H.R. Giger Returns To the Alien Franchise 144
An anonymous reader writes "Great news for Alien franchise purists, as conceptual artist H.R. Giger has been confirmed as a contributor to the prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The originator of the 'xenomorph' design, Giger was left out of James Cameron's Aliens (1986), since Cameron only needed a new 'Alien queen' design, and had come up with that himself. This article features the Swiss TV broadcast where Giger's wife broke the news, and a full gallery of Giger's conceptual work for Alien."
Re:Milking the cow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Prequels of played out franchises mostly blow chunks. Mostly.
Indeed, they do. And after the horror that was Alien: Resurrection and the absolute mediocrity of the two AvP movies, I was not expecting much out of this prequel.
But they've got Ridley Scott directing, and now H.R. Giger is on-board as well... A couple steps in the right direction.
It may not turn out to be absolutely horrible.
Maybe.
Re:Milking the cow... (Score:4, Insightful)
"HOW did that ship crash on that planet? Where did it come from? Who created those aliens?"
The real issue for me was that aliens 3 and 4 were such garbage. Aliens 3 would have been ok as a spin-off movie (alternate universe), but the directors had no clue where to take it after Aliens (technically 'alien 2').
They had such an awesome universe which they royally f'd up with the third and fourth movies. So badly that the whole series just doesn't feel right anymore. I'm not holding my breath for the prequel. As far as I'm concerned the series ended for me with Aliens.
Re:No humans, please (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
The really cool thing about that alien ship in Alien was just how *ALIEN* it was.
It'll turn out that humans engineering both the space-jockey species AND the Aliens. BORING. Let me say it again: BOR-ING!
Re:Which came first? (Score:4, Insightful)
Alien: 1979 [imdb.com]
Brood: 1982 [wikipedia.org]
Give it a chance already (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that resentment rides high on Slashdot over Lucas' prequel efforts, but Ridley Scott is a Director/Producer of a whole other calibre. Franky, I'm hard pressed to name a bad film by Scott... sure, some movies such as Kingdom of Heaven and Hannibal come to mind, but they were very watchable and had many redeeming qualities beyond just action and effects. Also keep in mind that Scott is responsible for both Alien and Blade Runner, two of most memorable and defining sci-fi efforts in cinematic history, and he did them back to back. And most importantly, Scott's entire portfolio is very diverse in genre and subject matter. Unlike Lucas, he is a truly imaginative and gifted director and not one to take up a project to make a buck or milk a franchise.
Personally, I see lots of potential for these prequels to be nothing short of fantastic. The telling of the story of the Space Jockey and the origins of the Xeno-Morph has all sorts of potential, as does the telling of the 1st encounter and discovery of the Xeno-Morph by Weyland-Yutani. These stories aren't those of a true prequel in the Star Wars sense, those were stories that closely followed an existing story arc around a small set of characters. Here, we have a whole other set of stories only loosely related to the stories we already know.
So give Scott some slack, you know you're going to see these movies in the theatre no matter what the reviews say and you know that with Scott at the helm, there will be a decent plot and story line and that the visuals and world will be stunning and engaging.
Darkseed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Milking the cow... (Score:4, Insightful)
We still haven't seen Alien sex though. Just sayin
Which part of facehumper do you not understand?
Re:Milking the cow... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that much of the horror in Alien that made it work is overdone now. It had a lot of gore for a movie of it's time, complete with a woman running around in her panties. That was cute and new and the horror was what was off the screen.
Movie goers are immune to the gore, immune to that half naked woman (even fully naked women at this point) and the horror of what's not seen, is now just seen as a cheap budget. You can't even be scared by something you've seen before, which is why Cameron spent so much time in the first sequel not even showing you the Alien until he was ready to throw all of it at you.
You won't get another Alien. You won't get another Aliens. Give it up folks. We're stuck with what we've gotten of the AvP movies, Predators and Resurrection. It doesn't get new. Just enjoy the story.
Aliens and Xenobiology (Score:4, Insightful)
The Aliens are intelligent. They've got VERY big brains, they're possibly socially telepathic, and they've gotten around the cultural problem of a lack of information-continuity between generations by developing (or adopting from another parasitised species) a form of inherited memory. That's how the Ripley-Alien hybrid clone has memories of being Ripley.
The nasty question posed by the inherited-memory thing is: The aliens have a fetal stage (implanted by the face-huggers) during which they adapt to their new environment by adapting to and adopting elements of their host's biology ... and presumably they also retain memories from the Queen that laid their egg. During the adaptation process, does the alien fetus, which potentially has telepathic abilities, also imprint on the memories and personality of its host?
In other words, when Little Aliens burst out of humans and become Big Aliens, do those Big Aliens then have false memories of being human? That might go some way to explaining why they're so pissed off.
While there's stuff like that that still needs to be addressed, I think there's space for at least one more film, and if we're going to be seeing unexplored aspects of the Alien biology, it's cool that they've got Giger onboard to extend and elaborate on some of his original designs.
Re:Milking the cow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of H.R. Giger's own work involves alien boning:
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Not alien related, but OMG so horrible:
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