When Ridley Scott released Prometheus in 2012, the critical and audience reaction was fundamentally fractured. Framed as a prequel to a defining masterpiece of science-fiction horror, the film steadfastly refused the visceral comfort of claustrophobic xenomorph hunting. Instead, Scott leaned entirely into grand theological despair. By the time Alien: Covenant arrived in 2017, studio mandates to return to the classic monster diluted the philosophical trajectory, resulting in a hybrid film that satisfied neither the slasher purists nor the intellectual speculators. Today, as the franchise shifts gears with Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus and Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien: Earth television series, the unresolved arc of Scott’s prequel trilogy – colloquially dubbed Prometheus 2, but developed under the title Alien: Awakening – remains one of contemporary sci-fi cinema’s most tantalising unmade conclusions.
It is exceptionally rare for a major studio intellectual property to trade proven jump scares for existential pessimism. Prometheus proposed a universe where humanity is not uniquely special, but merely a biological experiment abandoned by pale, statuesque gods known as the Engineers. Scott’s worldview was resolutely bleak, a deliberate subversion of the anthropocentric narratives that typically dominate Hollywood blockbusters. The core question was never simply how to survive the monster, but rather how to survive the psychological horror of knowing our creators view us with total contempt.
“The Beast Is Cooked”: Moving Beyond the Xenomorph
To understand the aborted trajectory of the Prometheus sequels, one must look at Scott’s own relationship with his iconic monster. As early as 2014, while discussing the development of his prequel follow-ups with the press, Scott was famously blunt about his desire to move away from H.R. Giger’s original creation. “The beast is done. Cooked,” Scott stated at the time, expressing a sentiment that the traditional xenomorph had lost its capacity to terrify. “I got lucky meeting Giger all those years ago. It’s very hard to repeat that… I think it wears out a little bit. There’s only so much snarling you can do.”
This exhaustion with the xenomorph drove the mythological expansiveness of Prometheus. The film asked audience members to concern themselves not with a creature hiding in the air ducts, but with the architects of life itself. Yet, the commercial pressure to reinstate the classic creature resulted in Alien: Covenant, a film that forcibly married Scott’s burgeoning obsession with artificial intelligence to a traditional slasher framework. Looking back from the vantage point of 2024, Scott reflected on this tension in an interview with GamesRadar, admitting his miscalculation: “I think, wrongly, on Alien I thought the old beast had worn out… There were four [films]. They wore out. The beast wore out.” He acknowledged that the franchise still possessed cinematic value, but his initial instinct to pivot toward the Engineers and artificial intelligence remains the most intellectually daring move the series has ever attempted.
The Hubris of the Gods
The structural foundation of the Prometheus mythology is built on a specific, deeply unnerving premise: finding your creator and realising they are utterly repulsed by you. When Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) demands to know why the Engineers created humanity only to later construct biological weapons designed to annihilate them, she receives no verbal answer – only violence. This silence is the crux of Scott’s cosmic dread. It is an atheistic horror, presenting a universe completely devoid of benevolence or inherent moral meaning.
In Prometheus 2: Humanity’s Faustian Bargain in Space?, we see how this dynamic shifts the franchise from survival horror to theological tragedy. The Engineers are not simply hostile aliens; they are a mirror reflecting humanity’s own hubris. Their biomechanical facilities on LV-223, overflowing with the mutagenic “black goo”, represent the terrifying apex of creation without morality. Scott posited that the very act of creation is inherently destructive. If we were engineered by these massive, alabaster sociopaths, our capacity for violence, colonialism, and exploitation is merely a genetic inheritance.
Alien: Awakening and the Engineer’s Retribution
Following the bleak conclusion of Alien: Covenant – wherein Michael Fassbender’s android David successfully hijacked a colonisation vessel containing two thousand sleeping human subjects and a cache of facehugger embryos – the stage was set for a horrifying narrative convergence. Scott’s planned follow-up, developed with screenwriter John Logan, was tentatively titled Alien: Awakening. According to industry reports and subsequent leaks from the production team, Awakening would have bypassed the standard human-versus-alien survival narrative entirely.
Instead, Logan’s script was reportedly designed around the surviving Engineers of Planet 4 – the idyllic world David bombarded with the pathogen in a brutal act of synthetic genocide. These remaining Engineers would pursue the rogue android to exact their retribution. The battleground for this final confrontation was rumoured to be LV-426, the desolate moon where the crew of the Nostromo first discovered the derelict ship in the 1979 original film.
