Ridley Scott wishes he hadn’t been forced to choose between Alien: Covenant and Blade Runner 2049
It all worked out okay, because Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant are both good, but what if things had been... different?
Aux News Blade Runner
Way back in 2014, before the orcas had rebelled, before the virus, before we learned that Alexander Hamilton could rap, Ridley Scott was the belle of the ball: 20th Century Fox wanted him to make another Alien movie, and Warner Bros. wanted him to make another Blade Runner movie. Jurassic World and The Force Awakens weren’t out yet, and the idea of doing a new entry in a legendary film franchise was still a relatively novel and exciting idea. Scott must’ve been on top of the world!
But then one of Scott’s suitors developed an ugly new personality trait: jealousy. Forced to choose between the movie that would become Alien: Covenant and the movie that would become Blade Runner 2049, Scott chose the Xenomorphs—or at least a prototype version of the Xenomorphs—over Rick Deckard and the replicants. It all worked out fine, with Covenant being fairly well-received and Denis Villeneuve’s 2049 arguably being better than the original Blade Runner (that’s us, we’re the ones arguing that), but Scott has some regrets about the whole thing.
Scott said as much in a recent Empire piece (via Deadline), saying, “I shouldn’t have had to make that decision, but I had to.” The implication there, in case it wasn’t clear before now, is that Fox made Scott chose between the two projects, and he chose Covenant, but he also told Emprie that he “should have done Blade Runner 2” as well. It’s an interesting “what if” scenario, because 2049 was very good in our reality, but also Villeneuve was presumably working off of a pretty similar script the one Scott would’ve used. Maybe the cast would’ve been different? Maybe Harrison Ford wouldn’t have been as game?
Either way, Scott will still get to live out his “return to Blade Runner” dreams a little bit, since he’s executive producing Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 series. We don’t know much about the series, but it will most likely have to acknowledge some of the big things that happened in 2049—namely the revelation that replicants can have children (happy belated second birthday to young Ana Stelline, who is hopefully doing okay in Lennie James’ orphanage with her little wooden horse). Also, we live in the world where Scott is making a Gladiator sequel, so he’s clearly still the belle of the ball.
(But if Scott had made 2049, who would be making the Dune movies now???)
73 Comments
Of all the celebrity woe-is-mes this has to be the most unecessary. Practice some gratitude, man.
Pretty sure the result of this alternative timeline would have meant that both movies would have sucked instead of just Covenant, so I can’t share the sentiment.
From experience, I’ll say that Alien Covenant is best enjoyed on an airplane with a drink (ditto Prometheus, for that matter).
My favorite alternate timeline theory is that Scott’s brother didn’t die, and he didn’t take time off, so he chose to do Dune instead of passing. That meant that Lynch would have been free to do Return of the Jedi. And without Scott available to do Blade Runner, Kubrick would have stepped in.
IMAGINE THOSE MOVIES.
I think he regrets Blade Runner because it would have been a prestige film. A sequel to a 1980s masterpiece he created would have been a big deal for him. Instead he went with… another Alien cash out? I wonder if there’s more to this story. Perhaps he didn’t want to mess it up but now thinks he would have been able to do it properly. The pressure on him was probably very high to get this right.
I’m very glad he didn’t make it, because I’m sure it would have focused on his incredibly stupid “Deckard is a replicant” take.
You know in Trainspotting when Renton and Sick Boy are having the conversation about great artists who have it but then lose it? I feel like Ridley Scott could easily fit into that category. While his films are still great on a technical level, I don’t think anything touches golden era Scott. He arguably peaked with Gladiator but it was a decent run.
With his SF films specifically, Scott is just one cog in a machine of legendary artists who helped make Alien and Blade Runner happen. It was a moment in time when a group of people who had changed the face of the SF genre came together to make something, and I think Scott with his obsessions with Chariot of the Gods-esque ancient alien conspiracy theories and Pinocchio style mechanical toys wanting to be real people, needs to be kept far, far away from those films.
We didn’t need to know where the Alien came from, the mystery was a major part of the appeal and the fact that the freaky alien mummy was just an exo-suit being worn by a big albino (who was way smaller than the creature in the original film) is one of the most underwhelming retcons in film history.
