The Future Of The Alien Franchise

[UniSol GR77]

I want an Alien 5 which is a sequel to Resurrection. I want Ripley 8.

[EvaDK]

Regarding Covenant, I maintain that Ridley killing of Elizabeth Shaw between films and exchanging her with a big cast of largely nobodies, was a huge mistake.

I was invested in Shaw as a character; I didn't care much for any of the new ones. Canon fodder the lot of them + an Ellen Ripley wannabe.

[s2mikey]

Originally Posted by EvaDK

Regarding Covenant, I maintain that Ridley killing of Elizabeth Shaw between films and exchanging her with a big cast of largely nobodies, was a huge mistake.

I was invested in Shaw as a character; I didn't care much for any of the new ones. Canon fodder the lot of them + an Ellen Ripley wannabe.

Absolutely, positively. It killed it before it even got going. The cast of Covenant were competent performers but the characters were crap. Close to teen slasher flick horror fodder. Like that bad. I had zero investment in any of them.

What they should of done was had Shaw be alive but David ultimatey murder her by the end of Covennant as he used her to ultimately end up making the Queen that we get in Aliens via a hybrid female human and Xenomorph. It would have been damned cool and would have tied these all together in a tangible way. Instead we got....I dont even know what we got. We got two prequels that were very loosely tied to The Alien films sort of, kind of. They wrecked the mystique of the Xenomorph by making it yet another science experiment gone bad. Been there a million times. The whole idea was pretty weak.

[SpartanJGE]

I want a resolution to Ridley's prequels, I want to see that story play out. Unlike many people I really enjoyed Prometheus AND Covenant. But I also wouldn't mind a sequel to Aliens, don't care if it acknowledges 3 and Ressurection or ret-cons them, I can see an argument for either.

[SpartanJGE]

Originally Posted by FiendishlyInventive

If you want another Terminator Dark Fate scenario go ahead, retcon it, enjoy the hollow competent or incompetent retread then.

Well you're just a ray of sunshine... And to be fair, Dark Fate was better than T3 or Geonesosaurus or whatever.

[FiendishlyInventive]

I think I more than contributed enough obvious positivity for the filmmaking artistry of Ridley Scott, beyond having forgotten more things about the original than most people will ever know, I always appreciate that each Alien entry does something new so the only thing I'm opposed to's regurgitation.

[John1701D]

Originally Posted by FiendishlyInventive

I think I more than contributed enough obvious positivity for the filmmaking artistry of Ridley Scott, beyond having forgotten more things about the original than most people will ever know

[jayman3]

Originally Posted by UniSol GR77

I want an Alien 5 which is a sequel to Resurrection. I want Ripley 8.

Where would they go? Earth is destroyed though

[mwynn]

Alien Resurrection Deleted Scene: Alternate Ending - YouTube

[John1701D]

Originally Posted by mwynn

Alien Resurrection Deleted Scene: Alternate Ending - YouTube

Wynona's delivery in that clip would give Mark Wahlberg a run for his money.

[mwynn]

Originally Posted by John1701D

Wynona's delivery in that clip would give Mark Wahlberg a run for his money.

The Happening - Funny Scene - What... No!!! - YouTube

[FiendishlyInventive]

Yeah I know it's fairly pathetic but you don't need to take it out of context to ascertain that though.

[UniSol GR77]

Originally Posted by jayman3

Where would they go? Earth is destroyed though

Post-apocalyptic and sci-fi...

...but did they show the ruins only in the Director's Cut?

[jayman3]

Originally Posted by UniSol GR77

Post-apocalyptic and sci-fi...

...but did they show the ruins only in the Director's Cut?

Yeah. Only in directors cut.

Not sure where else the story would go from that ending. They were “too late” and earth was no more.

[mwynn]

Originally Posted by jayman3

Yeah. Only in directors cut.

Not sure where else the story would go from that ending. They were “too late” and earth was no more.

They could just ignore it like it most of the Resident Evil movies.

[mwynn]

https://www.cbr.com/marvel-comics-al...es-early-2021/

Writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson (Empyre: Captain America) and artist Salvador Larroca (Doctor Doom) collaborate on Alien #1 launching in March 2021. The comic will feature new and classic characters from Earth and beyond, including a Weyland-Yutani mercenary named Gabriel Cruz. The Alien #1 description says Cruz "battles a deadly new breed of xenomorph with the survival of his child hanging in the balance."

[FiendishlyInventive]

February 22, 2021: Hardback
February 22, 2022: Paperback
560 Pages.
The first book under the new 20th Century Studios moniker.
I sincerely encourage you to pick up the author's first under 20th Century Fox.
https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths...charybdis.html

[FiendishlyInventive]

So in this regard, the new one's a big upgrade,
topping the writing's another matter entirely.

