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Alien5: It's a Bug Hunt (pre-release thread)

I've never really liked the last two Alien films. But that doesn't mean that this film will be any better.

No, but by not killing Newt offscreen, Aliens hasn't been undermined, and the presence of Hicks has got to be a huge bonus.

From a start like that they could still screw it all up, but it's a great starting point !

If there is one thing Hollywood does well it's screw things up. ;)
 
I liked Alien 3 even if it did piss off lots of people including James Cameron.

But i'm ok if they ignore it. That's the trend these days. It won't diminish Alien 3 in the slightest. Japanese Animation and Hong Kong movies do this type of thing all the time. Having alternate events and endings open things up for some great story potential.
 
It's been like fifteen years since I read the Alien spin off books (some of which were actually pretty great), but I seem to remember the Ripley and Hicks characters being changed to other people who experienced similar events so as not to step on the toes of any potential movie sequels with those characters.

I also feel like either the Ripley stand-in or Ripley herself is revealed to be an android with super high fidelity in one of the later books with red "blood" and all as part of some WY plot to figure out just what made Ellen Ripley so special that she survived multiple encounters with the aliens. Or something.

There are like twenty books and eight or nine authors so maybe I'm conflating plots and characters but anyway the end result was a hive war on earth between multiple queens (red & black) like ant colonies fighting over resources with humanity caught in the middle. A rival to WY ended up freeing the aliens The Company had managed to gather and had incomprehensibly chosen to test in a lab on earth.

As for production design, the latest alien game, Isolation, with Ripleys daughter Amanda as the protagonist, faithfully recreated the look and feel of the original movie tech and it was epic.

I think Prometheus was gorgeous but made the same mistake as the Star Wars prequels by making the past look way more advanced than films set later in the timeline. It's a fictional future. There's no reason the tech couldn't look like the original film other than someone in a suit in an early meeting saying "Hey, my iPhone looks more advanced than that spaceship. I don't get it. Make it shinier with more holograms." Actually I'd love if they made Isolation into a movie and go back to the scifi horror roots of the series in a grungy lived in setting.
 
I think Prometheus was gorgeous but made the same mistake as the Star Wars prequels by making the past look way more advanced than films set later in the timeline.

Yeah, because when I think of a reasearch vessel funded by a super rich dude for a very important science mission I think it should look like a glorified space truck that's isn't exactly in the best condition :rolleyes:

Of course the Prometheus looks better than the Nostromo, one is built for research and Weyland probably included all the frills the other for hauling crap around and was probably lucky Weyland Yutani sprung for a safety system to keep the reactor from overloading.
 
Didn't the 90's novels series go down this route of Alien 3 being a hypersleep dream and the bulk of the story being set on Earth?


No, they didn't.

I own them all and have read each at least twice. Well, except "Music of The Spears". That one's just AWFUL and I barely made it through once!

The novels start and stop different continuities, ignore past entries, retcon facts and circumstances and one of them is a sequel to AR.

Some people hated that. I just enjoyed the fact we had multiple more Alien stories and enjoyed them as kind of "alternate universe" takes on the mythos.

That said, I don't recall ANY novel where A3 is explained as a dream, although it should've.
 
Hicks and Newts are dead, let it go.

Keep the continuity, as bad as Resurrection was.

Very hyped about this development, regardless.
 
Ummm.... hmmm. Not so fast, continuity-smashers.

Blomkamp Clarifies - Or Further Confuses? - His Approach to Alien Continuity...

Maybe post-Colonial Marines Hicks just takes a 220-year cryonap...

But how does that square away the Weyland Yutani stuff in the concept art with them being defunct by Alien Resurrection?
I would think the new movie happens between Aliens and Resurrection.
Hicks and Newts are dead, let it go.

Keep the continuity, as bad as Resurrection was.

Very hyped about this development, regardless.

Resurrection wasn't the problem, Alien 3 was. Newt and Hicks are needed.
 
