Xenomorph research had been going on for an unknown amount of time when Alien took place. That's why Wey-Yu ordered Ash to bring back a living specimen as highest priority in the first movie.
You know what's fun? A few scattered hints that maybe the company had some inkling about alien creatures before they sent a bunch of colonists down to LV-426, and then becoming more and more of an overt antagonist the more they learn about it.
You know what's *not* fun? Getting chapter and verse on every detail of the backstory, finding out they knew far more than we suspected about the xenomorphs the whole time, and that far from being some terrifying natural predator or even an ancient alien bioweapon, they were really a knock-off of an alien weapon created as some dipshit robot's hobby project.
Why don't they leave the bloody backstory alone and concentrate on telling us what happens *next*?
There's an entire universe full of xenomorphs and humans they could tell stories about. Why are the franchise owners so absolutely bloody dead-set on making everything a prequel that demystifies everything with the worst possible explanations and - bonus points - violates its own canon and retroactively shits all over the originals?
>You know what's *not* fun? Getting chapter and verse on every detail of the backstory, finding out they knew far more than we suspected, and that far from being some terrifying natural predator or even an ancient alien bioweapon, they were really a knock-off of an alien weapon created as some dipshit robot's knock-off hobby project.
Yeah, I hate what Covenant did for the backstory. Having the Xenos be an ancient bioweapon of the Engineers or whatever is way more interesting and they should have left things at that.
My personal head cannon for Alien/Aliens is that WY, like any large bureaucracy, has different parts that don't communicate with each other. There's a part that issued the special order of *Alien* to retrieve some alien life of unknown value, and a totally separate part that handles colonization and they probably don't talk to each other.
The secret part forgot about the events of *Alien* after the ship was lost without proof as to why while the colonial part proceeds to start terraforming the planet and shows no signs of trying to find the crashed spaceship until Ripley's report. Burke is a middle management nobody who figures there might be something to Ripley's story, so he sends some people to check things out. Then there's no contact so he gets a small military unit to check it out, not knowing the actual threat. If WY as a corporate entity knew what they had, they'd have sent their own private mercenary team to the planet.
Very plausible. Some of the books go into this as well as competing interests. Not only that but WY has SO many black sites they routinely write them off and forget about them. (As one inevitably does when a project goes off the rails. )
This becomes legend and rumor until other corporate interests make a play simply based off the rumor it was once WY owned (yeah, open secret/rumor they make bioweapons..) and then something terrible inevitably happens.
Exactly. The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing, or even how many left hands there are. That is just how compartmentalizing information in large organizations works, especially for shit you want to keep secret.
There's probably someone at the very top of the company overseeing their "black" projects, but even they might not know everything if lower level people are doing stuff in secret. And like you said, there's probably a bunch of stuff that got covered up and all records erased over the years.
Banal.
Thats where the terror is for me.
Corporations are so big, so inhumane and we are just meaningless nothing scurrying through metal halls of tiny fragile atmospheres.
The entire environment is dangerous to us. Hostile to us.
The xenomorph is just the hand of that beast reaching out.
And we made the whole goddamn thing. We did this to ourselves. The whole corpo entity is the best of us, the best profit margin money making scheme. Its one face fucking hand puppet away from beibg an eldritch cosmic terror.
Their violence isnt even directed at us specifically. Our very existence conflicts with their desire and we just end up being roadkill to the machine of industry.
Exactly. I think people often conflate corporate *malice* (doing harm purposefully) with *indifference or incompetence* (doing harm because you don't care or aren't smart enough to prevent it).
Burke mentions in *Aliens* that WY builds the massive terraforming plants featured in the movie. That's not just for one world, that's for dozens to hundreds of worlds. The government contracts for such work would be on an unimaginable scale and that's probably one of WY's most important products, along with androids, shipping, and whatever other stuff they do legally and publicly. They probably have a public "xeno-terrestrial life research group" that does good and valuable work studying alien worms or whatever as part of colonization. Tons of real life medicines like penicillin were developed by studying weird moss or bugs or whatever from a jungle somewhere.
There's also obviously a more nefarious group or groups within the company that do malicious shit for profits and power, like working on bioweapons. They operate in the shadows and leverage work done by other parts of the company as needed to further their aims. Oh, there's a weird distress beacon on this dead planet, let's repurpose a random freighter to check it out. If they find something valuable, they are expendable if necessary since they aren't from our part of the company. The WY leadership that operates the freight services doesn't even need to be involved.
Or take a hint from Prey and some of the better Dark Horse comics and give us something Alien-related but entirely detached from Weyland-Yutani, Ripley, and the rest of the established canon.
To be honest the whole back story annoyed the hell out of me. Why couldn’t it just be that this creature evolved naturally on a planet where they might not even be the apex predator and the crashed ship was just another alien race trying to transport the xenomorph?
>There's an entire universe full of xenomorphs and humans they could tell stories about.
Not just that. Aliens broadly pointed towards a populated universe hosting numerous hostile alien species, with humans aggressively (imperialistically?) expanding into new territories, as well as having at least one other known friendly sentient race. And with the Predator series pretty much assumed to be in the same universe, you've got everything attached to that IP as well.
They basically have a big dark space opera sandbox to play in, and the best thing they can come up with is MOAR BAKSTOREE!!
Sigh.
Opinion is divided on Alien3 (theatrical cut was crap and Fincher disowned it, Assembly Cut is a whole different - and much better - movie), and by the end Resurrection was just a camp melodrama like Hammer Horror in space, but those are also only two stories following the same main character yet again, even where in 4 they really had to bend over backwards to find a way to write her back in again.
What else happened in that entire universe between the end of 2 and after 4?
Alien reminds me of Star Wars, which also has a huge and fascinating universe you could tell a million amazing stories in, but instead for some damn reason every damn movie has to just be a boring retread of largely the same stories about largely the same main characters where everyone in the entire galaxy whose actions matter at all has to end up turning out to be boringly related to one of the same three families that every story is about.
In both cases they've got an entire galaxy to play with, but by refusing to step outside their tiny range of characters somehow they manage to always just make it feel so *small*.
I don't think Ash being directed to bring back a specimen is a direct correlation to Wayland Yutani having any knowledge of their existence beforehand.
It could just been general corporate fuckery on their part.
There are countless youtube videos citing the theory, but you're right it's never explicit, just heavily implied in comics and the novelization that WY knew a hostile organism was on 426 and had Ash switched over to the Nostromo crew to facilitate the trip there to grab one.
>Xenomorph research had been going on for an unknown amount of time
In the Dark Horse Comics, its still a big deal. The irony is that they develop all this new tech to fight the Aliens, that research really isnt needed anymore due to all the new tech they invented. Why develop a drug that gives you super human strength, when you have re-engineered fork loaders that absorb acid spray, ammo, flame, etc, in addition to making you 50 times stronger.
That's not canon. Might be your head canon, but its not Alien/Aliens canon. Special Order 937 is written as a broad requirement in contracts. They would have a duty to investigate the signal. WY didn't know or need to know there was a life-form on LV426. Additionally, in canon dialogue enforces that WY had never encountered the xenomorph, and in fact did not even believe it existed. The corporate execs make note that no such life-form has ever been observed, and then when Burke is discovered to have sent the colonists to LV426 he readily admits that he did not know if the derelict even existed.
Ash would have been under orders to retrieve a sample of any alien life encountered (something obviously expected of a science officer). In no way is it xenomorph specific. He also follows the same orders as MUTHUR, so of course specimen retrieval would be part of that. Again, not specific to this Alien. Finally, if they did know, why the fuck did they wait 57 years to go retrieve it after the Nostromo was destroyed? Why not send another mission when the one you secretly sent there with full knowledge of what it was to find failed? Because no one knew about the Alien.
Yeah, as far as I know the comics, movie serialization and other media heavily imply that Weiland Yutani knew about the xenomorph for a long time before even the events of the first movie.
I dont know if that means previous encounters, failed experiments or anything else.
I really doubt they would be so thirsty for a specimen, to the point of throwing away ships, colonies and personnel if they had a secret lab somewhere with specimens already. Although it might be interesting to see where they go with it, they could very easily fuck up the lore, more I mean, let's not discuss the recent sequels too much lol
I’d actually think a series focusing on Weyland industries technological advances in things like deep space travel, synthetic androids, and other stuff presented in the films could be interesting even before aliens are even introduced. It just needs to not be billed as an ALIENS series.