[FiendishlyInventive]

My final thoughts on Alien Covenant. Before the new Disney era begins. I think whilst most cinema goers enjoyed the film overall. A lot of people did not "see the forest for the trees" truly if you like. That does not mean it's exempt from criticism, the final act's an unnecessary mess for example, albeit with beautiful imagery. But I think the vast majority of criticisms fall flat when it's what the film's explicitly aiming for. Even the most often criticised human decision making because of genre expectations. Emerging from a general ignorance of the nature of biology, the simple fact being the likelihood of something so compatible, harmful and, instantaneous existing out in deep space's near impossible, ask any known Scientist, plus it's not like the crew's basically equivalent to colonists or anything, with an onboard computer that they have no reason to doubt and the film makes a large point of their decision being a combination of fear (getting back into the pods for another ten years may burn all of them alive like their Captain), obvious hubris (faith in themselves and their creations), and blind faith in the form of Oram the newly appointed leader. Plus David ostensibly saves their lives, whilst theatrical, he also carries the face of a man they have all trusted for years. The Neomorph's redefining of the Pathogen into something with consistent features' also much appreciated as the Praetomorph ancestor.

A man "othered" who's unrequited "love" leads to harvesting a woman's sexual organs to create a version of both an A.I and the human being together, to the form of a rape monster with male and female signatures intertwined at the root to dominate every other living thing.

The final evolution of three generations David considers "failures" ultimately, he's reached "success" that, according to "perfect AI" it is the one perfect organism, according to David Weyland and Ash, even Bishop and Michael believe it is magnificent, Soldier or Sentry, Praetorian or Queen, but perfection though perfection's something a human being can't even conceive of, never mind agree or disagree with, so we can't see the "perfect organism" objectively.

Now though, for the ones who subscribe to the interpretation that David did not explicitly create the familiar star beast and's not ultimately responsible for the thing's design, it's life-cycle etcetera, this' valid insofar that he's an unreliable narrator and full of egotism and recognisable grandiosity as a creator, he gets the author of Ozymandias incorrect and more importantly appears oblivious to the way the poem pertains to the inevitable downfall of kings and rulers.



Now Ridley Scott's explicit about David being the A.I creator, but Ridley, also insists on Deckard being a replicant in Blade Runner. Now his view's valid and can be supported by the film but so can the contrary. Covenant's very much similar given that the Pathogen's an ancient virus pre-existing David's machinations. It's clearly not the progeny of humanity's apparent otherworldly ancestors, perhaps the race simply came upon it once, wielded it with varying success but ultimately perished by it.

David's advantaged in that he's synthetic and immeasurably intelligent and thus can wield the fire of the Gods without the fear of being destroyed by it, thus far, anyway as it is, so more able to unlock the secrets within than any mortal did. Pity though, one note is off, David's unstable, and his "Praetomorph" the "Neomorph" successor not quite the biomechanical beast nor the life cycle he created from his crossbreeding experiments entirety in line with the classic life cycle we know, a certain step's absent. So it's just as valid to make the inference that the star beast existed in its original form at some point before it being liquified, atomised, honed, etcetera as the Pathogen, for whatever reason though. Now remains a mystery.

On the other hand, David as the creator's another valid inference given how resolutely evocative it is of human sex organs. It's a walking, murderous, drooling phallus with teeth. David's behaviour's touched upon by Dane Hallett and Matt Hatton specifically when he describes his pathos, the synthetic's built to be so close to a human yet can not procreate; he can experience a simulacrum of human feelings such as love etcetera, but remains ultimately incapable of exhibiting their function for mating. How does an increasingly unstable and luciferin Artificial Intelligence compensate for such internal conflict? Why... you create an organism that's a violent perversion of human reproduction, of course. The Egg, obvious yes? The Facehugger itself's two skeletal hands fused together, a vulva and a phallus and literally rapes the host, before providing it oxygen. This thing's adapted quite wonderfully to human mammals. Themes of artificial intelligence in technology, sexuality, life, death, their fusion and transfiguration's something H.R Giger explored throughout his art and a lot of the masterpieces he created exist as visions of the future not the ancient past. So David the creator's got merit with regards to careful consideration of Hans Ruedi Giger's themes in his renowned body of work.

Alien Covenant, from the outset presents the mentality of stripping away a lot of what hindered Prometheus with refining the creation narrative into one that primarily explores the tortured David and the experiments in his gothic Dracula and Frankenstein like lab tucked away on an obsolete Engineer planet.

