3. John Milton & Paradise Lost
Published in 1667 during a time of severe religious and political upheaval, John Miltons
Paradise Lost stands amongst the greatest pieces of literature ever to have been wrought and conceived by the hands of man (if you havent read it, you really should!). Beyond epic in scope, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse, this great work recounts the fall of mankind, the fall from grace of the angel Satan, and the decision of Christ to sacrifice his future life to atone for mankinds sins. When you hear that Miltons purpose in writing this book was to justify the ways of god to man you can already begin to see the parallels with
Prometheus. Ridley Scott himself has admitted that the 17th Century book served as an inspiration when making this movie, and you can read about that interview
here. When asked if
Paradise Lost was an inspiration for
Prometheus Mr Scott said:
That sounds incredibly pretentiously intellectual. But in a funny sort of way, yes. I started off with a title called Paradise. Either rightly or wrongly, we thought that was telling the audience too much. But then with Prometheus which I thought was bloody well intellectual that wasnt my idea. It was Foxs notion, It came from Tom Rothman, whos a smart fellow. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a good idea. This is about someone who dares and is horribly punished. And besides, do you know something? A little bit of an education at the cinema isnt such a bad thing look at the Engineers, theyre tall and elegant they are the dark angels, not God And the parallels between Miltons book and Scotts movie dont stop with the Engineers being akin to dark angels who meddle in the affairs of man The marble skinned titan-like bodies of the engineers might well have been sculpted by none other than Agsenander of Rhodes himself- and they are wonderfully reminiscent of the style of figures that William Blake used to illustrate
Paradise Lost. And so too are the key themes that are echoed within this marvelous work: the epic struggle between the creator and the created, the dangers of forbidden knowledge (think the black liquid/ the forbidden fruit of The Tree of Life), the terrible consequences of daring to transgress against the gods, and the need for sacrifice before progression (Christ offers himself for mankind in a key moment in the book).