Following all the recent news regarding the potential Alien 5 project by District 9 and Chappie helmer Neill Blomkamp, he posted a piece of H.R Giger’s concept artwork for Alien on his Instagram with the notation “I think it’s officially my next film. #alien“.
At this point we know very little about the actual plot of the film, only that Blomkamp has been very enthusiastic about the film and that Sigourney Weaver also voiced her interest. We’re awaiting an official announcement from 20th Century Fox.
According to The Wrap (thanks to Gazz for the link) who write that “an individual familiar with the project” has informed them that Alien 5 will be produced by Ridley Scott and will take place after Prometheus 2.
I think that the film taking place after the Prometheus films would have been a given but what’s important to take away from that tidbit is that Blomkamp’s project wont be interfering with Ridley Scott’s Prometheus sequel.
Variety is posting that the deal is official and that 20th Century Fox has signed the deal. They also clarify that “The untitled sci-fi project is separate from “Prometheus 2,” which Fox is still making with Ridley Scott” and that “the new “Alien” takes place years after the “Prometheus” sequel”
Then all she needs to do is survive a Terminator sequel and she'll be the new, inverse Bill Paxton.
He should cast Alice Braga again so that she can be a survivor of both a Predator and Alien.
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Thanks for putting that in my head.
Although, I also remember a popular theory about them being maggot like creatures that humans have taken to raping. :/
I think a majority of prostitutes in the Vietnam War were A) not treated with respect B) possibly underage C) all of it wasn't great at all. Sexual trauma is hardly good, if you can imagine the soldiers getting PTSD from war, well, there you go, you can get PTSD from every single thing those women and girls and boys endured as well. Suicide was probable. It's just such a shitty thing to joke about for the same entire reason it's shitty to openly go up to a Vet and say all the men he saw mangled by mines and strewn across fields of blood, with orange clouds of defoliant spreading past the treeline, and the distant sounds of gunfire, deserved to die and were pigs. Those people endured sexual violence, and very possibly beatings from xenophobic soldiers who would go another hour saying "All asians look the same as a matter of fact all asian pussy looks the same" or maybe traumatized drafted average people broken by what they saw and just used prostitutes as a way to release their pent up tension and energy, slamming them against the wall and slapping them. You could make a terrible person in war, good people can change into things they never thought possible, and might regret for the rest of their life, and the victims never get their stories told.
Saying jokes about the entire subject aren't politically correct is such crap. Because, if we can all put it towards uptight leftists who can't take a joke, what can be said if it affects the psyche of a vietnam vet listening in on that joke, or maybe a family member who knew someone who lived in Vietnam and never saw them again. How does comedy hold accountability for the subtext of jokes that furthers the ideas fully present in the time of the era said joke is about, that were used to distance from the acts done. Also it's just a matter of decency.
If explored in a context of how f**ked up it is, I'm all for it. Jokes about the violence of forced sex in war are not. As a matter of fact, there's reason we are capable of making jokes about the distant Vietnamese prostitutes, but not 240,000 German women raped by red infantry in World War II. Make a joke about the latter, a line is crossed, yet the former, you can get away with among friends.
Jokes about war by people who weren't there are just not fun for anyone, it's not a great thing to talk about.
I think, it was meant to allude to something along those lines. What I just found in bad taste was just the joking about a really terrible point in time for the lives of lots of underage teenagers in Vietnam.
Just opinions and all that.
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You guys are silly billies.
^ ^
This, not only does this explanation fit more with the universe but it doesn't conflict tonally with the depressing-ass hard-edge world that they're trying to create.
Also, remember when the Space Jockey was just a really cool-looking plot device that foreshadowed what would happen to the crew of the Nostromo?
f**k the 15 year old prostitute who probably gets beaten for not putting out well enough because they have to f**k for money for some pimp who can take advantage of it because poverty is devastating and people took the first opportunity to exploit children for fast cash? That this existence of misery and trauma is thrust upon their development as children that will leave them permanently scarred?
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All of this, surprisingly, fits in how terrible the world of Alien is, so good on James Cameron.
Or Yolandi.
But personally I prefer if they kept the realistic hard-edged feel of the Alien universe. The chance of humans encountering intelligent humanoid alien life within the next hundred to two hundred years is extremely slim even with FTL capability.
It also makes the discovery of the Space Jockey in Alien so much more awe-inspiring.
