Alien Concept

What the fuck is going on with this Alien prequel project eh? First Ridley was producing and now he’s directing. HR Geiger was contacted for pre-production work and now I hear he’s been discarded. Then it was still supposed to be set in the Alien  ‘universe‘ and now it isn’t, the project allegedly xenomorphing into something altogether different – it’s all a bit strange. I’m not terribly excited I have to say, I love the series for the most part with some reservations – the quality certainly eroded as the franchise developed – but the prospect of another SF film from Ridley who is no spring chicken at the venerable age of 72 still retains a certain tempo of interest.

Anyway this brings me to the point of this post and a potential blog exercise that occurred to me over the weekend, mostly inspired by my imminent purchase of this snarling little beauty. The original Alien Quadrilogy box-set of course was one of the best DVD box-sets released thus far for the genre connoisseur, all those commentaries, documentaries and associated material were fabulous and the prospect of revisiting these in high definition with another five hours of excised material makes my stomach churn. I’ve read that the transfers are outstanding so I thought it could be fun to run a series of posts on the films, potentially more aligned to personal recollections and observations rather than straightforward reviews, hey at least it’ll keep me out of trouble.

I’ll say upfront that I don’t think I’ve actually seen the Aliens Special Edition as one compact entity, I’ve seen all that extra material on LV-426 of course but not all together in one viewing. So that could be frantic.

It could also be an interesting time to revisit Fincher’s maligned debut around Oscar time, if I time things correctly, and it could be fun to compare and contrast the theatrical cut with the subsequent directors cut, as well as the fascinating concepts and pre-production work on Vincent Ward’s mooted version from which some concepts remain, albeit in a diluted and mangled form.

Unfortunately such an exercise is destined to end in tears as I mostly loathed that fourth episode to the franchise, although a revisit might unearth some obscured qualities that I haven’t detected – you live in hope. Finally I suppose I should weigh in with my fascinating insights into probably the weeks biggest movie news.  I welcome Tom Hardy materializing in Nolan’s Gotham universe even if he is playing a character I have little knowledge and no affection for, more worrying to me is the casting of Anne Hathaway – she’s a fairly good actresses and everything but I’m not sure I can buy her in that world, then again of course it’s very early days and I’m just another opinionated jerk on the internet so what do I know? I’m trying with a supreme force of will to avoid anything about this until a trailer hits in I guess about a years time, until then I will try to revisit that long gestating Dark Knight analysis I’ve been ignoring for a couple of years now, it really needs a complete overhaul so we’ll see if I can muster up the enthusiasm and inspiration.  This weekend I will be back on the review circuit, I’m going to try to catch Blue Valentine in an effort to cross off another two (potentially) Oscar potential performances prior to next Tuesdays nomination announcement, and if I can find a cinema that’s screening The Ward I’ll see that too, god help me. Keep your distress frequencies open….