It may have a shiny new name, Alien: Paradise Lost, but the film will still follow on the heels of Ridley Scott’s 2012 sci-fi film Prometheus. We’ll get to see what happens to Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the humanoid robot David (Michael Fassbender) after they blast off, continuing their search for the creators of humanity. However, they won’t be the only travellers on this particular road, there’s going to be some new fodder for whatever alien creation they encounter.
On the publicity trail stumping for his The Martian, Sir Ridley has frequently been asked about his upcoming adventure in the Alien world. Talking to Awards Campaign, the subject came up again, and he shed some light on the nature of the new movie and who will populate it. He said:
It’s going to be it’s own separate thing because they are going to the planet of the Engineers and they are going to see what happened there. It was a disaster. And they will be in that alien craft that takes them there, but with a new group that’s incoming, a new group of travelers in the beginning of the first act.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Scott and company introduce these new characters. When last we saw this particular universe, the action was on a distant moon, LV-223, and Shaw and David were setting off into the unknown in a repurposed alien ship. Here’s the problem, the moon is hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, and took the crew decades of travelling in suspended animation to reach, so just running into other humans out there is going to be one hell of a coincidence.
I’m sure they’ll come up with a reasonable explanation. It’s easy to imagine that other people followed the same directions to that particular corner of the universe that they follow in Prometheus. Or the Weyland Corporation (which could have become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation by this point), could have sent someone out to check on their substantial investment. Maybe it’s some kind of military operation.
Whatever it is, we’re sure it will work out, but we can’t help but be curious. And given that Ridley Scott has said that there will be some connections to Ellen Ripley, you have to wonder of one of these new travelers could provide that link. And if nothing else, it will be nice to have new blood to feed to the Xenomorph or subject to wicked experiments of the Engineers or just get otherwise destroyed by the various hazards of deep space.
There’s not a ton of information available about Alien: Paradise Lost, but the more Ridley Scott says, the clearer the picture becomes. In addition to the connection to Ripley, he’s said that we will once again see the classic Xenomorph, this is the first in multiple movies in this timeline that are in planning, and he has big things in store for David’s severed head. Filming should begin early next year, starting in January, with an eye on a summer 2017 release date.
