Ridley Scott’s Alien is one of the most groundbreaking horror films of a generation. James Cameron’s Aliens is 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 beloved Alien franchise, 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 the Alien film 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 film came courtesy of David Fincher, but the larger culprit was likely the three writers adapting the story by a fourth.
Alien: Resurrection was 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 behind Don’t Breathe fix it?
Fede Álvarez appeared on the scene in a big way in 2013, with the remake of the beloved cult horror film Evil 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 film Don’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 2 was a lackluster sequel that Álvarez wrote and produced. Álvarez also co-wrote the story which later became 2022’s abysmal Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Fede Álvarez is an interesting filmmaker and his fingerprint could be a welcome change for the Alien franchise if he actually gets his vision onto the screen.
The problem with most of the Alien sequels 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. Alien was 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. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are 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 crafted Alien. 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 seen Alien, 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 ongoing series Raised by Wolves to see a more dedicated exploration of the concept.
The problems of the Alien franchise are a microcosm with the problems of the current era of IP-driven cinema in general. Fede Álvarez is set to reboot the franchise, try to get away from the tangled mess, and take things back to basics. Having already succeeded in doing that with Evil Dead makes 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.
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