The CMTM was written with reference to the RPG as well as the movie, however it's very much from the viewpoint of the marines who've never encountered anything all that nasty besides other humans. Post "Aliens", provided the information got out, things might change somewhat.

In the RPG, yes, absolutely. The Corporations certainly do have their own armies, often filled with head hunted ex-colonial marines. Although they're more involved with security and corporate espionage, they do from time to time engage in "traditional" battles. The Corporate militaries are also much better equipped than the Colonial Marines.
Because of the costs involved in sending troops across space, the Corporations prefer to have the Colonial marines do much of the heavy lifting whenever they can, much like occurred in the second movie.

The CMTM also mentions the US Army in a couple of spots, IIRC, once in a throw away line and another time in the organizational section. But nothing that would really give an idea of what the Army is, what role it fills, etc.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/

The prequel???

Yeah, you didn't know about that one?

Looks fantastic, I can't wait to see it.

You know, this book plus Hero System 5e + Science Fiction supplement = some RPG goodness. I'd love to get a game going someday. Ignoring the Xenos, even, just using everything else.

You may now see where I got the inspiration for my article techniques...

Ah, yes. In the right hands, it definitely works.

Agreed. I find myself daydreaming scenarios for a platoon of Colonial Marines...

Remove the Xenomorphs almost entirely, throw everything else into the Hammers Slammers universe sans hovertanks and powerguns...MMM...delicious.

yeah I can't wait to see Prometheus either. Charlize Theron!

our friends across the atlantic already have a chance to see it. They released Prometheus early over in Europe because of some soccer tournament.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/releaseinfo

the wikipedia for Prometheus already has a plot synopsis.

The European Cup. Interestingly enough, the English team are based in Krakow.

Only arguably the second biggest football tournament in the World after the World Cup...

And Poland plays today. I have a soft spot for them due to all the time in spend in Poland (in my mind) thanks to T2K.

Actually it's the third largest watched televised sporting event after the World Cup (Football) and The Summer Olympics, if it isn't rained off this year...

I'm just settling down to watch the game.

I was going to ask you for a prediction - I seem to recall you did pretty well calling the World Cup...;)

FWIW my money (literally) is on Germany.

I'm trying to decide whether rain will enhance the beach volleyball or not...

I think the costumes are pretty rain proof, plus there's not much of tehm to get wet.

Saw Prometheus. I'll hold my peace until others can chime in.

Saw it, loved it, seeing it again tomorrow.
For anyone who knows the lore surrounding the Alien movies (not including number 4) and have a familiarity with the lore of BladeRunner, there's a lot to be seen in Prometheus.

Ignore the critics, ignore the haters, you have to see it for yourself and make up your own mind.

Keep in mind that Ridley Scott originally filmed it for an R rating and then trimmed it back to get an M rating (M ratings recoup their costs faster). The claim is that when the DVD gets released it will have his original "R rating" version so there will possibly be more to find out in that version.

My Vague Review (Contains Spoiler)
 

Saw it yesterday. I was pretty thoroughly entertained but left feeling a little unsatisfied. There were a couple of significant loose ends, I felt, and, IMHO, it was made a little too complicated at times. Alien and Aliens worked so well because they were pretty simple, plot-wise. Overall, though, I found it to be incredibly suspenseful and visually stunning to behold.


SPOILER ALERT:

My wife, who was 28 and pretty fit at the time, had an emergency C-section with our first child and there's no way someone who's just undergone that procedure is going to be running and jumping around just minutes afterwards. Even if she was all drugged up and pumped full of synthetic adrenaline or whatever, your abdominal muscles are shot for a few weeks, at least. Not happening. :rolleyes:

Having waited for others to say something positive, I'll weigh in. I want my $14 back. My time could have been better invested seeing The Avengers again or just staying home and writing. Apparently, I'm a hater.

You're entitled to hate. The studios really hyped it up the last couple of weeks- too much, I think- and the final product didn't quite deliver. I'd like to see it again to see if maybe I can pick up something I may have missed the first time.

