8 Things Prometheus 2 Must Do To Avoid Being Terrible

4. Stop Referencing Older Movies In Otherwise Pointless Scenes

Let's not get started on LVs and numbers and which planet was landed on by whom; any relation to Alien doesn't have any real bearing on the story that was told in Prometheus, and it only served as both a distraction and a reminder that Ridley Scott can and has done far, far better with similar material decades ago. Not a great way to impress your audience, really. The inclusion of the not-quite-Alien-alien at the end of the film felt like a post-credits tag in the style of Marvel's cinematic universe, except that instead of a surprising cameo we got to see a slightly shinier, negligibly different Xenomorph that can't possibly have anything to do with the story of Prometheus 2 as Shaw and David leave the planet it's on at the end of the film. So including it is pure nostalgia and nothing more. If a film has to rely on references to other films in order to get by, then it clearly has no conviction that the story it's telling is any good, so why should anyone watching it? Fingers crossed that Scott doesn't feel the need to use the same crutch as last time and allows the film to stand as its own story in its own clearly-defined universe.