How Aliens Ruined A Franchise

[Lono Shrugged]

I don't really agree with any of the points raised in the article. And as a fan of all movies, the dismissive attitude towards certain genres is a little condescending in my opinion. By definition of the argument. Alien should have been a stand alone film. The idea that James Cameron's films lack soul is a fairly recent one as many of his films are at their core, very much about human relationships. The Abyss being the best example of this. A lot of points raised very much have the benefit of both hindsight and the films influence on sci-fi action movies. It's a hard film to take seriously on revisiting because it has been so pervasive in pop culture. But you have to remember how groundbreaking that film was when it came out. And also how the macho marine characters were very much shown up to be as helpless as the crew of the doomed Nostromo. An idea so played out that the original motivation and shock factor has been swallowed up by countless films where the over confident military is picked off. The Aliens themselves remained a terrifying force and even though they lost some of the psycho-sexual terror found in the first film. It was very effective in the story it told.

Another reason that the argument is poorly framed is disregarding Alien 3. A troubled film I personally think is criminally under rated. Alien 3 was a bleak, hopeless film filled with complex characters that can get unexpectedly killed off. (Even after delivering heartfelt back story) THAT was a film that lives up to the bleak practicality of the first film and killed off nearly all the characters. It is the film widely regarded as the one that "ruined" the franchise.

I don't think any one film ruined the franchise. I think the franchise ruined the franchise. All Alien films have their own flaws and merits. But one amazing thing is that they are all wildly different films. No 2 are really alike and that is an incredible thing. The franchise collapsed because they had no more stories to tell and the property was not bankable anymore. They will eventually try and dust it off and reboot it with a fresh actor to escape the Ellen Ripley ties. (Much like Terminator did)

Aliens is an incredible work and must be viewed as a product of it's time. It is flawed, but not in the ways you listed. It changed the paradigms of the first film, but not at all to the detriment to that film. It has become a cliche of a cliche with catch phrases and parodies. It's director was once an outlaw genius is now a egomaniac dictator. Perceptions of films change with time. But like history, films must be viewed from the perspective of the time they were made. Hindsight has it's place, but not at the expense of good popcorn.

Edit: I hate to be "that" guy but Alien was not really a hard sci fi. No more than Blade Runner was or Gladiator was an accurate historical film. Ridley Scott has a reputation for being a world builder with a practical approach. His worlds are realistic to his vision for them and the story being told. He is NOT a director obsessed with realistic details. I admire him for this and that's why I think it is worth mentioning. I just fucking love movies and this article has rubbed me up the wrong way. Can't believe this is a featured piece.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

But Alien on its own isnt a franchise, so how could Aliens ruin it? Its a sequel.....which even then it takes more than 2 movies to be deemed a franchise. What ruined the franchise was the producers inability to be original and also to think that they had to add Ripley into every movie. Thats what ruined it, lack of creativity to tell a new story.

That was along the lines I was thinking of. I mean, Aliens was when Ripley got dragged back into it. For 3 I would have liked to seen a movie with a completely new cast with no connections to the first two. Maybe an industrial mining team in deep space uncovers an alien mine and decides to explore it. What killed the franchise was 3 in my opinion. All the payoff of saving Newt and Hick's offscreen death pissed me off when I first saw it and I didn't like how we got to see how the alien "saw". Yes, Aliens was far less innovative or scary than Alien but as a sequel you could do worse.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

I like the entire series of films. Hell, I like most of the games and comics too.

The idea that Aliens somehow "ruined" a franchise (and this isn't the first time I've heard it being said) is frankly absurd. If the series had continued on from Alien as a horror franchise, it would have suffered the same fate as every horror franchise. It would have gotten increasingly formulaic and stale before fading away into obscurity and direct-to-video sequels.

Alien was already a fantastic horror movie. One that set the bar so incredibly high that if they had continued as a pure horror franchise, all we would have gotten is disappointing sequel after disappointing sequel. At least with Aliens they tried to do something different with the universe, and it worked. So now instead of one fantastic movie and a bunch of bleh sequels, we now have two fantastic movies of two different genres. How is that not better?

