'Prometheus' bound

You get the sense that Scott, 74, shares this view of his career to some extent. It would certainly explain his decision to return to science fiction after three decades with this week’s enigmatic genre entry “Prometheus,” and soon, perhaps, with a rumored “Blade Runner” sequel. (Unless we count the sometime ad man’s memorable, “1984”-inspired Super Bowl spot introducing Apple’s Macintosh, in which case it’s only been, oh, 28 years.)

Scott, his “Prometheus” collaborators, and the studio’s marketing team have teased fans for months with cagey hints and deflections about the film and whether it’s in fact an “Alien” prequel. The official synopsis: “A team of explorers [Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, and Idris Elba] discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.”

So there we have it — clear as the mud on some alien-spittle-slicked extraterrestrial surface. Still, you can bet that Scott’s aim is to school audien­ces all over again in how to redefine a genre. On that note, we submit our list — possibly soon to be amended — of Five Things Ridley Scott Has Helped Teach Us About Sci-Fi:

1. The future is a grimy place to visit, and you wouldn’t want to live there.

In “Alien,” Sigourney Weaver and her shipmates might be sailing through deep space, but there’s no final-frontier wonder about it, none of the excitement that comes with discovering a galaxy far, far away. Their ship, the Nostromo, is a cargo transport carrying  hauling mining ore — the spacefaring equivalent of an oil rig, as the film’s realistically contained, industrial-dreary set design constantly reminds us.

In “Blade Runner,” 2019 Los Angeles has a mesmerizing nighttime sheen, but the light sources include refinery flames, Jumbotron blimps pitching exorbitant off-world escapesa better life off-world (Scott the ad man again), and glowing umbrellas devised to cope with the relentless dirty rain. The film doesn’t hesitate to take showy elements conceptualized by futurist Syd Mead and just scuff them right up; whatever beauty the cityscape offers from a distance, up close it’s shabby, crowded, and, well, gross. (No wonder Harrison Ford’s android-hunting cop does a light undercover bit as a moral-violations inspector.)

In her 1987 book, “Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film,” cinema scholar Vivian Sobchack uses the term “inverted millenarianism” to characterize Scott’s genre aesthetic: “the visual ‘trashing’ and yet operative functioning of what used to be shiny ‘futurist’ technology.” And in this case, we’re not talking about “Star Wars” jalopies destined for great things; brightly lit adventure doesn’t lie just around the corner of Scott’s visual heaps. As “Prometheus” co-writer Damon Lindelof (“Lost”) reflected in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, “Ridley decided to say, I’m going to look at the future the way it might actually look. I’m going to think about what urban design is going to look like, the ships are going to be gritty and grungy, the people who inhabit this world are blue-collar people. He took the fantasy out of sci-fi and grounded it in a profound way.”

2. As the tagline for “Alien” famously put it, “In space no one can hear you scream.” But women sure can roar.

Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is, of course, one of the great, strong maternal heroines in cinema history. No, Scott wasn’t responsible for that poster image of Weaver clutching orphan girl Newt in one arm and a creature-blasting machine gun in the other; that’s from “Aliens,” James Cameron’s 1986 sequel. (For the original, Weaver is probably more typically pictured climactically confronting the monstrous “xenomorph” in her undies. Consider that another lesson from Scott: Space travel demands cottony comfort.) Still, Scott and Weaver together composed all of the key notes for the character. On a ship crewed mostly by men, Ripley is the one with the resourcefulness and resilience to survive. She gives half the orders, always with an eye toward protecting the group. And while she might not have a kid in her care just yet, she’s almost suicidally attentive toward that danger-prone cat. The ship’s computer isn’t the only “Mother” on board the Nostromo.

You can see strands of Ripley’s DNA in a variety of screen heroines who’ve captured our imaginations since. You’d guess Cameron had her somewhere in his mind when he conceived Linda Hamilton’s character for “The Terminator,” and particularly when he had Hamilton morph into a driven she-warrior for “T2.” In Scott’s “Thelma & Louise,” Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, like Ripley, find themselves drawing on surprising reserves of back-against-the-wall gutsiness.

In both the Swedish and Hollywood adaptations of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” cyberpunk hacker Lisbeth Salander also feels, in a way, like a Scott creation. Some have likened the character to Daryl Hannah’s “Blade Runner” wackjob Pris, a lethal, screwed-up, grotesquely made-up fembot. But consider Lisbeth’s dark echoes of Ripley: She’s a formidable fighter when pushed, and at the same time manages to reconcile her ass-kicking streak with a need to look after partner/lover Mikael Blomkvist. No coincidence, maybe, that “Prometheus” lead Rapace played Lisbeth in the Swedish “Tattoo.”

3. By definition, “creature features” feature creatures — so better make ’em good and scary.

Scott studied at art school and draws his own elaborately composed storyboards. Early in his career, he even held a BBC production gig that nearly saw him overseeing design on “Doctor Who.” (A scheduling conflict reportedly killed an assignment to develop cult-fave robotic villains the Daleks.) Despite this background — or because of it — he shrewdly enlisted Swiss surrealist artist H.R. Giger to handle the creature designs for “Alien.” (Same idea with Mead on “Blade Runner.”) The phallic, eyeless skull, the telescoping razor-toothed maw, the creepy biomechanical hide — all of it flowed from Giger’s primal renderings. Few movie monsters have been more iconic.

It’s telling that today, even with all of the effects technology at Hollywood’s disposal, sci-fi movies can’t seem to conjure up anything even a fraction as potent. Any guaranteed lasting memories of the beasties in “Men in Black 3”? Probably not. “John Carter”? Nope. “Cowboys & Aliens”? Sorry, pardners. But hey, good news: Giger reportedly contributed a couple of background elements to “Prometheus.”

4. Androids apparently never got the memo re: Better Living Through Technology.

The “replicants” of “Blade Runner” — Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty, Hannah’s Pris, and friends — are the ultimate in existential angst, artificial beings tormented by questions of identity and purpose precisely because they know that answers might be out there. No wonder they’re so unforgettably, homicidally nuts (“Batty” is right).

This wasn’t the first time that Scott imagined that humanoid robots might have it in for us. In “Alien,” Ian Holm’s coldly clinical undercover android Ash established the genus’s insidiousness in fine, freaky style. Part of the fun of re-watching “Alien” is recognizing the bird-of-prey tics Holm flashes as Ash dispassionately studies the monster’s vivisection of the crew. Wired magazine featured an intriguing piece a few months back discussing a robotics-confounding concept that one scientist has dubbed “the uncanny valley” — the eerie sensation that people feel seeing creations that appear almost human, but not quite. While Ash might not be on the valley floor — he’s played mostly by a human performer, of course — we’d say he’s on the slope leading there.

5. Forget about any unwritten rules against leaving fans hanging. Do just that, and they’ll hang with you for decades.

Is there some definitive read that “Blade Runner” audiences are meant to have on the origami unicorn that Edward James Olmos’s inscrutable cop leaves for Harrison Ford’s Deckard and lover/replicant Rachael (Sean Young) at the film’s conclusion? Cultists still wonder, and not just idly. (Skeptical? Try Googling “ ‘Blade Runner’ unanswered questions.”) What was the story behind, say, the fossilized “Space Jockey” that Ripley’s crewmates stumble onto when they ill-advisedly answer that fateful distress signal? We never found out — at least not until now, as word has it that “Prometheus” revisits the mystery. Not a bad job of holding fans’ attention for a director who’s been otherwise occupied since you were knee-high to a chestburster.

Tom Russo can be reached at trusso2222@gmail.com.