alien 5 Hicks returns

[Purple]

Honestly I agree with Starglider and Channel72. Killing two major characters as an afterthought was a very good way of driving home just how dark and desperate the universe is. Aliens is set is a very much dystopian setting. It is very much the modern world in its logical if nightmarish conclusion. Human colonization into outer space is a slow and tedious affair under the thumb of corporations that value human life less than profit margins. Entire colonies are left to be sacrificed to aliens for the sake of capturing them as weapons. I like that.

[Batman]

'Resurrection' was actually a much more entertaining movie than 3. It just wasn't a particularly 'Alien' one, it was a SciFi movie that happened to have Ripley and the Xenomorphs. I've heard that the Director's Cut of 3 is much better but given how monumentally the theatrical release stunk I never bothered to find out.

And both Alien and Aliens had the key characters surviving so no matter how dystopian the world they live in, there's still hope. 3 completely torpedoes that. Regardless of whether or not they keep 4 I have zero problem with them writing the abomination that was 3 out of continuity. (Not that I would be particularly heartbroken about them losing 4 too).

[Purple]

Honestly I liked the change. Hope at the time was as overrated and drawn out as dark and gritty is today.

[Patroklos]

The fact that people consider two or three out of a dozen plus well written (even if somewhat limited in some cases) characters surviving hopeful is gritty all by itself.

[Themightytom]

As a rule, I don't like the idea of basically erasing films from continuity because people don't like them. It feels lazy (they're saying "that didn't happen" rather than trying to fix what they have to work with) and petty and insulting to other film makers to effectively override and dismiss their work. Especially if its done to pander to the whiny fanboy crowd, because their will be people whining whatever you do and if we listened to them Doctor Who would have ended when David Tenant left.

Edit: I would accept an explicit reboot/alternate reality.

I don't suppose you saw Highlander 2... or Rocky V... or the Star Wars Holiday Special... sometimes creativity goes the wrong direction.

What bothered me most about 3 was really just that, I didn't give a crap about the characters, and I didn't give a crap about the consequences. With Alien, I was introduced to this world and these people just working in it, and was caught up in What Would Happen To The Cat.. as well as the rest of them as they began to drop like flies. Alien is actually much less interesting if you don't watch it first, because you already know Ripley makes it.

Alien 2... had...space marines, actions, explosions, company manipulations... world building.. a gioant robot... I liked the characters and the consequences to them were part of what kept me watching but REALLY... after the seeming threat of the Alien in the first one, having a whole colony of them, I kind of liked watching them get all mowed down. The Xenomorphs are easy to hate.

Alien 3 had a pet dog and a bunch of pseudo religious assholes stereotyped to the point where I felt awkward even watching... and then The Eveel Company popping up out of nowhere as well as a completely unimpactful surprise revelation of identity for no reason.

Alien 4... idk the most interesting thing was the android. Alien has had a subplot going on with them for a while that i kind of forgot about until Alien 4. The space mercs were at least quirky enough to be entertaining, and the military was completely useless, but having the HUGE ship hurdling towards earth, the consequences were at least something i could identify with, either it blows a hole in the planet or infests it.

So Alien 5.. I hope it expands on the Aliens themselves maybe, and not in the wtf Prometheus manner that Prometheus is trying to do, So far at this point the Xenomorphs are like an infestation or accident. There's enough time passing, that Alien 5 could be set a decade or two later, and the Xenomorphs have a larger enough population to start getting organized.

Reintroducing Ripley and Hicks is easy without messing up the timeline, "You slept way too long" opening to ditch Alien 3.. A bait and switch "We stole the real Ripley and replaced her with a clone, we sent her to the prison to see what would happen, but the real one just escaped" It's a pretty good cover up for kidnapping after the zounds of incident reports probably filed after blowing up a colony and losing marines.

or a new cast and now Ripley is an AI, that would be rough on her since she doesn't trust androids and would be freaking out about the company having programmed her, also why they would make an old android, idfk.

