Prometheus, Ridley Scott's upcoming Alien sorta-prequel, is the only film I care about in 2012. The Avengers? Slag off! The Dark Knight Rises? Only if Marion Cotillard plays Talia al Ghul. OK, so I'll coincidentally be in Tokyo this May for the premiere of Sadako 3D—of Ringu/The Ring fame—but that's neither here nor there.

After a lot of hinting and fanboy-rumoring, Scott unveiled a bonkers Prometheus trailer at WonderCon 2012. Predictably, the blogs facehugged the shit out of it, parsing out each and every detail. Bloody Disgusting, one of my trusted go-to sites for all that is cinematically bloody and/or disgusting, offered a slew of screen-grabs with commentary like “yes, that looks like a Xenomorph to me, too.” (If you're just joining the party, theXenomorph was the primary antagonist of the Alien film series. Quoth Wikipedia,“a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species.”)

I've been intrigued since a Sky News tip that the Space Jockey, that huge-ass desiccated lifeform from the original Alien, will figure significantly inPrometheus. Also: that H.R. Giger, the Swiss biomechanical alchemist responsible for the Alien design itself, is contributing Prometheus set designs. Corridors that resemble jumbo industrial-design ribcages? A fully-functioning Derelict, the junked wishbone-shaped spacecraft containing the long-dead Space Jockey? “Proper” Xenomorphs or not, I am beyond stoked.

A fan already spliced the Prometheus teaser from this past December withclips from Alien, highlighting the films' respective contextual similarities, down to the repeating, distorted Wilhelm screams. Blogging last month about the rumored Blade Runner redo and the perils of cinematic replication, I included Scott's comment that Prometheus shares “strands ofAlien's DNA, so to speak.” More than that: they exist emphatically within the same universe.

This ain't no Men in Black III, that's for damn sure. Like the Greek god himself, Scott brings us mortals a much-needed dose of “hard sci-fi,” perfected by him in Blade Runner and largely poisoned by American cinema subsequently. I was a kid when James Cameron's Aliens came out, which was awesomely entertaining but lacked that deep-space dread of Scott's original. In spite of a few highlights—like David Twohy's genuinely dope Pitch Black (no small thanks to Vin Diesel) and Paul Anderson's Event Horizon for its glorious gore—there hasn't been a Scott-calibre sci-fi thriller since.

“In space, no one can hear you scream,” says that iconic Alien trailer. Guess what: that doesn't apply to theaters. There's gonna be a lot of screaming, and June 8 can't come any quicker.

Image: courtesy Badass Digest