It’s not very often that an announcement about a script rewrite is considered interesting news, much less something to be excited about, but I think more than a few people will perk their ears up at this headline. As you may know, Ridley Scott is currently prepping for what will hopefully be his next movie, Alien 5 aka The Untitled Alien Prequel. Last we heard, the script had been written by Jon Spaihts (Passengers, The Darkest Hour) and Scott liked it so much that he decided to direct the movie himself. However, apparently he still wants to do some tinkering with it, and now he has hired Lost’s Damon Lindelof to do a rewrite of the script. Perhaps he wants to bring in some intergalactic polar bears?

Lindelof has recently been helping out Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman in writing J.J. Abrams’ sequel to Star Trek, and he also contributed to their script for Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens. According to Deadline.com, however, he jumped at the chance to work with Ridley Scott because he is a huge fan of the original Alien.

At the moment, it’s unclear what this might mean for Alien 5. One might assume that Lindelof is being recruited in order to bring more of a pure science-fiction angle to the story, but if he loves the original, you’d think he would want to stay true to the claustrophobic horror. I just hope that this doesn’t end up being a case where there are too many cooks in the kitchen. For better or worse, Scott’s continual rewrite requests for Robin Hood ended up producing a film that was nothing like the original script (probably for worse). What do you think, could Damon Lindelof bring something cool to the Alien prequel, or is this a bad move?

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