[FiendishlyInventive]

In a way it's more of a film on the subject of gothic horror romanticism with the history, the place in the collective psyche, and ultimately an examination of the way the death dream constantly underlies all fantasies of ego and eros. Director Ridley Scott reaches out for a hundred and one reference points, a number of them already plain in the Alien lexicon.The deserted Engineer city recalls the Cyclopean confines of the lost cities in Lovecraft tales, like At the Mountains of Madness, the Elder Gods all entirely gorgonized by David’s inhuman perfidy.

At one point the Director explicitly recreates Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead, an image that obsessed H.R Giger the crucial designer behind so much of the Alien mythos, one the aforementioned artist recreated in his own signature style taking it from a very natural piece to a very unnatural piece in appearance. Preoccupying him arguably as it did Val Lewton, that the often cavernously eerie psychological parables of redefined horror cinema in the 1940s, Ridley Scott no doubt with each in mind.

David’s so called love for Elizabeth, now taking the form of relentlessly exploiting her body to lend genetic material to his creations, both reminiscent of a particularly tactile serial killer worthy of Thomas Harris, whilst the whole meditates as intensely and morbidly on the landscape of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and the obsessive invasive eroticisation of the loved one’s cadaver found within. The design of the unsuccessful prototypes furnishing David's humble abode, hung with sketches reminiscent of medieval alchemic ephemera, while an examination of the total human experience filtered through the more human than human artifice, visible to us through drawing parallels to the best naturalists such as Leonardo da Vinci, it also pays tribute to Guillermo Del Toro, and also poke the oeuvre back, for it's own debt to Ridley Scott and H.R Giger.

The fateful victim Rosenthal decapitated by an extension of David's will in the form of the deliberately spérmatozoa like Neomorph, ancestor of the Praetomorph, and ultimately no doubt connected in a way to the titular Alien, in my view recalls the religiously poised drowned Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1852), with the posture often repugnantly viewed as something erotic in the eyes of men over the years, with a vacant expressioned head floating in water in addition reminding me of Neil Jordan’s self-conscious unpacking of fairy tales. Like in the famous story behind the painting Ridley Scott maintains an homage in depicting all of his female characters dying offscreen with his male characters dying onscreen, attacking that part of the audience more specifically, insisted upon by Alien (1979) and Dark Star's (1979) co-writer Dan O'Bannon. With the first onscreen death of Jacob Branson lampshading this connection immediately as he suffers a fate similar to that of the Captain in Dan O'Bannon's Dark Star, Alien's original direct predecessor. Taking place before the first onscreen death in the film, we do learn through revelatory experimentation of an offscreen one, in the passing of Doctor Elizabeth Shaw as the object of David's sexualisation before the story truly began and also then implied in the fate of Daniels Branson after the story's conclusion. David like the Alien itself requires hosts for reproduction, like each other their selection's purposeful, and visably delighting in the violation just as in the original film of Ash with Ripley and the Alien itself with Lambert.



Speaking of, later in the film Ridley Scott stages a shower sequence that sees Upworth and Ricks having a steamy minute under the spigot, only to be interrupted by an alien predator. At first glance this pays tribute to the infinite history of considerably trashier slasher films both before and after the Alien's first appearance, it does but it's also a final revelling distillation of the thesis of the film entirely killing the male immediately and tormenting the female, it is a confidently morbid examination of the empty cycles of desire driven violence.

I admire everything that Prometheus attempted, I still enjoy examining the film, and believe it an important piece of Ridley Scott's overarching science fiction investigations now fully formed in Raised By Wolves. Pitifully though I believe Prometheus itself never received the correct writers at all on the project, and yet even when completely filmed, the editing's even more entirely scattered. It is my observation Alien Covenant took what worked from it's predecessor and explored it in a capacity it managed, with much more relevance, and an internal logic that benefited the film. Say what you will about the titular Alien being created by David, but it thematically resonates with what we know about the thing as a biomechanical sexual monster that kills humans created by a rapist android that shows abhorrence not only for humanity or their creators, but the entire lineage of biological creation and the writing and editing's much more refined over in Prometheus.

And it contains my single favourite scene in the entire mythology, that being the prologue as we finally see a version of Weyland Corporation's founder worthy of the status it maintains today, three minutes of divine perfection courtesy of accomplished playwright John Logan the other writing staff and Ridley Scott.

Lastly even if you still can't stand the film for whatever reasons you have, it lead to the best piece of Alien media since the 1979 original in the form of Alien The Cold Forge, and that's reason enough to appreciate it's existence.