“Alien” prequel news

Exciting news from Moviesblog.MTV.com:

Surprise, surprise: Damon Lindelof’s rewrite of Ridley Scott’s “Alien” prequel has allegedly made the film infinitely more awesome. Culture Vulture got the exclusive that executives at Fox read the new draft of the screenplay (originally penned by Jon Spaihts) and were “very pleased with it indeed.”

While all of Vulture’s sources were sworn to secrecy on details of the plot, two big reasons Fox was happier than a pig in poop are that Lindelof’s version lacks any big-budget set pieces, which is likely to bring down the suggested $150 million budget, and the film could also could potentially pull off a PG-13 rating, making it more accessible to mass audiences. But the reason we’re so psyched for this script is the news that Lindelof and Scott are returning the sci-fi action franchise to the horror-suspense roots planted by Scott’s original “Alien.”

Focusing on suspense over the elaborately violent action sequences that have characterized the recent “Alien vs. Predator” movies (which this prequel is pretending do not exist, by the way — shocker!) explains why a PG-13 rating is feasible, despite Scott’s earlier suggestion that the movie would be “really tough, really nasty” and closer to an R rating.

One of Vulture’s sources explains: “The thinking is that if the original ‘Alien’ were released today, minus the F-bombs, you could still get a PG-13. ‘Alien’ is a very ‘Jaws’-ian movie: There’s no sex, and while there’s lots of violence, most of it is off-camera. Maybe you’d have to cut away from certain scenes two seconds earlier, but it could be done.”

That’s so right about the original Alien, much more of a thriller. For example, the scene where Dallas (Tom Skerritt) is in the ship’s duct system trying to find and kill the alien, while everyone in the crew can see the alien as a blip on a tracking device getting closer and closer to Dallas is one of the most frightening moments in my personal cinematic history, one of only two times where I actually jumped out of my seat (the other is the shower scene in Psycho). 

Here is the original teaser trailer for Alien.

Now that’s a damn good trailer! And the movie has one of the best taglines every:

“In space, no one can hear you scream.”

For more of the article, go here.

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