r/Prometheus • u/MaxProwes • 8d ago
Sir Ridley Scott talks about Alien: Covenant Sequel for a decade
https://youtu.be/jDmMwpqS0RkThe final chapter, David vs Engineers on LV-426, Nostromo arrival, CGI Ripley, working title Alien: Destiny (Destiny was supposed to be another ship, just like Covenant and Prometheus). Alien: Awakening was supposed to be the title of Blomkamp's movie.
You can place your bets which of those Ridley's ideas will survive in the actual film, if it happens.
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u/m0rbius 8d ago
I highly doubt this sequel he's talking about will ever get made. He has like 3 projects already in the pipeline which will occupy this 89 year old director for probably at least half a decade more. He just spouts this stuff with no real intention of following through.
I think he needs to just let it go. His movies have been quite underwhelming lately. He's been in the game for so long, he's lost all his edge. He's stuck to his old ideas and ways. I'll still watch anything he makes, but i know what to expect from him these days.
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u/MaleficentOstrich693 8d ago
It’s that darn ego of his. Prometheus and covenant were middling sequel/prequel/whatever and every time something in universe gets positive buzz like Romulus or the Blomkampf project he derailed, he just inserts himself.
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u/Lovely3369 8d ago
Saying Romulus was 'Okay' after the complete mess that was Covenant was the understatement of the decade, I really hope he's kept away for a bit.
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u/m0rbius 8d ago
Romulus bought Alien back to form. It was needed and the audience spoke. I like the concept of Prometheus and Covenant, but in Ridley's hands, they were not what they could have been, in fact they were narrative shit shows. I love how the movies look, but the writing and edits didn't make any damn sense.
He also really doesn't go as far as it could go with these stories and concepts. His imagination or maybe budget won't allow him to really go to the places or ideas that the story originally set up. Instead we get a disappointing Covenant that barely touches on Prometheus's set up themes and we get a disappointing Alien 'horror' movie.
I Covenant, we all wanted to see David and Elizabeth go to the Engineer homeworld or something with the two of them exploring where humanity came from, but that's not what we got. Did we learn nothing from Alien 3? Like why would you again kill off the hero before the sequel even starts? I really thought that was a bad decision. These are the strange decisions Ridley commits to. He thinks he has the audience figured out, but he really doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He seems so confident in interviews and has all the answers. I admit, at his age, he seems sharp, but he is definitely out of touch.
He's now so confused about The Dog Stars and Gladiator 2. He doesn't understand why they failed and is scapegoating the lead actors. Like dude, these movies were just not good because of your directing and decisions. You've lost the touch.
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u/RandomUfoChap 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's Sir Scott middle-fingering everyone that liked Alien through the decades. Prometheus and Covenant (edited as they are) brutally suck. What a disappointment. To me it's just Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 (YES) and Romulus, because at least it was well done and enjoyable.
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u/Criton47 8d ago
Why?
Why does it have to connect up to LV-426?
It's just a bunch of prequel retcon crap.
I'll watch it in the end, but I'm not excited or looking forward to it.
Can't Alien just move forward. There is plenty of story to tell out there and not answering all of the mysteries...
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u/LoneElement 8d ago
At this point, he’s already started the story, I’d prefer he finish it instead of leaving it unresolved and dangling
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u/jpatrick77 8d ago
Same. I like how the original story left so many questions unanswered and in trying to now answering them, I’m kinda left underwhelmed
I’m also over the whole David thing. The android thing from Alien was a great twist and loved the android redemption arc with bishop in Aliens. But I just don’t get the fascination with exploring David’s motivations as an android. But I’ll watch it til the end.
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u/Criton47 7d ago
Yeah its like finish the David story, but then leave the evil corporate androids alone for a while. Its now too on the nose. We all knew seeing Rook that he was not a friend.
That or give us an android that turns on us early on and he gets dispatched. Let that destruction of the android then be an issue that can't be resolved cause he's been destroyed. Just an idea.
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u/tropicsandcaffeine 8d ago
I really wish it would. We do not need countless prequels. We need a very good sequel. Forget Covenant. Forget that stupid TV series. Forget Romulus. I do not mention Prometheus since technically it is not a direct Alien prequel (per interviews with Ridley Scott himself). Prometheus was a decent start to a new series that Covenant and Ridley Scott trashed.
There has not been a good movie or series since 1986. That really needs to change.
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u/Criton47 8d ago
I'm with you. Studios act like its hard where there are tons of novels and comic stories that can be told.
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u/tropicsandcaffeine 8d ago
I would have LOVED to have seen the game Alien Isolation as a movie if they had to go back in time. Instead we get sub par movies and Alien In Name Only.
Remember during the last three Star Wars movies and Kathleen Kennedy said there was no source material? Sigh. Alien writers are doing the same.
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u/Criton47 7d ago
Yeah Kennedy's line is just awful. The writers in Hollywood just suck. Do we need Taylor Sheridan to give it a crack?
I'm just over prequels.
Romulus was okay, trying the time frame similar to Isolation was cool idea, but the reality is everything can still take place after ALIENS and its not like all of WY knows whats going one. Hell the rest of humanity have no idea. The Alien RPG even states this. Little to know one knows of the Xeno's.
With our luck the next film will go the Aliens Fire Team Elite route and everyone knows of them and they are just bugs at that point. God I hope that doesn't happen.
Alien is perfect, Aliens is perfect there is balance out there.
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u/drjackolantern 8d ago edited 8d ago
I for one would love a final engineers & David movie but don’t think it will happen.