I saw the Avengers in the theater also and I had some of the same problems with it that I did with Prometheus. The plot was too complicated by half and the baddies were so much canon fodder (a little of that goes a long way, IMHO, and Avengers ran with it for a good 20 minutes). Avengers did make me LOL a few times and I do like Whedon dialogue but, overall, I thought it was pretty overrated. Given the choice, I would see Prometheus again. My wife, who saw both with me, would go with Avengers.

I don't particularly like the superhero genre, too overblown for my tastes so I haven't seen the Avengers but I'm also one of the people completely turned-off by the fact that it's a Whedon movie and so I most likely never will see it. I think Whedon's incapable of writing a mature/sophisticated/complex script and falls back on the same plot points in everything he's written.

As for Prometheus, it seems it is absolutely one of those movies that you either like or hate. It doesn't spoon-feed people the answers (which is all too common in movies these days and something I utterly despise) and probably it's one of those movies that rewards the "initiated", i.e. those who know a lot about the other Alien movies and Scott's other movies (specifically, BladeRunner). It also ties in with the H.P. Lovecraft tale At The Mountains Of Madness and specifically with the legend of the titan Prometheus.

Ah, Prometheus. Saw it today. Much to love, but much not to love also. The future tech, the spaceships, the special effects, all good. The script writing, the behaviour of most of the characters, some of the basic science... utter crap. Any RL archaeologist seeing how the two married "archeologists" acted on archeological sites in the movie would want to slap them into unconsciousness. The lemming-like need for a bunch of the characters to throw themselves into life-threatening danger was breathtakingly frustrating.

*SPOILERS*

Hopefully a sequel will answer some of the big questions raised in the film. Like where the Predators fit in. I suspect the Engineers created the black ooze and other bioweapons as part of an ongoing war with the Predators. One thing that confused me was that the Engineers had near enough to identical DNA to modern humans. But some of the contact on Earth with the Engineers was 35,000 years ago in Scotland. There were no Homo Sapiens in Scotland at that time so the contact must have been with Neanderthals, and Neanderthals would have DNA with some pretty distinct differences to modern humans. So how does all that work? And how does it work that we have a fossil record showing the evolution of non-human primates all the way through to Homo Sapiens? For me it's pretty clear that humans evolved here. Did Engineer DNA spark the evolution of primates but early primates had spectacularly mutated Engineer DNA that slowly evolved back into modern human/Engineer DNA? Cough*bullshit*cough.

** TOTALLY SPOILER **

Three things I'd like to throw in,

1. Prometheus is a sci-fi B-movie replicating an earlier Ridley Scott sci-fi B-movie (using the same plot points, including killing off all the crew until only one lone woman is left, and even the same camera angles/shots in some cases). And it's seriously funny - the man seeking eternal life creates artificial life and then gets beaten to death with the head of the "man" he created! It's hilarious!

It deals with "things man was not meant to know", just like H.P. Lovecraft writes in his Cthulhu stories - there are Elder Beings in the universe, some have motives that are utterly unknown to us and will never be know. The first movie dealt with a Lovecraftian horror, it can't be killed without risk of killing yourself, it's completely alien to us and it cares not one whit about us. It's for exactly this reason that Guillermo del Toro decided not to push ahead with his film version of Lovecraft's story "At The Mountains Of Madness". He considered that Scott had beaten him to the punch because "Prometheus" follows the same story.

"Prometheus" is not a "hard-science" movie, it's a sci-fi B-movie harking back to the 1950s with all the fears of atomic science unleashing giant ants, giant gila monsters or Godzilla to punish us for playing with the metaphorical fire. Just like the title hints at - play with fire and you will get burnt, play with the gods (or try to be god) and you will get burnt.

2. The movie is not going to give answers to everything, not to the characters in the movie nor to the audience watching it. One of the themes is that there are some questions you will never know the answer to, you must accept what you have and accept it on faith. All the people who saw the movie and are seeking answers are doing exactly what the characters in the movie were doing. Scott has given you no answer, just like the characters in the movie received no answer - you're interactively part of the story.

3. The Predators are highly unlikely to feature in any sequel as Scott does not consider them part of Alien movie lore despite the Predator movies hinting that there's a connection.

It's a helluva lot more than a hint. And once you've let the genie out of the bottle you can't cram it back in.