Indeed it was. However, the new books wouldn't be the only thing to do that. IIRC the old Aliens RPG did the same? And I'm sure this has been argued to death since the old days of the email groups.
I'd prefer it to be some other species. To widen the universe.
I think it's really silly for the new books to make them out to be something they were obviously not.
Incidentally I remember someone wrote a fan fiction years ago entitled "Hudson's Tale" that featured Hudson having a run in with an Arcturian. Turns out their space trannys. Oh, and he's gay with Hicks. Yeaahh...
...I don't think the Arcturians should feature in Alien 5. Unless Copley is gonna play one.
I bet their cover of The Crying Game is amazing.
That's been my impression the whole time. Arcturia was a colony/station that they and other ships docked at, that maybe had some bars with cheap grub and a somewhat-known community of prostitutes that were happy to service crewpeople on passing military ships. :p
I think any EU book that describes them otherwise is just taking their (The crew of the Sulaco's)comments a bit too literally if they describe them as being aliens. This isn't Star Trek people!
More likely than not, they're just really skilled androgynous prostitutes.
Also this article from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla
Yes, I did all that because of your Arcturian comment. :p I think things over way too much.
Morph. Xeno. Xeno = Alien. Morph = one of a set of forms that a morpheme may take in different contexts, or commonly, just a synonym for changing. It's techno babble, and because it's technobabble, it's probably easily interpretable, and knowing James Cameron, he probably thought of how the Alien lifecycle exists within nature (because he did actually consider it and that's how he brought about the Queen) as there is nothing like it on Earth.It's an assumption, but it's in part from evidence, including, "We endanger species".
Also, according to the Weyland Industries website and a deleted scene from Prometheus, most forms of life discovered at that point are micro-organisms. Further, from the site, most are quarantined, because contaminating a life bearing world with Earth organisms has historically, been considered, and across the board, its agreed one could very possible wipe out the other if it's a small population of life. Or, it could cause serious infection in multicellular organisms. Everything has to be clean. If life was encountered, this would be taken into consideration. Nobody would go out to a world and decide to shoot Extraterrestrial life.
So, putting it altogether, it seems possible that Marines are occasionally called in to deal with a pest species of "bug" like organisms that could endanger the health and safety of colonists, but is capable of breathing our air. Gorman said "xenomorph" probably, in this context, and assumed, that's what it was. Again evidence "Bug Hunt" and the side of the dropship "We endanger species" decal.
How are you getting that from the generic term xenomorph?
See, but I'm pretty sure comments made in the production of Aliens said they have, you could assume spread from a irresponsible research facility on a life bearing world, that is composed of multiple life cycles. A "xenomorph". Something unseen on Earth. One organism, multiple expendable forms, separate larval, instar, immature, and mature forms, that are composed of separate forms. On the side of Marines' dropship, an eagle with boots is circled by the words "We endanger species". It's probably a serious rampant pest of some sort. These sorts of events aren't unknown on Earth. Plus if I remember correctly, in the crew timeline background they made in the production of Alien, the one that mentions the United Americas and the Third World Empire, it implied Kane once worked in an archaeological dig of a kind off world.
"
2112 (October 28)
Kane begins working on a UK/EU archeological dig on Konor Minor, co-supervising with Dr Elisabeth Monygham."
What you can imply from this is that perhaps after the events of Prometheus, ruins from a precursor civilization become popping up, but they're all dead. There's no real intelligent life aside from ourselves. There are other forms of life, but they're animals. There are rumors here and there about Space Urban Legends, as quoted from the actors about the production of Alien. That myths like UFOs, have parallels in that world, probably coming from whatever rumors about the ruins man has encountered like the one on Konor Minor.
He mentioned it right after Gorman said that "a xenomorph may be involved." You may be right or I may be, who knows.
I can see where you're coming from, though I think that the Engineers have too much potential to simply be a legacy species. Instead, why not make them, as I postulated earlier, the slaves of their weapons? Have their homeworld be utterly transformed into a Giger-like mess with Shaw and David having to ensure that it never spreads (though David's loyalty is quite suspect at this point). If Prometheus became a trilogy or longer, a central theme could be the very essence of what it means to be human vs. the very essence of what it means to be alien. As Ridley himself has said, the series will be increasingly removed from the traditional Alien series, so the sky is the limit. It of course has to be mainstream and action packed enough for the audience to understand and enjoy what's happening, but why not turn this into a deep space psychological epic? In the end, the Engineers and everything else surrounding them could be destroyed (minus maybe a few remnants of them or their weapons escaping in the farthest ends of the universe), with the link to the Blomkamp's films that is being rumored being that, besides humans. the xenomorphs are the only notable legacy of the Engineers. It would be the ultimate tragedy and morality tale; the final legacy of a once great civilization who conquered the stars and who created humanity being the unleashing of an alien species that only lives for destruction.