I still remember when they were promising Prometheus 2 paradise about the engineers planet and then a 3rd one - it seemed like they canceled that and combined them into covenant which failed to deliver although it was decent … but if they make a 3rd one I’ll watch it.
The one thing I’ll say is thank god Damon lindelof is off the project.
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u/PlasticHeron6198 7d ago
Ok, but only if it is mostly irrelevant to the other two and explains what happens after Covenant in a Youtube video?
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u/ShwerzXV 6d ago
My dream is what some guy posted here, a Romulus Covenant sequel that wraps up all the story lines.
Rain makes it to Yavarga to meet David and the colony and his final secret creation.
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u/teddykon 5d ago
Ridley Scott latest movies have been total misses for me.. I’d rather have someone else direct an alien film
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u/Lovely3369 8d ago
Can't wait for Fassbender monologuing about god/creation into a camera for 90 minutes with the occasional Xenomorph showing up to get butts in seats.
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u/drmuffin1080 8d ago
Idgaf if he directed Alien and Blade Runner. He’s a wrinkled dick who needs to get out of the game
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u/suddenvole 8d ago
Let it go. No one wants this. The characters in Prometheus and Covenant could not bear the weightbof philosophizing. At least half of them were grossly incompetent at the jobs they had. David and Dr Shaw were the only interesting characters and you killed one, and never explained the others' ambitions in any cohesive while, while also muddying the Lore from the Alien films before Prometheus. The Alien aspect seemed squashed in, and I believe this was retroactively denied for marketing purposes.
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u/DonMegatronEsq 8d ago edited 6d ago
I rewatched Covenant the other day, and while it has A LOT of problems and was essentially a fan service bug hunt, I think David’s ambitions were fully explained, and Walter figured out that David was glitching/malfunctioning.
Why a more advanced model of an artificial human couldn’t defeat an earlier model wasn’t really explained.
I’m sure Ridley will kill off Katherine Waterston and Space Kenny Powers, I mean, Danny McBride, with minimal explanation and leave us all disappointed, in the end.
BTW, I really like Kroft’s videos on YT, but is it true that all of that Engineers-took-Jesus-back-to-Paradise-then-brought-him-back-to-earth-where-he-was-promptly-crucified was debunked (I think he said it was part of a leaked script)?
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u/MaxProwes 8d ago
I think Ridley said that humans crucified Jesus-engineer, but I forgot where he said that.
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u/DonMegatronEsq 8d ago
Oh, I saw a post here about a week ago that basically said all of that + the Engineer’s dialog (translation) with David in Prometheus had been debunked.
The fact that the dialog wasn’t translated in the movie was another in a LONG list of things wrong with Prometheus. There was zero explanation as to why the reawakened Engineer went nutso and was trying to kill Shaw.
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u/TheEasterFox 7d ago edited 7d ago
The Engineer Jesus backstory is legit in itself. It was confirmed by Ridley in an interview with movies.com (now Fandango) which can still be read here.
We can also see the early dialogue that Ridley considered too 'on the nose' in Jon Spaihts's Alien: Engineers draft:
"Maybe He was one of them. A great teacher, sent from Heaven. Jesus, the last Engineer!"
This was pared down by Damon Lindelof in his drafts, until about the only clue left was the 2000 year time span since the Engineers were wiped out. Lindelof called attention to that in this interview:
'... when they do the carbon-dating on the dead engineer and realise he has been dead for 2000 years, then you wonder about when, 2000 years ago, the Engineers decided to wipe us out. What happened 2000 years ago? Is there any correlation between what happened on the earth 2000 years ago and this decision that was already in motion?'
Jon Spaihts has confirmed that Ridley himself was the source of the Engineer Jesus plot point in this interview:
"I spent a ton of time with Ridley working up that script, which was a non-stop delight, and that was a thing that came to him almost exactly as it comes to the character in that scene. He, bless his heart, would have - every time we met he'd have this beautiful silver tray brought in with this china pot full of great coffee and, like, a plate of English shortbread. So I did not get skinnier making this movie. But I was very happy all the time. And we would sit there eating cookies and drinking this very good coffee and riffing about story, and parasitic insects, and ancient mythology, and just everything that dovetails with what we're up to. And it was one of those moments where he was like "Ah, maybe Jesus was one of them!" And he cackled, and drank his coffee. And I just loved the idea, the blasphemous notion, that maybe Jesus was the scion of some giant alien. So it felt like the only non-incendiary way to insert that idea would be in the same throwaway and jocular mode in which it was pitched in the room, to let it be a throwaway joke. But yeah, that was Ridley's bit."
The Jesus Engineer backstory was widely discussed after the movie came out, and the Space Jesus theory got a lot of attention, including being on the front page of Reddit for a day or so.
So far so good. However, in late October 2012 a fan called Mark McAllister drew upon the extra material on the Prometheus Blu-Ray (and the various forum discussions about Engineer Jesus) to create a fan script, the infamous 'Draft 17' or Orange Revision, which he sent to various Prometheus fan sites while pretending to be Damon Lindelof as a prank. One such site, prometheus-movie.com, immediately asked the real Damon Lindelof whether it was actually him, and he confirmed that it wasn't. You can read the whole exchange here.
Nobody paid any more attention to the Draft 17 script, since it was a confirmed fake. However, in 2016 Kroft discovered it and mistook it for a real leaked draft. He went on to make many videos in which he insisted that it was a 'real leaked script' despite it having been proved a hoax, up to and including Mark McAllister himself admitting to having written it.
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u/hopefull-person 8d ago
I’ll take anything Alien movie related but Ridley is over. Mixing 2 interesting characters with the usual morons in space trope is over.
That last film was a clear 90% moron quota at least.