There's no reason you can't combine hard science and good science fiction. Heck, the original Alien film was fine as far as hard science goes. Same with Aliens, pretty much. Prometheus is what you get when a series of different writers go to work on what was probably a pretty reasonable script to start with and slowly give it the death of a thousand cuts. And it's also highly symptomatic of what you get when you've got a nice, fat, juicy budget and a target audience with a highly tenuous (if that) grasp of genetics, chemistry, ancient history and paleoanthropology.

I'm firmly of the belief that the best films (or TV programs or whatever) educate at the same time as they entertain.

You can if you're rebooting the franchise. I'm not clear on whether this film is intended to be a prequel or a reboot? If the latter, then going forward the whole Predator link (and the events of both Alien Vs Predator films) can presumably be disregarded by the writers if they wish.

Hard to say. The CEO of Weyland Corporation in Alien vs Predator was a middle-aged Charles Bishop Weyland. The CEO of Weyland Corporation in Prometheus is a very elderly Peter Weyland. The two films are set 89 years apart. I guess Peter Weyland could be Charles Weyland's son.

The sad thing is that the AvP films (well IMO certainly the first one) were better than the later Aliens films. I'd be happier to see Ridley Scott et al keep the AvP canon and dump Alien 3 and 4 than keep 3 and 4 and pretend that the AvP films didn't happen. I'd be happiest of all if Ridley Scott just wrapped it all up nicely together somehow. I find that 99% of the time what I want in a film isn't what I get. Then again I accept the fact that I'm probably a good 20 to 30 IQ points higher than the average target audience and have a damn sight better understanding of how the universe works.

Yep, I'd agree with most of that (not sure whether I'd keep the second AvP!). To be honest I pretty much lost interest after Aliens...I don't think I've even seen the third one all the way through, only bits of it.

The "Aliens and Predators as part of the same universe" idea is only because of an FX set-dresser's joke, really.

I'd heard that there was a graphic novel pitting Aliens and Predators against each other.

Graphic novels, novels and, of course, two films.

The films, I've heard, were the result of the popularity of the graphic novel.

I think you're right there. I read at least the first (non graphic) novel and it was actually pretty good.

Yeah, the AvP comics came first, IIRC.

There's several; Dark Horse Comics traded in a lot of AvP cachet back in the 90s when we were all expecting an Aliens sequel at any time - to the point of publishing a sort of "continuing adventures of Newt, Hicks and Ripley". of course when A3 washed all that away, later TPBs of that series retconned the names of the little girl and the marine, adding some new information about Ripley being cloned and bonding with the girl and the Hicks replacement due to their similarity to Hicks and Newt.

But what I said about the entirety of the AvP crossover being a set-dresser's joke is the truth. The "xenomorph" skull that appears just briefly in the Predator's ship in AvP2.

Sure, that was the origin of it all, but what's done is done. Film makers rolled with it, they made the Aliens vs Predator films, and now its established canon. And I for one think it's an excellent mix. I think it's very sad that Ridley Scott has nothing but contempt for the crossover canon.

Forward: Targan, I am not having a shot at you, I've been reading a lot of people's comments on Prometheus and there's a whole lot of haters out there. My comments are aimed at them in general.

As far as I know, Scott didn't say he had contempt for the AvP material, he just said that the two didn't mix. AvP was made simpy as a money maker for Fox, it has it's origins with Dark Horse wanting to make money out of the notion, just like the other comic crossovers like Batman vs. Superman or the old Universal Studios horror movies with Frankenstein versus Wolfman versus Dracula and so on. They may exist but it doesn't mean they are canon.

What started as a set-dressers little in-joke has been taken to heart by many but none of the film makers associated with the original Alien or Predator movies seriously considered doing a crossover. Dark Horse saw a way to make money and Fox picked up on it, it wasn't a film makers decision but a studio execs decision.

James Cameron had been working with Scott at one point to make further Alien movies and for various reasons and their other work, they didn't push ahead with it. Cameron was approached by Fox to continue the project and while he was interested, Fox wanted a money maker and suggested that the Predators be thrown in to make it more exciting.
Cameron said no because it destroys the integrity of both the Alien and Predator movies. Fox, seeing the chance to make a crowd pleaser and hence make lots of money, called Paul W.S. (Waste of Skin) Anderson in to make the AvP movie.

