Wednesday May 23, 2012 3:17 PM AEST

Atomic MPC > Features > Geek > Entertainment > The plot-obstacles to an Alien prequel

The plot-obstacles to an Alien prequel

The human element
It's going to take some work to get the human race involved in a prequel set-up forAlien. In the original movie, Weyland-Yutani's diversion of the Nostromo to LV-426 seems an opportunistic - if rather heartless - approach to new business acquisitions. The crew of the Nostromo are heading back from a long and gruelling spell of work in the Solomons when they are told to investigate the space-jockey's 'distress' signal or forfeit their shares. They'll later find out that they are all entirely 'expendable', so long as the valuable bug makes its way back to the Weyland-Yutani research labs.

Clearly the company is way ahead of the crew's efforts to decipher the signal, which obviously contains a pretty detailed description of the xenomorph and its potential capability as a military weapon.

The science-officer Ash turns out to be an android planted by the company to protect its interests, but at no point is it suggested that the Nostromo shipped out of Earth with Ash on board specifically to protect the alien. If the distress-signal is public-domain and has reached Earth, and (as at least one of the Aliens comics suggested) other military powers might be just as interested in it... why send the Nostromo off to accomplish its mining remit for years before diverting it to LV-426 on the return journey? Any other interested power aware of the information could just send a ship straight to the planet and comfortably beat Weyland-Yutani to the prize.

No, the suggestion is that Ash is on board as a 'mole' because of a general company policy of spying on its workers, and that the entirely surprising advent of the space-jockey's signal is exactly the kind of thing the company needs an 'inside man' for.

Paul Anderson's risible 2004 prequel Aliens Vs. Predator didn't even make a significant dent in this back-story, since it presented Lance Henrikson as the 'template' of Aliens' Bishop and co-founder of Weyland Yutani - and then killed him off. Anderson admitted as much in a 2005 edition of Movie Magic, declaring "...there's nothing in [Alien Vs. Predator] that contradicts anything that already exists".

All the company needed to do to 'look good for the records' and not be beaten to the punch was to divert the Nostromo on the way out. If, that is, they knew about LV-426 in advance of the mission. But let's face it, the way Alien is set up, they didn't.

The Nostromo was obviously the nearest ship available anywhere - if other powers on Earth had decoded the message and were sending ships to LV-426 to retrieve a xenomorph, they weren't going to beat the Nostromo, which was in the wrong place at the wrong time... at least according to the O'Bannon/Shusett script.

In my opinion, some nasty acts of canon-hacking will be needed to suggest that there were adequate human machinations to generate an entire film prior to the Nostromo's involvement.

But what choice is there, if this is the road the producers have chosen? The chances of Alien 0 dealing entirely with an expensive CGI/prosthetics space-jockey civilisation are pretty remote, not least because such an outlandish project doesn't tick all the demographic boxes for the target audience (who are almost inevitably going to be young teenagers, I fear). The producers will be needing pretty faces to shroud in face-huggers - and probably younger ones than featured in the original movie.

Alien 0 or Alilen 5
In light of these and other problems, may I strongly recommend that they return to the long-awaited Alien 5 instead? We know Sigourney Weaver costs money (and that this has always been an issue with the Alien movies after the first), but she's always been worth it. And unless the intention is to spin off the Alien canon into a new side-alley as J.J. Abrams did with Star Trek, we just don't seem to fit into the picture until the original Alien movie rumbles into view.

Ultimately, however, we'll leave you with a last word from Dan O'Bannon, Alien's creator.

"I'd like to see [the Alien sequels] stop. A horror movie's a fragile thing, and once you've gotten past the original, it isn't scary anymore."