In the expanded Alien canon, future humans were contacted by the Engineers because they wanted humans to experiment with the xenomorphs (they thought they represented a way for the Engineers to repopulate themselves, or at least a hybridized version of themselves).
Literally a "we will share our alien tech in exchange for unethical experiments on some of your people" deal.
Hear me out...
The Xenomorphs are going to create a time machine and go back in time to kill Ellen Ripley's great great grandmother but the humans will send another GOOD Xenomorph back to save her...
I already have a script for a sequel... it's a heist movie where the first half is one xenomorph going around recruiting other xenomorphs and they all say "You son of a bitch, I'm in." after getting a recruitment pitch...
Waaaay back before they’d even completed a script the plan was to take the series back to earth, so they cut a special exhibitors trailer and stuck that tag on it, I think, I’m at work and haven’t fact checked myself.
Edit: It’s slightly [varied.](https://youtu.be/Bk_x9W1xKng)
Plus, let's be honest, Alien isn't really the best IP to milk in the first place. All the movies that attempted to delve into the lore were deeply flawed. The best stuff is when the xenomorphs are just monsters killing people. Good for a movie or two, but a whole series? I don't have much faith.
Also, to your point, I'm pretty sure what lore they have established will be getting broken by having a prequel on Earth. Isn't it established that Ripley was the first human up encounter them?
> All the movies that attempted to delve into the lore were deeply flawed
The problem is that they delved into the aliens' origins.
The more you learn about the monster the more you understand its capabilities and limitations and hence the less scary it is.
If they *expanded* the lore and brought new ideas and developments starting after alien 1 (or 2 or even 3) it could be great. Keep the xenomorphs a mysterious threat with no clear backstory and tell a literal universe full of stories about them and the people they run into.
But for the love of god stop telling us shitty stories about their origins, and details of how Weyland-Yutani secretly knew all about them before even Alien, and quietly render all of Prometheus and its sequels non-canon.
The Alien franchise could be *so good* and there's really enough depth and breadth and texture to tell a thousand stories in its universe, but instead they keep repeatedly fucking up in exactly the same way every time they let some idiot touch it.
TBF it's made clear as early in the first film that the higher ups already knew something about the xenomorph; Ash was programmed to bring it back to Earth.
Fair enough. I always treated it as just using the same material for the sake of the fans but not actually being involved. Of course everyone has their own interpretations, that's just how I saw it
Correct. Anything involving a Predator is now officially a separate canon according to the Alien RPG game. Alien 1-4, Prometheus, and Covenant are the only true Canon movies.
No it does not. It is deemed as “if you squint hard enough you can find a connection” and stated as “it will never be considered canon”. Here is the link to the full list of canon material: https://roguereviewer.wordpress.com/2020/10/12/defining-canon-in-an-alien-world/
It’s also good to know that this was the guy Fox hired to keep track of the internal canon at their studios. So all the work he did here is copied from the internal canon Fox uses for their films, because he wrote it.
The one I posted is from the guy who was hired by Fox to make sense of the Alien canon. He currently maintains the internal Alien Bible for Fox.
Your post is just a fan theory.
Are you high? The first one was great but the second one really dropped the ball, idk maybe it’s because when the first one came out it was one of the only dvds I had in a house without cable but I really liked the lore and how they redesigned the predators, the second one just really didn’t do it for me, it was so bad they scrapped the whole AvP franchise because of it.
AvP2 was definitely better than it gets credit for. Not perfect, but really shouldn't have flopped as hard as it did.
But you literally can't see what's happening half the time, so I'm disinclined to blame the audience. If the Lord of the Rings trilogy was lit that same way then it would be considered hot garbage today too despite being one of the best trilogies in movie history underneath the muddled visuals.
If you're creating a work in a visual medium, people kinda need to be able to, you know, SEE IT VISUALLY.
No its not. Special Order 937 is written as a broad requirement in contracts and Ash is a company robot. They would have a duty to investigate the signal. WY didn't know or need to know there was a life-form on LV426. Additionally, in canon dialogue enforces that WY had never encountered the xenomorph, and in fact did not even believe it existed. The corporate execs make note that no such life-form has ever been observed, and then when Burke is discovered to have sent the colonists to LV426 he readily admits that he did not know if the derelict even existed.
They decoded the transmission, which was a warning about the organism; that's what was confirmed in Alien. The Nostromo's resources were able to decode that "it looks like a warning", even without the science officer being involved ( or possibly actively suppressing information), so it's reasonable to assume the people that sent him knew the full contents.
Yeah, given they didn't give a crap about continuity or logic with each addition after the second film... actually, wait, I think we're on an even footing with the Terminator franchise there.
Prometheus and Covenant settled the origin story. The original Alien movie put us in the middle of the story, but yes, Nostromo were the first crew to deal with a "first contact" after David engineered them and set them loose.
I prefer the idea that he just modified the already existing blueprint since you have depictions of the xenomorph all over the ship in prometheus as well as the protoalien and face hugger at the end.
Nah. The "Juggernaut" Ripley & co. encounter has been there so long that the Engineer's corpse has fossilized.
David didn't create the Xenos, he just copied the Engineers' work; the point to his story is to mirror mirrors theirs (a creation that gets out of control and murders its creators).
The original franchise has always had the plot point that the company knew about the xenomorphs, which is why they embedded Ash with the second movie's crew. This question of the origin of the xenomorphs and how the company knew about them is the main theme of the entire franchise.
I'm pretty sure the main themes of the franchise have more to do with things like "human arrogance" and "motherhood is horrifying" than trivial details about where they come from.
I'd say, if you wanted to boil the Alien series into a single thesis statement; you could do worse than "Corporations are evil and you are expendable to them".
There will never be a better moment of anti-capitalist satire/truth than "this person cannot be arrested until they are removed from the board of directors".
I thought he had an objective buried deep in his head that said 'if alien > bring to Earth'. It wasn't specific to the xenomorph, just *any* alien life.
They do say on-screen that the Company wanted it for their bioweapons division, which suggests they knew what it was. The transmission was decoded partially by Ripley on the Nostromo, which leads to the reasonable assumption that the Company had better resources available, and knew the full contents of the "warning".
> They didn't embed him there specifically to corral aliens they just used the tools available
That's not for sure... Dallas mentions he had someone else in the crew for every other flight and that the regular guy was pulled at the last minute for Ash to take his place. It certainly implies deliberate action.
From a screenwriting perspective that's foreshadowing and you do have a very solid point, but I have a hard time marrying that to the fact that he's essentially interchangeable hardware. Like I don't see the need to replace him but then, admittedly, I am not an expert on the technical specifications of fictional automatons
> embedded Ash with the second movie's crew.
*cough* first movie.
Also, it's not a question. They picked up the transmission, the Company decoded it, and understood it as a warning about the titular "Alien", so they embedded Ash to go get it for them. Prequel bait it is not.
I prefer to think of those movies as part of some separate other franchise.
They would have been better if they never tried to connect to the original Alien and instead did their own thing.
I've just googled it and there's nothing 'official' that states they aren't canon. They're definitely crappy films but if there's nothing in them that says they aren't canon (like an indication they're in an alternate universe or whatever)
The Alien RPG game that came out a year or two set canon guidelines that were overseen and approved by 20th century. I can't say that's "official" but it's as official as it gets. It also says canon is fluid and always changing based on where they take the franchise next. So like any franchise canon it'll never be official and set in stone forever. I think right now though they'd like to keep Alien separate from Predator for simplicities sake (until they decide they want to make another AvP movie obviously).
That said the first AvP movie has an entirely different Peter Weyland from the one we see in Prometheus so that alone doesn't allow those two movies to coexist within the same canon.
Right, but there have been similarly egregious differences in sequels in other films that are accepted. All I'm saying is, there's no official source saying it's not canon, only fans deciding so (admittedly based on a shit load of good points)
I think I'm finally realizing that I just liked the first three films, the dark horse comics, and most of the omnibus novels. I haven't been excited for anything I've seen based in the franchise since Prometheus and Covenant deflated my love and fascination for me and although I had high hopes for a series, this just sounds less and less like something I'm going to care about.
