In the long list of box office baton passing, James Cameron being handed the “Alien” franchise from Ridley Scott might be one of the greats. Not necessarily reinventing the acid-soaked wheel to Scott’s original 1979 sci-fi creature feature, 1986’s “Aliens” saw Cameron adding a chunkier grill and extra firepower to the Xenomorph franchise to very different yet, in many ways, equally successful results. It seemed warranted, then, when Cameron chimed in with his thoughts Scott’s return to “Alien” property by way of the thought-provoking prequel “Prometheus.”
It might not always rank as one of people’s favorite “Alien” movies, but Scott’s massive and far more cerebral 2012 film has its moments. Nevertheless, Cameron felt that things didn’t entirely add up in the movie. “I thought it was an interesting film. I thought it was thought provoking and beautifully, visually mounted, but at the end of the day it didn’t add up logically,” the filmmaker once admitted in a Reddit AMA. “But I enjoyed it, and I’m glad it was made. I liked it better than the previous two ‘Alien’ sequels.”
Cameron echoed his thoughts in a separate interview he gave in 2012, in which he stated, “There might have been a few things that I would have done differently [than Scott did in ‘Prometheus’], but that’s not the point, you could say that about any movie.” Scott and Cameron not seeing eye-to-eye about the “Alien” franchise is nothing new either, as the former was also concerned about the Xenomorph’s future when Cameron took control of the property in 1986.
Ridley Scott didn’t want James Cameron touching Alien (no offense)
It might be 38 years since James Cameron power loaded his way into the “Alien” saga, but Ridley Scott can still recall his initial reaction when he got word some new upstart was going to add a fresh chapter to his original creature feature. “When Jim called me up and said, listen … he was very nice but he said, ‘This is tough, your beast is so unique. It’s hard to make him as frightening again, now familiar ground,'” Scott told Deadline in a 2023 interview. “So he said, ‘I’m going in a more action, army kind of way.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And that’s the first time I actually thought, ‘Welcome to Hollywood.'”
In Scott’s eyes, anyone venturing back to LV-426 was doing something that couldn’t or, at the time, shouldn’t be done again. “I was pissed. I wouldn’t tell that to Jim, but I think I was hurt. I knew I’d done something very special, a one-off really. I was hurt, deeply hurt, actually because at that moment, I think I was damaged goods because I was trying to recover from ‘Blade Runner’ [disappointing at the box office],” Scott added. It might’ve been a slow recovery, but there’s no doubt that Scott’s sci-fi noir film has gained just as much reverence as his introduction to the Xenomorph, leading to the director being responsible for not one, but two of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made. Not bad for a human.
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