We also don’t need to know whether or not Deckard was a Replicant, although the screenwriter and actor who played Deckard insist he was human and point out that a Replicant Deckard kind of undermines the entire theme of an emotionally detached human devolving into a killing machine but regaining his humanity through the emotions of the robots he’s sent out to hunt.
We’ve been tongue bathing Scott for decades based largely on two landmark films that were the epitome of collaborative film making.
The insistence that the director is the author of any film they didn’t write, at the very least, is absurd.
Which two films do you mean? He made Thelma and Louis and for that, alone, wins my regard.
I got a ‘tongue bathing’ google alert for this?!
He’s made loads of great films as a director, because he’s an amazing visual stylist. He’s just best kept away from plot and script.
The problem with this approach is that hollywood exists only in a capitalist context, thus you can’t have mysteries that are never explained or solved for big blockbusters because the business pressure to make sequels is too high. The career advancement, prestige, and huge money involved means any beloved act of art will be super-monetized into a sequel franchise. Then how do you write a sequel? You’re stuck with explainitus which ruins so many films. Fans want things explained and that’s what producers and screenwriters give them for ticket sales. And if you don’t explain things you’re either retreading old ground, which would hurt ticket sales, or doing at best a spin-off and not a sequel, which also hurts ticket sales. Leave well enough alone for big moneymakers in Hollywood is, sadly, rare.
but Blade Runner was never a big blockbuster, which the sequel’s box office bore out. so i’m not sure how much demand there was for that particular mystery to be explained
Alien Covenant is a perfectly solid horror movie about killer aliens and evil Michael Fassbender, and Prometheus is a perfectly solid prequel to Alien Covenant. I’d put both of them well above the third and fourth Alien movies. They’re also the only Ridley Scott movies of the past (checks calendar) 41 years that I would consider watching a second time (or a first, for the most part). But holy hell, it’s incredible how the “Deckard is a replicant” thing has eclipsed the movie. And also how the movie’s “classic” status apparently forgives the narrative black hole that is JF Sebastian’s apartment.
Agree on Covenant, but…
…oof, Prometheus perfectly solid, above 3 and 4? It is at-best mediocre. It is constantly undermined by inconsistent and inchoate characterization, things that happen only so certain scenes (mostly action or suspense) can follow and not because of any sense of logic, and trying-yet-failing to make us care about sudden twists that shouldn’t have been twists at all for all the import they actually had. It also has the unfortunate distinction of making several BAFTA and Academy Award winners appear laughable. Saying it is better than Alien 3, which one can at least take semi-seriously as a better than average B-movie, or Alien 4, which is enjoyably not serious at all, is bizarre to me.
To each their own, of course. I just am surprised that this take is possible.
Prometheus was terrible in every way. First of all it had the scientists who discovered the cave paintings suggesting aliens were real to outfit a mission because they “believed” it. That’s not how science works. Yes, I know it’s fiction, but the public gets a lot of ideas of how science works from movies and it doesn’t hurt to actually attempt to show scientists acting in a scientific manner. And the nonsense about having the scared scientist on the planet suddenly decide to pet a snake is by far the stupidest scene in 21st century movies, easily surpassing the go-to example of Indy surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator.
Petting that snake annoyed me so hard. I was literally yelling at the TV. No scientist in the world would do that. No one with an ounce of common sense would do that.
Sadly, I prefer Prometheus to Aliens 3. 4 is kind of a guilty pleasure because of the cast and overall nutiness but 3 disappointed me.
3 felt like it should’ve been the logical followup to Alien.
4 felt like it should’ve been the logical followup to Aliens.
Prometheus felt like its own thing that randomly got tied to the Aliens franchise at the last minute. I loved Shaw as a lead (Noomi Rapace is great in most things she’s in) and David was charmingly sinister.
Alien Covenant felt like the sequel to a sequel to Prometheus. Like 3, it didn’t deliver what was promised from the end of the previous film. Without Shaw, it just seemed like someone just made a checklist of Aliens tropes into a semi-coherent film. I think the only recent sequel to disappoint me as much as Covenant did (in terms of following from the previous setup) was Jurassic World 3.
Alternative take — They all suck.
I can’t defend Prometheus against any of those things – it’s a very dumb movie. I just enjoyed the spectacle of an A-list cast going through the paces of a 50s pulp novel. And the whole movie is gorgeous – the production design does at least half the work. On the other hand, I couldn’t point to a single redeeming quality of Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection. I guess they have Sigourney Weaver going for them. But they’re boring, joyless, and ugly.