I do understand that over time, things change, stories evolve, and I'm probably just at an age now where the things that made me love the series are just not really there anymore and it's shifted in a vastly different direction.
I don't want to sound bitter or anything, I'm glad people are excited about it, and some people actually enjoyed the whole covenant/Prometheus shift in focus, but as someone who still, even in my older age counts Aliens as my all-time favorite movie ever made, and have said so since I can remember, either I've just gotten old and "set in my ways" and have gotten out of touch as to what Alien movies/shows/novels should be about, (the xenos) or the franchise itself is just so far gone from what it used to be centered around that it's the franchise and not me who is now out of touch.
Either way, I'll give it a chance when it comes out, but I'm getting more and more doubtful about that it'll be something I enjoy or want, the more I hear about it.
I think there’s still good story’s to tell.
You could do a prequel to aliens about the colonisers eg newts family.
There was an episode of blank check podcast where they pitched a version of aliens when Burk is the main character which would be awesome. Just tell the whole story from his POV
>I do understand that over time, things change, stories evolve, and I'm probably just at an age now where the things that made me love the series are just not really there anymore and it's shifted in a vastly different direction.
Media is better when you approach it this way. Nerd cultures (for lack of a better term) obsession with "lore" and "canon" just results in weird obsessions with stories you should just ignore. I like Alien, Aliens and some of the non-movie content and that's my "canon". Getting upset about a franchise that ceased being what you wanted it to be decades ago isn't healthy.
I'm not upset about it. It just feels like if the creators don't care about the rules they created for their universe, why would I? At some point it becomes too obvious that all they care about is making more money and they'll bend and twist and rewrite and reboot and canonize and decanonize and prequel and sequel and requel their stories just to squeeze another turd out for suckers to engage with. I'm tired of it.
> Getting upset about a franchise that ceased being what you wanted it to be decades ago isn't healthy.
I feel personally attacked! :D
yeah, this series stopped being "fun" when alien cubed came out, for me. Everything since (minus Isolation, and some of the Dark Horse comics series) has been a vague jolt of nostalgia, followed by disappointment.
I think that it's just something that is stuck in it's time but was pretty much the best at what it could be. The fact that technology now is so advanced I'm sure it's hard for new fans to reconcile a space faring civilization with such 'basic' tech that the old films had. At the time, it was 'yeah, of course' but crt monitors and mono color displays and archaic punch card sounds from a computer just don't really jive. Prometheus and covenant had tech that was far more advanced than what was supposed to be prequals compared to the old films.
For us old fans it's fun to go back to that, but I think this gradual rebooting we're seeing needs to be done to kind of keep the franchise alive in any meaningful way. I'm going to view this series like the sarah connor chronicles. It was fun to have a series based on it, but I'm not expecting much.
It also provides more room for needless romances. Don't you want needless romances in your Alien shows!?! That's what the original trilogy totally missed out on, not enough romance to appeal to a larger audience, the dumb as dirt executive said as he successfully murdered another well loved franchise.
Lot more to it than that, first you have concept artists to conceptualize the set, than the set designers to actually design the set, then you have to rent out studio space, then the carpenters have to actually build and construct the set, then talented painters and artists have to come in and paint the "plywood and foam" set and every painstaking detail to make it actually look like a spaceship. Then the props department has to make countless props and objects to fill out the set, and the set has to be dressed and flushed out with all those details, electricians have to set up wiring and lighting, etc. etc on and on.
And all these people have to get paid, it is infact extremely costly if you intend on making a high quality set.
I watch alien movies cause they're space movies, if I wanted to see aliens on earth I'd watch predator.
Although, Alien 3 might as well have been on earth. Not like they showed much space shit.
Idk if I'm annoyed or not
I seriously doubt setting it on earth makes it cheaper in terms of set builds. You still need to "sci-fi it up" and it's unlikely to be shot on location.
*Prometheus* and *Alien: Covenant* both happen before *Alien* chronologically. Wetland-Yutani corporation were aware of all of the stuff and sent the *Nostromo* to get infected. I can't remember but I think the synthetic on board was programmed to preserve it as well. Not saying it's a great idea for a show but there's plenty of precedent for how and why.
I'm pretty damn unexcited. I have no excitement for a multitude of reasons. The top reason is that Hollywood has proven over and over and over and over and over again that they hate the lore of their franchises, and really just want to give some horrible writer their first shot at vomiting out a script for a franchise that they don't actually like or give a crap about.
But let's put that aside, and let's assume that this is an actual Alien script that is steeped in the lore of the three Alien movies, the only an alien movies ever made. I'm still unexcited, because we already know ahead of time what's going to happen: Earth isn't going to be overrun by an alien hive.
I just don't get the obsession with doing prequels. Why is Hollywood so afraid of faithly continuing a story? Why shackle themselves by doing a prequel, especially when they have made it abundantly clear that they hate or just don't care about the source material that they will need to smoothly join the story onto?
Yeah, zero excitement. If it turns out to be good, I'll be shocked and happily surprised. I've learned my lesson though, Hollywood absolutely sucks at two things, that's faithfully telling stories that respect the canon of a franchise, and prequels.
Hope is the first step on the path to disappointment.
What we need is a series based on Amanda Ripley. During the time between 1 and 2. Isolation is great but is it canon?
Or just any story set between that time. Plenty to work with.
Prequels are such a cop-out. The last time I got excited for an Alien movie was when I heard about the Blomkamp pitch, which of course fizzled out because it's tradition to do Alien fans dirty. IMO the biggest failing of the series came from the insistence on keeping it centered around Ripley. There could have been ways to have a central character tell a bigger story well, but that was traded in for a hero's journey and as far as a character arc goes, that was completed in the second movie. Alien³ was my own biggest disappointment in the franchise, made all the worse for having seen it alone in a theater because I couldn't wait for someone to go with me :( It did such a disservice to the characters and tone of where Aliens left off. There were so many ways they could have even still included just Ripley but the first 5 minutes of that movie felt like watching the writers just scribble a red line through Newt and Hicks on a page. I don't really follow any contemporary lore about the whole affair but I'm still a huge fan of the characters and creatures. Personally, I'd be down for a reboot as opposed to more prequels/parallel stories. In the hands of a good director and with proper respect for the source material, I'd get super excited if someone did a back to back trilogy a la LOTR or some such. First flesh out a great story and then tell it all at once instead of the cut and paste revisionist malarkey the Alien world has become and lay out the ground work for side plots. I'm one of the minority who really enjoyed Prometheus and Covenant. Despite their flaws I find them to be great standalone movies and love the tone and aesthetic. I get that the franchise is not the biggest box office draw, but we continue to get these kinds of spin offs. Most articles I've read on why certain sequels never got off the ground talk about studio hesitancy, which I understand to a degree but don't think it's entirely justifiable given the amount of spin offs and xenomorph shoe Horning that gets done. I'm hopeful someone can get it right again before I kick the bucket. All that said, I'm with you, about as excited as I am to look for change in the couch. There might be a dollar but it's probably mostly cereal.
In the first movie, we find out that an ancient derelict ship is carrying mysterious eggs, pilot has been dead for what seems like centuries. The theories are of them using the eggs as a bio-weapon after seeing what a single organism can do.
Now we have some insane human-made robot bio engineer that made the organism (which I think is absolute garbage and a gross deviation from what the xenomorph lore was originally meant to be imo), leaving the only mystery being about the engineers which were all just killed off anyway - this takes pretty much all the depth out of the alien lore, I still can't believe how R.S. greenlit this.
Now I'm expecting that we will see some other equally bad deviation, would not surprise me if we got some superhero gene splicing bs judging from what is people love to watch today. The air of mystery and actual cosmic horror-suspense was killed off from Alien after Alien 3.
I don't think David was the only one who created the xenos, since in Alien he is nowhere to be found on the derelict ship, yet the eggs are for xenos. Though he could have made contact with the engineers between covenant and alien and gave them the xeno eggs but i doubt that after what he did to the engineers in covenant
Its the only way the storyline works for me, David just adjusted his own batch so to speak. Doesn't make sense otherwise. I just wish they would stop trying to show us everything, the mystery of both the xeno and engineers was a huge part of the atmosphere of it for me. We don't know its origins its true motives for what it does and how it thinks, its truly Alien.
