Eschewing the whiz bang pyrotechnics that the Colonial Marines usually bring to game adaptations of the Alien franchise, 2014’s Alien: Isolation took its cues from the quieter (but no less terrifying) original film.
The game was a big hit with critics and fans, though it struggled on the sales charts and a planned sequel never got off the ground. But Sega and The Creative Assembly recently teamed up with 20th Century Fox to give the game, which took place between Alien and Aliens, a second lease on life… as a movie.
A team at 20th Century Fox reedited Alien: Isolation into a feature-length movie (and released as a seven-part series) that gives fans another chance to experience the story of Amanda Ripley’s search for her missing mother:
Fifteen years after her mother disappeared on the deep space towing ship Nostromo, Amanda Ripley travels to a remote space station that may hold clues to her mother’s fate. But disaster strikes as she arrives at her destination.
The movie will be available exclusively through IGN (it’s also been embedded above) and it’ll feature “a combination of new animations and original cinematic cutscenes from the game.” As part of this partnership, the website was able to speak to the animators about the extensive lengths they went to to create these new animations:
“[We knew] that we would need to change the POV from first person, where the player is the character, to one where you are now watching Amanda Ripley navigate within the world,” [Fabien DuBois, a Director at animation studio DVgroup] said. “We then made storytelling choices based on the idea that we would be going deeper into Amanda Ripley’s psychology – to discover her demons, her fears, her motivations. The final series is comprised of three types of scenes: brand-new scenes that are rendered from scratch, cinematics taken directly from the game, and first-person scenes from the game we re-shot, edited and inserted a CG model of Amanda Ripley. Viewers will get to enjoy an exciting narrative that doesn’t repeat the Alien: Isolation story, but completes it.”
While a game sequel has yet to go into production, Amanda Ripley’s story will continue in Aliens: Resistance, a new comic series from Dark Horse. The first issue, written by Brian Wood and with art by Robert Carey, is available now.