I’m a bit late to this bit of brilliant viral marketing for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, in which Peter Weyland, the founder of the franchise’s fictional Weyland-Yutani Corporation, gives a talk at a futuristic version of TED:
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. The future has to evolve from something. And while it can be interesting to just jump thousands of years away from where we are now, I’m actually more excited to see what I might have to look forward. We’re evolving fast, and I expect the world will change a great deal while I’m still around to see it.
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