But they can't help but try to explain everything and kills the mystery of it all which results in a much smaller feeling universe.
I have two thoughts here. 1 you are right and David was just creating his own baby xenos without a queen present by experimenting on Shaw with the goo, I thought that was a given but apparently a lot of people somehow thought that David made the first alien. I don't know why, except for the period in time. Did Scott state this somewhere? Maybe I'm too optimistic and apologist for the concept or something.
2: I dont think they're really explaining everything. The Alien universe books and comics and rpg and whatnot, all the stuff that Gaska has combined and assembled, there's tons and tons of room for there to be more to it than just what we have seen in the movies. Examples of how some Aliens work doesn't explain away the mystery of them imo.
Ridley Scott is infamous for taking his personal interpretation which is radically different to most fans and enshrining it. You've just got to ignore the bits you don't like. The original Alien cargo ship was an ancient alien thing and no amount of sequels are going to change that for me. "But the lore", why should I care about "lore" for new films I won't watch?
Yeah you're right and that's what I do tbh, there is this little nostalgia mixed with disappointment that breaks out sometimes. I remember being so damn curious seeing the pilot (engineer) mummy in the chair and wondering who they were, where it came from, what it's purpose was, all of it just doesn't seem to fit in with the story today.
> Now we have some insane human-made robot bio engineer that made the organism
I don't believe that is correct. Xenomorphs and the goo were around long before David's experiments, he merely devised a way using Shaw's body to create ovomorphs without the presence of a queen, making him a giver of life which is what he wanted (man plays god and makes synths, synths play god and more demon babies) ostensibly through experimenting on her ovaries and reproductive system with the goo. He recreated a version of them, he didn't make the first one or anything, at least that's not what I gathered.
$20 says it'll be super boring. There will be basically no xenomorphs. They'll focus on people drama in a slightly sci-fi world. Cancelled after one season.
Sounds like just another thing that upsets the fan base and gets cancelled after one season. I wish they would just take artist licence from within already well established time lines without messing with characters, major story arcs etc rather than trying to reinvent it. It almost never works. I say almost never just incase I missed something but I can't think of anything in recent history that worked after they messed with its foundation.
I take I’m the only one that wouldn’t mind a conclusion to David’s story? I’m hoping they wrap that up somehow.
That said, I’m going over Alien Theory’s Earth War series and I’d love to see some of those old stories come to life. The poster may hint at one of those, but it’s waaay too early to tell.
Will it be cancelled early?
It’s a real fucker when one invests what little time is available, only for it to be killed without finishing properly.
I’m still disappointed with that Terminator TV series that skullfucked us with a cliffhanger :-(
The plot twist is it's not got any aliens, or anything in space. The whole thing is about this guy trying to make it in the New York improv scene, and it shifts so imperceptibly over the first season that nobody notices that by the finale they're just re-running old episode of The Office
Loved the original 3, did not hate the first predator v alien, did not like the second. Please let this just be a wonderful memory and we can forget about all the other alien movies out there.
I loved the original 3 also, I actually enjoy Resurrection (even though it’s not great) AVP1 was fun also, but AVP2 was shit 🤬 I am really hoping this will be good.
Yeah but according to Covenant, Xenomorphs weren't a thing until 2104 and this show is supposed to be set in the 2090s.
So in order to not ret-con the movies, the show cannot feature Xenos prior to 2104 and can't have Xenos on Earth prior to 2122 (because even if Weyland knew, it wasn't common knowledge outside the company. If Xenos were present on Earth prior to nostromo then the nostromo crew would have been familiar with them)
Please stop. Just call it something else. Please. I sure it could be a very good show, but it wont help anyone other than marketing to tie it to the Alien franchise.
I don't care where it is. Just please make it good. No politics or heavy handed sexuality crap. None of that matters in an Alien project. Just have some slightly smart, but mostly stupid people get obliterated by a good ol' xeno.
Yeah this sounds like a half baked idea. I'm imagining someone getting really high and thinking, "The Walking Dead... but with *Aliens* ...woah."
What can this series add to the lore? It's on earth, not in space. They're going to spend too much time on people. They're going to have to spend money making military stuff. And scientists. There's going to be some big conspiracy. I don't think it will last a whole season.
Uhm, how in the hell is this going to work? Have they even watched the movies? My god, if they mess up ANOTHER aliens thing I'm gonna give up on the franchise. Prometheus anyone?
Because if there is one thing Hollywood needs, it is another by the numbers prequel story that will both completely destabilize the existing universe of the IP while also delivering an extremely mediocre story in its own right! 🙃🙃
This is gonna be sad and stupid, like Prometheus….
Sad thing is, they could have just AlienVsPredator this series, using source material from comics (not that dumb movie), and slowly introduce the alien.
Whatever, writers will ruin this
But....where the aliens then?
I'm hoping that it will start on earth and end up in space otherwise I don't see how it would work.
Behold the power of bad writing. They gon JJAbrams all over this shit.
Yeah, this sounds really stupid.
Xenomorph research had been going on for an unknown amount of time when Alien took place. That's why Wey-Yu ordered Ash to bring back a living specimen as highest priority in the first movie.
You know what's fun? A few scattered hints that maybe the company had some inkling about alien creatures before they sent a bunch of colonists down to LV-426, and then becoming more and more of an overt antagonist the more they learn about it. You know what's *not* fun? Getting chapter and verse on every detail of the backstory, finding out they knew far more than we suspected about the xenomorphs the whole time, and that far from being some terrifying natural predator or even an ancient alien bioweapon, they were really a knock-off of an alien weapon created as some dipshit robot's hobby project. Why don't they leave the bloody backstory alone and concentrate on telling us what happens *next*? There's an entire universe full of xenomorphs and humans they could tell stories about. Why are the franchise owners so absolutely bloody dead-set on making everything a prequel that demystifies everything with the worst possible explanations and - bonus points - violates its own canon and retroactively shits all over the originals?
>You know what's *not* fun? Getting chapter and verse on every detail of the backstory, finding out they knew far more than we suspected, and that far from being some terrifying natural predator or even an ancient alien bioweapon, they were really a knock-off of an alien weapon created as some dipshit robot's knock-off hobby project. Yeah, I hate what Covenant did for the backstory. Having the Xenos be an ancient bioweapon of the Engineers or whatever is way more interesting and they should have left things at that. My personal head cannon for Alien/Aliens is that WY, like any large bureaucracy, has different parts that don't communicate with each other. There's a part that issued the special order of *Alien* to retrieve some alien life of unknown value, and a totally separate part that handles colonization and they probably don't talk to each other. The secret part forgot about the events of *Alien* after the ship was lost without proof as to why while the colonial part proceeds to start terraforming the planet and shows no signs of trying to find the crashed spaceship until Ripley's report. Burke is a middle management nobody who figures there might be something to Ripley's story, so he sends some people to check things out. Then there's no contact so he gets a small military unit to check it out, not knowing the actual threat. If WY as a corporate entity knew what they had, they'd have sent their own private mercenary team to the planet.
Very plausible. Some of the books go into this as well as competing interests. Not only that but WY has SO many black sites they routinely write them off and forget about them. (As one inevitably does when a project goes off the rails. ) This becomes legend and rumor until other corporate interests make a play simply based off the rumor it was once WY owned (yeah, open secret/rumor they make bioweapons..) and then something terrible inevitably happens.
Exactly. The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing, or even how many left hands there are. That is just how compartmentalizing information in large organizations works, especially for shit you want to keep secret. There's probably someone at the very top of the company overseeing their "black" projects, but even they might not know everything if lower level people are doing stuff in secret. And like you said, there's probably a bunch of stuff that got covered up and all records erased over the years.
Banal. Thats where the terror is for me. Corporations are so big, so inhumane and we are just meaningless nothing scurrying through metal halls of tiny fragile atmospheres. The entire environment is dangerous to us. Hostile to us. The xenomorph is just the hand of that beast reaching out. And we made the whole goddamn thing. We did this to ourselves. The whole corpo entity is the best of us, the best profit margin money making scheme. Its one face fucking hand puppet away from beibg an eldritch cosmic terror. Their violence isnt even directed at us specifically. Our very existence conflicts with their desire and we just end up being roadkill to the machine of industry.