[Borgholio]

or a new cast and now Ripley is an AI, that would be rough on her since she doesn't trust androids and would be freaking out about the company having programmed her, also why they would make an old android, idfk.

One of the novels had her actually being an android programmed to think she was human. This was not long after the events of Alien 3.

[Themightytom]

or a new cast and now Ripley is an AI, that would be rough on her since she doesn't trust androids and would be freaking out about the company having programmed her, also why they would make an old android, idfk.

One of the novels had her actually being an android programmed to think she was human. This was not long after the events of Alien 3.

She must have loved that.

[Borgholio]

She must have loved that.

When she found out she tried starving herself, but she was programmed to feel hunger so eventually she just dealt with it.
Spoiler

Part of the plot was her finding something to live for, which she used to fight against the Xenomorph invasion of Earth.

[Channel72]

Alien 3 had a pet dog and a bunch of pseudo religious assholes stereotyped to the point where I felt awkward even watching... and then The Eveel Company popping up out of nowhere as well as a completely unimpactful surprise revelation of identity for no reason.

Sometimes I'm convinced I must have seen a different Alien3 than the rest of the world...

I think after the first two films, the direction they took in 3 was pretty compelling. The thing that made it a great film, for me, was the idea that Ripley was essentially fighting against nihilism and condemnation - all her friends were dead, her new love interest (the prison doctor) is quickly killed off, she herself is sentenced to die via chestburster... the only thing left in her short life is the struggle with the Alien. It made the whole conflict extremely personal - almost intimate even, in a way that was missing from the "mysterious black monster kills crew 1 by 1" in Alien and the giant horde of bugs in Starship Troopers James Cameron's Aliens. The fact that, in Alien3, the Alien also refuses to kill Ripley, added in an extra dimension of intimacy to the struggle between Ripley and the Alien. There's a great scene where she basically seeks out the Alien in order to commit suicide, but it refuses to kill her. She says something like "I'm part of the family now..." or whatever. I thought it was a really great scene.

I think the thing that puts people off about the film is the very un-Hollywood writing strategy of just killing off meaningful characters arbitrarily - the ultimate example being Newt and Hicks obviously, but even Ripley's new love interest (the prison Doctor) is summarily dispatched by the alien all of a sudden. It's weird and jarring, because they give him a backstory, and they develop his character, and he has a great connection and chemistry with Ripley, so you get the sense he's going to play a major role in the film ... except then he's just killed off in an instant like some random redshirt. Ordinarily I would find this annoying, but in the context of the movie it further cements the "personal" struggle between Ripley and the Alien. The Alien literally takes everything from her... it even essentially "rapes" her (the "alien" being a standin for the Xenomorph species in general, rather than the particular Alien in the prison planet neccessarily), making the relationship and struggle between Ripley and the Alien extremely personal and compelling.

The other problem with the film (besides the few shitty CGI shots) that people complain about is the lack of interesting characters, compared with Aliens where we had lots of cool side characters like Hudson, Vasquez, etc. But Charles Dutton's character Dillon was pretty awesome (and was fittingly an ex-rapist himself) as a fiery religious zealot. The doctor was great too... during his short time on screen. The rest of the characters don't matter much, I agree, which is a fair criticism; but the movie is ultimately about Ripley's struggle with the Alien, and her coming to terms with the fact that she is essentially condemned to die. This makes her final sacrifice awesome as well.

Oh, and the altered morphology of the Alien is really cool as well - making it a fast moving quadruped instead of a slow moving bi-ped was great.

Given the many possible directions they could have gone with after Aliens, I think Alien3 turned out to be a very subtle, personal and dramatic story. The alternatives were some kind of fan-wanky all-out war on Earth or some nonsense, which likely would have sucked.

That said, if they decide to pretend Alien 3 never happened it won't bother me much. The idea of a movie "canon" is pretty silly to begin with - it's not like "non-canonical" media somehow ceases to exist just because some Hollywood executive decides it's no longer part of a particular storyline.

