Some cinematic ideas just weren’t meant to last forever, and some franchises aren’t designed to keep putting out new entries. One good idea can lead to another, but the modern trend of forcing every marketable concept to last forever simply doesn’t work more often than not.
Ridley Scott’sAlienisone of the most groundbreaking horror films of a generation. James Cameron’sAliensis among the best sci-fi action epics of all time. Every film since then has been either disappointing or disastrous for reasons that have slowly piled up and threatened to ruin any successive attempt.
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When new filmmakers enter the belovedAlienfranchise, they now must deal with a needlessly convoluted mess of lore, backstory, symbolism, and background storytelling. There have been four directors and around a dozen writers who have taken part in theAlienfilm franchise. Ridley Scott directed three of the six films; the 1979 original and the two newest entries. James Cameron wrote and directed his 1986 effort, building only on the details established in the first film.The lackluster third filmcame courtesy of David Fincher, but the larger culprit was likely the three writers adapting the story by a fourth.
Alien: Resurrectionwas directed by French art-house director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but the film was reportedly mired with creative disputes with screenwriter Joss Whedon. Four filmmakers have each tried to lay their unique creative touch on the franchise, and most of them have had a lot of trouble getting the project they envisioned to the screen. This raises the somewhat unexpected question, can the creative mind behindDon’t Breathefix it?
Fede Álvarez appeared on the scene in a big way in 2013, with the remake of the beloved culthorror filmEvil Dead. The mythical fourth film in the franchise was rumored and attempted for nearly a decade before Álvarez took over as director and co-writer. The 2013 film is both a remake and a sequel that takes place after the events of the first film and redoes most of its narrative. Shockingly, the remake was pretty good, and Álvarez followed it up with the intensely well-received horror filmDon’t Breathe.
Álvarez is rightly perceived as one of the best up-and-coming talents in the horror world, but his cultural cache hasn’t been untouched. After substantial buildup,Don’t Breathe 2wasa lackluster sequel that Álvarez wrote and produced. Álvarez also co-wrote the story which later became 2022’s abysmalTexas Chainsaw Massacre. Fede Álvarez is an interesting filmmaker and his fingerprint could be a welcome change for theAlienfranchise if he actually gets his vision onto the screen.
Theproblem with most of theAliensequels hasn’t been the director. The third and fourth entries in the franchise were directed by fascinating, unique, beloved creators whose unique vision for the franchise was largely absent. Studio interference, way too many writers, conflict with other creatives, and more common franchise issues plagued every entry after the first two. The issue wasn’t the filmmakers, it was the existence of the franchise. When a simple story spawns an expanded sequel, fans expect the next entry to go bigger and continue expanding. This weighs on a creative team, but it affects the studio that owns the IP. Telling a simple or effective story is much harder when the people holding the purse strings are now arguing over one of their biggest cash cows.Alienwas fighting against its directors and the films suffered for it.
One would think that when the original creator got the project back under his control, it would improve, but it simply broke differently instead.PrometheusandAlien: Covenantare both directed by Ridley Scott, returning to the franchise he created after decades away. Scott is a radically different filmmaker than he was when he craftedAlien. His new films in the franchise serve to demystify and overcomplicate every interesting element of the narrative. This is a mistake, but it makes sense when viewed through the lens of franchise media. Fans have seenAlien, the same hostile creature loose in a spaceship material can’t work over and over. Scott had to develop the franchise in a direction, and it seems like a fine place to explore the atheistic take on gods and creation mythology that seems to have captured his imagination. Look to the ongoingseriesRaised by Wolvesto see a more dedicated exploration of the concept.
The problems of theAlienfranchise are a microcosm with the problems of the current era of IP-driven cinema in general. Fede Álvarez is set to reboot the franchise, attempt to get away from the tangled mess, and take things back to basics. Having already succeeded in doingthat withEvil Deadmakes it likely that whatever he comes up with will be a good movie, but it still won’t fix the underlying problem. Building a never-ending empire out of a beloved couple of films is an extremely marketable business strategy that inevitably kills everything that makes the franchise special.
