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Ellen Ripley needs one more story

I recently bought the Alien Anthology on Blu-Ray, and I just finished watching "Alien Resurrection," and I think there is still one chapter in the Ellen Ripley saga that needs to be told. "Alien 3" brings Ripley's character arc to a close and would have been a fitting end, but "Resurrection" opens it right back up again and does not provide a satisfactory amount of closure.

The way "Alien Resurrection" ends, it's pretty obvious that the military is going to be hunting Ripley down. After hundreds of years of trying to capture and tame the Xenomorphs, they're not going to just give up now. So here's my thought:

After years in hiding, Ripley and Call discover something disturbing about the military: They've found the Xenomorph Homeworld. Ripley sees this as her one final chance to take the bastards out once and for all, so she arranges to be onboard the ships that are leaving for the Xenomorph planet.

Hilarity ensues.

I don't know, I'd just as soon they left well alone and I doubt Weaver would be interested anymore.

Just from a plot POV, there's no reason to think that the military (in indeed anyone higher up even knew about the project) would know the details of what happened. The Betty could have slipped detection and the surviving crew could have just quietly disappeared.

From a character POV, Ripley-8 probably wouldn't even care if the fools found the xeno-homeworld (if there is one - I prefer the Ridley Scott idea they they were engineered weapons.) I can't see even the original Ripley caring if another ship load of fools gets themselves killed; even if much of the original Ripley's memories came back, she's a different person and I she'd probably be even less concerned.

What I wouldn't mind though, is a film with Ripley-8 that has nothing to do with the xenos. The crew of the Betty were after all an early prototype for Firefly so we know there's plenty of story potential for a motley crew of fugitives, mercenaries and scoundrels.
 
From a character POV, Ripley-8 probably wouldn't even care if the fools found the xeno-homeworld (if there is one - I prefer the Ridley Scott idea they they were engineered weapons.) I can't see even the original Ripley caring if another ship load of fools gets themselves killed; even if much of the original Ripley's memories came back, she's a different person and I she'd probably be even less concerned.

It was never about a random ship getting destroyed, though. It was always about preventing the Xenomorphs from escaping into the galaxy. It was about a greedy corporation/military trying to take the Xenos and use them as weapons.

True, Ripley-8 might not really care about the fate of humanity anymore, but I have to think that she would be incredibly curious about and drawn to the Xenomorph Homeworld.

We learned from AVP that the Xenomorphs have been around for thousands of years, used by the Predators for sport, so if they were in fact an engineered weapon, they were engineered a long ass time ago and have probably killed their creators and taken over their world. Ergo, homeworld.
 
I doubt very much that they would use the AvP backstories in any movie that Weaver was involved with. She thought they were a terrible idea and would likely have no truck with anything do to with them.
 
I'm not saying they should include those backstories from AvP. I'm just saying they shouldn't intentionally contradict them by giving the Xenos a different origin.
 
I like the idea of an ageing, cynical part-alien Sigourney Weaver wreaking havoc once more. She's the best female action lead ever given a genuinely kick-ass role (pax Linda Hamilton), so of course we'd love to see her again.

Yeah, but what we need her in is

lady_expendables.jpg


And, yes, I think that's what they should do for an Expendables sequel...
 
1) No she doesn't.

Agreed. I just ignore Alien Resurrection.

2) She actually needed one less story - there are three female archetypes and the first three films covered them.
Can you expand on this?

Both of the variants linked to from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_goddess

Though Ripley fits the second one best.

Basically there's Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

In Alien she's the Maiden - her fame starts here, her usefulness starts here, and she's in at the birth of the creature, and is the only one who survives it. (Also she's a girl in a rape movie, if you want to look at it that way.)

In Aliens, we learn she was an actual mother, and she becomes surrogate mother to Newt, against the Queen who is the Aliens' mother. (Ripley's also the villain in this one- basically she's the wicked stepmother if you actually think about it for a minute)

In Alien 3 she's worn out, a herald of death, and embraces death to end the Alien, the film and the series.

Then they go and make a fourth film with her, without a fourth archetype to match her to. So Resurrection becomes kind of a "Best Of" compilation which doesn't actually need Ripley, and which would probably have worked better *as* a "Best Of" remix without her...
 
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I'd like to see a new Alien movie without Ripley. It's a big universe, how about some new characters? Sorta like what they did with Predators - faithful to the original but with a new setting and some new people to chew on.
 
Then they go and make a fourth film with her, without a fourth archetype to match her to. So Resurrection becomes kind of a "Best Of" compilation which doesn't actually need Ripley, and which would probably have worked better *as* a "Best Of" remix without her...

Another archetype is "whore" -- doing it for the money.
 
The problem is, they wouldn't do just one more movie. They'd always have it in the back of their minds to make another sequel or two with the same cast if successful.
 
