Ridley Scott Abandons Alien Prequel 170
An anonymous reader writes "With Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox announcing that the much-vaunted 3D Alien prequel has now mutated into an original SF film project called Prometheus, starring Noomi Rapace, the author of this article recalls his 2007 interview with the late Dan O'Bannon, who presumably is happy about the news, wherever he is. Asked what he'd like to see happen to the xenomorph franchise, the Alien co-creator said: 'I'd like to see it stop. A horror movie's a fragile thing, and once you've gotten past the original, it isn't scary anymore. So you do a bunch of sequels to a horror movie, all they do is drain any remaining impact out of the original...it's not as effective as it would have been if you had just left it alone.'"
Applies to all movies (Score:5, Insightful)
So you do a bunch of sequels to a horror movie, all they do is drain any remaining impact out of the original
I'm sure this applies to any hit movie. I mean, the first time they made Scary Movie, it was a guilty pleasure. Now it's, well, just dull. There are few exceptions. Empire Strikes Back thematically seems better than Star Wars. The revelation of the relationship between Luke and Darth Vader was good enough to be parodied by Toy Story (was it 2 or 3?). But the Star Wars prequels? Maybe the producers should take a hint.
Re:Applies to all movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the problem with sequels (Score:4, Insightful)
The Matrix, on the other hand, was a movie where a sequel was completely impossible. Neo had already won. The war was over but for the fussy details. There is simply no possible way that anyone could do a sequel of any good with that movie.
Look, we're all annoyed that they never made any sequels to the Matrix, but I could tell you tons of good stories to follow up on the adventures of Neo vs the Machines.
Neo can hack their world, but they have the hardware and the source code, they can split the matrix into separate cells so his influence is limited, he'd have to log in to each network one after the other and they would each have a different universe in them, with a modified code he'd have to re-hack each time. Then there's the fight in meatspace, that could be interesting, with Neo hacking Squids so their eyes turn blue and the serve humans. The people in the Matrices wouldn't all want to be liberated, they'd be more willing to make a deal with the Agents for steak, they could know that the devil named Neo was coming to rip them from their world to force them to be his servants in a cold gray world where they would never see the sun... etc.
But maybe you're right, maybe if they made a sequel it would suck, and they would end up just being a stupid shoot 'em up with transparent pandering to the religious crowd.