District 9 was an impressive debut for director Neill Blomkamp, proving that the helmer could fuse sci-fi action and smart satire to great effect. However, Blomkamp’s subsequent efforts have failed to find the right balance between these elements, losing the director critical acclaim as a result.
2013’s sci-fi satire Demonic, failed to impress critics and left some Alien franchise fans glad that the director’s proposed Alien 5 never made it into production. However, Blomkamp’s joking comments on the canceled project revealed, however unintentionally, that he does have something the Alien series needs.
In an interview, the Demonic helmer itted, half-jokingly, that “it’s possible Ridley Scott saw Chappie” and instantly lost faith in the director’s ability to take over the Alien franchise. This is ironic because, for all of Chappie’s flaws, the blackly comic thriller is a dystopian sci-fi that underlines the dangerous relationship between technology corporations and the military-industrial complex—something that Alien and Blomkamp’s proposed Alien 5 will likely never happen, but the director’s work on Chappie, in particular, proved that he could bring back the anti-capitalist satire that grounded the human characters of the earliest—and still most critically acclaimed—Alien movies.
The story of Chappie largely centers on the titular android, an experimental prototype that ends up in the hands of hardened criminals despite being designed for policing purposes. The movie depicts the militarized police as corrupt and authoritarian, not unlike ranking high among Blomkamp’s movies, but the plot still touches on pertinent themes that have been conspicuously absent from recent installments of the Alien franchise. The first two Alien movies were unsparingly critical of the fictitious Weyland-Yutani Corporation, with Ridley Scott’s original featuring an android character who was programmed to keep the lethal Xenomorph on board for use as a bioweapon despite the dwindling crew and Aliens featuring Ripley’s iconic dressing-down of duplicitous company man Carter Burke. However, later Alien movies (and particularly the franchise’s recent prequels) moved away from this territory, depicting the uber-rich owners of the corporation as human, if flawed, entrepreneurs.
This marked a big departure from the ethos of earlier franchise outings as, while Alien television series is set to cast the rich stakeholders of Weyland-Yutani as its villains, proving the Alien franchise can still bring back this ethos despite Blomkamp’s departure.
