There is, of course, no previously mapped lead-in to a story involving humans in Ridley Scott‘s just-announced Alien prequel. The only back-story alluded to in Scott’s 30-year-old original came when mining-cargo voyagers John Hurt and Veronica Cartwright explored that huge abandoned spacecraft resting on that dark, howling planetoid and came upon that skeletal carcass of a gargantuan creature with an elephant trunk whose rib cage apparently been penetrated from within.

Honestly? I would love to see a subtitled film about a crew of 30-foot-tall life forms with elephant trunks dealing with an alien invasion. No humans, I mean. That would be very cool, very avant-garde. Joe Popcorn wouldn’t like it, of course, but a studio chief who looks to Joe’s wants and needs for movie inspiration needs to go on a sabbatical.

Screenwriter Jon Spaihts will write the prequel screenplay (his pitch to 20th Century Fox and Scott Free having triggered the project). And we’re all presuming that Scott will deliver a class-act feature but c’mon…this is just another lazy greed move-slash-brand reboot. The franchise has been re-thought, re-vamped, re-mined, re-action-figured (I own two black queens from the mid ’90s) and DVD box-setted to death.