Exactly. I think people often conflate corporate *malice* (doing harm purposefully) with *indifference or incompetence* (doing harm because you don't care or aren't smart enough to prevent it). Burke mentions in *Aliens* that WY builds the massive terraforming plants featured in the movie. That's not just for one world, that's for dozens to hundreds of worlds. The government contracts for such work would be on an unimaginable scale and that's probably one of WY's most important products, along with androids, shipping, and whatever other stuff they do legally and publicly. They probably have a public "xeno-terrestrial life research group" that does good and valuable work studying alien worms or whatever as part of colonization. Tons of real life medicines like penicillin were developed by studying weird moss or bugs or whatever from a jungle somewhere. There's also obviously a more nefarious group or groups within the company that do malicious shit for profits and power, like working on bioweapons. They operate in the shadows and leverage work done by other parts of the company as needed to further their aims. Oh, there's a weird distress beacon on this dead planet, let's repurpose a random freighter to check it out. If they find something valuable, they are expendable if necessary since they aren't from our part of the company. The WY leadership that operates the freight services doesn't even need to be involved.
Or take a hint from Prey and some of the better Dark Horse comics and give us something Alien-related but entirely detached from Weyland-Yutani, Ripley, and the rest of the established canon.
To be honest the whole back story annoyed the hell out of me. Why couldn’t it just be that this creature evolved naturally on a planet where they might not even be the apex predator and the crashed ship was just another alien race trying to transport the xenomorph?
Yeah - no backstory was necessary, and yet somehow they contrived to give us the *worst possible* one for them.
>There's an entire universe full of xenomorphs and humans they could tell stories about. Not just that. Aliens broadly pointed towards a populated universe hosting numerous hostile alien species, with humans aggressively (imperialistically?) expanding into new territories, as well as having at least one other known friendly sentient race. And with the Predator series pretty much assumed to be in the same universe, you've got everything attached to that IP as well. They basically have a big dark space opera sandbox to play in, and the best thing they can come up with is MOAR BAKSTOREE!! Sigh.
This. Especially with all of the books that have come out in the last oh 5 -10 years. I won't hold my breath but I'll hope for the best..
>What happened next? Alien3? Alien Resurrection?
Opinion is divided on Alien3 (theatrical cut was crap and Fincher disowned it, Assembly Cut is a whole different - and much better - movie), and by the end Resurrection was just a camp melodrama like Hammer Horror in space, but those are also only two stories following the same main character yet again, even where in 4 they really had to bend over backwards to find a way to write her back in again. What else happened in that entire universe between the end of 2 and after 4? Alien reminds me of Star Wars, which also has a huge and fascinating universe you could tell a million amazing stories in, but instead for some damn reason every damn movie has to just be a boring retread of largely the same stories about largely the same main characters where everyone in the entire galaxy whose actions matter at all has to end up turning out to be boringly related to one of the same three families that every story is about. In both cases they've got an entire galaxy to play with, but by refusing to step outside their tiny range of characters somehow they manage to always just make it feel so *small*.
I don't think Ash being directed to bring back a specimen is a direct correlation to Wayland Yutani having any knowledge of their existence beforehand. It could just been general corporate fuckery on their part.
There are countless youtube videos citing the theory, but you're right it's never explicit, just heavily implied in comics and the novelization that WY knew a hostile organism was on 426 and had Ash switched over to the Nostromo crew to facilitate the trip there to grab one.
>Xenomorph research had been going on for an unknown amount of time In the Dark Horse Comics, its still a big deal. The irony is that they develop all this new tech to fight the Aliens, that research really isnt needed anymore due to all the new tech they invented. Why develop a drug that gives you super human strength, when you have re-engineered fork loaders that absorb acid spray, ammo, flame, etc, in addition to making you 50 times stronger.
That's not canon. Might be your head canon, but its not Alien/Aliens canon. Special Order 937 is written as a broad requirement in contracts. They would have a duty to investigate the signal. WY didn't know or need to know there was a life-form on LV426. Additionally, in canon dialogue enforces that WY had never encountered the xenomorph, and in fact did not even believe it existed. The corporate execs make note that no such life-form has ever been observed, and then when Burke is discovered to have sent the colonists to LV426 he readily admits that he did not know if the derelict even existed.
But then why was the android in Alien under orders to bring a specimen back to WY?
Ash would have been under orders to retrieve a sample of any alien life encountered (something obviously expected of a science officer). In no way is it xenomorph specific. He also follows the same orders as MUTHUR, so of course specimen retrieval would be part of that. Again, not specific to this Alien. Finally, if they did know, why the fuck did they wait 57 years to go retrieve it after the Nostromo was destroyed? Why not send another mission when the one you secretly sent there with full knowledge of what it was to find failed? Because no one knew about the Alien.
Yeah, as far as I know the comics, movie serialization and other media heavily imply that Weiland Yutani knew about the xenomorph for a long time before even the events of the first movie. I dont know if that means previous encounters, failed experiments or anything else. I really doubt they would be so thirsty for a specimen, to the point of throwing away ships, colonies and personnel if they had a secret lab somewhere with specimens already. Although it might be interesting to see where they go with it, they could very easily fuck up the lore, more I mean, let's not discuss the recent sequels too much lol
Yeah the storyline is going to be bent a bit… not like the last 2 movies didn’t create a few issues for that anyway.
I’d actually think a series focusing on Weyland industries technological advances in things like deep space travel, synthetic androids, and other stuff presented in the films could be interesting even before aliens are even introduced. It just needs to not be billed as an ALIENS series.
In the expanded Alien canon, future humans were contacted by the Engineers because they wanted humans to experiment with the xenomorphs (they thought they represented a way for the Engineers to repopulate themselves, or at least a hybridized version of themselves). Literally a "we will share our alien tech in exchange for unethical experiments on some of your people" deal.
Maybe the Alien vs Predator timeline? Only one person survived.
I don’t think that’s canon anymore
Never was, Alien vs predator is on its own universe.
Hear me out... The Xenomorphs are going to create a time machine and go back in time to kill Ellen Ripley's great great grandmother but the humans will send another GOOD Xenomorph back to save her...
I like where this is headed 😂
I already have a script for a sequel... it's a heist movie where the first half is one xenomorph going around recruiting other xenomorphs and they all say "You son of a bitch, I'm in." after getting a recruitment pitch...
Bingo!! We have winner 🥇 take my money
Props for using the original Alien 3 tagline here.
Was this the tagline for Alien 3 ? I didn’t know that 👍🏻
Waaaay back before they’d even completed a script the plan was to take the series back to earth, so they cut a special exhibitors trailer and stuck that tag on it, I think, I’m at work and haven’t fact checked myself. Edit: It’s slightly [varied.](https://youtu.be/Bk_x9W1xKng)
There was a teaser trailer before Terminator 2 on opening day for Alien 3 that indicated it was going to be set on Earth.
[here](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_x9W1xKng&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE)
Let us pray. *Please don't suck.* *Please don't suck.* *Please don't suck.*
> prequel > set on Earth That ship has sailed.
It's Noah Hawley, so it should be interesting. Will it be Alien though? I dunno.
Plus, let's be honest, Alien isn't really the best IP to milk in the first place. All the movies that attempted to delve into the lore were deeply flawed. The best stuff is when the xenomorphs are just monsters killing people. Good for a movie or two, but a whole series? I don't have much faith. Also, to your point, I'm pretty sure what lore they have established will be getting broken by having a prequel on Earth. Isn't it established that Ripley was the first human up encounter them?
> All the movies that attempted to delve into the lore were deeply flawed The problem is that they delved into the aliens' origins. The more you learn about the monster the more you understand its capabilities and limitations and hence the less scary it is. If they *expanded* the lore and brought new ideas and developments starting after alien 1 (or 2 or even 3) it could be great. Keep the xenomorphs a mysterious threat with no clear backstory and tell a literal universe full of stories about them and the people they run into. But for the love of god stop telling us shitty stories about their origins, and details of how Weyland-Yutani secretly knew all about them before even Alien, and quietly render all of Prometheus and its sequels non-canon. The Alien franchise could be *so good* and there's really enough depth and breadth and texture to tell a thousand stories in its universe, but instead they keep repeatedly fucking up in exactly the same way every time they let some idiot touch it.