I don’t see how JF Sebastian’s apartment is a “narrative black hole”. It was useful to show how even likable sympathetic characters like Sebastian didn’t get that replicants were self-aware and saw no problem with creating his “toys”.
41 years? Not even Thelma and Louis? I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted a sequel so badly as at the end of Prometheus.
If you can get past the beginning of 3 undermining Aliens well-deserved ending, the special edition of 3 is actually pretty damn good.
“He arguably peaked with Gladiator but it was a decent run.”
I would argue he absolutely, positively did *NOT* peak with that mediocre movie.
We didn’t need to know where the Alien came from, the mystery was a major part of the appealIt didn’t need to be A Whole Thing. It was a parasitic species. Maybe on its home planet, it has some kind of predator (a Predator?) to keep it in check, but it managed to spread beyond its homeworld where it no longer had natural predators, thus becoming an invasive species.I made all that up in my head. It’s not that complicated. It totally makes sense and works as a metaphor for how invasive species work on our own planet. It also doesn’t at all necessitate being depicted on screen. I genuinely wonder what watching Prometheus would be like for someone who has never seen any of the Alien movies. Maybe it would feel less dumb. Unfortunately, this is something I’ll never know.
My reading of both BR and BR2049 is that the question of “whether Deckard is a replicant” is actually a question of personhood or subjectivity subsumed and erased by capitalism.The anxiety at the core of the first Blade Runner is that surrounding identity and purpose in a world where everything is fake, everything is a product. There is no longer a natural world and all anyone can do is engage with said products in their little interchangeable pods. The idea that Roy is a fake person and Deckard is a real one becomes, at that point, purely theoretical: the substance of their lives is the same, they are both defined by what they do. “What’s real” becomes a kind of esoteric religious belief, because in material reality they’re both nothing more than functionaries who can do their jobs or be disregarded as broken machines. The fact they both have dreams and feelings and memories stirs the human soul, but the mechanism of their brutalist society doesn’t care.BR2049 takes that last part as a given. K already knows he isn’t real, that the premise of “being real” is mostly immaterial. Where the Voight-Kampff test preyed on the anxiety for humans to “prove” they’re real, the Baseline test exists to enforce the understanding that you can’t be. The reason the whole “who’s the child” mystery works is because it’s an existential reminder that although this society has so completely ceded a person’s value to some capitalistic market sense of the word, there is actually something transcendental or inherently meaningful about being alive. The movie doesn’t “answer the question” of whether Deckard is a replicant or not, because it doesn’t matter. It never did. He’s real because he says he is. In the end, K or Joi or any other “fake” person isn’t validated as real because they were ever human, but because they asserted an identity not defined by the churning wheel of capitalist production or consumption. Lived for some other principle, loved someone, felt things, “saw a miracle,” etc.
Wait, he was in demand after Prometheus? What’s next, Michael Bay to adapt The Three-Body Problem on the strength of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? Tom Hooper to remake West Side Story after adapting Cats?
Funny you should say that since the people who actually adapting The Three-Body Problem are widely perceived to have had their demand fall in recent years.
I had to look that one up: Benioff and Weiss, ouch.
I tried watching Three Body, the Chinese adaptation, but couldn’t find it without subtitles. Looking forward to the Netflix version though I’m not too hopeful it can be adapted well due to its density.
He did The Martian, All the Money in the World…He is good at directing, or to be brutally critical, he has a solid track record of competency, so he’s never going to hurt for work.He also doesn’t have a single writing credit to his name so I do wonder, how much of Prometheus and Covenant are -truly- his fault. (To wit, one of the first’s credited writers is Lindelof…of Watchmen(TV), yes, but also Lost, Cowboys & Aliens and Star Trek Into Darkness…)
You’re right, it’s not really a fair comparison, is it. He’s obviously a solid director technically, unlike Tom Hooper with Cats (and even Les Mis, from the sound of it), and Prometheus was probably an outlier in terms of bad scripts (versus most of what Bay directed starting with Transformers 2).
Hooper’s Les Mis was criticized, but it actually isn’t a bad rendition. Although Les Misérables: The Staged Concert (2019) is probably the best version filmed, although as the name says it is mostly the cast singing on stage with minimal sets.
