‘Prometheus’ may not have been much of a success in the US– It OPENED in second behind ‘Madagascar 3’!– and was mostly panned by critics and audiences, but the film made over $400 million worldwide and director Ridley Scott apparently has more story to tell, so a sequel is still in the works. The appeal of ‘Prometheus’ was that it was sold as a prequel to ‘Alien’, but Scott has already stated that the famous toothy monstrosities won’t be in the sequel, so… what’s the point?
Scott, for his part, seems more interested in continuing to pursue the “Engineers” the life creators of the first film. What else can film fans expect from ‘Prometheus 2’?
While promoting his new movie ‘The Martian’, Scott stated:
“You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can’t because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from, I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don’t think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it.
That raises the question to me, same as was depicted in 2001 when that object comes hurtling through space, and lands in Ethiopia. And an ape that had been grubbing around in the water hole with all of them bickering at each other, goes up and touches it. He has a bigger thought injected into his brain than Newton got sitting under a tree and seeing an apple fall. Stanley then picks something metaphorically poetic in its violence, as the ape picks up a hip bone and brains the anteater so they can eat him. That is one gigantic, magnificent leap of a thousand years of evolution; that is where the world begins. It is pretty grand thinking, and that’s what I want to explore. You’ve got to go back and find those engineers and see what they are thinking. If engineers are the forerunners of us, and therefore were creators of life forms in places that were possible for biology to function, who created that? Where’s the big boy? You think this was all an accident? I don’t know. Even Stephen Hawking now says, I am not sure. He no longer believes in the big bang.”
Get all that?
‘Prometheus’ was grandiose for sure, but for all its lofty intentions, most critics agree that it fell short. And since the ‘Alien’ element– the one thing that drew audiences in the first place– won’t be a part, is there anything really appealing about this extraterrestrial search of the creation of life?
What do you think? Do you trust in Scott’s vision for higher life in the universe? Or are you waiting to see how the film turns out before deciding?
