Prometheus, are you seeing this? Ridley Scott’s titular and ultra-futuristic space vessel may have been blown to kingdom come during the divisive 2012 original, but that hasn’t dampened the director’s enthusiasm for his adjacent sci-fi universe. While Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5 quietly marches on in development, it’s Scott’s Prometheus 2 that is seemingly taking precedent at 20th Century Fox, and now the esteemed filmmaker has confirmed that the sequel will enter production in February 2016.
News comes by way of Deadline, who spoke with Scott during the Toronto International Film Festival, and it only aligns with previous reports that Prometheus 2 would be acting as the director’s next project once work is completed on his soon-to-be-released genre piece, The Martian.
[zergpaid]Clearly revelling his time back in the genre he helped define, Sir Ridley Scott has been ruminating on the set-up for the sequel for some time. Further in the interview, he also confirmed that so-hot-right-now Michael Fassbender will reprise his role as the (still headless?) synthetic David, while Noomi Rapace is back on board for another venture into the dark recesses of space.
But given that many deem Prometheus 2 to be an unnecessary follow-up, Scott also touched upon the bigger picture that the sequel will tackle – a bigger picture that was left frustratingly underexposed in the original film.
“You [could] leave the first film alone and jump ahead,” muses Sir Ridders, “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?
In addition, the filmmaker references the genre’s greats and, in particular, the seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how his follow-up will tap into many of the same themes.
“That raises the question to me,” he continues, “same as was depicted in 2001 when… that ape that had been grubbing around in the water hole with all of them bickering at each other… has a bigger thought injected into his brain than Newton got sitting under a tree and seeing an apple fall. 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.”
With a production start date in place, Fox has tentatively slated Prometheus 2 for a release in late 2016 or, in the more likely scenario, early 2017.