Aftermath

You'll remember me, when the West wind moves,

Among the fields of barley,

You'll forget the sun, in his jealous sky,

As we walk in fields of gold ..

It's the same old story. You finish something major, enter that phase of completion and freedom that you craved for so long and after a couple of days you're already winding up with the first onsets of boredom. In between eating cake and farting about on the internet, I'm half-arsedly trying to get my job in the pub back and trying to convince my sister not to base her choice of future universities solely on the attractiveness of the people in the prospectus.

I am very tired. I'd say I'd been this tired for the last 4 years but that'd be a lie. This is a new kind of tired. I have nothing of real substance to do so my body clock is shot to buggery and then some. I've started taking naps when I'm in Leeds, in which I occasionally dream about sleeping. My yawns are becoming something else. They're not just contagious, they cause bouts of narcolepsy among anyone who makes eye contact with me. Treat me like the sun and don't look at me directly.

I have the song Fields of Gold stuck in my head. It's a catchy one, particularly Sting's version.

It's been on repeat for three days. Wedged in my mind, somewhere between my memories of getting stung by a bee when I was about 11 and my knowledge of what maple syrup tastes like. And it's squatted there three days long. It's built a little hut and cooks marshmallows over it's little squatter fire. I cannot get it to leave my head.

Play me off, Sting.

Prometheus

Well I might take a boat or I'll take a plane,

I might hitch-hike or jump a railroad train ..

* potential spoilers ahead  *

 

I saw Ridley Scott's Prometheus again for the second time the other day. Discussions among friends on the film are wide ranging and a glance at my facebook feed shows one post hailing the film as "brilliant" and a comment underneath saying "nah i saw it yesterday - its shite". As a fan of the Alien films, I'd agree mostly with the first one, though Prometheus does fall short of it's predecessors. My breakdown:

POSITIVES

• Visually, one of, if not THE best films I've ever seen. The designs are flawless and the CG stuff isn't the half arsed clunky bollocks we so often see in big budget films of late. The opening credits showing a panorama of a volcanic world are worth the price of your cinema ticket alone.
  
  
• Deeper and a little more contemplative about the big questions than most other sci-fi films.

• Great main cast. Michael Fassbender steals the show with an Oscar-worthy performance as the humanoid android David, who is creepy and charming and mysterious all at the same time.
  
  
  
  
  
   Noomi Rapace is less of a power-frau than Ripley, but she's still very good. Charlize Theron is also great as the icy corporate bitch in charge of the operation.
  
  
• Nice links to the original Alien film, particularly the much-needed final scene and the introduction of the recognisable space-jockey.
  
  
  
  
  
• Old school gore. There are various bits that are tougher to watch than I was expecting, like a tentacled alien C-section. Be warned

NEGATIVES

• Pretty much everything about  the crew of the Prometheus spaceship. They've been in suspended animation for two years without ever having asked what the nature of the expedition was, wake up and find themselves to be generally incompatible with one another (needlessly) and, while Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender run around exploring, the non-speaking parts of the anonymous 17 member crew essentially just stand around waiting to be killed.
  
  
• The old man makeup. Hmmm.
  
  
•  Noomi Rapace legging it round and jumping over crevices shortly after major traumatic surgery and a couple of painkillers.
  
  
• Not giving answers. I guess this is the classic setup for a sequel, but the film just doesn't work as well as a standalone project as the producers thought; they tease us with questions and possibilities but only explore them superficially with no real closure.
  
  
• Questionable behaviour. Upon first contact with a creepy snake-like alien, the first response of one of the biologists is to poke his finger near its head, resulting in his gruesome untimely death.
  
  
• The space-jockey aliens from the original turn out to be wankers.
  
  
• Slightly better link between films needed in final scene. This isn't to say the final scene isn't awesome, but I think a more solid link was needed, perhaps having the alien-esque creature that emerges to be recognisable as a young Alien queen.

It would have been so much better as a direct prequel. For me, the perfect ending would be to have the crashing Engineer ship kill both Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron. In the crashed ship, the space-jockey lies dazed and injured in the iconic pilots seat. In the cargo hold, the thousands of vases containing the black goo and alien life forms lie scattered, some smashed and some opened, revealing Alien eggs, one of which opens.

In the cockpit, the Engineer realises the implications and sends out a transmission as a warning to other spacecraft, which the Nostromo will pick up in Alien. As the Engineer finishes the transmission, a facehugger leaps from the shadows.

OH YEAAAAHHHHHH.

In which Max finishes university

Then he may play on his harp in peace,

In a world such as Heaven intended,

For all the bitterness of man must cease,

And every battle must be ended ..

Holy nuts, it's been nearly a month since I wrote on here.

University has officially finished. The last academic essays I will hopefully ever write have been submitted, the last exams completed and arrangements made for graduation. The relief and happiness of finishing it all totally outweigh any bittersweet feelings or nagging doubts about the future that I anticipated last September. For myself at least, there's a kind of warm stoicism surrounding it all: what has been done is done. Nothing can change it, thus it shouldn't incur any feeling of regret or "what if". 

This celebratory period has however entered it's twilight days, and the real world is gonna bitch slap me into something of substance around the 1st of July, when I will have handed in the keys to my Leeds house and severed all ties to the slovenly, wondrous life of the pre-graduation-ceremony graduate. I think my friend Jazz summed up this time the most succinctly, something to the close effect of "all I've done since finishing is drink alcohol and eat cake".

In addition to drinking and eating cake (I almost wrote 'caking' there, let's make that catch on), I've been to a drag party, ruined my body clock and watched lots of stuff on the internet. I've now become far too keen a slave to Game of Thrones after me and Anya watched the first series in about two days. For any US fans of Thrones, the whole show is a pretty accurate depiction of the North-South relations in the UK, complete with the correct accents. Winterfell is Yorkshire.

Oh yeah, and I made a tit out of myself again. I ran into someone I knew the other day and we had the briefest of brief hello's while on our respective ways to places. Then he said "have a good night" but I first heard it as "how are you mate?". So I said "yeah, not bad. How are you?". And that's where it got awkward.

To recap our conversation:

Him: "Have a good night"

Me: "Yeah, not bad. How are you?"