Reboot Alien

[Creole Ned]

Enough with crappy Alien vs. Predator movies, it's time for a new (and probably crappy) Alien movie!

Unfortunately, the last two kind of sucked, so that doesn't leave a lot of room to keep developing the story without breaking continuity and if you're going to do that, why not just start over?

Post your cast for a spiffy remake of Alien. You can see the cast of characters in the IMdb entry (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078748/).

[Tai]

So you mean, of the original Alien movie story, just redone?

[Creole Ned]

Yes. I'm interested in seeing casting choices.

If you have a different idea on how you'd revive the series, feel free to share that, too.

[Tai]

If you have a different idea on how you'd revive the series, feel free to share that, too.

If it ain't dead already, nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. The last two were travesties.

[Paladin]

Dallas - Viggo Mortenson
Ripley - Emily Deschanel
Ash - Jean Reno
Parker - Michael-Clarke Duncan
Kane - Edward Norton
Lambert - Angelina Jolie
Brett - Woody Harrelson

[Snake]

You don't screw with the classics man!

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, but no one wants to see a remake of a bad movie.

I mean, if they remade Alien 3 (or Alien Cubed as some call it) and had this cast:

Ripley - Natalie Portman
All the British bald guys - members of aging boy bands Westlife and Take That (thank you, Wikipedia)
The Doctor - Ben Affleck with a British accent

And then made it a musical (since you have two aging boy bands as 3/4 of the cast)...would you pay to see it?

Granted, it would be a smash hit all across the UK, but here? Okay, it would probably still do better than the original Alien 3 but that's not the point. The point is...uh...we already know what Natalie Portman looks like with a shaved head. Or something.

But anyway, I like Paladin's choices except Angelina Jolie's lips would be too distracting, both to the audience and the alien destined to make a snack of her.

[Paladin]

But anyway, I like Paladin's choices except Angelina Jolie's lips would be too distracting, both to the audience and the alien destined to make a snack of her.

Yeah, the chick parts were the hardest to come up with. Ripley is very much an iconic character now, despite not really becoming one until uttering "Get away from her you bitch!" in Aliens. That scene sealed it. Now you need someone in the role who can be seen as a tough bitch herself, even though in Alien Ripley was the by-the-book officer who ended up fleeing when she couldn't stop Mother's self-destruct. She was NOT that tough in Alien. To me, Emily Deschanel could certainly handle the look and the tough-but-not-butch required for the role.

I settled on Angelina Jolie for Lambert because she can actually handle the role of a woman who comes apart at the seams, and does it pretty well in fact. My second choice would have been Jewel Staite (Firefly, Stargate Atlantis). I'm less confident in her having the acting chops to play someone going to pieces in terror than I am in Angelina Jolie, but I think she would be able to play a version of Lambert as the new crewman on her first interstellar voyage (and going into it knowing aliens of any kind don't exist because no one's ever seen one). She could pull of the naive innocent caught in something she's completely unprepared for role very well.

I could also see Mother being a role in a remake. Imagine Mother in a Shodan light, initially a benign AI who monitors the ship and does what she's told, conspiring with Ash once the alien is discovered, and finally becoming outright hostile to the human crew once Ash (her hands, as it were) is killed and it's clear the crew must be eliminated for the alien to be brought back to Earth. I could see her manipulating the hatches in the duct work to allow the alien to ambush Dallas even as Ripley is trying to guide him to the target. I could see her "helping" Ripley get to the escape pod she's already lured the alien to once the ship's destruction is unstoppable. I could see her singing a funny song about cake during the closing credits....

My initial choice for Dallas, by the way, was Kris Kristofferson (who you may remember from his role as Whistler in the Blade movies). I ended up choosing Viggo Mortenson figuring Hollywood today would require a generally younger cast than the original in 1979. That's the same reason Jean Reno got picked for Ash instead of Anthony Hopkins.

[Creole Ned]

Heh, I actually imagined Anthony Hopkins as Ash, too, but also figured "too old". Kristofferson would make a decent Dallas but he's in his 70s. He ought to have been promoted past captain by now. :P I can't think of another actor offhand who'd fit the role (although Viggo could do it).

The original actors were surprisingly well-cast, one of the movie's many strengths.

[LogRoller]

they should send it far after the ripley stuff, and have her be some solt of religious icon, and the humans are at far flung war with the alien species who turn out to have armies of hyper intelligent queens that are actually capable of space travel or something and then riddick would come in and start fucking shit up and be sent to alien prison to be dissected and then they'd have like fifteen thousand terminators who are all played by arnold totally trying to destroy humanity and the aliens at the same time and then bruce willis travels back in time to find himself in a sticky wicket and ends up killing like a whole bunch of the terminators and aliens at the same time while his shoes are off and he gets in a big knife fight with riddick but they end up setting their differences aside and start totally owning all of the terminators and aliens and the predators (who are also there, but not as much because they suck) and it will feature a special guest appearance by david bowie as the future hologram of nikola tesla who gives riddick and willis cunning advice about how to beat the aliens and save humanity. i envision this as a sixteen part epic action saga that will cost about five trillion dollars.