According to an article from Deadline.com, the Alien Prequel has now become an entirely new film called Prometheus that has resulted from Ridley and co’s work on the prequel:
“First, it started out as an Alien Prequel. But then it morphed into something “more original”, an insider tells us — even though Hollywood kept referring to the project as “The Alien Prequel” right up until today when Twentieth Century Fox officially announced the new Ridley Scott production as Prometheus is now bound for worldwide release on March 9th, 2012.”
The article also confirms Scott cast Noomi Rapace. So it sounds like we won’t be getting a new Alien film. Thanks to Brother and Mikey for the news.
Natural progression from the family unit Cambo created.
But then again, the story of Alien 3 had become Ripley centric, thanks to James Cameron's use of the Ripley character as the centerpiece for Aliens.
You didn't need to pay attention to anybody besides Clemens, Morse, Dillon, 85, and Ripley. Since Ripley has now become the series primary character and the others there merely help her story for the third film come to an apex and close.
Alien 3 took it a step further and made it a story arc. That said Alien 3 isn't about all those other characters. Its about whether a person would sacrifice their life for the good of a whole. Even if they don't deserve it. You don't need to have that many characters to tell that story. The disposables were merely there to show the threat of the Alien and of the collateral damage caused by rampant unchecked capitalism.
Ripley in alien 3 is just a representation of the best of mankind. The Alien is merely the tool that would cause the fall of mankind should the true series villian (the company) get its hands on it to pop a few dollars.
On a sidenote: I'm also fond of the Gibson Alien script, but not as an Alien movie. The changing of the species ability to do things they didn't originally is one of the things that led to the fall of the EU media. If you can't make the same creatures dangerous in the future, don't add random shit to make them more dangerous. Stop writing about them. They'll become something they aren't otherwise.
Definately think it could've worked as something else though. It reads somewhat like Dead Space (except the virus can change living host instead of reviving dead ones) now that I think of it.
It was a first draft, it obviously needed work. Gibson got Ripley and Newt out of the way in a way that was believable enough and shifted the focus to Hicks and Bishop instead. The script is dated by the Cold War references, but it's still a good read, and personally, I prefer it to what we got.
Helps that I'm a Gibson die-hard, though. Plenty of bias here.
And Gibson's script with the spores was shithouse.
Give me Gibson or give me death.
"Ergo, she drowned."
The same could also be said of other horror series, where the survivor of the previous film is bumped off in the first few minutes of the sequel.
That said, I immediately rationalised the carnage at the start of Alien3 as "This universe is a cruel and nasty place".
I supposse I'm just tired of the hollywood generic ending that gets constantly slapped on any series longer than two movies. It's contrived. It's old. It's cliche. It's predictable.
I'm thankful for something that at least tries to be different.
I went into Alien 3 with all my previous movie knowledge telling me that Hicks, Ripley and Newt were going to survive. Imagine the kick in the nuts I got at the beggining of the film. By the end of the movie the story had taken so many turns that I wasnt even close to my original projection of what was going to happen (I saw all these movies before internet kids).
Nobody predicted that. Nobody predicted Ripley killing the queen to save humanity by sacrificing herself.
It's different. The Alien itself had become stale, but the drama itself had been revitalized with some interesting takes. In otherwords it was a complete 180 of what I expected it to be. And what I originally expected seems to be what most everybody else wants it to be. With a minimalized Alien threat in the background nuked by Ripley and her team of do gooders as they rediscover the joys of humanity while sailing toward a promising new terraformed world to start anew.
Blech.
I'm at a loss for words.
Sounds like more of that eighties generic hollywood commonstance bullshit to me.
Could Newt and Hicks deaths had more weight in Alien 3? Yeah. But Ripley, Newt, and Hicks running around as the Untouchables in the Alien Universe would've been more damaging to the franchise than James Cameron's sentry guns. We don't need invincible characters in the Alien universe. Thats what made the original so great. Nobody had script immunity. The three of them retiring in the sunset would've been too perfect. Something that would seem entirely out of place in the Alien universe.
By the third film, even Ripley's luck had run out.
I infinately prefer the third film to that happy go lucky bullshit. It feels real. It feels grounded in reality. It fits the franchise.
Or maybe people prefer the ending that if I go to McDonald's I can see Hicks feeding Newt a Chicken Nugget while Ripley opens her kid's meal toy like nothing happened. Because thats believable.
We don't want that. They can kill of both Hicks and maybe even Ripley if they wanted, just don't kill Newt.
Yeah, 'cause that was the only option for the story to go. Aliens was about what Ripley lost and rebuilding a life from that. Alien 3 was about rehashing the whole trauma and, on the account of the writers and Weaver, just ending the damn franchise.
They were for the original version of the Aliens comics by Dark Horse.
I still miss them.
I can't stand it that everyone complains about Hicks and Newt getting killed. They died, so what? It added to the dark tone of the movie. What do you want, Ripley and Hicks get married, adopt Newt, skip happily through a meadow shooting aliens, proving that good will always overcome evil, and that everyone will live happily ever after? Is that what you want? It's an ALIEN film, not Disney. The series is about what Ripley lost and had to sacrifice to stop the company from getting the Xenomorphs.
Alien3 was good, but the main thing that made me hate it was the fact that they killed off Hicks and Newt at the start.
Aliens had such a good ending with the 4 of them surviving and all.
Alien 3 killed it all. Ruined the franchise for me.
So Ronnie S gets shafted?
I'm with Fincher, her death is more symbolic if she sacrifices herself without the Alien emerging.
