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H.R. Giger Returns To the Alien Franchise
An anonymous reader writes "Great news for Alien franchise purists, as conceptual artist H.R. Giger has been confirmed as a contributor to the prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The originator of the 'xenomorph' design, Giger was left out of James Cameron's Aliens (1986), since Cameron only needed a new 'Alien queen' design, and had come up with that himself. This article features the Swiss TV broadcast where Giger's wife broke the news, and a full gallery of Giger's conceptual work for Alien."
I've been to his museum in Switzerland and the dude has really nightmarish works - all from his conscious. His subconscious must be really weird
I wonder if in his nightmares, he has fuzzy bunnies and care bears?
Prequels of played out franchises mostly blow chunks. Mostly.
This made my day.
I remember a few months ago I was searching about the internet looking for info on if there would be another Aliens movie. Lots of searching turned up info on possibly a story revolving around Ripley or a prequel, most information seemed to hint that way. Also from what I recall prior to AvP James Cameron didn't want to do another Aliens movie mainly because he thought AvP would kill the series...but he found out he was wrong after it came out and apparently had a change of heart and started to consider a new movie. So this just information now finally casts it in stone that there is in fact another Alien movie coming, now I just wonder if it really is going to be a prequel or if its going to be some sort of sequel.
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Close your eyes and repeat "Please do not repeat Star Wars prequels , please do not repeat Star Wars prequels". Let me rescue something from those years!
that Giger is back working with the Alien franchise some thing I thought would not happen again since "Giger’s business relationships have sometimes been as turbulent as the dark world he has created. For example, he was in a legal dispute over the blockbuster film Alien 3. Giger contended that the film’s producers failed to properly credit him for his monstrous designs; consequently he was denied an Academy Award nomination."
That Hollywood hasn't had an ORIGINAL idea in decades. Instead of developing a NEW idea, they fall back on releasing part 2,3,4, then "prequels".
The problem with an Alien prequel is that somehow humans will be involved, which will make little or no sense at all. That was one of my beefs with the AvP movies.
How Ripley got on board the ship? Huh?
Alien or The Brood from X-Men?
As far as I could tell, they were identical.
And for all you young whipper-snappers, I mean X-Men the comic book from back in the 80s.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I just hope someone's remembered to take out a restraining order against George Lucas - he shouldn't be allowed within 1/2 mile of this project.
#DeleteChrome
I know that resentment rides high on Slashdot over Lucas' prequel efforts, but Ridley Scott is a Director/Producer of a whole other calibre. Franky, I'm hard pressed to name a bad film by Scott... sure, some movies such as Kingdom of Heaven and Hannibal come to mind, but they were very watchable and had many redeeming qualities beyond just action and effects. Also keep in mind that Scott is responsible for both Alien and Blade Runner, two of most memorable and defining sci-fi efforts in cinematic history, and he did them back to back. And most importantly, Scott's entire portfolio is very diverse in genre and subject matter. Unlike Lucas, he is a truly imaginative and gifted director and not one to take up a project to make a buck or milk a franchise.
Personally, I see lots of potential for these prequels to be nothing short of fantastic. The telling of the story of the Space Jockey and the origins of the Xeno-Morph has all sorts of potential, as does the telling of the 1st encounter and discovery of the Xeno-Morph by Weyland-Yutani. These stories aren't those of a true prequel in the Star Wars sense, those were stories that closely followed an existing story arc around a small set of characters. Here, we have a whole other set of stories only loosely related to the stories we already know.
So give Scott some slack, you know you're going to see these movies in the theatre no matter what the reviews say and you know that with Scott at the helm, there will be a decent plot and story line and that the visuals and world will be stunning and engaging.
Soundtrack by Triptykon?
He also did the artwork for the PC-Amiga Darkseed titles. Lots of his freaky, Alien type artwork. Can still be easily gotten ahold of if any fans want to check it out.
