I'm not sure if what I'm about to say is a good thing or a very bad thing, but Anderson absolutely feels like a fanboy, and he made a fanboy's movie (outside of the part where any fanboy worth their salt would have surely set this film on an extraterrestrial planet), complete with a fanboy's infatuation with little dumb details. It works much less well in AvP, which is unabashedly intoxicated by the accumulated lore of the Alien franchise (the Predator franchise, then consisting of an Arnold Schwarzenegger picture and a sequel nobody particularly likes, had much less lore to contend with), and wants to do its very best to do good by that lore. It works in that film, which is a zesty bit of trash that puts all its chips on Milla Jovovich's enormous screen presence. Using fast travel on a video game map, essentially). Predator feels much more like he hadn't gotten his last film - the first Resident Evil, from 2002 - entirely out of his system, and wanted to rework some of its plot points and visual ideas (and simply stealing from himself without a word of apology, by "zooming out" to a wire-frame representation of the underground bunker where the action takes place, and "zooming in" to a different room. I imagine that Anderson got the nod on account of his 1997 space horror picture Event Horizon (a film with an extremely evident debt to Alien), but the final version of Alien vs. Anderson, a man for whom "spectacularly stupid" is and was his bread and butter. To that end, the producers wisely assigned screenwriting and directing duties to Paul W.S. Let that soak in, and keep in mind that the best-case scenario for this project was that it be spectacularly stupid in a vigorously colorful way. Still, it took 15 years from that first comic book for 20th Century Fox to finally release the movie version Alien vs. The one thing conspicuously missing was a feature film based on the concept, not for want of trying. This triggered a goofy little cross-media franchise, with novels, video games, comic books, and a production design in-joke in the 1990 film Predator 2 all keeping the flame lit. Not the first time we've rewound the clock in this franchise, not even the first time Scott was responsible but I had something in mind a bit crasser than Prometheus.įor what reason, really, would it make sense that the aliens from Aliens and the predators from Predator would inhabit the same universe? For no reason at all, and yet that would hardly be enough to discourage goofball fans, which is why 1989 saw the release of Aliens versus Predator, a comic book published by Dark Horse Comics, in which aliens fight predators, on an alien planet.
This week: Ridley Scott takes us to the prehistory of his 1979 masterpiece Alien with a certain Alien: Covenant. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.