Spectre's John Logan Is Rewriting Prometheus 2 Because One Overly-Complicated Turn Deserves Another

What do you do when you’re working on a sequel to a movie that was visually stunning but made heads explode to think about? You hire someone to rewrite it who has just finished doing that. Brace yourselves for John Logan’s version of Alien: Paradise Lost.

In a fairly long profile of Ridley Scott, Variety dropped this bit of info:

Following that double-whammy, it was 30 years before Scott tried his hand at sci-fi again, though he now seems firmly re-entrenched in the zone. “Prometheus,” 2012’s oblique prequel to “Alien,” returned him to the extraterrestrial territory he revisits in “The Martian,” while he and scribe John Logan are revising the script for an as-yet-untitled “Prometheus” sequel — inspired, he says, by Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” — set to start rolling in February.

Does this mean that Alien: Paradise Lost isn’t really the name of the Prometheus sequel? That would be good. Not good? The chances that we find out that the robot head of David from Prometheus is secretly the foster brother of a facehugger. “We were brothers. And now you are only a face and I destroy them!”

Logan’s (Gladiator, Skyfall) last script was Spectre—which had a major problem I’ve already gone on about at length—but basically both it and Skyfall are films where unnecessarily complicated plots are driven by the messed up psychology of the characters. Prometheus was a movie that was likewise far too confusing for its own good. And in every case, there was a director who managed to make visually stunning films that almost managed to make you forget that.

I’m not saying that John Logan is a bad writer, but I am saying that his flaws are exactly the ones already present in the Prometheus DNA. Let’s not compound them.

[via Slashfilm]

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