Giant Freakin Robot

We’ve made some Christmas wishes recently here at Giant Freakin’ Robot, but I can’t trust this wish with only one mere holiday. I need to use up an entire year of days, or possibly even a decade, in order to make this one come true. For my wish is for director Ridley Scott to go the rest of his career without going forward with a sequel to any of his films. And if my nickname of Ridley “One and Done” Scott would catch on, that would be cool, too.

Scott is currently in production on one of my most anticipated features of 2015 (or whenever it actually comes out), an adaptation of Andy Weir’s stellar sci-fi novel The Martian. It’s a film that fits into his wheelhouse quite well, as it takes an epic-scale story and brings it down to a human level. But just because Scott has a wheelhouse doesn’t mean he’s always successful with the results, and he’s got enough solid flicks on his resume that any project he talks about gets mass amounts of attention. He’s been talking a lot about extending the story of both a genre classic, Blade Runner, and what is already a pseudo-sequel, Prometheus.

The idea of Blade Runner 2 is a tricky proposition for most of us, especially happening 30 plus years down the road. It sounds exciting at first, like, “Ooh, more Blade Runner,” but when we start to actually think about what that means all the creeping fears and concerns materialize, and we worry that it will be terrible and taint the legacy of the first film. There’s a script for Blade Runner 2, and apparently at least one key player, Harrison Ford, thinks it’s pretty awesome.

Pumping his latest film, the biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott stopped to talk to MTV, and as happens rather frequently, the subject of Blade Runner 2 came up. (So did Prometheus 2, which we’ll get to as well.) Scott confirmed that the screenplay is ready to go, but also reiterated that he’s not going to direct. (Honestly, after watching Exodus, which is a jumbled mess of a movie, and more than anything boring as all hell, this bit of news doesn’t bum me out as much as it did a couple of weeks ago.)

Talking about Prometheus 2 a while back, director Ridley Scott indicated that, though set in the same universe as his 1979 classic Alien, the new film will not feature the iconic xenomorphs. While we were disappointed to hear that we won’t be seeing one of the most terrifying creatures in cinema history, that doesn’t mean there won’t be all kinds of nasty beasts to contend with, and Scott has some big, terrifying changes in mind.

A while back, talking about the various drafts of the scripts, Scott said that, “there’s only so much snarling you can do,” and that he intends to introduce something new and “interesting.” He left it at that for the time, but recently, speaking to The Australian, he had more specific things to add to the conversation:

Prometheus is easily one of the most frustrating films of the past decade. Sure, with Ridley Scott returning to the fictional universe he helped birth in Alien, expectations were always going to set far higher than the finished film had any chance of reaching. But most of the problems came down to a script filled with idiotic characters doing idiotic thing, which made Prometheus worse than just a flawed film: it was a film flawed in easily avoidable ways. Still, we reluctantly remain excited about the prospect of the sequel Prometheus’ final moments teased, and we aren’t the only ones. Actress Noomi Rapace, who played Elizabeth Shaw in the film, says she’s just as eager to see where Shaw and David’s voyage takes them as we are.

Speaking to MTV News, it’s no real surprise that Rapace didn’t have any specific plot bombshells to drop. At this point I’m not sure even Ridley Scott knows what the hell is going to happen in Prometheus 2. Still, she agreed that Shaw’s journey definitely has to take her to the “Paradise” of the enigmatic and occasionally genocidal engineers. Rapace told MTV, “She can’t go to Earth. There’s nothing left for her there, really. She wants to go to where they came from. … What’s there? I don’t know, but she wants answers. I feel like I’m sharing her curiosity, but also her anger.” So Shaw’s basically in the same boat as the rest of us.

Ridley Scott is a busy man. His biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings opens this December, he’s getting ready to film The Martian—putting together one hell of a cast in the process—and the wheels are always turning when it comes to revisiting two of his bigger sci-fi films, Blade Runner and Prometheus. The director recently took a few minutes to address the status of both Blade Runner 2 and Prometheus 2, which is something we always appreciate.

Talking to Yahoo about Exodus, there was also a great deal of time dedicated to these two projects, and we have to admit, we’re way more interested in either one of these than seeing another Moses movie. According to the director, Prometheus 2 is well under way. He says, “Right now, as we speak, it’s being written. I’ve had 15 drafts evolving. I definitely want to do that again because I really enjoyed doing ‘Prometheus’.”

Yesterday Dark Horse launched Fire and Stone, an ambitious, multi-series comics event that explores the shared mythology of Aliens, Prometheus, and Predator. The story will encompass four new comics series: in addition to Prometheus: Fire and Stone, Aliens, Alien vs. Predator, and Predator series will follow, all culminating in a standalone issue to wrap up all the story threads.

Things kicked off with this week’s Prometheus: Fire and Stone #1, which follows a voyage back to LV-223, the mysterious moon that was the site of much calamity for Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and company in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. After the events of the movie, it seemed inevitable that someone would send a second mission to LV-223, but that mission doesn’t unfold exactly as you might expect. We’ll dig into the questions and revelations of Prometheus: Fire and Stone after this

SPOILER WARNING!