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8 Comments

thesorehead Jun 11, 2009 1:56 PM	"But what sense does that make? As soon as Kane breaks the beam of light, the little fellers start twitching. Why would any military party set a trap on board its own ship?" weell... actually they start twitching as soon as he gets close to them. Perhaps the blue light was just an indicator, a warning not to get too close. Or it could have been a kind of dampening field to allow personnel to work around the eggs without disturbing them. Alilen, I like it! Any story past Alien 4 (which I really liked, BTW) would have to either ditch Ripley or the Aliens.
Bolter01 Jun 11, 2009 5:38 PM	I love that gigantic refining ship, with everyone asleep millions of light years from anywhere. That's Scary. I would like to know their(space jockey & aleins) history too.
Not at all The Fuzz Jun 12, 2009 10:34 AM	a) the need to fuck off Ripley. I mean, Sigourney's great and all, but she's had her run. Her story has been told -- as the Dark Horse comics show, there are still plenty of fantastic stories to come that don't need Ripley. b) clearly, the blue light is there as part of an inhibitory mechanism to ensure that the facehuggers don't hatch until something is thrown in there. When the time is right, a sacrifice (or several thousand of them) is made and new alien warriors come out ready to wage war. Of course, the space jockeys would have a means of controlling the aliens once they erupted, but this hapless fellow is the result of [sci-fi cliche] that allowed one or two, at least, to escape. c) LV-426 is located in Zeta II Reticuli, which is 37 ly from Earth. The ship has definitely been there longer than that -- the signal has certainly had time to reach Earth. WY picked up on it and decided to investigate, sending Ash along with the crew of the Nostromo to protect the Alien. However, there's nothing the say that this is the first such contact the WY, or any other commercial interest, has had with this species. Other mining vessels/colonial expeditions/military operations/whatever may well have encountered this species before, and been similarly silenced. d) I would dearly love to see the species that needed an "Alien" as a bioweapon to fight them. Or even the Alien's natural predators, as must surely exist (and one particularly boring example of which was shown in, iirc, the original AvP comics).
orcone Jun 12, 2009 2:42 PM	FUCKING ALIENS WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE??? if i found alien in street i kick his ass shit in asshole he blled on me it wont hurt
philo-sofa Jun 12, 2009 3:18 PM	Hmm. Can't be worse than T4 rt? Maybe less 'awesome!' and more 'awesome movie' than the last few Aliens'?
Hawkeye Jun 12, 2009 4:53 PM	Man, you're getting into early, ain't ya Orc?
corinoco Jun 13, 2009 1:16 PM	When I first read 'Prequel to Aliens' the first thing I thought of was 'Enterprise'. The last thing the Trek franchise needed was a prequel; when have prequels ever worked? cough Star Wars cough Maybe what the directors and writers need to come up with is something new. WOAH! What a concept! Something... original! Oohhh, I feel woozy, need to sit down. Something that isn't a "re-imagining" of something we've already seen. I know, the new BG was good in parts, but go and look at the original. Sure it's all 80's beige velour, but it was ORIGINAL! OK, lets face it, these modern hacks can't do anything original anymore, the bean-coutners and marketroids don't like that kind of risk... so why the hell not mine some of the wealth of other scifi out there? We have finally seen Dune done reasonably well in the miniseries form (although David Lynch's original could have been SO much better - coincidence - Giger was art inspiration for that, too) How about - Friday - R. Heinlein or Ringworld - L. Niven Intergral Trees/Smoke Ring - L. Niven - a whole film in free fall! (Soundtrack by Vangelis for that one, please) Footfall (would be BRILLIANT!) - Niven / Pournelle Dark Tower / Gunslinger series - S. King (would be huge, need to cut out all the rude bits, which might shorten it) Rama series by A.C. Clarke and if David Lynch is still interested: Norstrillia - by Cordwainer Smith - Cross 'Australia' with 'Barbarella' and you might be somewhere near what Norstrillia could be. Any of the 'Gateway' series by Fredrick Pohl would make for some incredibly tight psycho-thrillers, especially the first book. The Uplift series by David Brin could also be a lot of fun. Heck, even some of J.W. Jeter's treatments for sequels to Bladerunner could be alright. If you haven't read any of the above-mentioned books - GO DO IT NOW.
baalbeck Jun 18, 2009 4:29 PM	I always assumed the fate of the space jockey was an indication of superior alien races falling in the exact same manner as the humans did. Ship with bio / genetically bred navigator and crew become infested with aliens. Crew is consumed/ Queen lays eggs, Navigator lives long enough to leave infested planet sends distress signal and crashes and dies. Aliens disperse across planet and conveniently disappear? ship is dormant for untold centuries until humans evolve to spread across the stars, blah,blah. The Key for me is the similarities in features from the space jockey and the aliens who are a parasitic species who assimilate characteristics of the host organism to quickly adapt to local environment. Could you get a movie from this that would be worth sitting through? NAH.

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Atomic Magazine

Issue: 137 | June, 2012

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