[FaxModem1]

Alien3's big problem is that it's trying to put the jack back in the box, when the first film already had it pop, so you can't have the suspense of what this thing is, what it can do, what is going to happen. We know the drill already, egg hatches, creature infects some random person(or in this case, a dog), monster comes out, kills people one by one, hero eventually kills it somehow.

Essentially, this is the plot of any bog standard horror movie. You could watch the same thing happen on Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, or some other horror film franchise. The big difference here, the 'victims' are rapists, murderers, and other such reprehensible things. When Alien came out, in the late 1970s, the slasher genre was pretty darn new, by the early 90s, this was so bog standard, that the tweak of having it happen to criminals makes it standout, but makes it even less appealing to audiences.

So, it doesn't do anything new with the material, it just made the same mistake Hellraiser did, in that they made the series indistinguishable from others with their third film in what was going to happen.

[TOSDOC]

Alien 3 had a pet dog and a bunch of pseudo religious assholes stereotyped to the point where I felt awkward even watching... and then The Eveel Company popping up out of nowhere as well as a completely unimpactful surprise revelation of identity for no reason.

Sometimes I'm convinced I must have seen a different Alien3 than the rest of the world...

I think after the first two films, the direction they took in 3 was pretty compelling. The thing that made it a great film, for me, was the idea that Ripley was essentially fighting against nihilism and condemnation - all her friends were dead, her new love interest (the prison doctor) is quickly killed off, she herself is sentenced to die via chestburster... the only thing left in her short life is the struggle with the Alien. It made the whole conflict extremely personal - almost intimate even, in a way that was missing from the "mysterious black monster kills crew 1 by 1" in Alien and the giant horde of bugs in Starship Troopers James Cameron's Aliens. The fact that, in Alien3, the Alien also refuses to kill Ripley, added in an extra dimension of intimacy to the struggle between Ripley and the Alien. There's a great scene where she basically seeks out the Alien in order to commit suicide, but it refuses to kill her. She says something like "I'm part of the family now..." or whatever. I thought it was a really great scene.

I think the thing that puts people off about the film is the very un-Hollywood writing strategy of just killing off meaningful characters arbitrarily - the ultimate example being Newt and Hicks obviously, but even Ripley's new love interest (the prison Doctor) is summarily dispatched by the alien all of a sudden. It's weird and jarring, because they give him a backstory, and they develop his character, and he has a great connection and chemistry with Ripley, so you get the sense he's going to play a major role in the film ... except then he's just killed off in an instant like some random redshirt. Ordinarily I would find this annoying, but in the context of the movie it further cements the "personal" struggle between Ripley and the Alien. The Alien literally takes everything from her... it even essentially "rapes" her (the "alien" being a standin for the Xenomorph species in general, rather than the particular Alien in the prison planet neccessarily), making the relationship and struggle between Ripley and the Alien extremely personal and compelling.

The other problem with the film (besides the few shitty CGI shots) that people complain about is the lack of interesting characters, compared with Aliens where we had lots of cool side characters like Hudson, Vasquez, etc. But Charles Dutton's character Dillon was pretty awesome (and was fittingly an ex-rapist himself) as a fiery religious zealot. The doctor was great too... during his short time on screen. The rest of the characters don't matter much, I agree, which is a fair criticism; but the movie is ultimately about Ripley's struggle with the Alien, and her coming to terms with the fact that she is essentially condemned to die. This makes her final sacrifice awesome as well.

Oh, and the altered morphology of the Alien is really cool as well - making it a fast moving quadruped instead of a slow moving bi-ped was great.

Given the many possible directions they could have gone with after Aliens, I think Alien3 turned out to be a very subtle, personal and dramatic story. The alternatives were some kind of fan-wanky all-out war on Earth or some nonsense, which likely would have sucked.

That said, if they decide to pretend Alien 3 never happened it won't bother me much. The idea of a movie "canon" is pretty silly to begin with - it's not like "non-canonical" media somehow ceases to exist just because some Hollywood executive decides it's no longer part of a particular storyline.