From a character POV, Ripley-8 probably wouldn't even care if the fools found the xeno-homeworld (if there is one - I prefer the Ridley Scott idea they they were engineered weapons.) I can't see even the original Ripley caring if another ship load of fools gets themselves killed; even if much of the original Ripley's memories came back, she's a different person and I she'd probably be even less concerned.

It was never about a random ship getting destroyed, though. It was always about preventing the Xenomorphs from escaping into the galaxy. It was about a greedy corporation/military trying to take the Xenos and use them as weapons.

True, Ripley-8 might not really care about the fate of humanity anymore, but I have to think that she would be incredibly curious about and drawn to the Xenomorph Homeworld.

Who's to say she doesn't already know all about it? She did get her genetic memory of the original Ripley from her Alien DNA, who's to say she doesn't also have the Alien race memories burred in there somewhere? She certainly had some of their senses and more than a little of their instincts. If not then I just can's see any amount of curiosity overriding her basic survival instincts. Going to a planet full of these things is death, guaranteed. This is a women who already died once because of these bloody things and I credit her with enough sense to stay the hell away from anything even remotely Alien looking.

As for them posing a threat to the galaxy, I just don't see it. While they're certainly intelligent, probably sentient, nothing we've seen indicates that the Xenos (the the likely exception of the "newborn") were ever sapient. Thus they can't actively spread to other worlds unless somebody takes them there.

All they can do is incubate as many hosts as are available, lay as many eggs as possible then go dormant until they're disturbed. They don't appear to have the foresight needed to develop beyond mere killing machines. They don't keep some of their hosts alive to breed new hosts like cattle, they don't build or pilot spacecraft and travel to other worlds. More to the point, since we know from the first Alien film they've been around for a very long time, if there are or were other xeno populations in the universe (it's possible that one ship had the only batch of eggs still in existance) and they had the capacity do develop sapience, then they'd have done so already and we'd all be dead by now.

At their very worst, all they'll ever be is the bio-mechanical equivalent of a virus or a natural disaster. Deadly, but manageable. With the human race spread across so many worlds, no one disaster would ever wipe out the whole race. Even if some corporation or government is dumb enough to remove samples and inflict them on a large population (accidentally or otherwise), I doubt anyone will be dumb enough to let to happen a second time. If a planet colony, or ship gets infested, all everyone else has to do to protect themselves is either a simple quarantine, or nuke them from a safe distance.
I'm not saying they should include those backstories from AvP. I'm just saying they shouldn't intentionally contradict them by giving the Xenos a different origin.

Why not? They were shite. Who cares if something else contradicts them?
 
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Alien 4 gives her a happy ending, her ship, crew and little girl back and that's fine for me. The only storylines I would approve of is either retconning it so Alien3 never happened or have her and Cal going back to where it all began and solving the mystery of the derelict
 
Alien 3 was a good film, especially the extended version on DVD. Saying everyone must pretend it didin't happen because you didn't like it is just, well, the sort of thing 4 year-olds do.
 
Alien 3 was a good film, especially the extended version on DVD. Saying everyone must pretend it didin't happen because you didn't like it is just, well, the sort of thing 4 year-olds do.

And calling others 4-year-olds because they didn't like what you like is...? ;)
 
Deckerd wrote:
Alien 3 was a good film, especially the extended version on DVD. Saying everyone must pretend it didin't happen because you didn't like it is just, well, the sort of thing 4 year-olds do.


WAAAAH! Is not! Is not!
 
Anybody know what James Cameron was apparantly planning to do with a potential Alien 5, before the AVP movies came about??
 
Alien 3 was a good film, especially the extended version on DVD. Saying everyone must pretend it didin't happen because you didn't like it is just, well, the sort of thing 4 year-olds do.
And rejecting other people's fan canons just because they don't own any copyrights to the material is just the sort of thing corporate peons do. :p

And no one said that others must pretend the post-Aliens films didn't happen, only that everyone should be free to make up their own minds. ;)
 
Anybody know what James Cameron was apparantly planning to do with a potential Alien 5, before the AVP movies came about??

All he ever said was he wanted to do another one in the mould of Aliens, with Ripley and a great crew of characters, but with Schwarzenegger in it as well.
 
Alien 3 was a good film, especially the extended version on DVD. Saying everyone must pretend it didin't happen because you didn't like it is just, well, the sort of thing 4 year-olds do.

A four year old could make a better film than Alien3 (Buzinga!:techman:). As for the proposed Scharzenegger/Aliens film I'm not sure if James Cameron was maybe having us on in that respect, post Aliens his films tended to be a lot less gung-ho and a lot more thoughtful for good or ill
 
I doubt anyone will be dumb enough to let to happen a second time.

Have you actually watched any of the Alien movies? They've done it. They keep doing it. Anytime Ripley's name pops up or there is some sign of the Xenomorphs, somebody goes and tries to collect samples, tries to bring them back home. "Crew expendable." The people in charge of these projects don't care about the humans involved. They want the weapon, and they will try as many times as it takes to get what they want.
 
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