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melmer

Concept art from a new (presumably cancelled) ALIEN film

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God knows :)

I assume this would've rebooted the series after Aliens? So like alien 3 onwards never occurred and this happened in its stead. Cool idea.

I guess this would've been the result of 30 years worth of Weyland bio weapon reaserch? Although it says space jockey... God knows

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I got the feeling she was wearing the suit to blend in or operate something. But maybe it was going for more Alien Resurrection styled madness.
For the record Alien 3 is great and resurrection isn't half bad.

But still seeing Hicks and Ripley together I was strongly reminded of the DARK HORSE comics. I'd love to see an Alien movie that picked up their plot lines like the cults that sprang up or the designer drugs made from Queen jelly.
Looking back, for me the best part of the Alien series were those comics.

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For the record Alien 3 is great and resurrection isn't half bad.

 

For the record, Alien 3 is weak (even the director's cut) and Resurrection is at least half bad!

 

But anyway, here's a cool little article about some unused Alien 3 concepts, some familiar (wooden planet, William Gibson), some not. It even mentions the comics (though it says they were Dark Horse)!

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Resurrection is perfectly fine junk food entertainment and Alien 3 gets marks for trying to recapture the bunch of people with nothing to use vs monster paradigm the first one did so well.

Three is not my perfect alien film by far but I think it deserves more credit than it got for re-establishing the series' grimness. 

Aliens was in parts a grim film but I think the action ended up overriding a lot of the horror; it was still tense but power loaders and nukes kinda ruined that by the end. Aliens Resurrection however was a theme park ride. Still it's interesting to hear about the filming of the underwater scene, the basketball shot, or seeing the alien queen's den which was pretty enough to win a technical lighting award.

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You know, in a lot of ways, Aliens is the worst possible sequel to Alien. It's a pretty good action movie, but it throws basically everything that made the first one great under the bus. While we don't learn a whole lot about Alien's characters, at least they feel like real people instead of two-dimensional caricatures of things like "corporate weasel" and "butch latina." And the Alien itself, whose strength as a monster was that we barely understood what little we learned about it and that it was much too risky to kill, is now not only cannon fodder whose only real advantage is sheer numbers, but they now take on the familiar social structure of ants or termites.

 

Also, technically impressive or not, the Alien Queen feels so slow and weightless that my brain refuses to see it as anything but a puppet.

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I thought discerning, quality people around the globe agreed that Alien 3 was underrated and Aliens poorly aging with every passing year?

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I remember reading/hearing somewhere (maybe here?) a major critique of the alien franchise is that the further you go along the less real the characters are. This might've been on a Thumbs podcast I really can't remember but basically the first Alien film has regular people in it. The successors have 2D cutouts and caricatures.

I'm kinda in two minds over James Cameron's additions, mostly because I grew up with all of it. I watched the films in order but 11 year old me far preferred the dumb Aliens action movie. For a while I didn't have much to do with the movies but I did have a whole lot to do with the Dark Horse comic books which were full of scary alien hives, Queens, single monster stories, predator, and even Judge Dredd cross overs. Plus that rts style PS2 game and 2001's AVP 2 for PC. 

So I'm kind of spoilt by the EU. If I'd watched the films as they came out I might have been bummed out by the lessening of the mystery. But I'm not too sure; after all I did enjoy parts of Prometheus.

 

I thought discerning, quality people around the globe agreed that Alien 3 was underrated
 
Seeing how flattered those words make me feel I will co-sign this statement. :P

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I agree completely Moddy and Tegan. Though it might not be entirely to my taste, Aliens does what it does pretty well. I just really wish it had invented its own fiction rather than completely undermining what Alien had established. For all that people hate Alien 3 for killing off Newt and Hicks, for me Aliens killed what the whole premise was even about. That's a much greater crime than the loss of a couple of fan-favourite characters in my book.

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That's basically my argument against almost all 'extended universe' material for anything. It waters down what usually once was a precise, metered out, delineated thing with a narrative spray of buckshot, filling up the fans' desire for more and more and more. It ruins the taste by saturating and democratizing and slackening the source material.

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I thought discerning, quality people around the globe agreed that Alien 3 was underrated and Aliens poorly aging with every passing year?

 

No no, that's hipsters.

 

Ha ha, but seriously, Aliens is an excellent action film, which cleverly starts off with a vibe very similar to its predecessor but gradually becomes a completely different film in a way which allows both to be appreciated on their own terms. Agreed on the Queen feeling weightless in a few shots, but the first film has some wonky stuff in there too. [EDIT: I disagree on the characterisation as well. Alien gets more credit because they went for Altman-esque naturalistic dialogue and performances. Aliens' characterisation is just as deep, it's just that Cameron went with a pulpy, theatrical style. It's no worse, it's just different.]

 

Alien 3 is an unimaginative move back towards the first film with a load of interesting ideas that never come together. Resurrection has a couple of cool set pieces and loads of ace character actors but also a load of dreadful, franchise-killing elements. (And dammit they didn't even frame that basketball shot properly!)

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Well, I already pretend that 3, Resurrection and Prometheus are dreams Ripley's having in post-Aliens deep-sleep, so why not have another go? Maybe I'll change my mind if Chappie turns out to be another Elysium rather than another District 9...

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Just head canon the crap out of everything even if it does disappoint. Keeps things fresh.

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Perhaps the story would be that after Alien 3 they made clones/androids using Ripley's and Hicks' DNA. That's the mid film twist, you go in thinking how can Hicks be alive, BOOM, clones.

Hicks thinks he's hicks from aliens, they've gave him a scar and everything so clone hicks doesn't know he died in stasis. Meanwhile Clone Ripley is having an existential crisis as she remembered being inpreganated and dying on the prison planet.... She remembers it because, alien tech, DNA memories! Do Aliens have genetic memories? Fuck knows I've gone to far

Anyways, it's following in the footsteps of Terminator Genesis in that it's a soft reboot of an 90's action film franchise. So, if that film does well this'll be next

Worm hole?

To be honest, I couldn't give a flying fuck about this film. I'm only slightly interested because Ripley and hicks are back and I'm wondering how. But I know the answer will be something as ridiculous as above

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Anyways, it's following in the footsteps of Terminator Genesis in that it's a soft reboot of an 90's action film franchise.

 

I won't bother putting this in the Didactic Thumbs thread, but "soft reboot" strikes me as one of those pointless terms that sites like io9 uses to give themselves more to talk about. They're just sequels!

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There should be a term for these films, yes, they're sequels but sequels that exsist purley to chase that nostalgia market.

We've had films like Transforms that used people's nostalgia of cartoons and toys (very lucrative). Now they're making films using the nostalgia of our iconic childhood films. Jurasic world and terminator seem to be borrowing massively from their predecessors, imagery, plot, stuff....

Like Star Trek into darkness, it's a sequel/remake, all the same shit just played out a little differently

They'll do the same for that new Indiana Jones (did I dream this was happening). I wouldn't be surprised if a new Back to the Future gets announced following the adventures of Marty's kids getting into some very familiar japes. Goonies sequel, is that still a thing

Will there come a time when we feel like we've been played by these "sequels", leaving all our beloved childhood movies tarnished in their wake.

Edit: Highlander :) I read earlier theres a new highlander

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There should be a term for these films, yes, they're sequels but sequels that exsist purley to chase that nostalgia market.

 

Let's think of one! The most obvious is nostalquel, but that's pretty awful.

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Sequalgia? Could be used as the term to incapsulate all this types of films together, the style of film if you will.

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