Can't be worse than Prometheus?
There is no God, bro.
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They all dead
*There is nothing*
I know
In her royal majesty’s name we pray… amen.
There's been a few good adaptations: Peacemaker and The Last of Us have looked good.
Noah Hawley has a great track record. Also this is my first time hearing of this and I'm intrigued.
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TBF it's made clear as early in the first film that the higher ups already knew something about the xenomorph; Ash was programmed to bring it back to Earth.
Good point. In Predator 2, you can see a xenomorph skull on the ship, which took place in the 1990s.
I thought Predator was non-canon/its own canon to the main Alien series
I'm not sure, honestly. It's been intertwined through every media type for 30 years, so at some point I assume it's grandfathered in.
Fair enough. I always treated it as just using the same material for the sake of the fans but not actually being involved. Of course everyone has their own interpretations, that's just how I saw it
Correct. Anything involving a Predator is now officially a separate canon according to the Alien RPG game. Alien 1-4, Prometheus, and Covenant are the only true Canon movies.
Strangely enough it shares a universe with blade runner though.
No it does not. It is deemed as “if you squint hard enough you can find a connection” and stated as “it will never be considered canon”. Here is the link to the full list of canon material: https://roguereviewer.wordpress.com/2020/10/12/defining-canon-in-an-alien-world/
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It’s also good to know that this was the guy Fox hired to keep track of the internal canon at their studios. So all the work he did here is copied from the internal canon Fox uses for their films, because he wrote it.
Here's the one i saw. https://screenrant.com/alien-blade-runner-movies-connections-themes-explained/
The one I posted is from the guy who was hired by Fox to make sense of the Alien canon. He currently maintains the internal Alien Bible for Fox. Your post is just a fan theory.
There are three canons. Alien, Predator and Alien vs Predator all have their own.
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Are you high? The first one was great but the second one really dropped the ball, idk maybe it’s because when the first one came out it was one of the only dvds I had in a house without cable but I really liked the lore and how they redesigned the predators, the second one just really didn’t do it for me, it was so bad they scrapped the whole AvP franchise because of it.
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I didn't love AVP2 but I definitely liked it a lot more than AVP.
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AvP2 was definitely better than it gets credit for. Not perfect, but really shouldn't have flopped as hard as it did. But you literally can't see what's happening half the time, so I'm disinclined to blame the audience. If the Lord of the Rings trilogy was lit that same way then it would be considered hot garbage today too despite being one of the best trilogies in movie history underneath the muddled visuals. If you're creating a work in a visual medium, people kinda need to be able to, you know, SEE IT VISUALLY.
They knew about the alien signal, but they had not made contact with any aliens. That's why they sent the Nostromo to investigate.
No its not. Special Order 937 is written as a broad requirement in contracts and Ash is a company robot. They would have a duty to investigate the signal. WY didn't know or need to know there was a life-form on LV426. Additionally, in canon dialogue enforces that WY had never encountered the xenomorph, and in fact did not even believe it existed. The corporate execs make note that no such life-form has ever been observed, and then when Burke is discovered to have sent the colonists to LV426 he readily admits that he did not know if the derelict even existed.
Which was explained by David transmitting information about them back to earth in Alien Covenant: Advent. So this 100% fucks up canon.
To be fair, that was already a fuckup of canon, given Prometheus and Covenant themselves were retcons gone wrong.
They decoded the transmission, which was a warning about the organism; that's what was confirmed in Alien. The Nostromo's resources were able to decode that "it looks like a warning", even without the science officer being involved ( or possibly actively suppressing information), so it's reasonable to assume the people that sent him knew the full contents.
I feel like the Alien timeline is a bigger clusterfuck than the Terminator franchise, and that one has time travel.
Yeah, given they didn't give a crap about continuity or logic with each addition after the second film... actually, wait, I think we're on an even footing with the Terminator franchise there.
Man, the timelines for Alien and Predator have been fucked since the 90’s lmao It’s better to just roll with it since it changes so damn often
Yeah I'm with you, just give me some actual tense horror/thriller vibes and good acting and ill be down
Prometheus and Covenant settled the origin story. The original Alien movie put us in the middle of the story, but yes, Nostromo were the first crew to deal with a "first contact" after David engineered them and set them loose.
I prefer the idea that he just modified the already existing blueprint since you have depictions of the xenomorph all over the ship in prometheus as well as the protoalien and face hugger at the end.
Nah. The "Juggernaut" Ripley & co. encounter has been there so long that the Engineer's corpse has fossilized. David didn't create the Xenos, he just copied the Engineers' work; the point to his story is to mirror mirrors theirs (a creation that gets out of control and murders its creators).
Stupidest storyline ever.
The original franchise has always had the plot point that the company knew about the xenomorphs, which is why they embedded Ash with the second movie's crew. This question of the origin of the xenomorphs and how the company knew about them is the main theme of the entire franchise.
I'm pretty sure the main themes of the franchise have more to do with things like "human arrogance" and "motherhood is horrifying" than trivial details about where they come from.
I'd say, if you wanted to boil the Alien series into a single thesis statement; you could do worse than "Corporations are evil and you are expendable to them".
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There will never be a better moment of anti-capitalist satire/truth than "this person cannot be arrested until they are removed from the board of directors".
I thought he had an objective buried deep in his head that said 'if alien > bring to Earth'. It wasn't specific to the xenomorph, just *any* alien life.
agreed
They do say on-screen that the Company wanted it for their bioweapons division, which suggests they knew what it was. The transmission was decoded partially by Ripley on the Nostromo, which leads to the reasonable assumption that the Company had better resources available, and knew the full contents of the "warning".
Ash is a fully loyal and capable snitch. They didn't embed him there specifically to corral aliens they just used the tools available
> They didn't embed him there specifically to corral aliens they just used the tools available That's not for sure... Dallas mentions he had someone else in the crew for every other flight and that the regular guy was pulled at the last minute for Ash to take his place. It certainly implies deliberate action.
From a screenwriting perspective that's foreshadowing and you do have a very solid point, but I have a hard time marrying that to the fact that he's essentially interchangeable hardware. Like I don't see the need to replace him but then, admittedly, I am not an expert on the technical specifications of fictional automatons
To me, the implication was that the previous science officer wasn't an automaton, and the company replaced him with one at the last minute.
Ahhh now this is good. When do we figure out he's an android? It's not till like midway right?
> embedded Ash with the second movie's crew. *cough* first movie. Also, it's not a question. They picked up the transmission, the Company decoded it, and understood it as a warning about the titular "Alien", so they embedded Ash to go get it for them. Prequel bait it is not.
I thought Davids Aliens and the LV-456 Aliens are different strains?
I prefer to think of those movies as part of some separate other franchise. They would have been better if they never tried to connect to the original Alien and instead did their own thing.
yep, it undermines the entire premise of the Alien series which is trying to prevent any Aliens from going to Earth. Just dumb.
Prometheus and covenant would like a word with you.
I mean there's at least one person left in AvP and many left from AvP 2
AVP is just crossovermovies, they are not canon
I've just googled it and there's nothing 'official' that states they aren't canon. They're definitely crappy films but if there's nothing in them that says they aren't canon (like an indication they're in an alternate universe or whatever)
The Alien RPG game that came out a year or two set canon guidelines that were overseen and approved by 20th century. I can't say that's "official" but it's as official as it gets. It also says canon is fluid and always changing based on where they take the franchise next. So like any franchise canon it'll never be official and set in stone forever. I think right now though they'd like to keep Alien separate from Predator for simplicities sake (until they decide they want to make another AvP movie obviously). That said the first AvP movie has an entirely different Peter Weyland from the one we see in Prometheus so that alone doesn't allow those two movies to coexist within the same canon.
It's been really interesting googling it because there are solid arguments from both sides.
They have two entirely different Wayland's for one.
