Shame Tony Scott isn't directing it himself--he's the best director EVER!

SFFMedia has reported that a prequel to Alien is officially in the works. I don't know why anybody hasn't thought of doing something like this before; indeed, it seems like such an obvious idea in retrospect, I'm shocked there's not already some kind of franchise of Alien prequels.

But we're told of this radically original, never-before-attempted premise:

Scifiwire reports that producer Tony Scott (brother of Ridley Scott who directed the original) confirmed that an Alien prequel will be going ahead with Carl Rinsch directing. He was speaking at a promotional event for The Taking of Pelham 123.

"Carl Rinsch is going to do the prequel to Alien," he said. "He's one of our directors at our company."

Scott said he hoped to start filming the Alien prequel by the end of the year for a possible 2011 release.

Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets followed up on this story, and was provided with a tantalizing sneak preview. In spite of the non-disclosure agreement, I'm going to tell you all about it right now.

The prequel, which will combine familiar concepts from the Alien series with elements of Stanley Kubrick's classics 2001 and Dr. Strangelove, is set in the near future on board a malfunctioning spaceship sent out on a mission to find and destroy unstable star systems that might be a potential threat to new human colonies. After a disaster virtually kills the commanding officer (whose body is placed in hypersleep and his brain connected to a computer that allows limited communications with the surviving crew--a concept perhaps derived from Philip K. Dick's brilliant novel Ubik), the second-in-command is forced to take over, only to find his mission underfunded and unappreciated by bureaucrats back home, who are unresponsive to his distress calls and requests for assistance. Meanwhile, an incompetent-but-good-natured replacement crewmember (we find, late in the script, that he was an accidental substitute for a planned crewmember, and was never meant to be on the mission at all), has become obsessed with one of the aliens and brought it on board as a pet. The alien escapes, an obvious threat to the crew--and then a secondary threat emerges when one of the ship's AI-enabled solar-system-destroying weapons becomes jammed and refuses to discharge from the ship. The undertrained substitute commander must deal with his crew's eroding mental state, the presence of a dangerous, hungry extraterrestrial, and the obstinate artificially intelligent weapon capable of destroying everything within a several-million-mile radius; meanwhile, the crewmember responsible for bringing the alien aboard strikes out on a risky solo attempt to capture or kill the alien invader, crawling through the bowels of the ship in a harrowing, terrifying cat-and-mouse game in which it becomes increasingly unclear whether he's the hunter... or the prey.

I gotta say, the first look is pretty damn interesting. I look forward to seeing what they come up with!

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GRATUITOUS POSTSCRIPT:

Only half of the above post is true.

Also, do you think my congressman could keep it from happening if I wrote to him? The franchise just needs to be allowed to die a merciful death before Alien vs. Frankenstein comes out.

Hm. Actually... Alien v. Frankenstein sounds kinda cool....