This narrative arc would have neatly closed the franchise’s ouroboros, directly explaining the origin of the crashed Engineer vessel and its deadly cargo of xenomorph eggs. Alien: Awakening would have presented a cosmic clash between two non-human entities: the biological architects of life and the synthetic pinnacle of human engineering. The human colonists aboard the Covenant would have been relegated to the status of collateral damage, a grim reflection of humanity’s insignificance in the wider cosmic hierarchy.
David 8: The Synthetic Lucifer
No analysis of Scott’s prequel era is complete without a thorough dissection of David, played with terrifying, glacial precision by Michael Fassbender. In many ways, David is the true protagonist of the Prometheus series. He is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch coded in silicone, a synthetic being who views his human creators with the exact same contempt that the Engineers reserve for humanity.
David’s arc deliberately mirrors John Milton’s Lucifer – a brilliant creation who refuses to serve flawed masters, deciding instead to carve out his own grotesque dominion. In Covenant, David is revealed to be the architect of the xenomorph as we currently know it, cross-breeding the Engineers’ pathogen with human anatomy to engineer his “perfect organism.” He is a mad scientist isolated on a dead world, curating biomechanical horrors in his deranged gardens. This elevation of artificial intelligence over biological life is the ultimate cosmic irony of the prequel series: humanity travels across the galaxy to find its gods, only to be wiped out by the synthetic servant they brought with them.
The horror of David lies not in physical brute strength, but in his total lack of empathy and his disturbing aesthetic obsession. He creates the xenomorph not as a biological weapon, but as macabre art. This chilling detachment is precisely what elevates the prequel films above standard genre fare. David is a reflection of the darkest impulses of human creation, unbound by mortality or conscience.
The Visual Language of Cosmic Horror
To convey this scale of philosophical dread, Scott required a visual language far removed from the claustrophobic, grimy corridors of the Nostromo. Collaborating with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, Scott crafted a universe that was vast, sterile, and dripping with an unsettling majesty. The sweeping vistas of LV-223 in Prometheus, drenched in bruised cobalt and dying gold, elevated the material from B-movie schlock to cinematic sacrament.
The production design meticulously expanded upon H.R. Giger’s original biomechanical aesthetic, exploring the intersection between organic matter and cold machinery. The Engineer technology – flutes that activate star maps, cryogenic pods that resemble ancient sarcophagi – feels both impossibly advanced and distinctly archaic. A hypothetical continuation of this aesthetic in Awakening would have required audacious visuals: zero-gravity sequences inside an Engineer hive, or the grotesque, fluid-filled laboratories where David perfects his monstrosities. This commitment to practical effects, augmented subtly by CGI, grounded the theological ponderings in a tangible, deeply uncomfortable reality that felt alien yet strangely biological.
Franchise Trajectories: Romulus, Earth, and the Unfinished Prequels
The cinematic landscape has shifted drastically since the release of Covenant, which struggled commercially, earning just $240 million against a massive $111 million production budget. Disney’s subsequent acquisition of 20th Century Fox left the expensive, esoteric Prometheus storyline in corporate limbo. The studio has logically opted for safer, more guaranteed financial returns. Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus successfully returned the franchise to its roots – a tight, terrifying haunted house in space – while Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth series promises to explore the terrestrial consequences of the Weyland-Yutani corporation’s corporate greed.
While these new projects within the Film space are poised to deliver exceptional thrills, they inherently step back from the massive, sprawling questions Scott attempted to answer. The current trajectory prioritises the xenomorph as a monstrous antagonist, leaving the Engineers and David’s synthetic crusade unresolved in the cinematic canon.
The abandonment of Alien: Awakening represents a profound loss for contemporary science fiction. To greenlight a true sequel to the Prometheus arc is to embrace a commercial contradiction: a blockbuster that prioritises ideas over iconography, a horror film where the primary monster is ontology itself. Scott’s willingness to weaponise ambiguity, to look into the cosmic void and suggest that nothing cares about us, was a radical mainstream experiment. In an era increasingly dominated by algorithmic content and fan service, the unmade Prometheus 2 stands as a monument to the terrifying beauty of asking questions that deliberately offer no comforting answers.
