Saturday, 9 June 2012

Quatermass and the Pit


Basically covers the same ground as Prometheus, but does a much better job.

2 comments:

eon said...

Of course, the tripedal Martian arthropods just wanted us to be surrogate Martians, not incubators and/or lunch.

The only thing missing from either version (TV or movie- I have both on video) is Quatermass demolishing Breen & Co.'s vision of "policing the Earth" with nuclear missiles from a Moon base. It was a common pipe dream of the 1950s, and frequently used to justify the Space Race (in the US), but the physics are against it.

(I.E., hitting a point target a quarter-million miles away on inertial guidance alone. Any sort of radio command correction is NBG, as the other side will be jamming for all they're worth. Not to mention time lag- two to three days from launch to target. ICBMs are about two orders of magnitude more cost-effective.)


cheers

eon

Fruitbat44 said...

‘Quatermass and The Pit’ is IMHO the scariest of the Quatermass movies.

OTOH I would consider 'Prometheus' to be . . . not bad, but seriously lacking the Wow! factor of either 'Alien' or 'Aliens.'

Hmmm . . . someone who while acknowledging the faults of 'Prometheus' rates it very highly made an interesting comment on it: "It's HP Lovecraft's 'The Mountains of Madness' in space!"