Ever since director Neill Blomkamp found that magic lamp and wished himself into directing a new Alien movie, he’s been emphasizing how much his planned film—officially the franchise’s fifth—would be a return to the form defined by James Cameron’s Aliens. It’s now been confirmed that he’ll be hewing even more closely to said form by employing one of the people who helped make it, with the news that Michael Biehn will be joining the new movie’s cast. Biehn played stoic survivor Corporal Hicks in Cameron’s film, the only member of Ellen Ripley’s Marine escort to survive the “bug hunt” at the infested colony of Hadley’s Hope.
Of course, 1992’s Alien 3, which Blomkamp has repeatedly asserted his film won’t ignore or negate, showed that Hicks died during the crash that stranded Ripley on the prison planet Fury. That would seem to present a logistical problem to getting the good corporal back in the game for a new film, but Blomkamp presumably has two wishes left to get it sorted out. Maybe the movie will include prequel footage, or long, dreamy sequences of Hicks hanging out in his cryo-sleep pod. Or perhaps Blomkamp will take a cue from the much-reviled 2013 video game Aliens: Colonial Marines, and reveal that the Hicks in the crashed escape pod was an imposter (or, maybe, an evil twin: the nefarious Laroproc Skcih). Given that the new project is fueled by fanboyish devotion to the ideals of mid-’80s James Cameron, though, we’ve got our fingers crossed for another possibility: The reveal that Biehn won’t be playing Hicks at all, but instead will reprise the role of heroic time traveler Kyle Reese, sent through time to wipe out the xenomorph threat and send Neill Blomkamp into a permanent trance of nerd-based ecstasy.
UPDATE: Turns out this was too good to be true, as Flickering Myth reports that the Instagram account where Biehn “broke the news” was a fake that has since been deleted. But considering Blomkamp basically willed himself into the director’s chair for the new Alien film, maybe if we close our eyes and wish real hard, Biehn will actually join up as well.