Ridley Scott Is Planning The Next ‘Alien’ Movie, But It’s Going In An Unexpected Direction

Ridley Scott doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all, considering he’s reshooting all of Kevin Spacey’s scenes in All the Money in the World with replacement Christopher Plummer at a jaw-dropping pace to meet the December 22nd release date. He’s also prepping the next installment of the Alien franchise, as he revealed to Entertainment Weekly. “We are [going to make another], we are,” Scott said, adding a surprising addendum. “I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff.”

Wait, what? How do you do Alien without “the alien stuff”? By focusing on something else potentially evil that’s been in Alien (and Blade Runner, for that matter) since the beginning: artificial intelligence.

“People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting.”

Alien: Covenant grossed at least $240 million on a $97 million production budget, but the memorably creepy AI characters Walter and David, both played by Michael Fassbender, were what I kept hearing about, and not just because I kept typing “Michael Fassbender making out with himself” into Google.

Scott went on to give an example of why artificial intelligence is so disturbing: the AI language research project Facebook had to shut down because two AIs started communicating in a novel language humans can’t understand, which will surely end well.

“They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f*cking language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”

Of course, we can’t see an Alien film without the aliens, but making the AI characters more villainous as the series goes along also makes sense. And it gives them more opportunities to film Michael Fassbender playing with himself. That’s terrifying. Or sexy. No, terrifying. (Also sexy.)

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

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