- Joined
- Jan 22, 2008
- Messages
- 8,123
My first answer would be "Please stop", but assuming that this doesn't happen, and the Company still wants to get a percentage out of the Alien, what should happen next?
I find the Alien world odd, because after the first two films, the best stuff seems to be spin-offs rater than sequels. The Alien: Isolation computer game, the Technical Manual and the recent role-playing game seem much better to me than Resurrection, Prometheus or Covenant. I've not seen the AVP films, but they don't sound great. The revelations in Prometheus and Covenant weren't very interesting, and the story of David playing God didn't really grip me either. If anything, they just took the mysteriousness of the setting away.
So where should the setting go? The risk is that it just does the same thing, over and again, with diminishing results, in a succession of similar films. A crew goes to a planet, makes a discovery that's meant to be awe-inspiring, and then gets picked off. The Company betrays/abandons them, and a robot helps the Alien (or, in a surprise twist, doesn't). This sounds as if the setting is small. But if you don't follow that plot, it's no smaller than, say, Firefly or The Expanse.
If Alien has to continue, I would like to see it become a TV series, perhaps rather like The Haunting of Hill House. I think Netflix or the like could do a good job of it. We could see life on the frontier; characters would have time and space to develop fully; we could see more of the Company than just the inevitable betrayal, perhaps with different factions. And then, when the inevitable killings began, we'd care about the characters more, and there'd be more to fight for.
I find the Alien world odd, because after the first two films, the best stuff seems to be spin-offs rater than sequels. The Alien: Isolation computer game, the Technical Manual and the recent role-playing game seem much better to me than Resurrection, Prometheus or Covenant. I've not seen the AVP films, but they don't sound great. The revelations in Prometheus and Covenant weren't very interesting, and the story of David playing God didn't really grip me either. If anything, they just took the mysteriousness of the setting away.
So where should the setting go? The risk is that it just does the same thing, over and again, with diminishing results, in a succession of similar films. A crew goes to a planet, makes a discovery that's meant to be awe-inspiring, and then gets picked off. The Company betrays/abandons them, and a robot helps the Alien (or, in a surprise twist, doesn't). This sounds as if the setting is small. But if you don't follow that plot, it's no smaller than, say, Firefly or The Expanse.
If Alien has to continue, I would like to see it become a TV series, perhaps rather like The Haunting of Hill House. I think Netflix or the like could do a good job of it. We could see life on the frontier; characters would have time and space to develop fully; we could see more of the Company than just the inevitable betrayal, perhaps with different factions. And then, when the inevitable killings began, we'd care about the characters more, and there'd be more to fight for.