I agree with most of what you said, but that's where I had a problem with the movie and how it could have been done differently. Most of the strength in Alien 3 lies in what Sigourney Weaver brings to the table, without which it would just be another slasher film in space.

For me, canon forms a kind of rulebook that kind of establishes what to expect from a franchise/universe without going off the deep end, which is what happened in 3 and 4. The quadruped alien is a terrific design and a bold new direction. But it's execution (special-effects wise and within canon) felt off. Nowhere in the first or second movies to we get an inkling that the Alien is eating people, only carrying them off for reproduction. Yet this creature could be replaced by a lion or other large homicidal earth predator and there wouldn't be much difference at all in its motivation - the "alienness" was absent, as was a lot of the mystery. Likewise in Alien 4, the creatures escape their cells by killing one of their own so it'll bleed acid and make them a hole. Yet a creature later in the film spits acid at one of the pirates. Why didn't they do that before? No attention to canon equals poor story.

The doctor's loss was a big blow for me too, because I enjoyed the interplay between Ripley and Hicks, two strong characters using their brains against huge problems. Clemens would have been extremely interesting to see thinking through the problem of the Alien, but it feels like they killed him off just so Ripley would be the defacto leader/idea person as much as it was the Alien taking away everything from her.

[Channel72]

The quadruped alien is a terrific design and a bold new direction. But it's execution (special-effects wise and within canon) felt off. Nowhere in the first or second movies to we get an inkling that the Alien is eating people, only carrying them off for reproduction. Yet this creature could be replaced by a lion or other large homicidal earth predator and there wouldn't be much difference at all in its motivation - the "alienness" was absent, as was a lot of the mystery.

Yeah, that's a good point. I honestly didn't think much about that - I assumed even in the previous films the Alien would sometimes just kill and eat its victims, and other times immobilize them and use them as hosts for facehuggers. In the original film I got the impression that the Alien was just killing/eating them, which is essentially the only conclusion available without that deleted scene where Dallas is shown immobilized. But at that point Ridley Scott and the writers hadn't really even figured out exactly what sort of life cycle this organism is supposed to have anyway - I think James Cameron more or less fleshed out those details. Still, it's never been too clear what a single Alien is supposed to do when there is no queen available. The deleted scene in Alien implies that a single Alien may be able to somehow create further eggs, but this is never really explored. In Alien 3, I always assumed the Alien was just sort of biding its time, killing/eating people for food, while waiting for the Queen to be born. Presumably it may have also immobilized some of its victims in preparation for future face-huggers, but this is never shown, and most of the on-screen kills appear particularly bloody and fatal.

Likewise in Alien 4, the creatures escape their cells by killing one of their own so it'll bleed acid and make them a hole. Yet a creature later in the film spits acid at one of the pirates. Why didn't they do that before? No attention to canon equals poor story.

Well, I'm not going to defend Alien 4. It totally just took the franchise off into crazy land. But in general, the problem with a franchise like this is that in each new sequel, there needs to be some fundamentally new element - which is very easy to fuck up. In Aliens, the new element was basically "okay now there's a LOT of aliens, plus there's a queen too." In Alien 3 the new element was the quadruped alien, along with Ripley herself being host to a new queen and thus "invulnerable" for the time being. I think it's only in Alien 4 where the new element just went off the deep end into utter shit territory - Ripley is a clone now with alien "powers" or whatever, plus there's this horribly designed shitty looking human/alien hybrid thing that just totally sucks. That's why I'm concerned about something like Alien 5 - it's going to be pretty difficult to come up with any kind of new take on the series that doesn't involve some kind of stupid shit. That's why I think Alien 3 was a nice way to close the series - it didn't introduce any new elements that were totally stupid, but it was different enough and interesting enough to stand apart from the other two films. The other thing is that the temptation in Hollywood always seems to be to make each sequel feature scaled up stakes and elements. If your second movie featured 100 monsters fighting robots, your third movie needs 1000 monsters fighting robots, or whatever. This usually never ends well... which is another reason why I think Alien3 was great. It was a much smaller, subtler story than Aliens - which I think was a good decision. Certainly, it would be better than some all-out human/Alien war garbage which is what a lot of fans wanted at the time.

