Now that Ridley Scott’s much-awaited sequel to Prometheus, Alien Covenant has had its time on the cinematic screen it’s only right that audiences of the film and the filmmakers start looking to the future of the much-loved Alien saga. In a recent interview with Collider, the original writer, Damon Lindelof, who was brought on board to hone Jon Spaihts story of the Engineers in Prometheus has given a little insight into what Scott’s follow-up might just look like.
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Whilst Lindelof wasn’t part of the writing team for Alien Covenant due to other commitments he had spent time with Scott examining the direction that a follow on from Covenant could take and the onus seems to lay heavy on the engineers.
“I think that one of the conversations that we had at the end of Prometheus is Shaw and David have basically locked in on the coordinates of the planet where the Engineers came from. What does that place look like? Ridley called it ‘Paradise’. What happens when they land on that planet? It doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten there yet in Covenant, Covenant felt like it maybe was a detour prior to them arriving at the place of origin so I don’t want to spoil any place that he might still be wanting to go, but the conversations that he and I had about where the story goes next were largely about the place where the Engineers were from and less the events of Covenant.”
Lindelof went on further to explain that the themes of that were favoured by the pair was Scott’s marrying the themes of both Prometheus and Blade Runner of creation.
“I don’t know, I mean we weren’t necessarily talking about what the sequel to Prometheus would be as opposed to like where this journey was going to end up, and I think that the themes that Ridley was really interested in overlapped with themes that I was interested in, which is things that he had already explored in Blade Runner. He had always explained Prometheus to me as the marriage between Alien and Blade Runner because he was interested in this idea of creation and that there were three generations of creation. You have man and his creation, which are the synthetic beings, the androids, the robots, replicants, whatever you wanna call them depending on which Ridley movie you’re in. And then what’s the next level of that, which is who created man? So that search for God as it were to go and ask, ‘Why did you make me and to what end?’ was something that Ridley was interested in and was in Jon Spaihts’ draft long before I came along, and so that was the thing that I keyed into.”
The home of the Engineers could be a very likely story for Scott to concentrate next, and it would make a whole lot of sense to delve deeper into the unknown, whatever Scott decides it will certainly serve up a rich offering.
I really like “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant” and would love to see the end of the story.
Box office hasn’t been great so far, therefore I would advice them to finish the prequels as a trilogy – with one more epic film that ties all prequels together and finally connects them at the end to the first “Alien” film. I would love to see an army of freak creatures led by David The Android in a war against the Engineers and Humanity: Robots against Gods and Man. That sounds like the most epic battle ever & it offers amazing visual opportunities for Ridley Scott.
There are still important questions to answer and the next sequel should deliver otherwise it will further alienate the fans: Who did create man? If it were the Engineers, why did they try to wipe out humanity again? Why did David wipe out the civilization of the aliens-that-look-like-Engineers? How does the Black Goo really work? Who did create the Black Goo in the first place?
While it’s cool that the prequels don’t explain everything and demand the audience to think for themselves, you still need to offer reasons and motivations for the characters’ actions & at least some answers on the big questions that started the prequel series.
Good luck!