Home Entertainment Neill Blomkamp's ALIEN 5 to focus on older Hicks and Newt, ignore ALIEN 3 & 4

Neill Blomkamp's ALIEN 5 to focus on older Hicks and Newt, ignore ALIEN 3 & 4

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It seems the xenomorph-cat is out of the bag. Neill Blomkamp’s still untitled Alien film may be delayed indefinitely thanks to Ridley Scott and his pesky Prometheus plans taking prominence (say that three times fast while drunk!), but that doesn’t mean that we still don’t want to know exactly what the hell it’s supposed to be about. Especially after Neill released those concept artwork pieces which seemed to indicate the return of characters that were supposed to be dead.

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One of those dead folk was colonial marine Corporal Hicks, who appeared in the franchise’ first sequel Aliens and became a fan-favourite alongside Newt, the traumatized young girl rescued from the alien queen by Sigourney Weaver’s franchise heroine Ellen Ripley. And according to Michael Biehn, the actor who played Hicks, him and Newt are coming back in Blomkamp’s film. Biehn spilled the beans to Icons of Fright accordingly:

“They’re planning on bringing me and Newt back, and at this point Newt will be around twenty-seven years old. I know that every actress in Hollywood is going to want to play this one, it’s really a passing of the torch between Sigourney and this younger actress who would play Newt.”

I genuinely like the idea that this new older Newt would be taking over as the lead from her surrogate mother Ellen Ripley. Last year’s mega-successful – and so uber scary that I never finished it for fear that I would constantly be voiding my bladder – video game Alien: Isolation actually took a similar tack, but there it was Ripley’s biological daughter Amanda who was the heroine.

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Of course there’s just the tiny aforementioned problem of Newt and Hicks being dead, with both characters infamously killed off-screen at the the start of the heavily troubled Alien 3. Which they wouldn’t be if the events of that divisive movie didn’t happen. That was seemingly the rumour earlier in the year – that Blomkamp would be tossing out the story of the movies that came after Aliens – but that story was then promptly killed by the director himself. Except now Biehn is resurrecting it again along with his character.

“The basic idea is acting like Alien 3 and 4 never existed, so if you go on Neill Blomkamp’s site everyone can see all of the artwork for that.”

Okay, then. Clear as mud, that is. And I have a feeling we won’t get a straightforward answer on whether or not Biehn is correct for quite some time, as Ridley Scott has seemingly made plans for a number of Prometheus sequels that will all tie back into his original Alien, and we would first need to see how those shake out before Blomkamp gets to play with these toys himself. And Blomkamp’s Alien film will indeed happen. At least that’s according to the optimistic Biehn.

“I know Ridley Scott is doing his movie first and is going to be the executive producer on this one, so I’m really looking forward to that. I know that Ridley’s focus is on the second ‘Prometheus’ and I’m sure that he and Fox both don’t want that and Neill’s movie to come out right next to each other, because they’re kind of two different worlds, with ‘Aliens’ taking place thousands of years later, which is how they explained it all to me, but at the same time, they want to give them a similar feel. I know they’re putting the brakes on Neill’s movie just for a little while, but I really think that it would be embarrassing to Ridley and Fox and Sigourney if they just didn’t make the movie.”

You’re right, Mr Biehn. We’ve already had Alien: Resurrection and the two Alien vs Predator movies. This franchise doesn’t need any further embarrassment.

Last Updated: November 25, 2015

One Comment

  1. RinceThis

    November 25, 2015 at 14:47

    YAY!

    Reply

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