He also doesn’t have a single writing credit to his nameNo, but he’s pretty well known for demanding rewrites until he gets the script he wants. And isn’t there also some WGA rule that makes it harder for directors to get writing credit?
Scott was definitely the driving force behind Prometheus and Covenant, with the writers almost certainly working to his instruction.He’s basically a great director-for-hire. Hand him a finished script and he will shoot it about as well as anyone could. But the more involved he gets in developing the story in the first place, the worse the outcome is going to be.
Not a Lost fan?
Had to look up The Three-Body Problem. Intriguing; I take it you recommend?
You misspelled “Empire” and “Emprie” in one place above. I agree that 2049 is probably better than the original Bladerunner, and I also enjoyed Covenant as an improvement over Prometheus (Oram’s stupidity is the one bit that annoys me, while there’s a lot more of that in Prometheus).
I also enjoyed Covenant as an improvement over Prometheus“This moist yet firm turd is a significant improvement over the last watery puddle!”
But if Scott had made 2049, who would be making the Dune movies now???
Shyamalan
Lynch?
It’s hard for me to decide, even though Alien Covenant was by far the worse film out of the two, I did get a free pair of brand new Nikes out of it while Blade Runner 2049 got me zero new shoes.
Yeah, I don’t get why Alien: Covenant is viewed so highly above Prometheus.
Prometheus was a beautiful mess, but at least it was memorable (and the cinematography was well above the quality in Covenant). The most memorable thing about Covenant are James Franco burning alive in the first 10 minutes, the black goo wiping out the planet of the Engineers, and the David/Walter switcheroo in the end. Notice something? Nothing involving the xenomorphs, which I think is an indictment against the quality of any Alien movie (and arguably a reason why Prometheus is titled as such).
Hard agree about Prometheus. They’re both flawed movies, but Prometheus looks incredible and was far more ambitious about the kind of mythology it was depicting.Covenant is “a better movie” only in the sense it’s more straightforward, sticks more closely to the horror formula that Alien already executed perfectly. Which is why I’ve never re-watched…why bother with a messier, longer, more derivative Alien when the original absolutely nailed the same assignment 40 years ago?
Yeah, I don’t get why Alien: Covenant is viewed so highly above Prometheus.
Prometheus was a beautiful mess, but at least it was memorable (and the cinematography was well above the quality in Covenant). The most memorable thing about Covenant are James Franco burning alive in the first 10 minutes, the black goo wiping out the planet of the Engineers, and the David/Walter switcheroo in the end. Notice something? Nothing involving the xenomorphs, which I think is an indictment against the quality of any Alien movie (and arguably a reason why Prometheus is titled as such).
It was trying to be 2 wildly different films at the same time.I’ve been saying for years that Covenant was a bad Alien movie, but a fascinating update of The Island of Dr. Moreau.
It all worked out okay, because Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant are both good
Eh, BR 2049 was okay, nowhere near as good as the original, but okay. The best thing that can be said for Alien: Covenant is that it was better than Prometheus.
I forgot that there was even another late-period Alien movie after the terrible “Prometheus.”
I think we can help him get over the emotional hurt this choice caused him by fully supporting his next directorial effort, Aliens vs Predator vs Bladerunner.
Frankly, I wish we hadn’t gotten either movie and that Scott had retired after “Black Rain.” I can’t think of another director who has managed to forget more and more about filmmaking with every subsequent movie he’s made (OK, you can toss in George Lucas). That said, I would have liked to have seen the version of “Dune” he almost made in the mid-eighties (minus the incest) over the recent Netflix-looking thing we got instead.As for what he did to the “Alien” franchise (shudder).
Both movies are mid & Scott is well past his prime. There really is something to Tarantinos 10 movie cap.
His prime was the period where he was successful enough to get directing work, but not famous enough to get the last word on the script.
Alien Covenant is not good
“It all worked out okay, because Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant are both good”Well, you’re half right.
Anyone have other pop culture sites they’d recommend that don’t resort to argument bait-y bullshit like this? I’m done with this site.
it is the only way they get people to comment. Other articles that are more nuanced have almost no one commenting on them, because people here only comment when it talks to them personally or can validate their ideas or tastes.
Or they want to bitch about the AVClub.