But how does that square away the Weyland Yutani stuff in the concept art with them being defunct by Alien Resurrection?

There's some footnote on the Alien wiki about Weyland Yutani rising up again (after the events of Resurrection) and taking over the USM. I don't know how canon that's supposed to be.
 
But how does that square away the Weyland Yutani stuff in the concept art with them being defunct by Alien Resurrection?

There's some footnote on the Alien wiki about Weyland Yutani rising up again (after the events of Resurrection) and taking over the USM. I don't know how canon that's supposed to be.

That seems to have come from the recent novel Alien: Sea of Sorrows by James A. Moore. Set eight years after Resurrection, it follows a distant descendant of Ripley (through her daughter Amanda) working as an ICC deputy commissioner who gets roped into an Company excavation of ancient ruins (and yes, his ancestry does have something to do with it). Basically, this is Alien: The Revenge.
 
And I thought that novel was bad......until I read the third one, "River of Pain".

What a piece of shit!

I've heard rumours a new trilogy of books is planned but thus far have been able to find no concrete information. Has anybody heard of a second trilogy?

If true, let's hope it's better than the most recent one.
 
i read the first book, the one that takes place between Alien and Aliens. it was decent. i haven't heard anything about a second trilogy.
 
Well despite a few extra wrinkles Weaver still looks pretty darn good, I think, and seems to be back to her thinner self again. So it shouldn't be that hard to pretend this somehow takes place between Aliens and Alien 3, if that's how they decide to do it.

And then at the end at the end of this new movie her, Hicks and Newt can go back to sleep in special, magically rejuvenating cryo-tubes so she wakes up looking young again for Alien 3. :D
 
Ummm.... hmmm. Not so fast, continuity-smashers.
Ugh. And has Biehn even publicly commented on all this?

I haven't heard anything from Biehn on this. But, considering how bitter he sounded on the DVD doc. about being written out of Alien 3, I imagine he'd come back for the next one no matter what.

https://games.yahoo.com/news/blomkamps-alien-movie-direct-sequel-001543969.html

Sooooo.... sounds like we're going the Superman Returns route. No sidetrip to Fiorina 161, no lousy video game, no cloning two centuries later. We're gonna finally get the movie the Alien3 teaser trailer promised.

Thoughts?

I hated Superman Returns but this will be different. Superman Returns tried to capture the same magic from Superman I- II and be a sequel to those movies. Without any of the cast from those movies but instead actors (who in a certain light) resemble the original actors. Routh especially was told to act like Chris Reeve. Well Singer's fanfic/love letter didn't inspire audiences to want to sit through his 2 hour and 30 minute movie repeatedly. Critics loved it though. Not surprisingly.

Here we are getting Weaver, Bhein and presumably and actress to play Newt. I trust Blompkamp to learn from the past mistakes of the previous Alien films (Alien 3, Ressurection, AvP, AvP 2) when crafting his movie. I don't hate Alien 3 but it definitely could've been better and was not a way should've gone Ripley out with.

The comparison between them is that Superman Returns is a movie that only seemed to acknowledge the continuity of the first 2 movies in the series and ignored the other sequels that it didn't like. There have been other examples of this. The Sarah Connor Chronicles totally ignored Terminator 3. And while the Highlander movies are a continuity nightmare, the one thing that all subsequent versions seem to agree on is that no one likes Highlander II. (I like Highlander II but even I agree that the movie was on crack.)

Personally, while I don't particularly like Alien 3, I do respect it. While I suppose killing Hicks & Newt negates the themes of family from Aliens, it is entirely in line with the dark, nihilistic tone of Alien 3. It's not a fun movie but it does succeed in its goal of being really fucking depressing.

The point is, I don't much care for the idea of the new movie completely ignoring it. Thankfully, I don't think Blomkamp is going to do that. I don't think 20th Century Fox would let him do that.
 
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