Joey Magidson
The Sunday Scaries are upon us once again! Yes, as the weekend concludes, most of us feel an oncoming sense of anticipatory dread about the week ahead. Anxiety about work manifests itself into a feeling that’s known as the Sunday Scaries. However, we at Awards Radar are here to combat that, by taking back the name. Now, we want you think about a horror-centric piece on the site when you hear the term. So, let us continue on with another installment of the Awards Radar Sunday Scaries! This time around, we’re looking at where the long-running Alien franchise could be headed next…
Last time I wrote about the Alien franchise here, it was right after Prey had taken the Predator series back to basics. I wrote, in part:
Few properties have the mix of genre acclaim and actual prestige that this one has. After all, the Academy Awards gave multiple nominations and wins to the first two installments. Hell, Sigourney Weaver even got a Best Actress nomination at the Oscars for a sequel. Above the line citations for an action sequel to a hit horror film? That doesn’t happen often. So, you know you have special movies here. They’ve been tied in with the Predator flicks for some time, but this week, we’re untangling them and hoping the powers that be can go back to basics with the Xenomorph.
This series has two stone cold classics under its belt with Ridley Scott‘s Alien and James Cameron‘s Aliens. Both were Oscar cited, with actual wins, and both changed the game, cinematically.
Beyond Alien and Aliens, things fluctuate more. Alien 3 has more than its share of moments, and the alternate cut that contains a big more of a young David Fincher‘s directorial vision is superior, while Alien: Resurrection is big and weird, opting to be almost a sillier take on Aliens. At that point, the franchise seemed to be alternating between horror and action. Then, a purported Alien 5, one set on Earth, never got off the ground. So, we wound up with Alien vs Predator and its sequel, Alien vs Predator: Requiem. Like I mentioned last week in the column, the less said about those, the better. More recently, we’ve seen Scott come back to the property with prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, both of which were mixed bags.
The thing is, Scott used Prometheus and Alien: Covenant to add more mythology to the Xenomorph, which doesn’t make them more impactful. Part of why Prey is so good, as detailed previously, is that it’s just meat and potatoes, largely doing away with all of that. It’s a good lesson that I hope the next installment takes, unlikely as that seemingly is.
Our next outing in the franchise will be on the small screen, by way of Noah Hawley. The television version of Alien will be Earth based and also fill in more blanks, so it’s not doing what I’d prefer. However, what makes this at least somewhat promising is that TV gives you more time, so it may well actually earn the right to add to the mythos. Hopefully it’s an even balance, since Prometheus was almost exclusively in one direction, while Alien: Covenant almost throws in its Xenomorph centric final act out of soulless obligation.
Of course, some aborted efforts have gotten the hopes up of fans over the years. The aforementioned Alien 5 on Earth had the amazing tagline of “On Earth, everyone can hear you scream.” Whether Cameron or Scott ever seriously considered making it is another story. More recently, Neill Blomkamp came pretty close to bringing back Weaver and Michael Biehn for his alternate Alien 3 of sorts, doing the modern thing of retconning and ignoring all but the best loved installments. While the filmmaker has seen his star dim quite a bit with a few notable misfires, the premise at least got folks pretty excited.
So, for me at least, it’s a matter of just getting back to basics. Look at what Cameron did. Look at hat Scott (originally) did. You have epic action and claustrophobic horror. Both options could easily bear fruit if done well. Not to use video games as an example, but the action of the Alien vs Predator video game franchise, as well as the retro survival horror aspect of Alien: Isolation, show that it’s clearly the ways that work for this property. As an aside, an Alien: Isolation adaptation wouldn’t be a terrible idea, Hollywood. Just saying…
Hopefully, whether it’s Hawley’s Alien show on television, or another cinematic outing, this franchise will see glory days again. Scott has gotten a chance to play around in this sandbox again, so maybe Cameron will take another crack at it one day? If not, here’s hoping that a hungry young filmmaker can knock it out of the park. Alien and Aliens are the template, so as long as we stay far away from the AvP quality levels, there’s hope here, one day. Until then, we wait for rescue, much like Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo.
