Let’s cut to the chase. This week, Ridley Scott dropped a bunch of knowledge on the public regarding his many splendored sequels/prequel-sequels currently in development. Somewhere in there, he revealed that the xenomorphs from Alien would not make an appearance in Prometheus 2.
From Yahoo Movies UK:
“The beast is done. Cooked,” he says simply. “I got lucky meeting Giger all those years ago. It’s very hard to repeat that. I just happen to be the one who forced it through because they said it’s obscene. They didn’t want to do it and I said, ‘I want to do it, it’s fantastic’. But after four (he has conveniently forgotten the ‘AvP’ movies), I think it wears out a little bit. There’s only so much snarling you can do. I think you’ve got to come back with something more interesting. And I think we’ve found the next step. I thought the Engineers were quite a good start.”
This is nothing but good news. Ridley doesn’t want to make another movie with the xenomorph in it and he has the foresight to recognize that, rather than dragging the creature through an uninspired bit of fan obligation. GOOD. Let someone hungry to tackle the franchise have a crack at a sequel. There’s a far better chance of that movie “working” if the person behind the camera, you know, actually wants to make another Alien film. But Ridley wants to make an “Engineer” film, and he wants the headless (or was it bodiless?) android David along for the ride.
“You’ll probably have to go with [Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw] and [Michael Fassbender’s android David] – without his head. Find out how he gets his head back on!”
The best moments in Prometheus involve Fassbender’s David wandering around an empty space ship while everyone else snoozes in cryosleep. It was moody, atmospheric and it explained David’s character to us in an almost purely visual way. If Ridley wants to make a movie where that character is now one of two humanoids at the center of some cosmic terror, then sign me up. I’m completely fine with walking in to the next Prometheus installment, void of the misconception that the story is somehow tied to Alien.
This news also confirms something about Prometheus that I happen to like: the xenomorphs are a cosmic joke. There’s no further mystery to them, because we saw it all. The Engineers made their military goo, a bunch of their creations come looking for them, got sick from the military goo, created a parasite that attached to the Engineer and belched the most fearsome bug in the galaxy from its chest. We’re now free to explore another side of a universe that has otherwise felt very small. While Weyland Yutani spends the next few centuries puzzling over how to harvest a queen, a headless android and a barren woman get to astrotrip on a quest for the meaning of life. And we get to see it through Ridley Scott’s remarkable eye for production design and detail. That sounds way better than more “snarling.”