story is placed before Alien and the ending blends quite well with Alien. I watched Alien long ago, so I checked out its screenshots on the web and it seems the Prometheus team took the original spaceship concepts which we could see in Alien and reused them. The spaceship looks similar in both movies, both inside and outside.
The movie does not attempt to be as scary as Alien. There was one or two jumpy scenes, but that was it. It’s actually good, since I was expecting a good SciFi instead of just a horror.
Prometheus explains the existence of the nasty alien creatures, although it (fortunately) bears no connection with the B-movie Alien vs. Predator, which was silly IMHO.
The plot evolves around a scientific expedition trying to find origins of human civilization. The flick tries to have a deeper meaning, by exploring the questions of existence and life creation, god, and alien civilizations.
If you’ve seen any of the Alien movies and liked them, I strongly recommend seeing this one. It’s very well made, excellent piece of SciFi. There is a lot of action in it and no boring moments.
Spoilers
Nowadays there is a “creationism” movement in the US, which tries to enforce new laws of teaching that god created life on Earth and that evolution is “just a theory”. Prometheus seems to be aiming at that. The message of the movie is that humans are neither a creation of god nor evolution, but rather direct descendants of an alien species. The first scene in the movie is the creation scene where an alien being throws itself from a rock into water to seed the Earth with its DNA.
Although the movie is quite clear about it, the ending leaves the interpretation slightly open – people who believe in god will be able to say that there must be god after all, since the only person who survived was a deep believer. I don’t know if this was intended, I suspect that the studio wanted this to satisfy a broader audience. This is what I didn’t like about this movie.
There are several things in the movie which don’t make scientific sense, such as the abovementioned indication that humans descendent from aliens, gravity on the ship and on the alien moon seemingly the same as on Earth, the aliens growing in several hours without eating a lot of food, etc. But it’s fun to watch regardless.
The thing I liked the most is that the vicious alien creatures turned out to be an engineered biological weapon. This makes a lot of sense, because I don’t believe that an alien species could evolve the capabilities of surviving in so many environments and eating humans.
Would I watch it again? I will!
What’s the magic word?
Apparently cracking a 11-character password with lowercase letters and numbers plus a single symbol takes under 3 weeks if you have a lot of computing power.
If you only have a few powerful computers it will take 54 years.
I think the author forgot to add that it will take 54 years “using today’s technology” and did not adjust for the fact that the computing power doubles every 18 months. This is still true for GPUs and CPUs may start improving like this again in a few years with manycore architectures. One may argue that we will eventually hit a wall once we get down to a few molecules, but there’s still quantum computing and optical computing to explore, so computers will keep getting faster in the years to come.
It looks like no password is safe.
Chris Dragan's Corner 