Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – Contemporary Horror of AI (2020)

Summary

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant — the contemporary horror of AI by Robert Alpert “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded." —Steven Hawking, English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author[1] [open endnotes in new window] Science fiction is one of the earliest movie genres. Georges Méliès’ silent feature A Trip to the Moon (1902), together with Auguste and Louis Lumières’ shorts, such as “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” (1895), are typically considered the key movies in the divide that French movie critic Andre Bazin later famously characterized as between “those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality.”[2] While Bazin clearly sided with the latter, the placement of faith in the image by the directors of science fiction movies has allowed science fiction movies to address the most pressing social and philosophical issues of contemporary times. For example, produced during the 1920s in a politically divided Germany, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) focused on the Marxist struggle of workers in a capitalist society. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) explored both the hubris of the male scientist described in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) as well as the repressive sexuality of Western culture. Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) advocated for a liberal belief in the collective submission to a technocratic elite. Cabal is god-like in his determination to master the universe. The entire universe lies before man for the taking. “All the universe or nothing!” Of course, faith in the image has oftentimes resulted in science fiction movies that have reveled in the sensuousness of the image and hence in the e...