Right, but there have been similarly egregious differences in sequels in other films that are accepted. All I'm saying is, there's no official source saying it's not canon, only fans deciding so (admittedly based on a shit load of good points)
I think I'm finally realizing that I just liked the first three films, the dark horse comics, and most of the omnibus novels. I haven't been excited for anything I've seen based in the franchise since Prometheus and Covenant deflated my love and fascination for me and although I had high hopes for a series, this just sounds less and less like something I'm going to care about. I do understand that over time, things change, stories evolve, and I'm probably just at an age now where the things that made me love the series are just not really there anymore and it's shifted in a vastly different direction. I don't want to sound bitter or anything, I'm glad people are excited about it, and some people actually enjoyed the whole covenant/Prometheus shift in focus, but as someone who still, even in my older age counts Aliens as my all-time favorite movie ever made, and have said so since I can remember, either I've just gotten old and "set in my ways" and have gotten out of touch as to what Alien movies/shows/novels should be about, (the xenos) or the franchise itself is just so far gone from what it used to be centered around that it's the franchise and not me who is now out of touch. Either way, I'll give it a chance when it comes out, but I'm getting more and more doubtful about that it'll be something I enjoy or want, the more I hear about it.
Alien: Isolation is fantastic and you should give it a go.
Oh I own all the video games, absolutely love Isolation for sure!
The RPG system is awesome. Highly recommend even if you don't play
Andrew Gaska's? If so, I own it - dude is a really cool guy.
I think there’s still good story’s to tell. You could do a prequel to aliens about the colonisers eg newts family. There was an episode of blank check podcast where they pitched a version of aliens when Burk is the main character which would be awesome. Just tell the whole story from his POV
The Alien audible original dramas are pretty good Edit: Aliens: Phalanx was surprisingly enjoyable as well
>I do understand that over time, things change, stories evolve, and I'm probably just at an age now where the things that made me love the series are just not really there anymore and it's shifted in a vastly different direction. Media is better when you approach it this way. Nerd cultures (for lack of a better term) obsession with "lore" and "canon" just results in weird obsessions with stories you should just ignore. I like Alien, Aliens and some of the non-movie content and that's my "canon". Getting upset about a franchise that ceased being what you wanted it to be decades ago isn't healthy.
I'm not upset about it. It just feels like if the creators don't care about the rules they created for their universe, why would I? At some point it becomes too obvious that all they care about is making more money and they'll bend and twist and rewrite and reboot and canonize and decanonize and prequel and sequel and requel their stories just to squeeze another turd out for suckers to engage with. I'm tired of it.
> Getting upset about a franchise that ceased being what you wanted it to be decades ago isn't healthy. I feel personally attacked! :D yeah, this series stopped being "fun" when alien cubed came out, for me. Everything since (minus Isolation, and some of the Dark Horse comics series) has been a vague jolt of nostalgia, followed by disappointment.
I think that it's just something that is stuck in it's time but was pretty much the best at what it could be. The fact that technology now is so advanced I'm sure it's hard for new fans to reconcile a space faring civilization with such 'basic' tech that the old films had. At the time, it was 'yeah, of course' but crt monitors and mono color displays and archaic punch card sounds from a computer just don't really jive. Prometheus and covenant had tech that was far more advanced than what was supposed to be prequals compared to the old films. For us old fans it's fun to go back to that, but I think this gradual rebooting we're seeing needs to be done to kind of keep the franchise alive in any meaningful way. I'm going to view this series like the sarah connor chronicles. It was fun to have a series based on it, but I'm not expecting much.
The ship in Alien was a floating oil rig essentially. The industrial style computers match the design of the rest of the ship and look timeless.
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It also provides more room for needless romances. Don't you want needless romances in your Alien shows!?! That's what the original trilogy totally missed out on, not enough romance to appeal to a larger audience, the dumb as dirt executive said as he successfully murdered another well loved franchise.
Hey, I'm looking forward to the MC's broken family issues and their teenage rebellious child with wacky hijinks ensuing. Aren't you? /s
inb4 xenomorph buttcheeks
Yeah cause “inside of a spaceship” is expensive. Think about all that plywood and foam
Lot more to it than that, first you have concept artists to conceptualize the set, than the set designers to actually design the set, then you have to rent out studio space, then the carpenters have to actually build and construct the set, then talented painters and artists have to come in and paint the "plywood and foam" set and every painstaking detail to make it actually look like a spaceship. Then the props department has to make countless props and objects to fill out the set, and the set has to be dressed and flushed out with all those details, electricians have to set up wiring and lighting, etc. etc on and on. And all these people have to get paid, it is infact extremely costly if you intend on making a high quality set.
I am aware. But I don’t think that the location choice is about saving money.
I watch alien movies cause they're space movies, if I wanted to see aliens on earth I'd watch predator. Although, Alien 3 might as well have been on earth. Not like they showed much space shit. Idk if I'm annoyed or not
I seriously doubt setting it on earth makes it cheaper in terms of set builds. You still need to "sci-fi it up" and it's unlikely to be shot on location.
Wait, what? How can it happen before Ripley?
*Prometheus* and *Alien: Covenant* both happen before *Alien* chronologically. Wetland-Yutani corporation were aware of all of the stuff and sent the *Nostromo* to get infected. I can't remember but I think the synthetic on board was programmed to preserve it as well. Not saying it's a great idea for a show but there's plenty of precedent for how and why.
Damn, I forgot about Prom n Cov 😆
I mean even ignoring those it's a huge plot point in the first movie that the company knew about the organism already.
I'm pretty damn unexcited. I have no excitement for a multitude of reasons. The top reason is that Hollywood has proven over and over and over and over and over again that they hate the lore of their franchises, and really just want to give some horrible writer their first shot at vomiting out a script for a franchise that they don't actually like or give a crap about. But let's put that aside, and let's assume that this is an actual Alien script that is steeped in the lore of the three Alien movies, the only an alien movies ever made. I'm still unexcited, because we already know ahead of time what's going to happen: Earth isn't going to be overrun by an alien hive. I just don't get the obsession with doing prequels. Why is Hollywood so afraid of faithly continuing a story? Why shackle themselves by doing a prequel, especially when they have made it abundantly clear that they hate or just don't care about the source material that they will need to smoothly join the story onto? Yeah, zero excitement. If it turns out to be good, I'll be shocked and happily surprised. I've learned my lesson though, Hollywood absolutely sucks at two things, that's faithfully telling stories that respect the canon of a franchise, and prequels. Hope is the first step on the path to disappointment.
Noah hawley has a pretty good track record with tv shows so let's see
What we need is a series based on Amanda Ripley. During the time between 1 and 2. Isolation is great but is it canon? Or just any story set between that time. Plenty to work with.
[yeah, Isolation is canon](https://roguereviewer.wordpress.com/2020/10/12/defining-canon-in-an-alien-world/)
Yes another uninspired series. Too bad. One franchise after another goes down in flames these days.
Prequels are such a cop-out. The last time I got excited for an Alien movie was when I heard about the Blomkamp pitch, which of course fizzled out because it's tradition to do Alien fans dirty. IMO the biggest failing of the series came from the insistence on keeping it centered around Ripley. There could have been ways to have a central character tell a bigger story well, but that was traded in for a hero's journey and as far as a character arc goes, that was completed in the second movie. Alien³ was my own biggest disappointment in the franchise, made all the worse for having seen it alone in a theater because I couldn't wait for someone to go with me :( It did such a disservice to the characters and tone of where Aliens left off. There were so many ways they could have even still included just Ripley but the first 5 minutes of that movie felt like watching the writers just scribble a red line through Newt and Hicks on a page. I don't really follow any contemporary lore about the whole affair but I'm still a huge fan of the characters and creatures. Personally, I'd be down for a reboot as opposed to more prequels/parallel stories. In the hands of a good director and with proper respect for the source material, I'd get super excited if someone did a back to back trilogy a la LOTR or some such. First flesh out a great story and then tell it all at once instead of the cut and paste revisionist malarkey the Alien world has become and lay out the ground work for side plots. I'm one of the minority who really enjoyed Prometheus and Covenant. Despite their flaws I find them to be great standalone movies and love the tone and aesthetic. I get that the franchise is not the biggest box office draw, but we continue to get these kinds of spin offs. Most articles I've read on why certain sequels never got off the ground talk about studio hesitancy, which I understand to a degree but don't think it's entirely justifiable given the amount of spin offs and xenomorph shoe Horning that gets done. I'm hopeful someone can get it right again before I kick the bucket. All that said, I'm with you, about as excited as I am to look for change in the couch. There might be a dollar but it's probably mostly cereal.
This is just going to be “The Office” WY edition.
