At the moment that this week's announcement from Fox that Ridley Scott's mystery movie being released in 2016 was made, science-fiction fans all over the world experienced an inexplicable feeling of dread in the pits of their stomachs. Upon learning that Prometheus 2 is a concrete prospect, that dread likely turned to ambivalent resignation that the sequel's likely to be just as ill-conceived and poorly executed as the first (or is that fifth? It's hard to tell with Alien movies. Does Aliens vs. Predator count?). Can we really expect anything better? Yes, Prometheus had a whole host of problems that have been exhaustively detailed in many of the internet's hate-outlets: script issues, poor character motivations, a shaky-at-best plot and some of the dumbest intergalactic scientists in movie history being just a fraction of the criticisms leveled at Ridley Scott's first new sci-fi picture since Blade Runner. Well, at least it looked pretty. But what if all of the issues with Prometheus could be solved in the sequel? What if, instead of relying on nostalgia for a franchise he helped start over 30 years ago to put bums in seats, the director actually tried to make a decent movie that really explored the themes the first movie just danced around and pointed at before being crushed by a rolling circular spaceship it didn't have the good sense to sidestep? Well, with that in mind, here are some suggestions that Scott and his creative team should perhaps consider when they start work in earnest if they don't want the sequel to the prequel to Alien to be quite as maligned as the first one...