Prometheus at least tried to do something totally different and more sci-fi oriented. Too bad it just fell apart at the writing stage.

The doctor's loss was a big blow for me too, because I enjoyed the interplay between Ripley and Hicks, two strong characters using their brains against huge problems. Clemens would have been extremely interesting to see thinking through the problem of the Alien, but it feels like they killed him off just so Ripley would be the defacto leader/idea person as much as it was the Alien taking away everything from her.

Yeah, the Doctor was a great character - it's a shame he didn't a more expanded role.

[Alyrium Denryle]

What was wrong with Alien3?

Granted, I saw it a long time ago, but I remember it being interesting take on the continuation of the series, unique setting, unlikely protagonists, Aliens being really dangerous and sneaky again without being 'in your face' pretty harmless berserker threat from Aliens, and Ripley closing the storyline with one last attempt to get rid of aliens as she was dead anyway, as was everyone who ever know her. It was fitting way to go, without forced happy ending or cavalry arriving at last moment.

Could A3 be better? Maybe. But calling it a bad movie is a disservice, IMHO.

I always kinda figured a lone Xenomorph goes into a behavioral mode not unlike a parasitic wasp. It has to hunt, build a larder, lay its limited supply of eggs, and raise one of them into a New Queen (or itself become a New Queen).

To do that they must be sneaky and horrifying.

When they have a pre-existing colony though, the individual lives of the workers dont matter. Throw enough of them at a problem and the problem tends to end up with little alien babies bursting out of their chests.

This sounds pretty cool, especially if they bring Michael Biehn back along with Sigourney Weaver. You'd have to adjust the storyline to reflect their age, but that wouldn't be impossible - you'd just come up with some younger co-stars to star alongside them, and have Biehn be part of the group that retrieves Ripley.

And yeah, I'm fine with them retconning away the bad third and fourth films, although the "dream" idea is pretty cool as well.

Scenario Time

It is something like 20-30 years later. Ripley and Hicks are married by this point (because they totally would be), and their adopted daughter Newt (unfortunately you will have to find a different actress to play her because Carrie Henn is a teacher now) is off doing something or other. Maybe a teacher (as a shout out to Carrie Henn) or something of that sort.

Hicks is either somewhat disabled, or a sexy cyborg (I totally have an 80s mancruch on Michael Biehn). Ripley has re-specialized her career track into some kind of investigative terror, making WY's corporate lives hell for the last couple decades (or she could be back piloting cargo-loaders. Either way)

All three of them wake up in cryo chambers at the start of the film (where Ripley has the Dream Sequence that erases the abomination of Alien 3 from continuity without erasing it from continuity). They have basically been renditioned by WY, who take them to an off-world research facility. They have managed to capture a few face-huggers, and shanghaied the only people left alive who know jack shit about these organisms in order to pick their brains on how to manage them. They have already taken the intelligent step of keeping the Xenos compartmentalized in different parts of the facility.

Lots of people in the facility dont actually know what is going on, incidentally (so there are some characters we can sympathize with)

Unwitting interns are used as hosts, and various behavioral and cognitive things are done. Training is attempted. This takes place on a backdrop of our protagonists trying to manipulate their captors and escape, or convince them to terminate their project.

The best "performing" xeno manages to lure someone into a false sense of security and escapes. It begins building its Larder, and attempting to free the other Xenos.

[Starglider]

Prometheus at least tried to do something totally different and more sci-fi oriented. Too bad it just fell apart at the writing stage.

Prometheus was almost a really good film. Unfortunately somewhere between the writing and the direction, it just didn't come together.

