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Ridley Scott Directing Alien Prequel
brumgrunt writes "After three decades of speculation, original Alien director Ridley Scott has signed on to the new Fox sequel. 'Nothing is known about the set-up of the new movie, except that chronologically it precedes the plight of the Nostromo. Since it's obviously going to involve the human race [...] Writer Jon Spaihts successfully pitched to Fox and Scott Free Productions, and is working on the script.'"
they mostly come at night... mostly
I want the story of the ship the Nostromo found.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Now just sign up James Cameron to do the movie after *that* and we'll be good.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Is "Alien vs. Predator" and "Alien vs. Predator: Requiem" part of the canon? Will it be for this prequel?
IMDB currently lists him having FOURTEEN projects "in development". So either he spends barely any time at all on any of them (and they all suck) or this movie will not come out until sometime in the 2020's (and we will all be dead from swine flu).
"I don't know if you've been keeping score... But we're getting our asses kicked, here!" I love it and can't wait.
At least I had a few years without Xenomorphs showing up in my nightmare.
(IIRC, the nightmares involved having a pulse rifle that ran out of ammo.)
Funny, I would have thought the most recent ones would have involved Jean-Pierre Jeunet directing another movie. :)
I so hope he can pull this off, unfortunately horror/action directors don't seem to age as well as suspense/noir/drama directors do.
OFCS saved me from the latest Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Transformer and Terminator fiascoes, this may be another one I'll have to miss...but I hope not. Ridley Scott may be old, but he has an eye for quality, and he has clout. Here's hoping he can nail this, and give us a proper Alien trilogy (prequel, original, and Aliens of course).
*NOTE TO FOX - please put the money down and hire a talented writer and editor!*
(my other hand has fingers crossed for James Cameron and Avatar)
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I sure hope they throw a bit at the Pilot/Space Jockey subplot.
There's lots already proposed for that item's existence in the story, and I'd be happy with almost any of them.
Meh -- after Titanic I lost all my faith in James Cameron. I don't want to let him near the Alien franchise again, Ridley Scott has yet to let me down, though. I always thought Alien was better, anyway, but that is just my opinion.
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That's silly... we all know nuking them from orbit is the only way to be sure.
At least I had a few years without Xenomorphs showing up in my nightmare.
(IIRC, the nightmares involved having a pulse rifle that ran out of ammo.)
Funny, I would have thought the most recent ones would have involved Jean-Pierre Jeunet directing another movie. :)
Why do you think my clip was empty???
This story should make sense because the original story directly implied prior knowledge of the Alien organism prior to its "discovery" in the movie--although why anyone thought it needed "protecting" is beyond me. It always seemed quite capable of protecting itself.
Best alien joke: The cartoon of the Imperial Storm Trooper with a face-grabber on its face saying, "I hate being the one to have to walk Lord Darth Vader's pet."
And yes, after seeing the original Alien in an evening movie showing without knowing what it was really about ahead of time, I left the bathroom light on that night afterwards just in case. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How about you just wget it and use grep?
Oh noes you may have to learn something.
Since it's obviously going to involve the human race [...] Writer Jon Spaihts successfully pitched to Fox
So...it was successfully pitched to Fox because...it will involve the human race? Only Fox greenlights movies involving humans? Or do they always greenlight movies involving humans?
I've been prepping my sons (3.5 years and 7 months) for their first viewing of Alien/Aliens since birth by grabbing their entire face with my hand. They think its funny... at least for now.
While his style is well-known, there is possibly still something more to ask of him that would tie the movies together outside of any simple plotline.
If he could be commissioned for something new, using some of the erotic or torture pieces as a haunting/dream-like "infection" plot device, he might be able to really breath some new visual life into the series.
Giger was given ample room to express himself in the original, but sadly was not credited as much as he should have been for the derivative works of the monsters. This could be a great way to welcome him back, although I've read that he can be a bit eccentric to work with (The Ghost Train ordeal).
I've been prepping my sons (3.5 years and 7 months) for their first viewing of Alien/Aliens since birth by grabbing their entire face with my hand. They think its funny... at least for now.
I hope you're done having kids. Because if you ever explain that that the baby will come out of mommy's belly...
