Whether or not Ridley Scott gets to finish his “Alien” prequel journey remains to be seen, but the film’s tepid box office performance (it looks unlikely to hit $100 million domestic) probably isn’t making 20th Century Fox eager to greenlight anything soon. Nonetheless, this is a story that still needs to be wrapped up, and Damon Lindelof teases where the next installment might go.
As you’ll recall, Lindelof worked on “Prometheus,” but didn’t return for ‘Covenant,’ but he’s had more than enough conversations with Scott about what he wanted to do with the “Alien” series, that he’s well informed of the director’s intentions. And according to Lindelof, the journey of the characters in the prequels to find their makers isn’t over.
“…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,” he told Collider. “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.”
Those themes are still present, but there’s still one more step for the story to take, and it’s one we didn’t see in ‘Covenant.’
“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 explained.
All fascinating stuff on paper, but as we learned with ‘Covenant,’ when paired with schlocky, poorly conceived horror tropes and terrible characterizations, the results are not so compelling. Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section.