Sci-fi director Neill Blomkamp was originally in line to direct Alien 5, but some of his canceled sequel plans can be seen in 2017’s short film Zygote. Arriving in cinemas in 1979, future Blade Runner director Ridley Scott’s Alien proved to be a huge hit upon release. The “haunted house in space” sci-fi horror was a critical and commercial success, earning favorable reviews thanks to its unforgettable titular monster and its resilient, resourceful heroine, Sigourney Weaver’s now-iconic Ellen Ripley.
The success of Scott’s movie was no sure thing, with the original script ruining Alien’s Xenomorphs by making the toothy beasts into mature, worldly scholars. However, once Alien did prove a hit with audiences, the movie’s outsized success soon resulted in countless rip-offs and a string of sequels of varying quality. James Cameron’s Aliens arrived in 1986, followed by two more direct sequels in the following decade and a pair of prequels in the ensuing two decades.
In 2015, three years after the underwhelming Prometheus saw Scott return to the series, Blomkamp announced that his next movie would be Alien 5. Although 20th Century Fox soon confirmed this exciting news, the plans fell through sometime between their announcement in January 2015 and two years later when Scott’s superior second prequel Alien: Covenant, arrived in cinemas. The same year, Blomkamp released the short film Zygote, a future-set sci-fi horror that may give fans an insight into what his proposed Alien sequel would have looked like. Although not canonically associated with the Alien mythos, Zygote features two characters that bear a striking resemblance to Newt and Hicks of Aliens fame in terms of their dynamic. As such, the short could give viewers a clue to where Blomkamp wanted to take the franchise plot-wise.
Zygote Explained
With an action-packed run-time of only 22 minutes, Zygote was released in July 2017 as part of Blomkamp’s OATS Studios project. Intended as a launching pad to gauge studio interest in expanding shorts into potential feature films, the project essentially consisted of Love, Death, & Robots-style standalone sci-fi short films, each of which featured different styles and stories. The fifth of these, Zygote, starred Dakota Fanning and Jose Pablo Cantillo. Set in the unspecified future (judging by the advanced technology), the opening of Zygote sees a group of precious mineral miners assimilated into a gigantic fleshy monster when they uncover a mysterious mineral called “the quartz” from an asteroid.
Two survivors, played by Fanning and Castillo, are then tasked with killing the lumbering monstrosity, with the older man teaching his young charge to use a rifle. He eventually must sacrifice himself to save her, but not before revealing to his colleague that she is a human, not an android as she had thought, in a neat inversion of the original Alien's Ash twist. With her mentor dead, the heroine faces off with the beast and temporarily subdues the monster, although the short ends on a cliffhanger as the heroine has nowhere to go, and the beast is still hot on her trail.
Zygote’s Sci-fi Horror Influences
As the plot summary implies, Zygote borrows a lot from ‘80s sci-fi horror classics. The snowy, remote setting and body-assimilating alien are reminiscent of John Carpenter's The Thing. Whereas the gruesome monster itself and its many dangling body parts are pure David Cronenberg, the mystery of whether our heroine is human or not is reminiscent of the Alien series and its secretly android characters. However, each of these elements receives an inventive twist in Blomkamp’s short film.
While most of the Alien franchise’s androids are villainous (as proven by David’s twisted Alien: Covenant plan), Fanning’s character is the heroine of the short and spends most of its runtime thinking she is an android. This twist, along with Blomkamp’s Chappie, proves that the director could have brought a more interesting approach to replicant-style characters to the series. His Alien 5 may have taken inspiration from ‘80s sci-fi horror, but if it were anything like Zygote, the sequel would have subverted the tropes of the decade as much as it played into them.
Could Zygote Have Been Blomkamp’s Alien 5 Plan?
The most compelling evidence that Zygote is a project repurposed from elements of Blomkamp’s abandoned Alien 5 plan is the fact that two characters viewers meet in the movie bear a striking resemblance to an older Newt and Hicks. Their dynamic reflects a more mature version of the gruff father figure and innocent younger girl seen in Cameron’s sequel Aliens. As such, it is possible that Zygote’s adventure between the pair was Blomkamp’s planned fate for the two iconic characters in Alien 5.
This would have retconned the duo’s fan-hated Alien 3 demises, something many fans had wanted from the series ever since director David Fincher’s movie killed off both fan favorites offscreen before the movie began with no fanfare. The fact that Castillo’s character sacrifices himself to save his younger coworker, meanwhile, is also surprisingly similar to the original fate of Hick’s in Aliens, who died to protect Ripley and Newt in early drafts of the sequel.
How Zygote Could Differ From Blomkamp’s Canceled Alien 5
While there is a chance that elements of Zygote owe their inspiration to Blomkamp’s Alien 5 sequel plans, the lumbering monstrosity that makes up the short’s villain is a far cry from any version of the Xenomorph seen so far in the series. There have been many versions of the titular alien seen throughout the franchise, but thus far, none have incorporated numerous bodies into the gruesome biological melange seen in Zygote.
It's unlikely that the Blomkamp sequel would have rewritten one of sci-fi horror’s most famous foes to be so similar to Carpenter’s The Thing when the director was given the chance to use the recognizable and terrifyingly lethal Xenomorph, as this body-consuming monster would have been a waste of the original HR Giger-designed beast and the iconic Alien Queen. While the body horror monster of Zygote proves the short film was not entirely intended to be Blomkamps’ unrealized sequel, there still may be elements of his canceled Alien 5 in the project’s DNA judging by the interaction between its two Newt and Hicks-esque heroes.