Ridley Scott Knows No Sequel Will Ever Top The Original Alien
By Anya Stanley/April 26, 2022 10:00 am EST
with The Hollywood Reporter. Despite coming back to direct “Alien” prequels “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” Scott acknowledges that nothing can beat the OG, which he characterized to the Los Angeles Times as “a great B movie … that elevated itself.” He said to The Hollywood Reporter:
Two other sci-fi films swirled together in the head of the director, creating a tempest from which a xenomorph would eventually emerge. While his film “The Duelists” was showcased to industry folks around Los Angeles, Scott caught a showing of “Star Wars” at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (now TCL Chinese Theater) and marveled at how hyped the audience was. When the script for “Alien” came, he chased the hype while doing an about-face from the romance and clean design of George Lucas’ space opera. As he developed the story, Scott pulled from Stanley Kubrick’s existential crisis-among-the-stars “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first movie to raise the idea for Scott that computers can outwit man. The result was a commercial success, grossing over $106 million and spawning three sequels, two crossover mashups, two prequels, and an upcoming television series. Initial mixed reviews gave way to its legacy as one of the most beloved sci-fi-horror films of all time.
‘You get to the point when you say, “Okay, it’s dead in the water.”’
One of the appeals of prequels like “Alien: Covenant” was it afforded Scott to play with the formula, rather than flogging a dead Facehugger:
The sentiment might put a bee in the bonnet of horror fans who enjoy the different iterations of evil and creativity in sequels in a genre that trades heavily in them. It might even be hard to find a consensus among cinephiles that “Alien” was the best of the bunch. “Scream 2” contains a classroom discussion of how sequels generally disappoint; “Aliens” is held up as an example of a follow-up that surpasses its predecessor. Where most can agree is in Scott’s insistence that for a franchise to sustain itself, one can’t keep doing the same thing — the organism must grow and evolve.
“I think ‘Alien vs. Predator’ was a daft idea. And I’m not sure it did very well or not, I don’t know. But it somehow brought down the beast. And I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like.’ So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually. But you know, there’s no alien in it, except the baby at the end that showed, itself, the possibility. … The alien [origin concept] is uniquely attached to Mother Nature. It simply comes off a wood beetle that will lay eggs inside some unsuspecting insect. And in so doing, the form of the egg will become the host for this new creature. That’s hideous. But that was what it was. And you can’t keep repeating that because the joke gets boring.