Also, as a side note, ragging on the Colonial Marines from Aliens for being two-dimensional while praising the characters from Alien for their depth is also kind of absurd. The Alien characters are for the most part just as two-dimensional. Character depth has never been part of that universe's stronger points.

So yeah... this article reeks of film snobbery.

 

[Serrenitei]

I can't imagine Aliens without Alien or any of the rest of original quadriology. They create a masterpiece that has endured where so many other movies have faded into obscurity. To cite one as killing the franchise shows a severely impaired understanding not only as the movies in question, but the series and it's legacy as a whole.

 

[camazotz]

If Aliens really did have such a lack of characterization then the ignominous death of Hicks and Newt in Alien 3 would not have stung so much. Alien and Aliens both had about equal levels of characterization, or depth if you will; but Alien had a lot more breathing room thanks to a tighter focus and expectations that did not lean toward "action horror." They are both admirable movies.

Even Alien 3 was decent in its own right, but it was the disrespect to what had come before, and the painful quagmire of tethering the series to Ripley's life that made the film less than it could have been.

For me, Alien: Resurrection is where the franchise truly jumped the shark, though.

(Edit: to clarify how much I get annoyed at A:R, I'd rather watch the AvP movies than A:R! A:R and onward is when the franchise went from "cool, smart fun" to "stupid, banal fun" for me. Still fun....but not maybe in the way I want it all to be.)

 

[Alarien]

snip

I really would just echo what Lono said. They are all good and bad in their own ways. To say that Aliens somehow damaged, much less ruined, the franchise is silly. Any further attempts to remake Alien as it stood would have been written off as copy and paste cash in, and that would have been true. Alien as a concept really only worked that one time. The fact that each of the remaining movies took a completely different approach to the concept of aliens vs. humans, with the aliens being the clearly dominant predator (let's not talk about the travesty that is AvP, however) is actually a strength of the series, and one of the reasons it has lasted in the popular psyche.

Honestly, saying that Aliens ruined a franchise comes off as backlash attention seeking. The same "look at me, please, I'm being controversial" commentary that you regularly get from people who popularly decide to hate generally well liked and regarded things such as Final Fantasy VII (though sometimes that's just the Kefka fanboys who can't possibly allow that another FF game or villain are in the same class as theirs, even if only slightly inferior to most), Bioshock Infinite, Demon's/Dark Souls, and countless other media.

It's one thing to say "I didn't enjoy something because and " but it's something completely different to announce that it was the downfall of an entire series that actually profited because of the subject, and went on to make two more films.

Hell, I think Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions ruined that franchise, but then I remember that, despite those The Matrix still exists and it's still awesome.

 

[shogunblade]

To borrow a phrase from Yahtzee, a Bad sequel wallows around duplicating the original story, while a good sequel takes something from the original and expands upon it.

Aliens is the logical next step the series would have been able to go into. Terminator was a killer robot movie, but by Terminator 2 It becomes Killer robot movie, on top of 'Former Killer Robot now guardian' allegory for fatherhood and a movie about maybe not using technology to screw ourselves into oblivion.

The story should be allowed to expand, otherwise it would have faded into the typical horror story clichés. Alien and Aliens are two movies I cannot choose between, I enjoy them both for different reasons.

Aliens has something else to add into the film, even if it is just James Cameron's 'Parenthood' angle he puts into a lot of his movies. Aliens feels a little more empty (personally), but I enjoy the movie well enough to say that buying it on Blu-Ray wasn't a bad decision.

That was along the lines I was thinking of. I mean, Aliens was when Ripley got dragged back into it. For 3 I would have liked to seen a movie with a completely new cast with no connections to the first two. Maybe an industrial mining team in deep space uncovers an alien mine and decides to explore it. What killed the franchise was 3 in my opinion. All the payoff of saving Newt and Hick's offscreen death pissed me off when I first saw it and I didn't like how we got to see how the alien "saw". Yes, Aliens was far less innovative or scary than Alien but as a sequel you could do worse.