I like this idea, especially the concept of generational memory (though this should be used with care). And who says that only eggs can survive for a long period of time? The xenomorph's bony structure could mean that they are far more efficient when it comes to taking in nutrients and can possible survive for periods of time possibly as long as the eggs (Ridley's idea ironically was the opposite; that the alien would die only a couple of days after being born, as its adulthood was not much longer than its childhood, and that it was 'perpetually dying'). And I do also like the idea of other strains being present, maybe some far more inconceivable than what we've already seen.
On the point of humans being alone with the aliens, we actually know that this is not true. If it was, Hudson would not have flippantly referred to 'bug hunts' in the second movie. Granted, it is heavily suggested that none of those other species come close to xenomorphs in terms of how dangerous they are. What these things are, we may never know, and I don't want the Alien universe to become a zoo (ideally, any other aliens we find might be mundane so as to not take the spotlight from the xenomorphs). Yet as I said before, the alien ability to mimic the physical characteristics of a host hints at the fact that aliens have been interacting with diverse segments of the universe for long periods of time, quite possibly longer than humans have been around or maybe even the Earth itself, as such an advanced ability would take a tremendous amount of time to be perfected. Now maybe all these species are dead, who knows. It is a compelling concept to have the universe outside of Earth be one gigantic tomb scattered with hibernating alien eggs and other related monstrosities.
One thing I would like to see is a return of the original Alien catch phrase "A word of warning..." It's so subtle yet hints at something unbelievably dangerous:
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Not sure if sarcastic or genuinely agreeing.
In either case... Prometheus did something to the Alien franchise, and that something was at the cost of expansion. Let me say that I am more of a Predator fan, and an AvP fan than strictly Alien-- but this is something I happened to notice. Prometheus, with the introduction (or re-introduction) of the Engineers dethroned the Alien as the main villain. For well over thirty years, the Alien was the main villain of the story and characters had to find ways to beat this unstoppable horror. Now... it's been reduced to being nothing more than a genetic f**k up by-product (assuming that is the case) where as the Engineers are the main villain and for all intents and purposes, the Masters of the Universe (No, not He-Man). And quite frankly.. that cost for the sake of expansion was a price too steep. One of the most iconic extraterrestrial threats.. now made an insectoid by-product f**k up.
But what really gets me, is that now the Engineers are being shoe-horned into the Predator and AVP franchises. Personally, I want Handsome Squidward to stay out of those two universes. But alas, it seems as if they are here to stay and dethrone the original antagonists and have them rendered being to second flute.. Which if you ask me, isn't really fair.
I like the idea that we're alone (with the Alien).
The Engineers are our predecessors. That was always the case on some level (and in fact was the point of including the derelict in Alien) but is now very literal. Although placing them as being active as recently as two millennia ago isn't to my taste, I don't hate the ancient aliens thing on principle and I can handle them not just being the guys who got wiped out by the Alien before us but also our creators - I still like them best as an extinct race though, and any ones surviving in stasis should be super rare.
The Alien, as I see it, is rogue genetic material with a "sentience" (but not sapience) handed down through generational memory (possibly in a literal sense, see A:R). It's the Lovecraftian crawling chaos that could be in any dark corner of space, just waiting. I'm very much a fan of the concept that outbreaks of the Alien as we know it burn out fairly quickly as they deplete hosts, but that through some sort of handwavium, eggs can survive indefinitely. So there's eggs, Engineer ruins containing modified strains or other applications of the Alien genetics, and who knows what else, scattered throughout space.
Which leads to us, alone in the dark with the Alien, which is just silently waiting out there amongst the stars.
I always thought that the reason the universe was so dark and empty was because of the Alien, whatever other life and civilization had been out there had been destroyed. Hence why the "Aliens on Earth: scenario was such a terrifying prospect (and f*ck AvP eternally f**k messing that up).
Could still be the case.
So far humans have only found left overs from things that existed long before.
