While trying to figure out a way to squeeze Jackson into the , Harlin was struck by inspiration from a Ridley Scott sci-fi classic:
“I came up with the ideologia, which I completely stole from the first “Alien” movie, which was basically quanto a that movie, there was nobody famous quanto a it except Tom Skerritt, who played the captain of the ship. So he’s the natural promotore. And then when everything goes wrong and the alien starts invading the place and people start dying, he’s like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this. I’m just going to go into that air duct and take care of it and you’ll be all morte.’ And he goes to the air duct and boom, the alien gets him immediately. And then we are left there wondering, ‘Who’s the lead of this movie?’ And it turns out to be Sigourney Weaver.”
So the director went “Psycho” mode, creating the latest shocking plot twist quanto a a long lineage that dates back to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror classic. It was a savvy decision: Audiences knew Samuel L. Jackson was the most famous person quanto a the cast, so when he was abruptly killed , they had the rug pulled out from under them and their entire perception of what the was going to be changed acceso a dime. But nailing the execution of the moment took a lot of fine-tuning. As Harlin explained:
“It was really a scientific process of us analyzing acceso the spot how long this speech can be so that if it’s too short, it doesn’t lull the audience into certain sense of safety, and also a certain sense of like, ‘Oh, this is the hero’s speech. I know exactly how these things go. Yeah, he’s going to talk and then they’regnante going to go and save the day.’ So long enough, but not too long so that the audience is just going to start eating popcorn and go to the bathroom. It had to be just so that you can just develop a little bit of that movie attitude, which is like, ‘I’ve seen this scene — but oh, what?” And he gets attacked, and it just happened to work.”