I've seen the first AvP movie and was not impressed, the leaps of logic and the lack of common sense displayed by the characters echoes all the criticisms that people throw at Prometheus. For example, one guy in the AvP movie decides that because (allegedly) the earlier civilizations used a decimal maths system, that the pyramid the characters are trapped in will change configuration every 10 minutes. Excuse me, what? That's a leap of logic so wide even Evel Knieval couldn't cross it.

It stuns me that people will critize Prometheus because they claim real scientists don't act like that or the science doesn't make any sense or the characters did stupid things but Peter Parker can get bitten by a radioactive spider and suddenly climb up vertical surfaces and that's perfectly acceptable.

I work with "real scientists" (chemists, geochemists, geologists, geographers) and some of them are f**king morons, very smart in their selected field but completely stupid at real life. I've watched them drop cyanide powder and then stand around for minutes wondering what to do, I've watched them get sulphuric acid on their gloves then scratch their head then later complain that their head is itchy. Scientists are just like normal people and prone to all the same emotions and stupidities that normal people have. And in some cases they're worse.

After all is said and done, Prometheus is just a movie, not real life. It's a mythological tale of horror set against the backdrop of science fiction and it replicates, in fact parallels, the Alien movie, in some cases using exactly the same cinematography and music score. It's up to the individual what they get out of the movie but there is a lot more going on in this movie than can be seen on the surface.

Admittedly I was massively paraphrasing. What Scott has said is that he's never seen the AvP films and has no interest in doing so. I interpreted that as contempt but I can't claim to know exactly what's in his head. For the record I think Ridley Scott is a genius. I've been watching his series Prophets of Science Fiction and absolutely loving it.

Yeah, that's an odd leap of logic. As far as I know, there are 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day because the Babylonians used a base 60 numbering system.

To me (and I'm just speaking for myself here) there are big differences between the superheroes genre and 'hard' science fiction like Alien et al, especially in terms of how far the viewer's suspension of disbelief is expected to stretch.

I know what you mean (my mum is a botanist and my stepfather is a marine biologist so I'm regularly exposed to scientists when visiting mum's place) but seriously, archaeologists would never tramp all over a dig site, they'd transect it and cautiously take to it with anything from shovels to toothbrushes. Both on earth and on LV-233 the "archaeologists" acted like criminal vandals.

That's all true. Well put.

SSC, I'd like to thank you for pointing out the link between Prometheus and At the Mountains of Madness. I am reading it now, for the first time, and it's readily apparent how many other authors and movie makers have drawn upon it for inspiration. I bought a big tome of collected Lovecraft stories a year or so ago, read a few of them (including the Call of what's-its-face that is so influential) and then put it back on the shelf. I wouldn't have thought to pick it up again if it weren't for you.

I don't agree that Prometheus is a b-movie. Perhaps I have a different understanding of what a b-movie is. To my mind, it's a very low-budget effort with minimal or nonsensical story and generally poor acting. I don't think Prometheus met any of those criteria.

I liked the first Predator film (now there's a b-movie, at least acting-wise), but I was 15 or so when I saw it the first time. I was 16 or 17 when I saw the sequel and I didn't particularly care for it. I also didn't much care for the third Aliens film and the fourth one, IMHO, was complete rubbish. In the right hands, I think the two universes could coexist quite well. From what little I've seen or heard, the first two attempts fell far short of the mark. I will confess that I haven't seen any of the AvP movies. Judging purely by the previews, I figured they would all be wastes of time and money and tarnish the fond memories that I have of Aliens, a film I loved as a teenager (I must have seen it at least 30 times by now), and still really enjoy.

Ironically At the Mountains of Madness has been cited (in the AvP Wikipedia article) as being a major influence on the first Aliens vs Predator film. Raellus, the first Alien vs Predator film is worth watching. I remember being particularly struck by the founder of Weyland Corporation having Bishop's face (well vice versa really). That was an awesome touch IMO.