Now, we still haven’t gotten to see the small screen Alien show, but we did get Alien: Romulus. Interestingly, this movie more or less did what I asked for. Now, I didn’t ask for fan service, but going back to the basics of the franchise is sort of what the flick did. It ended up middle of the road, quality wise, as my ranking here indicates, but this was clearly an attempt to do what worked best in Alien and Aliens.
My review of the film here included the following:
The Alien franchise is a tail of a few highs, a couple of crossover lows, and aside from that, a lot of mediocrity. I’ll talk about that more when I rank the films later on in the week, but for a series with major influences on cinema, as well as a status as A-list, surprisingly few entries have been of high quality. There’s Alien and Aliens, but no other stone cold classic movies. So, Alien: Romulus enters the fray with a lower bar to clear than you might expect in order to be considered upper echelon. Does it accomplish that? Yes, but not quite by as much as you might hope. It’s good, to be sure, but anyone wishing for it to be great will end up at least slightly disappointed. Still, the franchise is on solid ground and potentially pointed in the right direction.
Alien: Romulus is closer in approach to the two best installments, though it does more or less take a straightforward approach to being a mix of science fiction and horror. The action is far less than in Aliens, so it’s a slightly scaled up Alien, at its core. That might not sit well with those looking for something big and bold and new. However, if you’re just looking for the powers that be to get this sort of thing right again, well, you’re in luck.
Going forward, the franchise has two options. They could continue making this sort of back to basics approach, though I do think that will get old faster than with Prey and Predator. What makes Alien and Aliens work was taking the premise to new heights, while the series on the whole tends to get ambitious and weirder the longer it goes. There’s a breaking point, but one could look at Alien: Romulus succeeding as an opportunity to try that again.
We shall see where things go, but I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the last of the Xenomorph. The form it takes (cinematically, not as a Chestburster/Facehugger, etc) remains to be seen. Here’s hoping we have more quality efforts on the horizon. Alien: Romulus was a step in the right direction. It should just be the first step, though…
Stay tuned for another Sunday Scaries installment next week!
Having sat on my disappointment-with-a-dash-of-genuine-moral-outrage over Alien: Romulus a little longer, I think I have to come down on the side that if we are going to continue with this series, then the only way for it to have a chance at producing worthwhile follow-ups in the future is to allow the fictional setting and canon of this series act as a canvas for young, ambitious, up-and-coming filmmakers to just go nuts with their specific directorial mindsets. Sometimes that will produce stone-cold masterpieces like Alien and Aliens, sometimes it will result in obviously compromised and conceptually confused post-production messes like Alien³, and sometimes it will give us silly nonsense like Alien Resurrection.
But all of those movies in the mainline series were, at a minimum, interesting. As irritated as I am with the mean-spirited spend-offs of Ripley, Hicks, Bishop, and Newt, I cannot deny being fascinated by the chaotic behind-the-scenes path Alien³ went through to get made, and pondering over the wreckage of the (at least) three completely different earlier drafts of screenplays mashed sloppily into this one, and making note of the earliest signs of the visual panache and uncompromising tonal nihilism that would become David Fincher‘s signatures just a few years later. Heck, even Alien Resurrection provides an insightful glimpse into what Jean-Pierre Jeunet lost by dropping his co-director Marc Caro and going solo for the first time in his career and the – so far! – only American film he’s ever directed. I cannot say the same for Alien: Romulus, helmed by a filmmaker who has directed a grand total of one feature film not tied to a pre-existing IP across the last eleven years, motivates no strong feelings to revisit or discuss it again except in the context of its offensive cinematic grave-robbing, and seemed motivated entirely by reminding nostalgic viewers of the existence of older and better movies from this franchise. And actually, maybe even recalling older, better video games like Alien: Isolation, which I haven’t played but I know for a fact that Fede Álvarez has played and the structure of Alien: Romulus‘ plotline and action sequences, in hindsight, felt… “videogamey,” to watch.
This franchise is now owned and controlled by The Walt Disney Corporation, so I know with 100% certainty that they will never go for this risky approach, especially since their top-down-managed, don’t-rock-the-boat mandates on this movie has been financially rewarding for them. But I fear that if any member of their board of directors ever come across your op-ed, they will intentionally misread your advice to “go back to basics” as “just do what worked last time over and over again.”
I do think they’ll misread this as well…