The problem is that practice isn't allowed as much freedom once you've introduced the same character twice into the series. Ask any fan of the Halloween Franchise if they consider Season of the Witch canon. I think it's a brilliant idea, but audiences don't really think so, and money says more than originality, so more Michael Myers for another decade of film. Sadly, unless more people clamored for Ripley, The series should have stopped at Two movies, and a third would have been brilliant if they went the route you suggested, but what you see is what we have.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

The problem is that practice isn't allowed as much freedom once you've introduced the same character twice into the series. Ask any fan of the Halloween Franchise if they consider Season of the Witch canon. I think it's a brilliant idea, but audiences don't really think so, and money says more than originality, so more Michael Myers for another decade of film. Sadly, unless more people clamored for Ripley, The series should have stopped at Two movies, and a third would have been brilliant if they went the route you suggested, but what you see is what we have.

Once again the studio system fails to maximize the creative potential of an IP. Too much of a push for easy to sell sequels.

 

[Kinitawowi]

You want one word that proves this whole argument bunk?

Prometheus.

Yes, Aliens stands out as the shining example of taking a film and making a sequel that runs off in a completely different direction, and yes, maybe it's easier to continue making dumb action films than it is to continue making taut horror. Aliens is still a horror movie but of a very different stripe (it's about the horror of the Vietnam War).

When Ridley Scott reluctantly revisited his own franchise, the result was Prometheus - an absolute travesty of a movie that literally nobody would have cared about if it wasn't for the umming and ahhing over whether it was an Alien prequel or not. It showed up the Alien route for the dead end it was; "haunted house film IN SPACE", "Vietnam film IN SPACE", "prison film IN SPACE", "entertaining movie if complete mess productionally IN SPACE" ran the first four, and following that up with "slow ponderous metaphysical treatise about the world and humanity's place in it IN SPACE" really didn't work. If I wanted to rewatch the first Alien, I've got it on DVD already. I don't need it being redone in the same way for a sequel. How could you even do it? "haunted house film IN... DIFFERENT SPACE"? Why bother?

 

[SecondPrize]

To be pedantic about it, I don't see how there would have been a franchise without Aliens. Another Alien in the horror genre would have just been more of the same. You can't tell someone the same scary story twice and expect them to be frightened the second time. Switching to a more action bent let Hollywood take the ball and run into other, shittier, action directions. Can you really argue that anything else would have come from the IP if Aliens hadn't given them another direction to take it in?

 

[Tumedus]

Already been said, but the Alien doesn't become a major franchise without Aliens. Whatever you think of Cameron, had he not taken the sequel in that direction, you would most likely ended up with weak rehashes of the same concept watering it down. It would have been more akin to Hellraiser, or Saw for a more recent example, than the major influence it remains today.

Cameron took simple concept, expanded the world, and still kept the magic alive while doing it. Heck, the term you so blithely throw around in your argument, that has taken heart of how special this monster is, "Xenomorph, wouldn't exist if not for Cameron.

And, for what it's worth, I like Alien better than Aliens. But Aliens was the right way to do the sequel and is the film that made this a brand.

 

[Scars Unseen]

The type of horror you get in Alien is kind of a one trick pony. Sequels that tried to duplicate its success would only have ended up as B-grade slasher flicks like every other serialized horror franchise that came out in the 80s. Aliens is memorable specifically because it isn't just Alien in a different setting.

 

[ramses05]

What a nonsense article. If you simply remake the same film over and over again, it gets boring. So it's hardly a surprise that Aliens as a sequel took things in a different direction and shifted toward action. And Aliens was a decent film if you take it for what it was trying to be; an action film. Oh and in terms of character development, the Nostromo's crew were scarcely more realised than the Sulaco's FTW. But all this is not what ruined a franchise. What ruined the franchise was the utter dross that constituted an Alien film post the Aliens movie. Pick anything and it's utter shite, and that has nothing to do with its genre. The Aliens franchise has become a disappointing shit stain because the films and games that make it up are crap, not because Aliens decided to do something different from its predecessor.

 

[erbi79]

I generally agree, while i think Aliens is a great action flick, among the best actually, i dont consider it to be a good sequel.

