Mar 052012
 

A clever viral video clip for the forthcoming movie Prometheus (the kinda-sorta prequel to Alien) has been making the rounds. In the clip, fictional tech titan Peter Weyland (founder of what will become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation) delivers a rousing address to a futuristic TED conference in 2023. Here’s the video:

Alyssa Rosenberg, a smart blogger who blogs smart things at ThinkProgress, praises the clip:

I think what I like about this is not just that the clip gives me a sense of what the movie is going to be like, but that it’s a bit of connective tissue between this world and our own. For me, a lot of what’s fun about near-future science fiction is a sense of what will survive from one era into the next, whether it’s jazz on Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, eighties pop culture in Ready Player One, or a version of TED that kind of looks like it got mashed up with the Old Republic’s Senate Chambers.

Hollywood is becoming quite adept at creating bits of viral marketing like this that are designed to get people talking about a movie or TV show. And Guy Pearce does a really great job of making Weyland a compelling character over the span of just a few minutes. It’s like he decided to channel the combined egos of Steve Jobs and Richard Branson and then thought to himself, “Hmm, needs more arrogance.” Let’s hope Weyland gets some screen time in the actual movie.

  One Response to “Imagining Tomorrow”

  1. […] that flesh out the film’s fictional universe. The previous video featured Guy Pearce as a supremely arrogant high-tech tycoon. The latest clip gives us Michael Fassbender as an android pitching the talents and versatility of […]

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