Aliens and androids

Ridley Scott will be the director of a new movie in Alien franchise. This new movie will be a prequel to the original movie, also directed by Scott, in 1979. While a good friend of mine, with whom I discussed the subject, advises me to be optimist about it, I can't help feeling skeptical about this installment. Alien is not only one of the best science fiction movies ever, but it is also a movie masterpiece, regardless of the way we look at it. Its first sequel, Aliens, directed by James Cameron, did not disappoint: turning from the suspence from the original movie to a more action-oriented movie was interesting, and Aliens turned out to be a great movie. But Alien 3, directed by David Fincher, was poor, frankly poor. And Jean Pierre Jeunet's Alien Resurrection was even worse (despite Sigourney Weaver and Wynona Ryder featuring on the cast).

Meanwhile, the other sci-fi movie directed by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, was chosen by movie fans as the best science-fiction movie ever, leaving behind crittically-acclaimed movies like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lucas' Star Wars. Fair enough: Blade Runner is truly an awe-inspiring movie, a masterpiece that, like Alien, survived the test of time unlike many other movies (let us remember Lynch's Dune). Moreover, Blade Runner is also a lesson in how to adapt a novel into a movie - Scott clearly understood that the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick, could not be, so to speak, "directly adapted", and made a movie of his own, that shines besides the novel - not because of it, not despite of it.

at last

one year waiting for this - for the time when joan vinge's first chapter of cat's saga was out of out-of-print status. already ordered on my regular bookshop, now two, three weeks of waiting. i don't know anything about the story, but the mere fact that it has been writen by the same mind that gave me the snow queen, world's end, the summer quen and tangled up in blue is promising enough. well, even though the current times are somewhat dark for me, it seems that there are some gains from our losses (even if not related at all, who cares anyway?). i just hope there will be some rights - any right - from my wrongs.