Patient_Leech
Perfect Organism
Originally posted by Esau Cairn
Thus the public confusion.
He didn't want to do a prequel but bases the story on a minor character (The Pilot/Engineer) from the original movie?I mean c'mon...without The Engineer, you wouldn't have Alien.
I don't know why Spaihts was hired to do a strict Alien prequel if that's not what Ridley wanted to do, because I think the studio was only interested in another Alien movie if Ridley would do it (the studio was at least savvy enough to realize that the Alien franchise was wearing pretty thin by the time Resurrection came around. 8-minute underwater scene anyone?). Maybe the studio just wanted to see what it would look like and use it as a starting point. I'm not sure, but my guess is that the studio execs (unoriginal as they usually are) probably commissioned the strict prequel treatment and Ridley wanted to steer it differently (plus it's hard to name a big budget movie that isn't planned in hopes of creating at least 2 or 3 more if it's a success). Ridley is not a writer, afterall. But he is clearly very precious with this subject matter and approves it all before he films it obviously. Ridley kept saying that if he was to do a follow-up to his Alien he would prefer to explore the elephantine "Space Jockey" (as it was once called). He's not as interested in doing something that's already been done (i.e. Alien sequels). James Cameron just ripped off the original movie, so to me it's really quite overrated. At this point xenomorphs and facehuggers have been done to death and are no longer scary or even interesting.
I think it was always thought of as an Alien prequel (to me it is still a prequel), it's just that once they started developing it more Ridley tried steering people away from expecting another Alien movie because there are no xenomorphs and facehuggers. I think that's where people got confused and had certain expectations. Ridley simply wanted to shift focus onto some newer ideas, like humanity's origin and desire for immortality. We haven't seen those ideas in an Alien movie until now. We've seen corporate greed over human life (twice actually, thanks to Mr. Cameron) and we've seen the hubris of mankind trying to control the aliens in hopes to learn from and weaponize them. But, Ridley, no doubt because he is getting up there in age, is probably contemplating his navel a bit more, so origin of the species and immortality were no doubt on his mind.
Originally posted by Kazenji
Have you been getting the Aliens book for Fire & Stone?.
No, I haven't. Just the Prometheus ones. I imagine they tie in somehow?