[biostem]

It would be interesting if Alien 5 revolved around a now aged Ripley and Hicks, who work jointly as independent troubleshooters, having systematically hunted down and eradicated the Xenomorphs over the last few decades. An interesting twist would be if the events of Alien 3 *did* occur, and both are either clones or purpose-built android replicas, who have actually been conducting research and collecting samples for Weyland Yutani, unbeknownst to even themselves, and are now looking for a way to undo the damage they have unwittingly caused. These events finally eradicate all traces of the Xeonmorphs, which in turn leads to the group in Alien Resurrection attempting the blood separation/cloning method used to recreate them, instead of just tracking down more eggs.

[Q99]

As a rule, I don't like the idea of basically erasing films from continuity because people don't like them. It feels lazy (they're saying "that didn't happen" rather than trying to fix what they have to work with) and petty and insulting to other film makers to effectively override and dismiss their work. Especially if its done to pander to the whiny fanboy crowd, because their will be people whining whatever you do and if we listened to them Doctor Who would have ended when David Tenant left.

Edit: I would accept an explicit reboot/alternate reality.

As a general rule, I agree, but the problem is the specific route the sequels took really closed off the universe, rather than expanding it.


And it is possible to have two continuities follow off of the same route. Consider Godzilla 1985- it ignored all that came after the first one, but that wasn't a bad thing, it was just an alternate thing.

[Purple]

Honestly I think all the ideas I have read on this page so far are lame. If it was up to me I'd go the way the various video games have and just create new characters and new stories that fit in the same universe and theme.

[TOSDOC]

Has anyone thought about fitting some of the pre-production art going around into a script in their head? The derelict ship being examined in a warehouse, Ripley trying on what looks like a biomechanical alien suit, and wearing a suicide bomb pack with a dead-man's switch in her hand? I don't think they're clones either - I would expect Hicks to still have his left eye if he was, otherwise a story where he doesn't know he's a clone would just suck.

[ZOmegaZ]

Suppose Ripley makes it back to Earth after Aliens. What's she do now? She still needs a job. In a sane world (admittedly not the one she lives in) her job would be protecting other colonies from what happened on LTV-426. I mean, WY may at least have some evil elements, but surely they're not as a whole so stupid they can't do cost-benefit analysis. The xenomorphs might be interesting and potentially profitable, but they cost an entire freakishly expensive colony! How much money could they possibly make from the xenomorphs compared to that? And what exactly is the potential profit stream from the things anyway? There are unanswered questions there.

But it's going to take a very long time for Ripley to get back. What happens in the meantime? There are other colonies out there. Some will have found xenomorphs, if they're at all common. Those that have will have been wiped out, and there's no way they're still a secret. Ripley may be a celebrity for having fought them and survived, and a valuable resource to be exploited. She's going to be interested in protecting people, spreading warnings and defining protocols for dealing with xenomorphs. If there are actually elements out there that might profit from xenomorphs spreading, they'll try to stop her, or marginalize her, or kill her.

Or what if, in the intervening decades, someone actually does manage to find a way to control the xenomorphs? What if she wakes up in a world where they've been successfully tamed for years, and nobody's afraid of them any more? I'd imagine she'd take up killing them for sport and catharsis. But then, what productive is anyone actually doing with the things? I suppose they're an excellent waste recycling system...

[Themightytom]

What if she wakes up in a world where they've been successfully tamed for years, and nobody's afraid of them any more? I'd imagine she'd take up killing them for sport and catharsis. But then, what productive is anyone actually doing with the things? I suppose they're an excellent waste recycling system...

Weyland Yuutani's competitors could just keep dropping eggs on their colonies, to make them look like incompetent assholes. if you found a way to control a queen, you could use the drones to perform labor in harsh environments, destroy enemy installations as shock troops, then you'd be set up for the inevitable Jurassic Park style nature finds a way debacle.

I wouldn't mind seeing the Xenomorphs unleashed on an even greater threat, like the Space Jockeys. Some kind of scenario where Ripley has to strike a devil's bargain and then reap the whirlwind, they kind of almost tried it with Alien Resurrection, but that wasn't really Ripley.