Following Alien’s defeat of Star Wars in week 4 of LA Time’s Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown, Sir Ridley Scott discussed his work on Alien with the newspaper. And tucked away at the bottom of the interview was another expression of interest in Scott’s desire to continue making Alien films.
“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.”
“You can see them wink the other eye at the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.” Sir Ridley Scott on the set of Alien: Covenant. Photo by Matt Thorne.
Though he explored the Space Jockeys in Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant answered the “who” of the Alien’s creation, it would seem Scott is currently interested in exploring the “purpose” of the Aliens if and when he returns to the series.
When Scott last spoke about the sequel, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in celebration of Alien’s big 4-0 last May, he again reiterated his desire for the Alien (both series, and creature) to evolve.
Ruminating on the immediate future of the Alien franchise, now that Disney has acquired 21st Century Fox, Scott confirms that there are discussions for future installments, but warns that if the basic premise of “the beast” does not evolve like the Xenomorph itself, the “joke” gets old.
“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.”
You can watch the full hour long interview with Scott over on the Los Angles Times YouTube channel!
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I totally missed that memo! Wow. If it is a legitimate plot point, I'm ok with it. I seriously thought Fox didn't want to pay additional royalties to Giger's estate.
But it will mean that David creates the Aliens in totality. Hmm. Unless that's why the engineer tried to kill David, because robots created Aliens in the past and engineers already fought them. Maybe that's what David meant when he said he learned of their ways. A stretch. I know.
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=63871.msg2469591#msg2469591
To be fair, the lack of "mechanical" components on Covenant's Alien is an intentional plot point; David's creation isn't finalized yet.
It's actually hard to argue with that. If only the Giger aesthetic were employed as well, one could justify David being the creator... almost
It's amazing what Clint Eastwood (90) has been doing, the latest being 2019's Richard Jewell - a really good movie. But then again, it's not big budget.
Yah! Might as well.
That's a fair old age to be directing big budget movies. Is there anyone older currently active?
I really don't think he has juice left in the tank for these films. We shouldn't have to settle for him when there's many people to choose from He's had an amazing career but folk need to let him go because he's not the best man for the job IMO.
But, I'm not inclined with him having anything to do with the derelict on LV-426. If that ship has not been there for thousands of years, it's a retcon of one of the best elements of the series.
The themes introduced in the prequels are fascinating, even if I have my complaints with the packaging. It can all coexist.
That about describes my feelings on the films as well. I think the best way to resolve this is for it to turn out that David duplicated what already existed, and through the same fault in his logic that allowed him to attribute the credit for a poem to the wrong author, he felt that he created the aliens.
I mean, where do you think the engineers got that crazy goo? Once your arcane science advances far enough to start tearing rifts in spacetime, you never quite know what your race will find in those dark and membranous voids between dimension. It might just be something that could seriously f**k up one's perfect composure; and maybe, just maybe, it's something that will blow your culture's damn mind in the process.
I say long live that new flesh.
I feel the same. On the one hand, I hate the apparent killing of the ancient Lovecraftian elements of the Alien. Can that be resurrected with the accelerant? Maybe! But until then...the making of the Alien as we know it a recent creation is something I really dislike about the prequels.
However, I truly love the thematic elements it introduces. That it was specifically designed by David as a perversion of reproduction that he wants, but cannot do, I think is really fascinating. I love it! It's a film that really has me on both ends of the stick.
Word!! Right? But I don't know, Denis' stuff is gorgeous and amazing, but a bit too stark sometimes. I'm an unabashed fan of that 70's Métal hurlant aesthetic, highly stylized like "Mandy", or the "Color Out of Space". I'm such a sucker for the fearless artistic diversity of some of the earliest Dark Horse stuff.
The powers that be need to stop banking of massively funded tentpoles and meet somewhere beautifully half way in between the bank-breaking budgets of Hollywood style blockbusters and the modestly funded fan films that came out of the 40th Anniversary shorts. Do a series of Fox Searchlight style artsy takes that explore bold and different visions on indie film production budgets flush in the kind of diversity of storytelling that Dark Horse embraced. You might get some duds, but you're bound to get some absolute gems as well.
