Ridley Scott has seen Fede Álvarez’s Alien sequel and loves it
In Ridley Scott’s office, no one can hear Fede Álvarez scream
Aux News Alien
For all the talk of Alien sequels over the last few years, we haven’t heard much about the one from Fede Álvarez, the director of Don’t Breathe and 2013’s Evil Dead. We know Neill Blomkamp isn’t directing an Alien and that Noah Hawley has a TV series on the way. As for Álvarez, his film is done and ready for Ridley Scott’s discerning eye.
Appearing yesterday at the DGA Latino Summit in Los Angeles, Álvarez was in conversation with Guillermo del Toro and revealed that his director’s cut of Alien: Romulus is complete. Whether there’s still time to change the subtitle to anything other than Romulus is unclear, but he did go through “the incredibly tense process” of sending the movie to Ridley Scott, who produced the film.
Despite hearing that Scott was “really tough on Blade Runner 2049,” which Álvarez called a “masterpiece,” and thought Top Gun: Maverick was “meh,” the director wanted to show Scott the movie “before anybody.” We’ve got a lot of respect for a director who wants to rip that Band-Aid off and do the stupidest thing anyone can do: Show Ridley Scott their movie.
“Even if he didn’t ask for it, I was gonna go there and sit at a table and look at him and get it,” Álvarez said. “Even if he was gonna say, ‘You destroyed my legacy,’ I wanted to be in front of him and see him in the eye. I didn’t want to get an email where it says, ‘Ridley says…’”
All this belly achin’ was for naught because Scott walked into the room and said, “‘Fede, what can I say? It’s fucking great.’”
“My family knows it was one of the best moments of my life to have a master like him, whom I admire so much, to even watch a movie I made, particularly something like this, and talk to me for an hour about what he liked about it. One of the best compliments he said was, ‘The dialogue is great. Are you the writer?’ Yes!”
Alien: Romulus will be an unconnected entry into the Alien canon and follows “a group of young people on a distant world, who find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe.” Yup, it sounds like an Alien movie.
Alien: Romulus bursts through the chest cavity and into theaters in August 2024.
85 Comments
Star Trek: Acheron
We’ve got a lot of respect for a director who wants to rip that Band-Aid
off and do the stupidest thing anyone can do: Show Ridley Scott their
movie.
Why? I showed Ridley Scott my movie. Well, it was technically a porno, and it wasn’t mine, I just got it off the internet. Still, he seemed visibly excited.
He wasn’t excited. You cheated by having powdered Viagra blowing from the A/C vents.
I think I saw that. It was sort of a twin flick to Alien: Romulus. It was Alien: Ream-us, right?
Actually, this was an earlier film called Alien: Cum In It.
That’s the one with the facehumper.
Alien: Res-Erection
Aliens Who Like To Have Sex With Each Other
Not Aliens: a porn parody
“The erections are great. Are you the fluffer?”
I am super stoked for this, although I didn’t love his Evil Dead. Something about the saturation?I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about the cinematography choices, but the colors were muted and the resolution seemed turned up to 11. I kept thinking of Ghost Rider 2, of all things.
I wonder how much of that was in-camera cinematography vs post.
I would love to know. Too bad there’s not a website that might dig into neat aspects of pop-culture film-making like that.I do think you could do an entire article about how different Jane Levy vs. Lily Sullivan look while covered in blood at the end of their respective Evil Deads. The new one has such bright tones it’s practically happy.
I liked it well enough and don’t mean to continually beat it up but I gotta say I felt kind of annoyed by the fact that Rise is built almost entirely on the fact that Alyssa Sutherland has an excellent face for Deadite makeup. Like… without her does the movie even happen?
Ya know what I want see? Ya know what you forgot to ask for?Aliens vs Jason. Friday the 13th part LV-426.
Did you know the xenomorph’s mom was the killer in the first Alien?
The first chest-bursting Alien was as bad as the camp counselors making love while Jason drowned?
I guess really it’s the reverse though. The mom is the main baddie in the second.
Cyborg Jason could face off against an entire assembly line of Lisa and Winona Ryder androids.
“a group of young people on a distant world, who find themselves in a
confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe.” It turns out it’s Man.
Yup. It’s told from the xenomorphs POV. Buncha face-huggers hanging out… all of a sudden a ship lands and they start getting pushed and prodded.
In the end, it was not guns and bombs that defeated the aliens, but that humblest of all God’s creatures, the Tyrannosaurus rex.
“The sourcers! They’s a-crashing!”
