Ali
It was assumed when Disney inherited Fox property “Alien” they’d press the reset button on the franchise, maybe even greenlight Neil Blomkamp’s “Alien 5” idea with Sigourney Weaver reprising Ripley and go back to the creature-blasting basics. In the least, we expected they’d do away with the controversial “Prometheus” prequel series.
According to director Ridley Scott, despite the house of mouse now owning the xenomorph, a second sequel to his controversial 2012 film is still very much in development.
The follow-up to 2017’s “Alien : Covenant” is in the script stage, Variety confirmed.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott said it’s all about the idea- and the idea has to get an upgrade if it’s to stick.
“You get to the point when you say, ‘Okay, it’s dead in the water,’” he says. “I think Alien vs. Predator was a daft idea. And I’m not sure it did very well or not, I don’t know. But it somehow brought down the beast. And I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like.’ So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually. But you know, there’s no alien in it, except the baby at the end that showed, itself, the possibility. I mean, it had the silhouette of an alien, right? The alien [origin concept] is uniquely attached to Mother Nature. It simply comes off a wood beetle that will lay eggs inside some unsuspecting insect. And in so doing, the form of the egg will become the host for this new creature. That’s hideous. But that was what it was. And you can’t keep repeating that because the joke gets boring.”
Scott uses the “Star Trek” franchise as a brand that knows how to do it right.
“When I watched Captain Kirk 50 years ago thinking, ‘Who the hell’s that guy? That guy really knows what he’s doing,’ I have to admit I paid great attention to Kirk and his cohorts,” he says. “So here we are, 50 years later, god bless them, they’ve kept that alive and kept going through its evolution. But it’s harder to keep the beast going for that long. I think it’s just tough. The joke wears out. Once you’ve seen it twice, three times, it’s no longer frightening.”
The veteran filmmaker is determined to bring something new to the next chapter in the franchise.
“Go on, leave that behind, and see where it can evolve,” he declares. “So we’re looking where we’re going to evolve.”
Scott’s original “Alien”, released in 1979, celebrates it’s 40th birthday this month.
“I thought the script had an inordinately good engine”, the filmmaker tells THR. “I thought it was virtually no characterization whatsoever. It was, ‘And then and then and then.’ And then I got to a page where it says, ‘And then this thing comes out of the guy’s chest.’ And I’m thinking, ‘This has put off four of the directors’ — because I was number number five on the list. Obviously, clearly, the previous four went, ‘What?!? This is ridiculous,’ and just put it down. Because I’m a bit of a designer, I could see the film and I knew exactly what to do.”
The filmmaker thought “the antithesis of Star Wars and be kind of dirty spaceships in space, used craft that were no longer spanking new and no longer futuristic, but felt like, as we ended up calling them, the ‘freighter in space.’ I wanted to go in that direction. So in a funny kind of way, I was already reacting more subliminally, I think, than design-wise against the way that Star Wars had been done.”
