Sigourney Weaver Stars in Neill Blomkamp & Oats Studios' Sci-Fi Short, 'Rakka'

Neill Blomkamp‘s take on the Alien franchise may no longer be happening, but the talented filmmaker has still found a way to work with Ripley. After a brief teaser and a slightly more in-depth trailer, Blomkamp’s Oats Studios has released Rakka, a sci-fi short starring none other than Sigourney Weaver. Set in 2020 in Texas, the film from the District 9 and Chappie director sees mankind enslaved following an alien invasion while Weaver’s character leads a resistance movement.

You can check out Rakka above in its entirety while an interview with Blomkamp about the film can be read over at The Verge. An excerpt appears below.

Tell me a little about the design in Rakka, because it feels quite a bit different from the other films that you’ve done.
The main idea that I like is that [the alien creatures] have this nanotech ferrofluid that changes shape. The aliens would have essentially come to earth in a lake. It forms whenever they need, and when they arrive at Earth, it probably split up into several pieces, with the different ships that formed out of it going to different continents and building the towers that they live in. They breathe a different atmosphere. If you look at the creature itself, it has this black hood on that also runs down the bridge of its nose. It’s almost like a gas mask, but hooked directly into their nostrils. It just does whatever they need it to: it processes Earth’s air into a mixture that they can breathe, it forms weapons, it forms the structures that they live in, it forms their vehicles. I just like the idea that [the fluid’s] always active, and it’s intelligent.

The aliens that we see in this piece, which we have dubbed the “Klum” aliens (rhymes with ‘plume’), are actually a sort of genetically cloned drone. They’re not entirely sentient, and they’re sent out by a far more intelligent species who we haven’t really seen yet.

There’s a scene where a soldier sees something after his truck is blown up. Was that the superior alien species?
Yeah. They’re floating around in the peripheral edges of our solar system, and they’re visualizing what’s happening on the Earth by proxy. They live inside some kind of quantum state back in their ship. They’re gathering any organism that they find that can help them think about how to survive the end of the universe. They know it’s coming, and they don’t want to die.

The Klum treat this species like a god. However, this intelligent species turned their back on them, but they didn’t do that to humans.

The character of Amir is an escaped prisoner. He’s obviously been experimented on by the Klum. Can you tell me a little about him?
[The Gone World author] Thomas Sweterlitsch came up with this idea. The experimentation we see on Amir is the Klum trying to find out what this top-tier species sees in humanity: why are humans worthy of attention, but not the Klum? Amir wasn’t killed, and the experimentation gives him an eye into how the Klum see the world. I have ideas where his character goes, but we just have to see if the audience gets behind us in order for us to tell more of these stories.