Blomkamp takes aim at resurrecting Alien franchise


With the exceptions of George Lucas and the late Stanley Kubrick, no filmmaker has done more to popularize science fiction than Ridley Scott. His two greatest achievements, Alien and Blade Runner, are universally acknowledged as classics of the genre, pop cultural touchstones whose thematic and stylistic influence cannot be overstated. Both movies are due to receive extremely belated sequels within the next few years, and each will be helmed by a talented up-and-coming director. The similarities end there, however, because while Alien deserves a quality follow-up, Blade Runner demands to be left alone.

Why, you ask? First of all, Alien is already an established franchise. The original film, which burst onto screens in the summer of 1979, remains a note-perfect synthesis of horror and science fiction, a futuristic twist on the “old dark house” narrative — a group of people are trapped in an enclosed environment and targeted for death by a malevolent entity — that relied on atmosphere, tension and H.R. Giger’s nightmarish creature designs to terrify audiences. It also introduced viewers to the courageous, no-nonsense Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the last survivor of the doomed ship Nostromo and one of cinema’s first true action heroines.

James Cameron’s 1986 sequel Aliens expanded the world and drastically altered the tone of the series, swapping claustrophobic, slow-burn horror for the red meat gristle of a war movie. The result was a hit with audiences and critics alike, and Weaver found herself in the running for a Best Actress Oscar after Ripley revealed a softer side, rescuing the orphaned Newt (Carrie Henn) from a horde of ravenous “xenomorphs” and trading banter with the irascible Corporal Dwayne Hicks (Michael Biehn) and the selfless android Bishop (Lance Henriksen). Ripley’s maternal bond with Newt culminates in an epic showdown with the monstrous alien queen, a standout sequence that would stand as the apex of Stan Winston’s visual effects wizardry prior to Jurassic Park in 1993.

After the success of Aliens, the quality of the series quickly went downhill. David Fincher has since matured into a masterful filmmaker, but his debut feature Alien 3 is a slick, soulless slog through hell that dispatches beloved characters with what amounts to glib nihilism. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s much-maligned Alien: Resurrection, with its failed Ripley clones and silly-looking alien-human hybrids, actually succeeds at being an amiably bizarre space opera — Joss Whedon penned the predictably snarky screenplay — but it’s far too in love with its own half-baked cleverness to measure up to the works of Scott and Cameron.

Now, 36 years after the release of Alien and on the heels of Scott’s polarizing but visually resplendent pseudo-prequel Prometheus, Fox has announced that the franchise’s fifth installment, currently slated for a 2017 release date, will be directed by Neill Blomkamp, the South African auteur behind District 9 and the newly released Chappie. The director, a longtime fan of the series who attracted the studio’s interest after posting homemade concept art featuring an older Ripley and a battle-scarred Hicks, should prove an excellent choice to revive the brand, which has been diluted after years of subpar video games, last year’s Alien: Isolation notwithstanding, and two dismal Alien vs. Predator movies.

Blomkamp’s work has the same lived-in, blue-collar aesthetic that made Scott and Cameron’s films so visually distinctive from the gleaming future-scapes of their genre contemporaries in the late ’70s and ’80s, and he has demonstrated a real knack for orchestrating character-driven carnage on a massive scale without losing the plot, even though he came perilously close in the ham-fisted third act of Elysium.

Even more exciting, both Weaver, who worked with Blomkamp on Chappie, and Biehn have expressed interest in signing up for the project, leading to widespread fan speculation that the events of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection are being ret-conned in favor of an alternate timeline, a storytelling mea culpa typically reserved for the cluttered mythologies of comic books. I personally hope the rumors are true, mainly because it would allow for the return of Henrikson’s Bishop, whose charm and naivete always served as a nice conversational counterbalance to Ripley’s take-no-prisoners attitude.

So what about Blade Runner? The 1982 neo-noir is every bit as celebrated and influential as Alien, and it’s never received any kind of follow-up before (with the exception of three non-canonical novels written by K.W. Jeter), so why isn’t the news of its sequel being greeted with more elan? For the majority of fans, the major sticking point is the decision to have Harrison Ford reprise his role as replicant hunter Rick Deckard.

The original film’s ending leaves it purposely vague as to whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant, an android with a tragically short lifespan of four years. In fact, the debate has raged among film fans for decades, spurred on by Scott’s decision to continually release different versions of the movie, including 2007’s definitive “Final Cut,” which contains omitted dialogue snippets and some choice dream imagery of a unicorn. Having Deckard appear as an older man will effectively ruin one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of cinema. It would be comparable to Quentin Tarantino revealing the contents of Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction or Christopher Nolan allowing Cobb’s totem to topple at the end of Inception. There’s simply no need.

Is there a way to make a Blade Runner sequel the fan base can get behind? Perhaps. Just as the Alien franchise had to make do without the Ellen Ripley character for the better part of 18 years, the world of Blade Runner goes far beyond the trials and tribulations of one lonely, soul-sick executioner. As the old saying goes, there are eight million stories in the naked city. We’ve only heard one. Hopefully the sequel’s director Denis Villeneuve, who brought such wicked intensity to the kidnapping drama Prisoners and last year’s identity crisis thriller Enemy, can find another worth telling.

Landon McDonald is a graduate student studying public relations. His column, “Screen Break,” runs Fridays.