That way she isn't just doing it because there is no time for the company to remove it.
Its just pure sacrifice in the Assembly Cut.
I don't want to hijack the thread, but I'm with you there. I love the Assembly Cut to pieces, but we need to see that chestburster emerge at the end.
This movie had a really interesting artistic direction, and awesome characters. And its (theatrical) ending was spot on, as far as I'm concerned.
As for Resurection... I'd say it had a good director and actors, but too much of a flawed plot for them to make up for. Also, the ending looks like something they made up at the last minute.
I guess this was debated enough already ...
I just think prequels are usually a bad idea (just look at Star Wars...), it takes a lot of skill and luck to have it not fail. Even if Scott made a masterpiece back then, it doesn't mean he still has it.
Oh well ... we'll never get to check anyway. At least not any soon.
You're right, there are only three Alien movies: Alien, Aliens, and AVP.
AVPR just flat out sucked, and not even hard enough to be enjoyably bad, thus making it even worse.
If a/the prequel is going to succeed, then it's got to return to the mystery of the original installment, that 2001-ish atmosphere, one awed, mystified, afraid, and excited at the same time about exploring the vast, open universe....
Only then can the film succeed, by making us wonder.
Actually, there are only 3 Aliens movies to me. The rest should have never existed.
I'm glad the whole Derelict part of the plot will remain a mystery. That's what made its charm.
Eating, killing, mercing. All the same shit in the hood.
Why the quotation marks? Is this some critical elitism where something can't be given a particular label unless it reaches some arbitrary level of quality?
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Because I'd figure you mofo's wouldn't get caught up on the label "story" vs "script" in the first place anyways.
The credits should read: O'bannon story, Giler & Hill script.
Kudos to Giler and Hill for Ash and the Company, though their script was also pulled back a little - in their draft, the Company created the Alien themselves, there was no real, truly 'alien' presence in the movie at all. Further drafts excised this [actually, it would have been dropped due to budget, but Scott was focused on showing the pyramid, not the Company Cylinder. O'Bannon recalled that when Scott read the original script he wanted to go back to the original idea ie pyramid. But the budget and time concerns nixed that idea].
Ideally, the credit should include all of their names. According to O'Bannon on the Anthology, he expressed the idea that it should, but Hill was dismissive. The two producers don't help themselves much by being constantly slanderous towards the guy, whereas O'Bannon praises those around him that helped out with the story [Shusett, Cobb]. I can see why he'd hold a grudge towards the two. I probably would. And of course, Giler and Hill pulled the same thing on Cameron with his Aliens treatment, bumping his name to third and taking all of the money for it: Walter and David got a check for my treatment, and I got nothing. I was pretty pissed off about that one - James Cameron.
It's a dirty biz'ness.
Why the quotation marks? Is this some critical elitism where something can't be given a particular label unless it reaches some arbitrary level of quality?
Obviously Hill and Giler's re-writes are better than what O'Bannon produced, but that doesn't mean they deserve more credit any more than ADI deserves more credit than Giger for creating Aliens out of better materials and more advanced technology.
Okay the story is pretty much the same. But then again. Alien is pretty much the same story as Voyage of the Space Beagle. Monster in a tin can has been done hundreds of times before and after Alien.
If you want to be technical about it, the "script" is where the difference lies. Both version have monsters eating people. One version portrays this in a believable way. The other is just a way for a creature to eat some people and provide cheap thrills.
Had O'bannon's "script" made the movies, we wouldn't be talking about anything that has helped keep the movie alive over the course of 25+ years. No social commentary, no feminist hero's (regardless of whether it was intentional it happened), no calling out of rampant commercialism. Even broader themes the series ask about artificial intelligence, sacrifice, etc wouldn't have come to light if O'bannon's "script" had been made because there wouldn't have been any sequels. At least any worth a damn.
One "script" is much more contextually deeper than they other. Thats what sets them apart.
You can boil any movie down to its bare bones and make them sound the same. In that regard Alien isn't that much different than Xtro II. Of course we know which one is quality.
And it was O'Bannon's idea to hire Giger.
Hill and Giler cleaned O'Bannon's execution up, yes, but from a plot level their only major contribution was Ash and the Company. All of Alien's memorable sequences are right there in Star Beat, just cheesier.
You put that shit out and nobody but saturday evening horror aficionado's know what it is. It'd be the Leviathan of the seventies.
Don't get me wrong. I like cheese ranging from the aforementioned leviathan to JCarpenter classic cheese like Ghost of Mars.
But I can also recognize that on every level Alien trounces those movies.
Starbeast rules. Sure, it was hella cheesy (not a bad thing in 70's sci-fi) but the core of Alien was always there. It got refined, the way all good screenplays do. The result was Alien. Yay.
Only good scene, the ONLY good scene was the chest bursting scene because it was new, and it also didn't involve some incredibly lame idea like a crewman transforming into a monster or a monster simply sneaking aboard the spacecraft. The rest was the same shit you'd seen in a hundred films before with even more cheeze.
It's terrible. O'Bannon definately deserves credit, because to put it simply, the chest bursting idea is one of two things that define the Alien (the other being Giger's design), but his story was god awful.
Blasphemy. f**king blasphemy.
Dan O'Bannon wrote a cheesefest with one good idea.
His own concept of the creature didn't even make it into the film. Scott's influence can be felt through the rest of the series.
Now it is 2011 . Alien 79 was a happy accident and Ridley
Scott became the new kid on the block,but a lot has change
I just hope Fox find some else and since the passing of
Dan O' Bannon who was Alien ............