Neill Blomkamp’s Alien: Franchise Redemption or Dead Weight?

So, let’s get up to speed on the happenings of the past two months. Firstly, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp released a series of concept art pieces relating to the Alien franchise on his Instagram. The images came with speculation that Blomkamp might have, at some stage, been working on a new Alien movie. He wasn’t, as such, the concept art was just a way of showing what such a film might look like if he ever got the chance. As it happens, Ridley Scott was already a fan, having described him as a “game changing film-maker” and a “force to be reckoned with” in an extremely praiseworthy piece for Time Magazine back in 2010. If Blomkamp’s sudden, seemingly spontaneous concept art post is starting to sound a bit less coincidental, just buckle your seatbelt.

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See Blomkamp’s upcoming film, Chappie, has Sigourney Weaver in it and apparently during the shoot Blomkamp and Weaver got to talking. Blomkamp had been incubating ideas about an Alien movie for years, but had never considered Ripley as a part of them, but then, from hearing Weaver talk about her ideas, he started to seriously consider both the idea of another Alien film with Ripley in it and adopting said idea for his next project. So it was that while Chappie was in post-production, Blomkamp let his concept art (containing images of both Ripley and Michael Biehn’s Hicks) slip online and franchise fans went ballistic. Fox noticed. Now, in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had our confirmation, Neill Blomkamp is indeed moving on to direct an Alien film with Sigourney Weaver once he’s done promoting Chappie. Ridley Scott’s own studio is producing it and everything. Blomkamp you crafty fokin’ prawn.

The latest news to break is that this film will discount literally everything that happened after Aliens, go back and reroute the traffic, kind of like what Bryan Singer did with X-Men: Days of Future Past but without any of that time-travel gubbins, this new film will simply deny the existence of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, to say nothing of all the other offal that’s sprouted up over the years. Weaver has stated that she wants this new entry to give Ripley the ending she deserves, to finally curtail her ties to the franchise, rather than kicking off an entirely new strain. I tend to agree, there’s no sense in extending her story any further beyond one final film, but is it even worth doing that?

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Once you brush past the excitement of knowing that the mind behind those amazing, hideous creatures from District 9 is going to be turning his attention towards xenomorphs, you have to wonder exactly how much interesting story this arm of the franchise (or indeed any of it) actually has to give. We know, or at least have a fairly good idea where the xenomorphs came from now (cheers, Prometheus), so I doubt the film is going to move in that direction. I’m just going to throw this out there, I like Alien 3, I think it gets too much of a bad press, it had one of the most difficult births of almost any sci-fi film you care to mention, with dozens upon dozens of rewrites, studio issues and lord knows what else. It’s really fascinating to look back and see what it could have been (one of the ideas that got closest to actually being done was a wooden planet populated by crypto-amish farmers). While the whole ‘space prison for British thespians’ thing didn’t really have much traction, it really explored Ripley’s character, how she’s dealt with the trauma of being followed across the galaxy by this tormenting monstrosity and gave her a worthy send-off.

One thing at Alien 3 did which I really liked was to isolate the ‘xeno’ in xenomorph and have a bit more fun with it, giving the titular role to an alien that came out of a dog (or cow, depending on which version you watch) instead of a human. That’s something which has never really been touched on in enough depth, the alien assumes the basic structure of whatever living thing it happened to burst out of. I remember when I was a kid there was a whole range of Alien: Resurrection toys you could get which basically applied the famous Giger look to various animals, gorillas, snakes, what have you. From a purely visual standpoint, getting a glimpse of some horrifying anti-Eden full of various different types of xenomorph would be amazing.

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Equally though, something subtle, reserved and insular could be just the franchise needs to round itself out. It started small, got bigger and for the past 30 years it’s been ballooning out, rarely ever revisiting its haunted house in space roots. In fact, the only piece of new material to really venture back in that direction was Alien: Isolation, and it’s no coincidence that the game represents the best entry into the franchise since Aliens. The story is fairly cut-and-dry, but just placing you in this massive space-station with only the most meager resources, faced down with crew-members so fearful that they’ve been reduced to tribal instinct, malevolent corporate androids and one 9-foot alien that you have no hope of killing or even trapping was a master-stroke.

What Ridley Scott and his team did with Alien, better than any other piece of science-fiction, was really offer a terrifying insight into what kind of horrors could exist out there, what kind of unknowably powerful apex predator could have been molded into existence out in the wider universe. For any story surrounding it to really work, you have to understand just how helpless we are against it, just how little we know about intergalactic biology.

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So with that in mind, I hope to High Hrothgar that we’re not faced with yet another ‘corporate doucheworms try and harness the alien’s power’ story, that particular barrel has been scraped so thoroughly that it’s basically made of paper at this stage. Ideally I think you want to heavily limit the number of human characters appearing in the film, perhaps paring it down to Ripley, Hicks, Newt and maybe Bishop at a push. You need people to die to heighten the sense of risk and peril, for sure, but perhaps Blomkamp could engineer a situation even more mysterious and frightening.

Under normal circumstances the xenomorphs capture people so that they can act as hosts, but perhaps that’s just the tip of the biomechanical iceberg, perhaps when the creatures have more of a foothold, they use humans for something else, something even more sinister. That could lead into something really abstract and introspective, audiences are becoming more receptive to horror films that really fuck with your head and throw you off-balance, imagine Alien by way of Under the Skin. In any case, this is most definitely a worthwhile undertaking, it will allow Blomkamp to apply his unique vision to something that has been without any real visionary momentum for decades. My interest in film-making all started with Alien and I doubt that I’m alone in that, I trust Blomkamp with it, I admire him for taking it on and I eagerly await the result. Game over man, game over (I’m sorry, I had to).

FURTHER READING:
‘Alien 5’ Has Problems, and Those Problems Are Video Games

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