Can't the franchise just die after the horrible efforts done by Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien Resurrection and David Fincher's Aliens 3? I think these films ruined Aliens forever. And After the first sequel the direction and feel of the franchise went in a massively different direction from Ridley Scott's version.
James Cameron's Aliens was fun but Ridley Scott's Alien has so much atmosphere to it. But Ridley Scott's version, while more artistic and interesting was not the box office smash that Aliens was.
Perhaps there is some way to recover the franchise, but I suspect your average movie-goer will be pissed at Scott's attempts at a prequel because it will likely not be anything like a film done by James Cameron, which is what people have come to expect from Aliens.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Not necessarily. In the film, they use hypersleep - suspended animation - because even at whatever multiple of the speed of light the ships move at, trips still take months. (Script says they're near Zeta II Reticuli, 39 light years from Earth, and they still have ten months to go.) If they can transmit data faster than ships move (or unmanned ships can move faster) then mobilizing a specialist team might take more time than they want to spend, when they can divert a freighter going by anyway.
The novelization (non-canon, but working from the shooting script) had Ash saying that the beacon had a fairly detailed warning, so the Company may well have known that parasitic aliens were there. No biggie, let the crew get infected and the ship return on autopilot.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The first movie was about a single alien, the second was about about many aliens. If this is a prequel, it will have to be about the egg of that first alien before it hatched.
"Hey, what's that?"
"I dunno, man, but it looks pretty strange."
"I've got a bad feeling about this..."
(spooky music)
You seem to forget that Alien predated Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and most of the other "classic horror" movies:
Alien (1979)
Friday the 13th (1980)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Only Halloween (1978) predates Alien, and by a short enough period that I think it's safe to say that Alien was well underway before Halloween hit the theater.
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robert rodriguez is producing a new predator movie, called predators (like alien is to aliens?). perhaps on the predator home planet, again, completely ignoring the whole avp bullshit
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/40865
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/40879
additionally, the director will be some hotshot hungarian horror director named nimrod antal. aintitcool had an interveiw with rodriguez about the project:
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41590
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
to find a dog, you merely open the closest door, and it will inevitably smack and disturb a sleeping dog
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i have an inside track on the ideas they are basing the prequel on, and it harkens back to classic themes in shockingly new and original ways, not at all feeling like some high school sophomore clicked around a bit on wikipedia and retread tired, stale ideas
for example, the story of the alien in the prequel will revolve around important rules that one should never break, which of course get inevitably broken:
1. don't get the alien wet, or it immediately reproduces more of its kind asexually by budding from its back
3. keep the alien away from bright lights... especially sunlight. this will kill it
4. and don't ever feed the alien after midnight
i think this is a brilliant and entirely original idea
furthermore, the movie will start with a crashed ship full of religious pilgrims, a stowaway, a dangerous criminal, etc. the alien hunts them all down relentlessly one by one whenever the planet falls into eclipse and darkness. but the fearless criminal has special surgically altered eyes that allows him to see in pitch black, so he turns the tables and hunts the alien instead
again, a brilliant and entirely original idea from hollywood for the alien prequel!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I hope you're done having kids. Because if you ever explain that that the baby will come out of mommy's belly...
Shit, my sister and I were both c-sections and the scar was ginormous. Being a Christian household, we weren't told that much about the birds and the bees but I did happen to see Alien one night when trying to catch a rerun of Fraggle Rock on HBO late at night and put two and two together... Gave me creepy visions of my little baby sister bursting out of the tummy, all blood and gnashing teeth.
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Why wait for another Aliens movie? Grab your copy of Tremulous and get going! Pronto!
My nightmares involve not being able to pounce away from a chainsuit fast enough.
I've been prepping my sons (3.5 years and 7 months) for their first viewing of Alien/Aliens since birth by grabbing their entire face with my hand. They think its funny... at least for now.
This reminds me of when my parents took me to see Alien when I was 5. Good time had by all due to a weeks worth of sleep deprivation.
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Each actor's name is a link so
shows 339 individual spoken lines. There's a horizontal rule (width=30%) after each block of dialog and
shows 102 HRs. Each of those numbers may be a bit off (I see at least one other HR on the page; there might be other name links as well)--sometimes you need manual labor, not code, to get exact answers to annoying questions like this.
