The Alien Franchise Needs to End

[Johnny Novgorod]

Prometheus, the AVP movies and Colonial Marines are awful, but I don't particularly associate them with my idea of "the Alien franchise", which to me begins with Alien and ends with Alien: Resurrection, if that was its name.

 

[Verlander]

Disagree, but I think it needs to improve. I think it's one of those IPs that might work better in the spin off realms of comics and fanfiction than it does at the hands of creators who have to answer to studios.

 

[Exley97_v1legacy]

I've seen it. But the "stain on his lungs"....I mean, he's the worst flippin' science officer in the world if he can't figure out something is alive in there

Well we can't do it now. I could have a tapeworm in my intestines for all I know. We both have microbes insides of us, though. We know this, but we don't see them with any sort of scan like those they performed in Alien. Even ultrasounds really don't bring up much, and ultrasounds are generally less preferrable to, say, an MRI. Doctors rarely perform an ultrasound unless they think there is a foreign physical object in there, and every inclination I remember from Alien is that they saw the facehugger as a parasite, not a pollination device.

I get your point regarding the parasite/pollination, but I just cannot imagine a scenario where a scientist looks an X-ray/scan of a person who has been in physical content with an alien life form, sees an abnormality, and simply says "Huh" and shrugs his or her shoulders. Just doesn't seem reasonable to me, especially when the patient is in critical condition. And I can't imagine the crew just sitting there and accepting Ash's answer. They're ready to cut the facehugger off of Kane, and yet....they're not going to investigate the stain on his lungs?

Also, they DID perform a scan of Kane during the film at some point, though I'm not sure if it's in the theatrical version or director's cut. It is, however, in this excellent Prometheus-style Alien trailer at the 00:29 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ6SUTI1j9M

As for Hadley's Hope, I know that has been implied, and it would certainly help explain a lot, but there's little canonical evidence to show that's actually true. First, recall that in the extended version, Newt's parents are the first members of the colony to find the ship, and there's no site of any WY personnel or research stations nearby. Second, Burke admits, when confronted by Ripley, that he ordered them to check out the ship -- well after the colony and atmosphere processor has already been built and populated. Why did Burke and the company wait until that point? And why stock Hadley's Hope with colonists and surveyers and salvage teams instead of, say, scienists and researchers? There's really nothing that would indicate that the company found the beacon first and THEN decided to build the colony and atmosphere processor, which if you recall has "a substantial dollar value attached to it."

Simple, Hadley's Hope citizens are test subjects. I mean, remember Burke, attempting to use Ripley and Newt to smuggle xenomorphs in? In fact, when Colonial Marines landed, I suggested that a better way to basically retcon the gap between Aliens and Alien 3 was that WeyYu deliberately sent Ripley and Newt, with a facehugger on board, to a prison colony with a small population that absolutely nobody would miss, and when WeyYu would arrive, it'd be an infested hive, which WeyYu could use for any number of things, such as xenomorph behavior observation.

Like I said, this is still the best explanation for all of this, but it still doesn't quite add up. It just seems like a terrible amount of time, money, effort and subterfuge to conceal something that people don't even know about. If anything, building a colony with that kind of investment is going to attract a lot more attention and scrutiny outside the company than, say, kidnapping a dozen or so people and using them as teest subjects, ala Alien: Resurrection. Plus, why send a platoon of Colonial Marines to Acheron to investigate anything if that's the express purpose of setting the colony up in the first place?

 

[happyninja42]

But I was so looking forward to the Aliens musical. :/

"Aliens Take Manhattan", coming soon. It's inevitable.

I hear Bono and The Edge are already working on the lyrics and music with some help from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I'm now picturing West Side Story but with different xenomorphs, spitting acid at each other in choreographed ways, idly melting random passers-by.

That might actually be a kind of musical that I could enjoy watching.

 

[DoPo]

But I was so looking forward to the Aliens musical. :/

"Aliens Take Manhattan", coming soon. It's inevitable.

I hear Bono and The Edge are already working on the lyrics and music with some help from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I'm now picturing West Side Story but with different xenomorphs, spitting acid at each other in choreographed ways, idly melting random passers-by.

That might actually be a kind of musical that I could enjoy watching.

It's actually quite interesting that the joke has been done some 27 years ago