Anghus Houvouras on how Neill Blomkamp will ruin Alien and every other franchise…
When I first read the headlines, I swear I could hear the high-pitched tear of a needle being dragged across a vinyl record. After posting a few pieces of concept art, 20th Century Fox gave the go-ahead to Neill Blomkamp to take the reigns of their wounded Alien franchise. The one that has been so poorly manhandled that they couldn’t even make a decent movie out the back story with Ridley Scott at the helm, and couldn’t mine one moment of fun from crossing over the classic Xenomorphs with the Predator franchise. I mean, seriously. Even the terrible Freddy vs. Jason had a few fun moments.
The Alien franchise has been drifting aimlessly since James Cameron delivered the universally loved Aliens nearly 30 years ago. Since then, Alien fans have been perpetually disappointed by the series. Alien 3 is seen by many as the first big misstep (though I personally love it), and the less said about Alien: Resurrection the better.
But now, Neill Blomkamp is here to save the day. Without any real direction to call their own, Fox is letting Blomkamp helm a new chapter of the Alien series. However, it’s not a reboot, it’s a sequel of sorts. Deciding to go the Bryan Singer/Superman Returns route, Blomkamp will be doing his own version of revisionist history and making his own version of Alien 3. One where Hicks and Newt don’t die off camera and can be given a proper story.
I’m aghast. Appalled, even. This is, at best, the fan fiction musings of a successful director who has enough clout to take the franchise in an old direction. At worst, it’s the new direction were going to see in dormant franchises from successful creative types who believe they can write the mistakes of past films and pilot the franchise into a new continuity that only uses the successful chapters as canon.
Horse hockey.
We’ve seen this done before. Like the aforementioned Superman Returns. Where Bryan Singer decides that he’s only going to use the Superman movies he likes in a sort of pseudo-sequel that ignores other cinematic adaptations that clash with his muddy vision of the movies. We all know how THAT went. It went poorly. Superman Returns was just awful and Bryan Singer ended up derailing the franchise for another five years or so before Zack Snyder took over and turned the Man of Steel into a city destroying, involuntary manslaughtering rage boner. It’s funny, because Singer actually learned from his mistakes. He couldn’t do the same thing to the X-Men franchise, so he found a more inventive way to course correct via Time Travelling shenanigans. The same creatively reckless process being taken with this summer’s awful looking Terminator: Genisys. Sure, the series needed course correction after the horrid Terminator: Salvation, but why is the solution always ‘more time travel’? Shrug.
The danger to all other franchises Hollywood has become dependent on is allowing creators to pick and choose what parts of the story they want to use for their pseudo-sequels. Hollywood has become all too accustomed with the reset button either with reboots or time travel, storyline eradicating scenarios. Now they’re going to allow filmmakers to cut apart franchises and stories to cater to the story they want to tell.
I’m guessing there’s a lot of us that made up stories for our favorite films when we were kids. I had a million different adventures for Indiana Jones. Does it mean if I was handed the franchise that the first thing I’d do is totally disregard Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Sure, it was terrible, but could I just grab Harrison Ford and pretend the whole painful exercise never took place? Creatively speaking, we’re in such a fragile and forgiving place. Fans are so worked up over seeing their favorite franchises get another installment that they’ll let studios trample their favorite characters & stories just in the hope that it might be worth watching. People seem fine with letting studios extrapolate single books into multi-installment monsters (The Hobbit), or create half-backed prequels trying to turn a simple series into a much grander tale (Prometheus), or let perpetually coked up directors make unintelligible car wrecks of their favorite childhood shows (Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).
On top of all that, we’re going to let Neill Blomkamp go Doctor Frankenstein on Alien simply because he thinks he has a decent idea of what could have happened if Alien 3 had never existed?
You know what Neill? Alien 3 did exist. As much as it you might not like it, Hicks and Newt died on that shuttle. Their deaths were tragic and pointless, which is why I like Alien 3 so much. You don’t get to jump in your Delorean and run over David Fincher before he makes his flawed attempt at an Alien film. And no, Bryan Singer, you don’t get to ignore the fact that Superman was temporarily turned evil by Richard Pryor and fought himself in a garbage dump. Whether you like it or not, that happened. Creators shouldn’t get to pick and choose what parts of the back-story they want to embrace.
Who do you think you are? Comic book writers?
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
Originally published March 7, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