But then again I have to disagree with the title, Aliens did not ruin the franchise, it made it a franchise, which in itself is kind of horrible^^

Most of you are probably to young to remember, but before Aliens, the xenomorph was actually very enigmatic. In Alien, its behaviour was very wierd at times, not exactly an animal, but mybe not really sentient. It offered the creepiness of a truely alien entity. Aliens reduced the creature to a overgrown insect, taking away much of the mistery surrounding it. If you are honest it is impossible to see the creatures from Aliens behaving the same as the creature in Alien.

Also it was made a big deal about how "indestructible" the creature is, in Aliens they are killed by handguns. In Alien they assumed it was an animal and would be scared of fire, Dallas went to hunt it, we know the result. There was no indication in Alien that it actually was scared by the flames or that it even cared. Since Aliens, though, fire is a apparently an effective weapon against the xenomorph, making it much less of a threat. So much less in fact that apart from Alien³ pretty much every story in the franchise has a major flaw:
Their limited intelligence and single minded nature would make them very easily controllable in a real world scenario, with people of actual intelligence handling the situation. In every story, be it comics, movies or video games, the humans have to be ridiculously dumb to actually make the story happen at all. It just became so contrived. And yes, there probably are exceptions to this, but the word "exception" is key here.

They are easily killed by light armament, making them actually kind of worthless in a sci fi environment as a biological weapon.

There is so much more to say about this, at one point I actually wanted to do a video talking about why I think it is a horrible sequel... ^^

Again, Aliens is a great action movie, that uses some horror elements to great effect, but to me Alien and Aliens can't relly exist within the same universe. By the nature of the two movies there are just to many contradictions.

Despite all of it's flaws, and it has enough of those^^, I like Alien³ more then Aliens, but then again I prefer a good tragedy over a heroic action movie at any time, so take this statement for what it is worth ^^

 

[Baresark]

Eh... I can't agree. The movies were definitely different from each other with different feels. But I will always say that for me, Aliens is a better film. It was visually more exciting and it expanded vastly on the universe itself Also, while it certainly was more action-y than Alien, Aliens had an even greater feeling of hopelessness. There were thousands of them which made for a more hair raising experience. I also think that Queen Alien VS Power Loader gave us one of the coolest scenes in science fiction. Alien also would have been a one trick pony without Aliens. Without a change, it would have stagnated and you would have just gotten the same movie again. I liked Alien, but I loved Aliens. That is of course, my opinion, and I can respect this article or anyone who disagrees with me.

 

[Netrigan]

Without ALIENS, there is no franchise worth defending. It would simply be one good movie and a bunch of crappy ones, rather than two good movies and a bunch of a crappy ones.

 

[Guilen-]

Look guys... Alien and Aliens are equal, just completely different. I thought we were over this. And to the person complaining that James Cameron doesn't have a human soul, that's EXACTLY what makes him so awesome at what he does. Saying that Aliens ruined the Alien franchise is like saying Star Wars was bad for sci-fi. Give me a break. (edit: I am SO happy to see all the comments disagree with this butt-hurt, pretentious article - Aliens was one of the greatest sci-fi flicks of all time and seeing it being accused of ruining the series as the front running article of the Escapist was the most offended I've ever been by this site)

 

[Seracen]

I would agree that seeing so many aliens ruined certain aspects of the horror element. I mentioned as much with how this new survival horror game in the Aliens universe struck me as...underwhelming.

However, Pitch Black managed to tout itself a sci-fi horror, even with hordes of alien menaces. If done well, a horde can be as menacing as a lone hunter, and vice versa.

Hell, zombie flicks do this, to varying degrees of efficacy, all the time.

As for the film, I'd rather say Aliens made the franchise, it just turned it into something else.

 

[sXeth]

I enjoyed both films (and Alien 3 for that matter), but if we take on the hypothesis that Aliens ruined the (then not really a) franchise, how do you think it would have fared if it had jumped straight from Alien to Alien 3(which I guess would've been 2). Its less of a tonal shift, but certainly seems to get derided by both sides of the Alien vs Aliens camp as often as not.