Things aren’t looking so hot for Alien right now. 2017’s Alien: Covenant was met with tepid reviews, didn’t meet box office expectations and seems to have effectively killed the series. After Covenant, Fox cooled on the idea of giving creative control to Ridley Scott to continue to explore the origins of the creature. Then came the Disney merger, meaning the House of Mouse now controls the Alien and Predator IPs.
That means that we’re unlikely to see a follow-up for some time, with most concluding that the best route to breathe new life into Alien would be a full reboot. After all, with four mainline movies, two prequels and a couple of spinoffs, the continuity has gotten pretty tangled.
Scott recently gave an interview to the LA Times in which he discussed the future of the franchise, and he said he still has questions he wants to answer.
“I still think there’s a lot of mileage in ‘Alien,’ but I think you’ll have to now re-evolve. What I always thought when I was making it, the first one, why would a creature like this be made and why was it traveling in what I always thought was a kind of war-craft, which was carrying a cargo of these eggs. What was the purpose of the vehicle and what was the purpose of the eggs? That’s the thing to question — who, why, and for what purpose is the next idea, I think.”
Honestly, at this point, I feel that the more we know about the origins of the xenomorphs, the less scary they become. Does it really add much to the creature now that we’re aware that it’s a rapidly evolving bioweapon whose evolution was guided by a robot caretaker? That’s why I’d like a new director to go back to first principles and give us a movie that impresses upon us how deadly a single xenomorph can be.
I’m not asking for an exact remake of Alien, but even after all these years, it’s the best film in the franchise, and something that tried to emulate its style, themes and narrative focus would be a welcome departure from typical horror fare. Here’s hoping there’s a young director out there who has some great ideas and a strong eye for visuals.
