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Alien: Isolation ideas could influence Blomkamp upcoming Alien flick

Even if you don’t keep up to date on all things movies, you’ve still probably heard of Neill Blomkamp. He was supposed to be the guy that was set to direct the Halo movie that never happened after all. However, those plans are now almost a decade old, and Blomkamp has gone on to work on many other films since – both good, bad, and somewhere in the middle. The 2013 release Elysium even had a few nods to Halo in it – which shows Blomkamp is not afraid to look to the games industry for a bit of influence.

This influence is set to continue, although perhaps more direct this time, as Blomkamp has mentioned to IGN that he has been keeping an eye on Alien: Isolation. In a chat with them he talks about how design decisions in that game may help him develop his vision for his upcoming entry in the Alien franchise.

Blomkamp comments:

I think it’s amazing. Even from the first screen grabs, just the quality of the art direction and how it looks. I’m such a visual person that the narrative of stuff is neither here nor there for me sometimes. It’s literally about imagery. And when I saw the images I thought ‘Shit, they can’t be that good.’ And then I played it and to me it was that good. It’s so good. It’s ridiculous.

He goes on to talk about how his ideas for the Alien franchise are very cutting edge and up to date, but the way Alien: Isolation looked to the past for influence was something he really liked. His final thought below is the most striking.

[W]hen Alien was made it was cutting edge. ‘Mother’ was cutting edge, and a green CRT monochromatic monitor was cutting edge, you know what I mean… [Y]ou’re on the colony planet and he’s getting print-outs on dot-matrix paper with holes down the side – that shit was real man. On the planet, in that future, that was cutting edge. So it’s an interesting debate if you look at it from my stand-point, which is do I make my cutting edge… is it cutting edge, or is it actually closer to the first two. Because I wanted to be like it has the same parent. It’s a genetic offspring of the first two movies, and Alien Isolation made me question that quite a lot. Because they got it so perfect with all of the late 1970s early ‘80s tech, it’s really cool.

As of yet, there is no set date for the fifth Alien film to make an appearance – and as with all things Hollywood there is a very good chance it may never happen at all. We probably won’t keep you updated on Alien 5 on DarkZero, as that’s not what we do, but we’ll probably talk about more games at some point if you stick around.