By Alien is about to turn 40, and heaven forbid we miss an anniversary these days without an opportunity to market and sell more Blu-rays and digital copies. However, 20th Century Fox Disney actually came up with something cool this time around. They teamed up with IGN and Tongal to find six budding filmmakers who were also Alien fans (aren’t we all?) and gave them the go-ahead to make six short films that are now, assumingly, canon. The directors were all given direct access to basically whatever they wanted and were even allowed to include some characters from past films if they wanted to.
The first short, ALIEN: Containment, will debut tomorrow on IGN at 12 PM EST, and the rest will follow weekly after that. If, for some reason, you hate IGN, you can wait until May 3rd when all the films will be available on Alien Universe.
Honestly, after the last two films, I am all for someone else getting their hands on this franchise. Ridley Scott has gone off his bonker with these things and its refreshing to see some new blood seemingly take the franchise back to its roots. It’s pretty clear that most of these shorts are going for the horror-style of the original Aliens but, hopefully, they all play around with it a bit. Maybe we’ll even get some new lore out of it.
You can see a summary of all the movies below.
March 29th: ALIEN: Containment –Four survivors find themselves stranded aboard a small escape pod in deep space. Trying to piece together the details around the outbreak that led to their ship’s destruction, they find themselves unsure to trust whether or not one of them might be infected. Written and Directed by Chris Reading.
April 5th: ALIEN: Specimen – It’s the night shift in a colony greenhouse, and Julie, a botanist, does her best to contain suspicious soil samples that have triggered her sensitive lab dog. Despite her best efforts the lab unexpectedly goes into full shutdown and she is trapped inside. Little does she know, an alien specimen has escaped the mysterious cargo, and a game of cat and mouse ensues as the creature searches for a host. Directed by Kelsey Taylor.
April 12th: ALIEN: Night Shift –When a missing space trucker is discovered hungover and disoriented, his co-worker suggests a nightcap as a remedy. Near closing time, they are reluctantly allowed inside the colony supply depot where the trucker’s condition worsens, leaving a young supply worker alone to take matters into her own hands.
April 19th: ALIEN: Ore – As a hard-working miner of a planet mining colony, Lorraine longs to make a better life for her daughter and grandchildren. When her shift uncovers the death of a fellow miner under mysterious circumstances, Lorraine is forced to choose between escape or defying management orders and facing her fears to fight for the safety of her family.
April 26th: ALIEN: Harvest – The surviving crew of a damaged deep-space harvester have minutes to reach the emergency evacuation shuttle. A motion sensor is their only navigation tool leading them to safety while a creature in the shadows terrorizes the crew. However, the greatest threat might have been hiding in plain sight all along.
April 26th: ALIEN: Alone – Hope, an abandoned crew member aboard the derelict chemical hauler Otranto, has spent a year trying to keep her ship and herself alive as both slowly fall apart. After discovering hidden cargo, she risks it all to power up the broken ship in search of human life.
