While it may have stumbled in its execution (not to mention questionable character motivations and decision making skills), you can’t fault Prometheus for not having grandiose ideas as it is essentially a search for God. The end of the film left a number of lingering questions, but director Ridley Scott now says that the upcoming Prometheus 2 will address the biggest of these uncertainties.
Hyping up his latest film, the Matt Damon-starring The Martian, at the Toronto International Film Festival, Collider asked Scott about his next film—Prometheus 2 is reportedly next up on his busy docket. One of the things he revealed is that the film will deal with who the Engineers are, and why they created such terrible things. He said:
It starts off with a very grand idea—or a grand question, really. Who are they and why did they create such evil biology and bacteriology? And [in creating], to protect themselves from what? So the questions are answered there, or rather, beginning to be answered in Prometheus 2.
After a disastrous trip to a distant moon in the hopes of finding the origins of the human race, Prometheus wrapped up with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the android David (Michael Fassbender) blasting off into space, continuing the search for our creators. But now they have another big question, why did the Engineers create such nasty things, which were apparently designed to land on, and presumably destroy all life on Earth. So they don’t just want to find our creators, they want to find out why our creators were being kind of dicks and wanted to wipe us out.
According to another report coming out of TIFF, both Rapace and Fassbender are on board to reprise their roles—they’re the only survivors of the first film—which answers one question we had about the movie. Scott has said that there were a crazy number of drafts floating around (at one point he said there were 15), and Michael Green (Green Lantern) is reportedly handling the latest version, though we’re not sure what stage the writing process is at right now.
These are things that we’ll likely find out before too awful long, as Prometheus 2 is slated to start filming in January of 2016. There are a ton of potential avenues that the film could follow, but given Ridley Scott’s latest comments, it sounds like it will continue to delve into the the wide reaching themes of creation and creators, of gods, and, perhaps as Noomi Rapace once suggested, of devils.
While the finished product of Prometheus may have left much to be desired—for all of its faults, it’s still a visually stunning movie—with the positive remarks The Martian has received (including our own glowing review), it’s nice to see Ridley Scott diving back into science fiction head first.
Prometheus 2 is scheduled for release in 2017.