I don’t concede that Alien: Covenant was good. i’m glad Ridley didn’t make 2049, while i still that movie was somewhat unnecessary at least it didn’t actively undermine its predecessor the way each Aliens movie seems to diminish the original two movies.
It all worked out okay, because Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant are both goodI was with you on the first one there, but…
The implication there, in case it wasn’t clear before now, is that Fox made Scott [choose] between the two projects, and he chose Covenant, but he also told [Empire] that he “should have done Blade Runner 2” as well.There also seems to be an implication that he thinks his 2049 would’ve been better than Villeneuve’s, which at the very least seems kind of ungracious, if not presumptuous and downright shitty. It’s like when washed up actors talk about how they were originally offered some part that they turned down and someone else went on to do well in, and they have that same “what if” attitude. You probably wouldn’t have done as good a job, sport. Get over it.
because Blade Runner 2049 and Alien: Covenant are both goodWhat Alien Covenant did they see? I saw the one that was hideously stupid and so far beneath the original, you wonder if Ridley Scott isn’t just an elaborate Weekend At Bernie’s doll run by his wife
2049 was good, but you’re crazy to say it was better than the original.
When I see Scott attached to 2099 I see a guy collecting a paycheque for his legacy, not active participation. But I didn’t dig into it or anything.So how do we know when a EP credit is for creative output and not for compensation purposes? Because that applies to a ….lot of stuff.
Scott’s directing CV is a lot more of a mixed bag than I think people want to remember it as being. He directed two of the best sci-fi movies in the canon (Alien and Blade Runner), and so he’s been elevated to this Super Director status. Yes, he’s got some other bangers under his belt: Thelma & Louise, The Martian, Gladiator. But there are also a lot of movies that have been forgettable or even regrettable: Prometheus/Covenant, Robin Hood, House of Gucci.He is a very good director, but I don’t think he has the consistent level of artistry that we usually attribute to the ones we consider great.And thus, I am really glad it was Villeneuve (who may be a great director – needs more movies under his belt before I’ll make that call) who did 2049.
I see people say this a lot about Ridley Scott’s latter day work, but I don’t think consistency is that important to a filmmaker’s reputation, because you can always just ignore the stuff that doesn’t work. Francis Ford Coppola has directed a number of clunkers since the 70s, and even if Megalopolis is unwatchably bad, he will go down as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time because his peak can never be diminished. Same thing for the recently departed William Friedkin, and I could say that for a lot of directors who never matched their early peak, because not every movie can be a timeless classic.Scott has worked non-stop for decades and he’s always putting new work out there, and I respect that he’s not afraid of his shadow and paralyzed by matching his past output. And really, a lot of Ridley Scott’s stuff since Gladiator or so has been quite good. If Hannibal had been his very first movie he’d still be known as a solid bankable studio director.
Post-Gladiator films that are actually really good:Black Hawk DownMatchstick MenKingdom of Heaven (his cut, not the rightfully-reviled theatrical cut)American GangsterThe MartianThe Last DuelAnd honestly, he deserves more credit for making Hannibal into something that’s at least watchable. Thomas Harris’ novel is hot garbage that absolutely reads like a blatant cash-in on The Silence of the Lambs film adaptation, including continuing the film’s continuity rather than his previous novel’s.
I can’t believe how polar oppositely I felt about the Kingdom of Heaven theatrical cut and the director’s cut.
Also, agreed on Matchstick Men and Black Hawk Down. I’d even argue Black Hawk Down is one of his best.
Humanity is bent toward exalting creations over their creator. That should probably be spiritual undertone of Scott’s next project.
Who would be making the Dune movies now?? I know who should be making them: David Lynch.
Lol Alien Covenant is fucking dog shit.
I’m in the minority that was underwhelmed by Blade Runner 2049. Didn’t think it was bad at all, and I absolutely love certain parts, but when looking at it as a whole, I couldn’t shake the feeling of, “Oh. That’s it?” I’ve never seen Alien: Covenant. I’ve never heard anything positive about Alien: Covenant until now, when I learned that it forced Ridley Scott to drop out of 2049. He can still make an entertaining movie, but he strikes me as the type of person who doesn’t grasp why people love the original Blade Runner, and I think his 2049 would’ve been worse.
The Alien franchise stopped at Aliens as far as I’m concerned. Scott made a great horror movie, Cameron turned it into one the best action movies of all time, and that universe was never heard from again. The end.