The Next Alien Movie Should Take Inspiration From Prey
Prey is a brilliantly uncomplicated film. It takes the concept of the Predator, as established in John McTiernan's 1987 movie, and cleverly recontextualises it in a new setting. It's not an origin story or an attempt to expand the mythology. It's a straightforward movie about a Yautja hunter arriving on Earth and searching for worthy prey—in this case, a young Comanche healer turned hunter named Naru. It's refreshing watching a movie based on an established series that doesn't dwell on mythologising what came before. The Predator exists on its own terms, rather than as a throwback to the original film, and the result is a creature as formidable and terrifying as it was when it was first introduced 35 years ago.
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In 1979, Ridley Scott made a landmark movie with a similarly uncomplicated premise. Alien was the story of Ellen Ripley, a woman trapped aboard a spaceship with a deadly, merciless alien hunter of her own. But then the series got more complicated. More aliens were introduced, the mythology deepened, and eventually—in Prometheus and Covenant—it became a grand, philosophical, epoch-spanning story about humanity's place in the universe. As flawed and occasionally frustrating as these later movies are, I still enjoy them. But watching Prey makes it more obvious than ever that Alien desperately needs to take a similar path, ditching the baggage and getting back to basics.
I love Alien's mythology. Weyland-Yutani, the Engineers, David's experiments, the black goo—all that good stuff. But we've reached a point now where the series is so overloaded with far-reaching lore that the clarity and simplicity of the original movie has been lost. The next Alien movie
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