10 Reasons You Shouldn't Get Excited About Neill Blomkamp's Alien 5

Did you know Neill Blomkamp's got a new film out? Probably not, because, even though Chappie has been moderately successful, all everyone's been talking about is the director's recently announced Alien project. Part of that's down to Chappie being a lazy cut-and-copy exercise from Blomkamp's own earlier work, but mainly because his new Alien is the most exciting thing to happen to a franchise in years (and, after Alien: Isolation, that's saying something). Blomkamp released some unofficial concepts for a new Alien movie back in January and since then it's gone from being some pretty polished fan art to a resuscitation of a presumed dead franchise; following the overwhelmingly positive reaction to his posts, 20th Century Fox announced they were going to actually make the movie, with both Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn confirming they'd look to return as Ripley and Hicks respectively. So yeah, it's been a whirlwind couple of months, although in the barrage of fan-pleasing soundbites it doesn't really look like anyone's looked at the proposed film with much objectivity. That's not saying Alien 5 is going to be a terrible movie (it's not a Terminator Genisys or Batman V Superman), but there's just not enough known about it to deserve the already ridiculous levels of hype. Alien fans should know by now that high expectations and a cool sounding idea isn't a shortcut to an exciting end product - just look at how Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, AVP, Colonial Marines and Prometheus all turned out - but that hasn't stopped everyone going crazy about the idea of Blomkamp behind a xenomorph picture. To take a look at it from the other side, here are eight reasons why you should probably temper your expectations.