THE HUMAN ELEMENT
It's going to take some work to get the human race involved in a prequel set-up for Alien. In the original movie, Weyland-Yutani's diversion of the Nostromo to LV-426 seems an opportunistic - if rather heartless - approach to new business acquisitions. The crew of the Nostromo are heading back from a long and gruelling spell of work in the Solomons when they are told to investigate the space-jockey's 'distress' signal or forfeit their shares. They'll later find out that they are all entirely 'expendable', so long as the valuable bug makes its way back to the Weyland-Yutani research labs.
Clearly the company is way ahead of the crew's efforts to decipher the signal, which obviously contains a pretty detailed description of the xenomorph and its potential capability as a military weapon.
The science-officer Ash turns out to be an android planted by the company to protect its interests, but at no point is it suggested that the Nostromo shipped out of Earth with Ash on board specifically to protect the alien. If the distress-signal is public-domain and has reached Earth, and (as at least one of the Aliens comics suggested) other military powers might be just as interested in it...why send the Nostromo off to accomplish its mining remit for years before diverting it to LV-426 on the return journey? Any other interested power aware of the information could just send a ship straight to the planet and comfortably beat Weyland-Yutani to the prize.
No, the suggestion is that Ash is on board as a 'mole' because of a general company policy of spying on its workers, and that the entirely surprising advent of the space-jockey's signal is exactly the kind of thing the company needs an 'inside man' for.
Paul Anderson's risible 2004 prequel Aliens Vs. Predator didn't even make a significant dent in this back-story, since it presented Lance Henrikson as the 'template' of Aliens' Bishop and co-founder of Weyland Yutani - and then killed him off. Anderson admitted as much in a 2005 edition of Movie Magic, declaring "…there's nothing in [Alien Vs. Predator] that contradicts anything that already exists".
All the company needed to do to 'look good for the records' and not be beaten to the punch was to divert the Nostromo on the way out. If, that is, they knew about LV-426 in advance of the mission. But let's face it, the way Alien is set up, they didn't.
The Nostromo was obviously the nearest ship available anywhere - if other powers on Earth had decoded the message and were sending ships to LV-426 to retrieve a xenomorph, they weren't going to beat the Nostromo, which was in the wrong place at the wrong time...at least according to the O'Bannon/Shusett script.
In my opinion, some nasty acts of canon-hacking will be needed to suggest that there were adequate human machinations to generate an entire film prior to the Nostromo's involvement.
But what choice is there, if this is the road the producers have chosen? The chances of Alien 0 dealing entirely with an expensive CGI/prosthetics space-jockey civilisation are pretty remote, not least because such an outlandish project doesn't tick all the demographic boxes for the target audience (who are almost inevitably going to be young teenagers, I fear). The producers will be needing pretty faces to shroud in face-huggers - and probably younger ones than featured in the original movie.
ALIEN 0 OR ALIEN 5?
In light of these and other problems, may I strongly recommend that they return to the long-awaited Alien 5 instead? We know Sigourney Weaver costs money (and that this has always been an issue with the Alien movies after the first), but she's always been worth it. And unless the intention is to spin off the Alien canon into a new side-alley as J.J. Abrams did with Star Trek, we just don't seem to fit into the picture until the original Alien movie rumbles into view.
"I’d like to see [the Alien sequels] stop. A horror movie’s a fragile thing, and once you’ve gotten past the original, it isn’t scary anymore." - Dan O'Bannon, creator of Alien.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/2599...n_prequel.html