The Alien sequel by Evil Dead remake director Fede Alvarez added new cast members for a story that sounds like it's returning to the franchise's roots and forgoing much of the mythology Ridley Scott's been playing around with.
When Alien first hit screens, it did so with the immortal tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Yet people did scream at the chest-bursting gore, the slick, biomechanical beast, and the violent, white-goo-filled androids. It spawned a franchise—three sequels, two “versus” movies (where it fought the Predator), two prequels, and countless games and comics—and a new film in the Alien franchise is coming from Evil Dead remake director Alvarez.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, while Alvarez may be at the helm of a new Alien sequel, his film isn’t a remake. Instead, it’s going back to the franchise roots established in the first Alien films with Sigourney Weaver and company by being about a colony of young folks trying to survive the onslaught of everyone’s favorite space monster: the Xenomorph, the creature of the acid blood and second mandible. It’s will have the stalker-killer quality of Alien combined with the colony-under-attack aspect of Aliens.
The Alien sequel sees Isabela Merced, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu joining Cailee Spaeny (whom genre fans know from Pacific Rim Uprising) to play said young folks being picked off one by one by the Xenomorph based on a script also written by Alvarez. The story is bare bones in a franchise that has moved away from that idea and into versus movies or a more philosophical direction dealing with the nature of violence and creation under the skilled hands of series originator Scott. Still, some of the best entries—Alien, Alien 3, Alien: Isolation—have been when the series goes for the meat-and-potatoes angle of heavily outmanned people trying to avoid the creature as much as anything else.
Alien started in 1979 based on an idea by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset, taking elements of '50s B-movies like It! The Terror From Beyond Space and putting them in a future that looked current by the standards of the 1970s. H.R. Giger, a Swiss artist of grotesque and sexually charged biomechanical artwork, was called in to help design the movie. He worked on every aspect from the intestinal-feeling walls of the Nostromo to the classic design of the Xenomorph, a creature that is born when an egg opens, a face-hugger leaps out and latches onto a victim’s face, and the creature bursts from the chest a short while later, quickly growing into the lethal killing machine of the series. Alvarez and his intrepid crew will be the next ones facing off—and getting picked off by—the fearsome Alien, and excitement should be high.
The Alien sequel begins production in March 2023.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter