Let's get things started with a bit of "catch-up" from earlier this year...
I watched Prometheus. Epic. It
took about five minutes after the end credits for me to remember to
close my mouth.
Mostly for the right reasons... although there were some
scenes that just left me stunned and I'm still not sure why - perhaps
just waiting for my brain to still catch up.
Ridley Scott goes to places few other directors dare to venture - and on
this wild celluloid ride into humanity's future/destiny/fate/origins,
his pivotal character is ironically not human at all...
"David" is a state-of-the-art android; caretaker and steward of the human crew who set out for the stars aboard the starship, Prometheus.
He is just the latest incarnation of a line of memorable,
more-human-than-human robot characters brought to life by Ridley Scott
and those that followed in his wake. In the Alien franchise alone, we now have A, B, C, and D: Ash, Bishop, Call and of course David.
But to me the greatest on-screen rendition of a robot at odds with his prime directive is Roy Batty, the Nexus-6 Replicant, who stole every scene in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
Scott's love affair with the robot has taken him full circle, and in the
disturbingly perfect semblance of humanity that is David, we see what
in many ways may have been the beginnings of Roy, before the experiences
of his volatile 4-year existence had taken their toll.
As Tyrell refers to Roy Batty as his 'prodigal son', so too does Peter
Weyland describe David as the 'closet thing he ever had to a son'; that
similar, tragic relationship between machine and maker...
Given time to develop, 8th Gen. David may one day question his role of carrying out tasks that his "human counterparts find... distressing." But of course that's a potential storyline for Scott to decide on. Hopefully he will.
There are many things that can be said about Prometheus, and its obviously going to be spoken about for many years to come. But David as portrayed by Michael Fassbender (the performance of his career, thus far) is set to become a truly iconic character.
(I always believed there could be no-one else to reprise the role of
Roy Batty in any sequel/reload of Blade Runner, which was why I have
been against such an idea. But now in Fassbender, I see a fitting
successor to Rutger Hauer's haunting portrayal).
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