The original Alien was a horror film with subtle psychological thriller elements set in a sci-fi setting. One of the things that struck me about Alien, and that sets it apart from sequels, was its true grounding in science fiction -- the cast of characters being a disgruntled mining crew, expendable employees of some future megacorp -- likely how space exploration will proceed in the real world. No Space Marines, no Federation, no green muppets with laser swords. Just strange, bestial life forms and attempts by greedy corporations to profit from them. The films that came after the original Alien, by comparison, were essentially brain-dead action movies, and among them only Cameron's Aliens could even be called entertaining in that regard. And as much as Aliens did for the sci-fi action genre, it's also responsible for the shift of the series away from intelligent sci-fi and into mainstream science fantasy.
I think the prequel direction is really the only place for Ridley Scott to go, since the post-Aliens and AvP environment is basically FUBAR. By making a prequel, he can still work with a clean slate and not resort to producing some reboot schlock that is currently the trend in Hollywood.
With Giger also now contributing to the film, it actually seems rather promising, like we are finally going to get the first true part 2 to Alien.
Killing off Newt, Hicks and Bishop before the movie even started was a pretty ballsy move.
Alien Resurection, I like to think of as Buffy v. Aliens.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/H._R._Giger.jpg
It's hard to imagine a new Alien movie being any good after all the crap since Aliens.
William Gibson wrote an interesting if flawed script for what could have been Alien 3, but it seems like they've missed a few obvious wins:
1.) The aliens get to earth and it's all out war. 2.) We find the alien home planet and it's all out war.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
The Aliens are intelligent. They've got VERY big brains, they're possibly socially telepathic, and they've gotten around the cultural problem of a lack of information-continuity between generations by developing (or adopting from another parasitised species) a form of inherited memory. That's how the Ripley-Alien hybrid clone has memories of being Ripley.
The nasty question posed by the inherited-memory thing is: The aliens have a fetal stage (implanted by the face-huggers) during which they adapt to their new environment by adapting to and adopting elements of their host's biology ... and presumably they also retain memories from the Queen that laid their egg. During the adaptation process, does the alien fetus, which potentially has telepathic abilities, also imprint on the memories and personality of its host?
In other words, when Little Aliens burst out of humans and become Big Aliens, do those Big Aliens then have false memories of being human? That might go some way to explaining why they're so pissed off.
While there's stuff like that that still needs to be addressed, I think there's space for at least one more film, and if we're going to be seeing unexplored aspects of the Alien biology, it's cool that they've got Giger onboard to extend and elaborate on some of his original designs.
Eric Baird
That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
... Ridley Scott's SF horror masterpiece ...
What? Come on, folks, Alien stopped being interesting or even scary after the creature erupted from the guy's chest and the characters started wandering off alone to get killed. You can tick them off one by one the moment they walk away from the safety of the group. You know be dead in a couple minutes. Scott even used the B-movie cliche of having a character enter a scary room and slowly turn around while looking up at the ceiling until he walks backwards into the creature [facepalm]. Alien was well acted and was certainly a great technical production, but how it ever became "a masterpiece of horror" is a huge mystery.
They rarely tell you anything you need to know, aren't answering burning questions, and are locked into predestination because you already know how the damn thing ends up. It's permissible to include flashbacks within a larger story that will provide some elaboration of how things came to pass. Probably the best example of that sort of thing was the whole Angelus backstory in Angel. Darla was a throwaway character from season 1 and none of that backstory was established beyond a sketchy paragraph in the story bible. The whole elaborate story of Angel, Darla, Spike and Dru was made up as the show went on but felt not only proper but completely intentional, as if it was known from the start. That takes some doing. But it would have been tedious if it was a whole prequel season.
If they want to resurrect the franchise, declare the first two movies to be canon, everything else is not canon, start from the Dark Horse comics that were meant as a direct sequel to Aliens and go from there. Aliens overrunning the Earth? You can't get much more apocalyptic than that.
And if you're wanting to bring AVP back, forget the previous two movies and reboot with a script adapted from the original AVP comic. It was great. Why not use it?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Often brilliant artists just run out of steam over time. For example, compare Salvador Dali's famous works to his stuff from later in life. Giger is now 70. I doubt he still has a stable hand to even create paintings of the calibur he used to.