The Perils of Prequels
Whether it’s fan service, money grab, or genuine expansion of the story, getting it right is easier said than done.
Creating a popular franchise is a rare and precious thing. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has grossed north of $29 billion. So naturally when a cash cow presents itself, Hollywood proceeds to optimize this property for every dollar. One of the more egregious ways is via the prequel.
In theory, the prequel can seem like a good idea, especially for the bean counters. You can keep familiar characters, often while using less expensive actors. But through the prequel, the franchise owners can easily fall into one of several traps:
Answering questions that shouldn’t be asked (or answered)
Who were the Space Jockeys? This is one of the very first mysteries of Alien. As viewers, we were in awe looking at the Space Jockey for the first time. The set design here is truly amazing. Ridley Scott and team created something incredibly powerful and a large part of that power is in the mystery. Who are they? Where are they from? What were they doing? When you don’t know the answers to these questions, you can spend hours wondering, debating, questioning, arguing, etc.
But once you start to answer those questions in Prometheus, the only remaining response is, “Oh.”
The chance that the official explanation is going to be superior to the aura created by the mystery is extremely unlikely.
For some reason, Hollywood believes that one of the main purposes of prequels is to answer the questions brought up by the original. You don’t have to do that. Mystery, especially in science fiction, is incredibly powerful. It’s part of the magic of storytelling. Stop ruining it.
Introducing elements that only confuse things
Xenomorphs. The perfect organism. Brutal killing machines with only one purpose. This is the cold, hard truth of the Alien universe. So why introduce the Black Goo? This isn’t mentioned in any of the previous (though subsequent in the in-universe timeline) movies. There was no need to create this new substance. Nobody wanted nor needed this. It only serves to overcomplicate things. The appeal (and power) of the Xenomorphs is their simplicity. Pure killing machines from the darkest pits of interstellar hell. Their story is not improved by making up, and telling, the story of their creation.
Here’s what you are asking a writer to do with a prequel: Write something powerful and memorable for the audience, but that at the same time will be so insignificant in-universe that it’s plausible it was never mentioned in the original and sequels. The midichlorians in Star Wars is another example.
The “Alden Ehrenreich Problem”
If a film begets a prequel, it’s probably because it was quite popular. If it was quite popular it probably had a breakout character. It’s tempting to tell the ‘early years’ story of that character in the prequel. But guess what? Finding somebody to play a young Sigourney Weaver is doomed to failure. Finding somebody to play a young Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard is doomed to failure, just like asking Alden Ehrenreich to play a young Harrison Ford as Han Solo went over like a lead balloon. I actually thought he did a pretty good job, but characters like Han Solo, Rick Deckard, or Ellen Ripley are so tied to their original actor that it’s damn near impossible to pull it off. Robert De Niro taking over for Marlon Brando in The Godfather films is one of the few cases where this worked, and it needed Robert De Niro to make it work.
Sequel Prequels
The Blade Runner franchise had a similar challenge, albeit in the other direction chronologically speaking. Rather than dealing with a prequel that was set well before the original, as Prometheus was to Alien, with Blade Runner 2049, they had a sequel that was by and large going to deal with events and characters removed from the original. In what I thought was a savvy move, both from a marketing and storytelling perspective, they created three short films, set between the two Blade Runner theatrical releases, to help bridge that gap.
While not masterpieces, I think these shorts did a good job providing some backdrop that would otherwise have burdened 2049. They also gave viewers of the sequel a brief taste of some of the characters they’d meet in the theatrical film. Overall a pretty smart move.
So what’s the solution? In addition to the three short films preceding Blade Runners 2049, the Blade Runner franchise chose the comic book medium to explore storylines prior to Blade Runner, which takes place in 2019. They further distanced themselves by not including any of the characters from that film. While on the whole, I wasn’t crazy about the story they told in that series, I never felt like they were breaking canon or retconning much.
I think Rogue One is a good example of a prequel that toed the fine line of telling its own story, while deftly linking to the original. I think it would be difficult to do that with Blade Runner. Seeing Rick Deckard as a rookie Blade Runner? You’ve now functionally broken the neo-noir vibe of the franchise that relies on the world-weary, veteran cop/detective.
Rogue One found the sweet spot for a prequel: close enough in proximity to the original to keep it contextually relevant, but not so close that you risk tripping over the existing story.
Prometheus got the latter right, but missed on the former. It’s just too far removed from the events of the earlier films to hook us. I think it works better as a stand-alone film than as part of the Alien franchise, and I believe Scott was trying to distance it from his original as well. But through numerous rewrites and studio pressure, it needed to be an “Alien” film. As a result, the plot has too much packed into it, and the Alien elements seem bolted on more than organically developed.
