In my Hojas Susurrantes I recount how I liked Planet of the Apes (1968) the same year I watched Kubrick’s magnum opus on the big screen. When I learned as a child that they were filming the second part of Planet, I loved the idea and thought it would be a fascinating film that would respect the original story. I remember that I found very long the months that, with great anxiety, I expected Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) to be released.
When it finally was released in Mexico City and went with my cousin Julio to the Cine de los Insurgentes I was shocked. The film was light-years apart from what I imagined it should be a legitimate sequel. As a child I didn’t have the faintest idea of what Hollywood really was, much less did I imagine that much of Hollywood’s interests had nothing to do with art or with an indictment of humankind—the main theme of the 1968 film. The sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which was released in Mexico about three years after the masterpiece of Franklin Schaffner, proved to be absolute crap and the worst was that it made the boy I felt completely cheated.
As a personal vignette I would say that, after watching the movie with my cousin, in the confusion we passed directly to the large roundabout which is in front of the now defunct Cine de los Insurgentes instead of going around it. (Incidentally, twenty years later they would film scenes of the 1990 Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the commercial part beneath the roundabout.) We got stuck on it and the speed of the cars wouldn’t let us escape the roundabout. It wasn’t built for pedestrians and Julio and I, who were about ten and twelve years old respectively, had gone to the theatre without our parents. I discovered the roundabout was not made for pedestrians when I realized that the “sidewalk” had no room for my feet. In a sense we had risked our lives by rushing directly into the upper side of the roundabout when we left the movie theatre. The chaotic and noisy Avenida de los Insurgentes and the congestion of the two children alone in the large roundabout turned out to be a pertinent corollary to my great disappointment.
Decades, and a dozen more disappointments of traitorous prequels, sequels and remakes of great sci-fi movies, passed until I grasped the fact that a market-driven society does not always coincide with my artistic sensibilities. In “Ridley Scott’s Prometheus” Trevor Lynch (Greg Johnson) recently put it this way:
As the credits rolled, I took off my 3-D glasses and rubbed by eyes in disbelief, trying to fathom the vulgarity of spirit behind this godawful movie. It is the same vulgarity of spirit that took the mysteries of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and gave us Peter Hyam’s sequel 2010 (1984), where the monoliths work to prevent nuclear war. It is the same vulgarity of spirit that took “the Force” of the original Star Wars trilogy and explained it in terms of little measurable material widgets called “midichlorians” in The Phantom Menace (1999). It is the same vulgarity of spirit that took the mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and gave us Rick Rosenthal’s made-for-TV sequel The Birds II: Land’s End (1994), in which we are informed that the bird attacks are due to pollution.
Heidegger tells us that this vulgarization is the essence of modernity, which seeks to abolish all mystery and transcendence, replacing them with the transparent and available, which in cultural terms boils down to the vulgar and the trite.
But some of us are more modern than others, and it all fell into place when I spied the name of screenwriter Damon Lindelof, one of the principal culprits behind Lost […]. Prometheus is the same kind of portentous swindle: just Jews making millions peddling myths for morons. Don’t lose your money, or your lunch, at Prometheus.
I lost my money today watching this grotesque film and I agree. But about Star Wars Johnson failed to say that the real abomination started not with The Phantom Menace but with The Return of the Jedi: where an idiotic George Lucas completely betrayed the character of Darth Vader that had impressed many adolescents who had watched the splendid The Empire Strikes Back.
In the interview “Alien Special Features” of my DVD, Special Edition I heard Ridley Scott saying that after Blade Runner he would never direct another sci-fi movie unless the story was really good, referring to the original script of the first Alien. With Prometheus Scott has just betrayed what he said.
Worst of all, of course, was 2010: Odyssey Two. Fuck you Arthur Clarke for having accepted the green bill, according to your own confession, to write a sequel you had promised never to write…
4 replies on “Beneath Ridley Scott’s planet”
Promotheus is one of the most disappointing movie experiences I’ve had in a long, long time. I’m ashamed of myself for buying into the hype when the project was announced last year. Like ROTJ, the Star Wars prequels and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, I just pretend they don’t exist, i.e. I ignore them…The Force is The Force, not a high midichlorian count.
Something is missing from Greg’s review. The idea of “bodily thetans,” Hubbard’s great dogma of Scientology, according to which we all suffer from traumatic memories of aliens, has a history in the writings of another brilliant madman: Alfred William Lawson. Lawson believed that microscopic creatures called menorgs existed in the human brain: mental systems that operate within cells. Note the analogy with Star Wars Episode I, where the large number of such beings in the child Anakin Skywalker drew the attention of a Jedi master. Lucas obviously drew from these kinds of wacky sources for that episode.
This is one of the reasons why the books I recommend in my previous posts, books that impacted me even though I read them before I became racially aware, are still relevant to nationalist interests. For example, I learned the above by reading one of the true classics in the debunking of pseudosciences, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner, published in 1952.
I was glad to have skipped Prometheus, and many a reviewer (including yourself) have justified my decision.
The brazen introduction of miscegenation with the black captain and Charlize Theron only supports conclusions that Ridley Scott has become, like many others of his caliber, almost lazy in inserting anti-white symbols and metaphors. I believe many White men are beginning to wake up to the anti-White code of the MSM because the MSM is losing touch with its ability to subversively insert these messages. For instance, the Badass movie starring Danny Trejo, based off the infamous “epic beard man” viral video is such an egregious case of PC transmutation that any 8th grade white boy can see it. In the viral video, epic beard man beats down a confrontational black bus rider. In the movie Badass, the black confrontational commuter is replaced with two neo-nazis who were preparing to assault an elderly black man, only to get beaten down by the holy diversity warrior Hispanic Danny Trejo. (link)
Its as if Hollywood is openly mocking us, as if there just asking for some kind of retribution. Perhaps they feel we’re no longer a worthwhile enemy that once required destruction by trickery, and perhaps this may work to our advantage in awakening white racial consciousness.
Off-topic, but while browsing VDARE, I found a video that in my opinion is prime evidence in my belief that there are many White Nationalists who do no know they are at heart WNs, than there are open or even passively open white nationalists.
Video: (link)
This simple man, far from the coffeehouse-eccentric persona of the Alt-Right intellectual, understands (better than the condescending metro/homo interviewing him) that he desires a White neighborhood for reasons he believes is self-evident. This view likely transfers to a desire for a White county, then to a White city, then to a White state.
My question is, how can we transfer this desire to live in a White neighborhood with a desire to create a White nation?
It is creating this leap of realization that baffles me in both its complexity and in the lack of progress so far. This leap that has failed to bring in anyone but the hardened Alt-Right intellectual into movements such as the Northwest Front.
There’s nothing to do with body-snatched Pods while System goods flow to these degenerates. We need to wait until the dollar crashes for any substantial revolutionary action to take place.