As far as we know Earth is the only place in the universe which houses millions of diverse species and out there in space are just scattered locations of abandoned Engineer/jockey technology and the alien.
That idea is what I love. It's us, the engineers and the alien. Nothing else.
The ultimate fear is that we're alone.
Unfortunately not, indeed. Everything has to be related and interconnect and we have to see all the continuity of events.
No mystery. No deep voids of emptiness. It's a crowded narrative sky.
We need to go back to this.. But we won't, unfortunately.
Have you ever heard of Death of the Author? It's a great idea, helps with blank slate worlds, for you to build, when the desire is for you to build. It is arguable that the above is more tried and tripe than the bottom. You might as well leave it as Roswell in Space.
I'm also with you, leaving space dead and empty. I am totally with you. 100%. My idea, is that all what I was implying happened long long ago. There are no more people anywhere other than Earth and its colonies. Its desolate. Everything died. But the point being, the galaxy, maybe even the universe, is surrounded by potential hazards that remain from that time. The Aliens being one of them. From microscopic to human sized or maybe a bit larger. And there's other non-sentient average ordinary life disconnected mostly from this.
But, the point being, it's mostly empty aside from endless danger. Which is, really, what space is in reality. The dangers we have to face in the Real World, are just things like radiation, time, zero g, and mostly inhospitable planets that would crush our most over designed space suits.
Scott didn't give us something unique. He gave us Ancient Astronauts. That idea is so old and used it's not funny. All he did was let it be shoehorned in where it had no place to be.
But we know now that it's not big, dead and empty, even with the predators now removed from continuity. Even from the very beginning of the series, there were hints of something larger at work, with the presence of the Derelict and Space Jockey. While it was postulated that they were hundreds if not thousands of years old, I don't think that that was ever officially confirmed. Now with the Prometheus series and the likelihood of more revelations about the Engineers, why not make something incredibly terrifying and awe-inspiring that pays tribute to the visions which Giger tried to suppress with opium, instead of just albino Buddha fascists who probably don't have the equivalent of the Geneva Conventions? The cat's out of the bag, let's make it a truly epic cat to remember.
And even if Prometheus had never happened, with the exception of Isolation, the Alien series has been going down the drain for years with poor crossover films, repetitious AVP games and the debacle of Colonial Marines. Heck, the best thing to come out during that time were excellent action figures. While I'm not pointing figures at anyone on this board, there are a large number of fans who, if they had their way, would have the series be nothing but 'bug hunts' featuring marines who yelled "Stay frosty!" every ten seconds. The last serious attempt to create something that paid tribute to the vision of the original film was Alien 3, and we all know how flawed that was. Resurrection had its moments but it was just too goofy and flat. Since the mid-90s, Aliens has been predominantly about explosions and guys with big guns; completely the opposite of what was originally intended. The first AVP computer game partially succeeded in bringing back that claustrophobic atmosphere but by and large, it was more of the same. The Alien series needs to go in another, possibly radical direction; the last twenty years are what's the problem, not Prometheus.
Alien desperately needs a major shake up in order to stay fresh and Isolation only begins to correct the problem. I'm not saying that my idea has to be accepted but there needs to be something to reinvigorate the series and bring back the original theme. Despite all its flaws, I applaud Ridley Scott for creating something totally unique. The Alien universe was honestly never a truly dead place and it's just become more crowded in recent years. Better to have a nihilistic Lovecraftian vision than something like this which I can easily see Fox lapsing back into.
I'm cool with Lovecraftian horrors, I just kind of liked that the Alien universe was big, dead and empty.
There's a favorite artist of mine by the name of Brian Smith whose art partially captures the essence of what I'm trying to get at:
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This one could definitely be retooled towards a xenomorph-based theme:
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But to each their own.
Maybe humans are just one species that's being manipulated, and that we're just a tiny, tiny cog in something much larger than ourselves. The xenomorph ability to adopt some of the traits of its host could hint at deep, sustained interactions with possibly a countless amount of species over a protracted period of time. I mentioned in another post that this master thing, whatever it was, would not be something anything remotely conceivable to the human mind (allowing it to stay 'alien') and that it would not spread through space ships and invasions but through a gradual, random expansion across the universe over a period of hundreds of millions of years. This would make it even more sinister as there would be no pattern that anyone could detect; it would be this slow-moving, inexorable plague that gradually spread across the universe, annihilating whole civilizations with no one the wiser.