Posted in: Movies | Tagged: alien, alien: covenant, film, HRL

Ridley Scott Says the New Alien Movies Will Have Fewer Aliens

Published Tue, 05 Dec 2017 15:38:29 -0600

Were you watching Alien: Covenant, a movie with the word "alien" in it, and thinking to yourself, "There are too many aliens in this?" It turns out that director Ridley Scott seems to think that there were people who thought that was the case. Entertainment Weekly was on the set of the reshoots for All the Money in The World and asked him about the future of the Alien franchise post-Alien: Covenant.

"We are [going to make another], we are," Scott told EW from the set of All the Money in the World. "I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff."

Okay, so maybe Scott doesn't actually want to make more Alien movies. That's fine, he doesn't have to — but the solution isn't that you make an Alien movie without aliens in it.

"People say, 'You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,' so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that's more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting."

You have an entire franchise about the dangers of AI. It's called Blade Runner, and you just made a sequel that was critically acclaimed but bombed at the box office. Then again, Alien: Covenant made a modest $240 million at the box office, so maybe aliens aren't that in, either.

"Fassbender was an AI," continues Scott. "Ian Holm [from Alien] was an AI; Roy Batty [from Blade Runner] was an AI; so was Rachael [from Blade Runner]."

If Scott wants to dig into the dangers of AI, then he should create a new movie. The Alien brand clearly doesn't have the pull it used to. To make his point that AI is the danger we should be focusing on, he refers to the incident last summer where two robots began talking in their own language.

"They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn't decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where's it gone? They could have already implemented something we don't know."

He's not wrong, but maybe the series about aliens isn't the place to explore that.

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