This is one of those situations where it does nobody (including Ridley Scott) any good to say bad things about it. Because if Kinja can recycle articles across multiple sites, I can do the same with comments.
On the plus side, I see your clone no longer post here.
Actually no. It was a private conversation, Scott could have said anything he wanted. If he thought it was shit, we would just have never heard about it.
I didn’t even know it was done filming. Looking forward to seeing it. I like Alvarez. I enjoyed Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead. Never saw The Girl in the Spider’s Web. I don’t think I will.
Don’t.
a group of young people on a distant world, who find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universeRidley Scott watching an Alien movie?
This sounds great
There should be a movie version of that video game with the grown version of Ripley’s daughter, where it’s just one alien again.
That’s exactly what I thought it was going to be when they first announced it.
Sounds like this is going to pretty much be a slasher movie.
Personally I’d ditch the Ripley’s daughter bit. I don’t think we need that kinda connection to the past. The Alien is enough.
So… they’re just going to let it sit and rot on the shelf for ten months? Sounds like the studio’s really excited about it.
Considering this is literally the first I’ve heard of this movie’s existence, I assume they will spend the next 10 months marketing it. Movies don’t usually appear in the theater as soon as they are complete.
Next you’re going to tell me there aren’t little people in the tv acting everything out.
“So… they’re just going to let it sit and rot on the shelf for ten months?”
Are you completely and utterly unfamiliar with how filmmaking works?
Then shut up.
This is just the directors cut. There is probably a lot more editing and post stuff to do too.
Haven’t they been doing that because of the strike preventing actors from doing promotion?
Man when they finally screen it it’s gonna smell yucky.
Mm-hmm. James Cameron loved Terminator Genisys and Dark Fate too.
Genisys I could chalk up to Cameron just saying something nice about the franchise in between doing whatever he was doing for Avatar (I assume). I assumed at the time that his assistant or someone gave him a 30 second rundown and Cameron thought “ok, sure” and then talked it up. Dark Fate on the other hand… damn. He seemed to be actively involved with that one. I saw it and I cannot tell you a single thing that happens, other than *SPOILER* John Connor dies and they basically re-do T2 with someone other than John Connor.
“Dark Fate on the other hand… damn. He seemed to be actively involved with that one.”
And you don’t understand why he would support it?
*sigh*
Come on, surely you remember that part where the guy who’s obviously the new Terminator is seemingly killed but then in slow motion he gets up and regenerates and it takes about 20 seconds and the protagonists are super surprised? It was, like, a moment you’d never experienced before.
“and the protagonists are super surprised?”
Yeah, why would they be surprised? Haven’t they seen The Terminator movies?
Cameron later addressed Dark Fate and admitted that he was wrong and lacked objectivity/was too close to the project.
I read this and was like “Yea this is the same guy who basically had scientists taking off protective gear and start fucking around with alien life forms and also had a woman get killed by a giant rolling wheel of doom by apparently never watched a Loony Tunes Cartoon in her life and you know, running out the path of it?”
I liked Don’t Breathe and I want this to be good as Alien is one of my favorite films, but yeah, I’m taking this with a grain of salt since Prometheus was pretty disappointing (and the track record for Alien sequels has not been great besides Aliens). I think the stuff you mentioned could’ve worked if they leaned a bit more into a campier/pulpier sci-fi tone—seemed like Charlize Theron and Idris Elba were going for that—but then there were too many serious or existential moments which made the stupid stuff seem especially stupid by comparison.
I can’t not read this in the CinemaSins guy’s voice.
“there’s breathable air in this cave on this planet we spent years traveling to, let’s do the exact opposite of our training, woooo” – hilarity ensues.
Prometheus and the Alien: Covenant had the potential to not be awful and went off the rails at the first chance they got.
I am not even a scientist but even I know the fucking basics to know you don’t do shit like that. The first goddamn time one of those morons popped off his helmet, alerts should have lit that place up like a fucking christmas tree and everyone should have been “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? GET BACK HERE AND INTO QUARANTINE, YOU STUPID ASSHAT.” simultaneously. Hell, there should have been full body scans in and out of the facility with quarantine lockdowns and shit everytime….we been fucking doing them since the goddamn Apollo moon missions. But nope, quick pop in after breathing some kind of shit, almost immediate truffle shuffle, and whoopsie doodle, lets cut that squid outta body later on….I mean shit, at least Cameron gave us a quick reason why LV-426 had a breathable atmosphere with a quick throwaway sentence but come on…not even a standard protocol to follow? It drove me freakin insane.
I am with you about them removing PPE total insanity. But you might be suprised about what people do in emergent situations. I have witnessed people making absolutely atrocious decisions during life and death situations, they don’t always choose correctly and sometimes pay with their lives.
