The news has burst furiously out of Hollywood's chest that Ridley Scott will direct another Alien movie-- either the fifth or the seventh installment (depending on whether you count the AVP quasi-franchise). This time it'll be a prequel to Scott's original film; and no, it looks as though Sigourney Weaver will not reprise her role as the almost comically beleaguered Ellen Ripley.

That last part is good news; the rest, I'm not sure. Sequels in general are typically nothing to get excited about -- they can be great fun, but those are most often the exception, not the rule -- and prequels in particular are often excuses to print money rather than logical or justifiable extensions of whatever made the original work any good.

In this case, it's worth noting that the proper Alien franchise has never really been about H.R. Geiger's fantastic vagina dentata creation. Rather, the beastie has been a narrative device against which four very different filmmakers chronicled the bizarre story of Weaver's character: Call it Alien: The Ellen Ripley Chronicles. Without her it's difficult to imagine a true Alien installment, given that the alien wasn't the star of the other movies in the first place.

In fact, there's a precedent in Scott's own resume that suggests what a bad idea this is. In 2001 he made Hannibal, a patently awful sequel to a phenomenally popular film whose producers made the mistake of assuming was more about the villain than the hero. Scott doesn't know how to make a bad-looking movie, but lush production values couldn't save Hannibal and may not be able to redeem the Alien prequel.

It's hard to imagine how this won't turn out to be a mistake. And as Hannibal and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull taught us, mistakes like these can often taint the experience of the great original films. Weaver has already indicated she won't participate in this; now, won't someone try to talk Scott out of his decision?