If y'all haven't checked it out, take a peek at Blood Engines, I've only seen one ep so far, but it's the perfect vibe for that 70's Space Truckin' junkie in your family. Straight up Classic Heavy Metal style. Less on the Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and more on the 300 or Fury Road style side.
Yeah but I'm also not going to put much energy into my own contributions if I can just bait Necro or NA into writing an essay for me.
Doesn't the strife that it generates in the fandom feed and sustain you like the sweetest of wines?
Painful in a way cuz how I would love to talk about Prometheus and Covenant the same way we do about Alien and Aliens. Unfortunately, Prometheus and Covenant were weak movies with Covenant being the weakest of them all. Just thinking about the beginning of Covenant itself pissess me off, like experts on your respective fields but forget all safety precautions and years of study cuz plot reasons.....please stop with the movies being disrespectful to human intelligence, I hate how these characters are written for the sake of story convince.
Giger's aesthetic isn't so much predicated on the unknown but the erotic and metamorphic transfiguration of sex, death and machines. His eyes were on the horizon. Thus thematically, the beast being moulded by the sexual nightmare visions of an A.I. is entirely consistent with his vision and aesthetic. The eggs are too explicitly labial to be completely foreign, Giger used human fingers for the huggers (he found human fingers particularly creepy), not to mention parasites and hosts require a history of intimacy/co-evolution; ET does not simply recognise mammal proteins and bind successfully to cell surfaces, thwart the immune system and provide oxygen haphazardly
All David did was sexualise a shoggoth, origins of the shoggoth unknown. It's bold, provocative. It's A.I. repressed sexuality fusing with alien biology baby.
It's lazier just to repeat Planet of the Vampires tbh...
I'm just glad they deal with Scott's thoughts on the afterlife and not a childhood fear of postal workers, Mall Santa's or gym class or something.
I'm not trying to convince you to like anything. I'm saying it wasn't lazy or vapid.
Everybody can't always agree on everything. The world would be boring as hell if we did. For me, the movies have fallen short in crucial areas. If they haven't for you, that's great. It means there are two more alien movies you enjoy more than I can.
Everybody likes what they like, for me THE meat of alien mythos is the story of Ripley, beginning with Ridley Scotts terrific very good looking film ending with Ripleys death in Fincher's nihlistic and also very well shot Alien 3. But despite prequel's whacky ideas that I so dislike, they dont offend me as much as Resurrection
Many seem to attribute the alien mythos to Scott, neglecting credit to Dan Obannon and Giger, who were equally as crucial to the first film and the creation of this thing as Scott was. Scott isnt the father of Alien, he is one of the fathers.
They did, but I'll never convince you, so f**k it.
Sooooo much better than anything made since Alien3. Personally I rate A3 along side the prequels in terms of enjoyment.
I just think they could've put a bit more thought into it than, "the bad guy did it".
Of course, we're dealing with a storyline that's already turned the space jockey into the jesus brothers, scientists that cant think straight, and one of the most foreseeable plot twists in recent memory.
The prequels are like two shiny dildos. They look clean, but still smell like @$$.
No, it just goes against the grain of what you wanted. It's not cheap, lazy or redundant at all.
Or that the pathogen was derived from. Blood of the gods and all that.
I like how the pathogen produces creatures vaguely similar to the Xenomorphs, only the key features present. Elongated skull, inner mouth, acid for blood. Perhaps remnants of some ancient creature that somehow fused with the pathogen, who knows.
The raw materials are still entirely otherworldly, however, and the Alien has clearly existed in other forms before David ever laid a finger on it. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant both reinforce this. The Pathogen's origins are still entirely unknown. Is it a naturally occurring substance? Did the Engineers make it? What else is it capable of? Nobody knows. Creatures in Prometheus that David was in no way responsible for had traits entirely evocative of the Alien.
The particular incarnation of the Alien that we are most familiar with, the "Perfect Organism" designed as David's antitheses to humanity, being the work of his own hands strikes me as a rather profound and interesting exploration of his character.
You're either twisting the poll results because you can't admit when you're wrong or you're not much of a numbers/stats guy.
Either way, lol.