I still think Genisys was interesting, dare I say good. And if the title had been Genesis, it would’ve been a lot more successful.
Yeah but they would have to call it the Terminator: Mega Drive outside the US
ha!
For marketing purpose. This is different.
I’m happy for this dude but keep in mind that this is the same Ridley Scott who made a movie about Noah teaming up with rock monsters to kill a bunch of dudes in an epic battle. I guess every avant-garde director is allowed to make one really shitty action movie, though, like how Alex Proyas made Gods of Egypt, or Terry Gilliam made The Brothers Grimm, or Mary Harron made Torque.
this is the same Ridley Scott who made a movie about Noah teaming up with rock monstersThat was Darren Aronofsky.
Oooooh I must have confused it with ExodusMy point still stands
“My point still stands”
Does it?
Is that what Noah is about? It’s the only Aronofsky movie I havent seen, but I kinda want to now.
You saw mother! and not Noah? That’s dedication.
Wikipedia says Torque was directed by Joseph Kahn (would be bonkers if that was a Mary Harron movie). I looked at her filmography and have no idea what you could’ve gotten it mixed up with.
See that was a joke but I also mixed up which stinky bible movie Scott made so it kind of got lostI don’t think Harron would put so much product placement in Torque if she had made it
“See that was a joke”
Sure.
Ridley Scott is a very talented director, but at this point I think we know for fact that he cannot tell a good movie from a bad one.
Like a number of others, this is the first I am hearing about it and it’s apparently already done? That is unusual these days.I liked Don’t Breathe, but skipped Evil Dead 2013. I saw the original trilogy and Evil Dead Rise, as well as Ash v. Evil dead, but reboots of original stuff (Friday the 13th, TX Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) tend to be of little interest to me.
As a life long Evil Dead fan, the remake was actually pretty good! It’s pretty different from the originals, enough to justify it for me.
ED 2013 is quite good. I prefer it to Rise, which slightly disappointed me given the hype for it. 2013 is a different animal from the OG, though. I’d say it’s much less interested in camp amusement. Some splatter and body horror stuff that wasn’t quite as present in the original. Sure, the ads set you up for the box cutter tongue split and that’s rough but there are a few *other* pretty rough moments. People have made a big deal out of the cheese grater and wine glass in Rise and all due respect I think they’re pretty tame compared to the stuff in 2013.
Rightly so, since most range anywhere from pale imitation of the original to outright sucking.
The 2013 ED is worth seeing. It’s great, and apparently it’s set in the same universe as the rest.
It’s not really a remake anymore than Rise. It follows the same basic setup (young people in a spooky cabin find a mysterious book) and has some blatant homages to the OG franchise, but the story is its own thing: A young woman struggling with addiction is taken to a cabin by her brother (who is struggling with guilt that he left her to look after their dying mother) and friends but, unbeknownst to them, the cabin was used a few years earlier in a ritual to cleanse a possessed teenager and the Necronomicon was left behind.
The fact that Scott liked this movie goes in the minus column for me. After all, he *MADE* Alien: Covenant, and that was a disaster.
“Yup, it sounds like an Alien movie.”
Nope, it sounds like a slasher movie.
I’ll watch anything Alien, so I’m down. Not crazy about Fede Alvarez though. His Evil Dead was OK and Don’t Breathe was alright. His Lisbeth Salander movie with Claire Foy was very forgettable though.
Ridley, old chap, if you didn’t like 2049 or Maverick, perhaps it’s time to quit pretending your tastes are based on anything other than your residuals.
Alien: Fully LoadedAlien: Where’s My CarAlien: Aliener
I’m excited reading that it’s unconnected to the main cannon. There’s been a lot of debate over that and while I actually kinda like the “ancient aliens” vibe of the story as it is from recent films, I think getting free of all that focusing on how horrendous these creatures are will be refreshing.
Ridley Scott is the worst big budget filmmaker of the last 30 years! fuck off and retire you hack!
Did he ever acknowledge that Covenant was a piece of shit? Just saying that if this is the endorsement of someone who felt Prometheus* and Covenant were good Alien movies then it’s pretty meaningless.*I think Prometheus is a decent sci-fi horror movie, but a bad Alien prequel.
“[A] group of young people on a distant world, who find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe.” You guessed it, Frank Stallone.
Histories greatest monster
this is the equivalent of “advance preview twitter raves say The Flash is the best superhero film of all time”
I didn’t like Blade Runner 2049 either. It lacked everything that the original was known for. Boring…