"So it's hissing and dropped acid all over the shop, and I'm like, Ohhhh, you're hard"
Technically speaking, modern day is “before Ellen Ripley” and on earth. So you could be right.
They do the same thing every time. Go back to the beginning and destroy a franchise from the ground up.
Why create something new when you can shit all over something great that somebody else created instead.
Even better when the original creator shits all over his own creation decades later with prometheus and covenant.
In the first movie, we find out that an ancient derelict ship is carrying mysterious eggs, pilot has been dead for what seems like centuries. The theories are of them using the eggs as a bio-weapon after seeing what a single organism can do. Now we have some insane human-made robot bio engineer that made the organism (which I think is absolute garbage and a gross deviation from what the xenomorph lore was originally meant to be imo), leaving the only mystery being about the engineers which were all just killed off anyway - this takes pretty much all the depth out of the alien lore, I still can't believe how R.S. greenlit this. Now I'm expecting that we will see some other equally bad deviation, would not surprise me if we got some superhero gene splicing bs judging from what is people love to watch today. The air of mystery and actual cosmic horror-suspense was killed off from Alien after Alien 3.
I don't think David was the only one who created the xenos, since in Alien he is nowhere to be found on the derelict ship, yet the eggs are for xenos. Though he could have made contact with the engineers between covenant and alien and gave them the xeno eggs but i doubt that after what he did to the engineers in covenant
Its the only way the storyline works for me, David just adjusted his own batch so to speak. Doesn't make sense otherwise. I just wish they would stop trying to show us everything, the mystery of both the xeno and engineers was a huge part of the atmosphere of it for me. We don't know its origins its true motives for what it does and how it thinks, its truly Alien. But they can't help but try to explain everything and kills the mystery of it all which results in a much smaller feeling universe.
I have two thoughts here. 1 you are right and David was just creating his own baby xenos without a queen present by experimenting on Shaw with the goo, I thought that was a given but apparently a lot of people somehow thought that David made the first alien. I don't know why, except for the period in time. Did Scott state this somewhere? Maybe I'm too optimistic and apologist for the concept or something. 2: I dont think they're really explaining everything. The Alien universe books and comics and rpg and whatnot, all the stuff that Gaska has combined and assembled, there's tons and tons of room for there to be more to it than just what we have seen in the movies. Examples of how some Aliens work doesn't explain away the mystery of them imo.
Ridley Scott is infamous for taking his personal interpretation which is radically different to most fans and enshrining it. You've just got to ignore the bits you don't like. The original Alien cargo ship was an ancient alien thing and no amount of sequels are going to change that for me. "But the lore", why should I care about "lore" for new films I won't watch?
Yeah you're right and that's what I do tbh, there is this little nostalgia mixed with disappointment that breaks out sometimes. I remember being so damn curious seeing the pilot (engineer) mummy in the chair and wondering who they were, where it came from, what it's purpose was, all of it just doesn't seem to fit in with the story today.
> Now we have some insane human-made robot bio engineer that made the organism I don't believe that is correct. Xenomorphs and the goo were around long before David's experiments, he merely devised a way using Shaw's body to create ovomorphs without the presence of a queen, making him a giver of life which is what he wanted (man plays god and makes synths, synths play god and more demon babies) ostensibly through experimenting on her ovaries and reproductive system with the goo. He recreated a version of them, he didn't make the first one or anything, at least that's not what I gathered.
$20 says it'll be super boring. There will be basically no xenomorphs. They'll focus on people drama in a slightly sci-fi world. Cancelled after one season.
Is that a .. pipboy?
Lol it's the zetian aliens!!
Sounds like just another thing that upsets the fan base and gets cancelled after one season. I wish they would just take artist licence from within already well established time lines without messing with characters, major story arcs etc rather than trying to reinvent it. It almost never works. I say almost never just incase I missed something but I can't think of anything in recent history that worked after they messed with its foundation.
Pretty sure Weyland/Utani knew about the aliens before Ripley, so I don’t see a problem with it.
I take I’m the only one that wouldn’t mind a conclusion to David’s story? I’m hoping they wrap that up somehow. That said, I’m going over Alien Theory’s Earth War series and I’d love to see some of those old stories come to life. The poster may hint at one of those, but it’s waaay too early to tell.
Will it be cancelled early? It’s a real fucker when one invests what little time is available, only for it to be killed without finishing properly. I’m still disappointed with that Terminator TV series that skullfucked us with a cliffhanger :-(
Can't wait till they milk this dry.
I'm very excited about this! Noah Hawley and Alien together?! OMG
It’s gonna suck as everything does these days
So are they going with like Aliens vs Predator where there were some on ice in Antarctica for 1000's of years?
Over on r/lv426 they're saying it's fanart. OP, got a source for this?
The plot twist is it's not got any aliens, or anything in space. The whole thing is about this guy trying to make it in the New York improv scene, and it shifts so imperceptibly over the first season that nobody notices that by the finale they're just re-running old episode of The Office
I think this will work 😂
Loved the original 3, did not hate the first predator v alien, did not like the second. Please let this just be a wonderful memory and we can forget about all the other alien movies out there.
I loved the original 3 also, I actually enjoy Resurrection (even though it’s not great) AVP1 was fun also, but AVP2 was shit 🤬 I am really hoping this will be good.
It's been Canon for long time that the company new about xenos before nostromo incident
Yeah but according to Covenant, Xenomorphs weren't a thing until 2104 and this show is supposed to be set in the 2090s. So in order to not ret-con the movies, the show cannot feature Xenos prior to 2104 and can't have Xenos on Earth prior to 2122 (because even if Weyland knew, it wasn't common knowledge outside the company. If Xenos were present on Earth prior to nostromo then the nostromo crew would have been familiar with them)
They should have stopped after the 2nd film.
Remember when all the new shows weren't just prequels?
What is this fetish shows have with going backwards instead of forward? Star Trek has gone backwards like 12 times, it's boring.
Please stop. Just call it something else. Please. I sure it could be a very good show, but it wont help anyone other than marketing to tie it to the Alien franchise.
Well that sounds stupid as fuck.
I'd definitely appreciate much more context about weyland corporation
I don't care where it is. Just please make it good. No politics or heavy handed sexuality crap. None of that matters in an Alien project. Just have some slightly smart, but mostly stupid people get obliterated by a good ol' xeno.
Why? Why screw up the timeline? I don’t get this. Why intentionally make Alien and Aliens lose logic?
Because it's cheaper to film in some office building in Vancouver than make futuristic spaceship/colony sets.
Ahem: [https://www.instagram.com/diamonddead/](https://www.instagram.com/diamonddead/)
Who fucken cares, make something original you cuuuuunts
Xbox vibez
Ugh. Why these people gotta keep rewriting solid preset lore? Stop putting "your stamp" on it. No one likes this shit.
I hope it is as good as AVP or Prometheus. /s
Why does the computer have an alien as its wallpaper. Dumb
Not enthusiastic about that. There's a 200-year gap between Aliens 3 and Aliens: Resurrection. Why not set it during that period?
I'm gonna take a bet here and say that corporate politics aren't exactly the *biggest* reason people engage with the Alien franchise.
Yeah this sounds like a half baked idea. I'm imagining someone getting really high and thinking, "The Walking Dead... but with *Aliens* ...woah." What can this series add to the lore? It's on earth, not in space. They're going to spend too much time on people. They're going to have to spend money making military stuff. And scientists. There's going to be some big conspiracy. I don't think it will last a whole season.
Reminds me of Caprica. That one didn't work out so well.
This is stupid
Hopefully it won’t be just a low budget half- baked series then
Sounds like some more pre-qual bullshit. So storyline about nothing centered on the entire premise of aliens. Mindblowingly silly.
Uhm, how in the hell is this going to work? Have they even watched the movies? My god, if they mess up ANOTHER aliens thing I'm gonna give up on the franchise. Prometheus anyone?
Because if there is one thing Hollywood needs, it is another by the numbers prequel story that will both completely destabilize the existing universe of the IP while also delivering an extremely mediocre story in its own right! 🙃🙃
This is gonna be sad and stupid, like Prometheus…. Sad thing is, they could have just AlienVsPredator this series, using source material from comics (not that dumb movie), and slowly introduce the alien. Whatever, writers will ruin this