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When I saw it in the theater, there were scenes where I could not watch it -- I had to cover my eyes. Even when it was on TV, I still did that years later. (Specifically, the scene where Dallas is crawling through the ducts and the alien attacks.)
What made Alien so different from previous monster movies is the alien was so fast. Before Alien filmakers thought it heightened the suspense to show the monster slowly approaching the victims. Ridley Scott realized that if the alien moves quickly, the danger is increased because you are never safe; it can get you at any time.
That's not the only groundbreaking part of the movie. (Spoiler alert!)
Remember when Ripley set the Nostromo to self destruct, but then the alien is blocking her path to the escape pod, so she goes back to cancel the self destruct. How many times have we seen this before? It is such a cliche. So it was astounding when the timer ran down and she could not stop it! I've never seen that before. And I can't think of many movies that have done that since.
"It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)"
"Out of the fifties 'B' Science-Fiction monster movies, this easily ranks as the best. It's most notable as the film that ALIEN is an unaccredited remake of, thus giving it a certain historical significance."
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
is a comment like this modded as insightful rather than funny
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You know, I loved the first two movies, and would have liked the series to progress as it seemed it should - 3 would have the Alien actually brought back to a space station around Earth, then 4 could be them getting TO Earth.
But the point I wanted to make is that the next sequel should have someone stumble on the Alien's home planet - where they originally are from. Think about it - they are communal, live in a colony and can build a new one with a single individual, like some of our insects. They cooperate, can withstand very hostile environments. They have eggs that can do the same and lie dormant for long periods of time. They have lightning speed, hide really well, and have acid for blood.
Now think about the world that could produce such a creature, with all those defenses. The Aliens.... are not even CLOSE to the top of the food chain. Imagine what horrors you would find on the world that produced them....
THAT's the movie I want to see.
alien was basically "big bug in space". they had the thing's life cycle thought out in terms of egg->parasite->adult. it was really the first scifi movie where the monster wasn't a one dimensional big baddie, but a whole well-thought out three dimensional (biologically speaking) xenomorph, where the biological cycle itself was truly alien
and yet NOT alien. fear of spiders, snakes, sharks, is innate and natural. and bugs usually elicit some sort of ancient biological horror because of what they represent in terms of threat to survival. heck, the alien's life cycle really is the same as plenty of parasitical insects on earth, like the tse-tse fly. so alien also plugged into this whole ancient psychological hate/ fear of parasites and insects, just like jaws did to great effect when it plugged into fear of big fish in the water (which came out what, 2 years before?). i guess they naturally extended that to big snake with anaconda, arachnophobia, etc, but obviously to not as great success
then of course along came aliens, which bucked the odds of the sequel being worse than the original, and it did by basically expanding upon the biological notions in the first movie: well, if alien is just a big bug in space, lets give them a social insect like a hive of wasps or a colony of ants. complete of course with the queen, and her giant alien egg laying apparatus. so again, its totally alien, yet at the same time totally familiar and natural to anyone who has given even a cursory interest in the happenings of social insects, which basically describes human experience in any rural/ suburban community, not to mention probaby hardwired into our psychology as a threat, again, from millions of years of exposure
finally, in aliens, they had the primal biological notion of species versus species vying for survival of its offspring, perhaps the most primal directive besides sex. with alien queen going up against ripley, where both motivations are the same: alien queen enraged at the death of her offspring, ripley protecting her (adopted) human child. complete with the line "get away from her you bitch!": its basically a catfight, something you would see on the serengeti: female lioness versus female hyena
because in nature, as well as human society, no masculine rage can possibly be matched by the female's rage at protecting her offsping. its incredibly primal, incredibly biological, and incredibly powerful as a movie plot device, because its so real
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, it beat the 80's Horror Film Peak, but there were plenty before that. Ridley himself pitched the movie as "Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Space" when trying to sign on people who were initially not enthused about doing a SciFi film.
But wasn't "just" a horror movie. It was an awesome horror movie.
Ask your doctor for some sort of drug that works in the brain. They often stimulate remembering dreams. Antidepressants sometimes work. Old beta blockers (a type of blood pressure medication) are pretty good as well.
Better living through chemistry.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Maybe because I'm still scarred from the Star Wars Prequels. Though I'd pay to watch Jar Jar get killed by one of em.