"I want to keep it on hyper-lockdown. It’s early yet. It’s ‘Chappie‘ time," Neill Blomkamp stated when EW pressed him for details on his "Alien" movie. But the director only has himself to blame if he’s bombarded by questions about the movie in the run-up to his sci-fi flick. After dropping "Alien" concept art at the beginning of the year, chatter started going into overdrive about the possibility of the "District 9" director stepping into the world created by Ridley Scott. The rumors became real a week ago when it was confirmed Blomkamp overcome his reservations about doing a studio project and signed up to direct an "Alien" flick. Aside from that details are scarce, however, one key character is back.
"It did have to do with having Sigourney [Weaver] on ‘Chappie.’ It’s just something that I’ve always wanted to one day be a part of," Blomkamp told the magazine about the genesis of his movie, his concept art, and now his movie came to include Ripley.
"Over the years, I came up with a story for a film in that universe that I wanted to make. And then when I talked to her about her experience making those films and what she thought about Ripley and everything else, it informed and changed the film I wanted to make into something different," he added. "It just sort of stuck with me. A year later, when post-production was winding down on ‘Chappie,’ I started fleshing out the idea for a film that would contain Sigourney. Fox never knew. I just worked on it when I could. Before I knew it, I had this really awesome film with a lot of artwork and a lot of backstory. And then I didn’t know whether I was going to make it or not. So I just kind of sat on it for a while."
Well, it’s no longer sitting around, and the movie is now going forward. There are lots of questions remaining, but at the top of our list? Michael Biehn, aka Hicks, was also seen in the concept, does that mean he’s back to? And if so, how? He died in "Alien 3." However, the video game world, he lives on with a careful fudging/retcon of the timelines as this video from "Aliens: Colonial Marines Stasis Interrupted DLC" explains. Or maybe we can just pretend "Alien 3" never happened.
