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Since the 30th anniversary of Alien is this year, new video games are being developed and Dark Horse is coming out with new comics, I thought a thread like this would be appropriate.

Did anybody check out the Free Comic Book Day Aliens/Predator preview issue? New Aliens and Predator comics; it's like I'm six all over again. ^_^

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I definitely picked up that issue. I can remember the damn-near interminable waiting for the very first Aliens mini series, and I loved Dennis Beauvais' airbrushed art for the second. They got a little staid towars the end, but the first ones were a lot of fun. Same for that first Chris Warner Predator series and the first AvP. I still maintain that would have made the best AvP movie.

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  • 4 weeks later...

There's supposedly a french flier that says the Quadrilogy is coming to Blu-ray soon. These are the movies I have been waiting for the most on Blu-ray. I hope this release lives up to the awesomeness of its DVD counterpart. ^_^

Did anybody check out the first issue of Aliens that was released last week? The next issue doesn't come out until July. :( At least the new Predator series comes out this month.

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There are rumors that Alien is up for being remade, begin swearing now.

On the one hand I'm aghast and horrified at the idea of remaking something that was done right, on the other, I'm surprised it took Hollywood this long to contemplate defiling it.

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I hear it's not going to be a remake (thank the many and varied movie gods), but a prequel directed by Carl Rinsch, who is a protege of the Scott brothers (i.e. Ridley and Tony). That's enough for me to be extremely cautiously optimistic. Barely.

Edited by Penguin
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I hear it's not going to be a remake (thank the many and varied movie gods), but a prequel directed by Carl Rinsch, who is a protege of the Scott brothers (i.e. Ridley and Tony). That's enough for me to be extremely cautiously optimistic. Barely.

So we get to see more of the Space Jocky? .....Nice?

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There are rumors that Alien is up for being remade, begin swearing now.

Naw man, it'll be a cool, hip and totally NOW reboot along the likes of Star Trek 2009. The cast is sure to be picture perfect, with refugess from the casting camps of The Hills, OC, etc. And then, instead of trying to regard the Alien as the killing, breeding machine that it is, this movie will try and foster an understanding of the creature and its violent ways.

Ultimately the only thing I care about is the upcoming AvP game; that's why I got into computers in the first place...

Edited by myk
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So we get to see more of the Space Jocky? .....Nice?

I wonder what a prequal to Alien really means. Will there even be any humans in it? Has there ever been a live action movie with absolutely no humans at all? I'm not talking about an alien that looks exactly like a human from Earth either. :p Off the top of my head I can't think of one, but I'm sure there must have been at least one.

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Personally, I would like to see an Alien vs Predator vs Colonial Marine vs Terminator vs Robocop vs Iron Man vs Chuck Norris. :p Everyone travels through time and dimension to fight the ultimate fight. Sort of an inter-galactic Bloodsport. If I'm crazy enough to think it up here, then I'm sure someone in Hollywood has that on the back burner.

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Alien does not need to be remade. It was damn good for its time. I don't think modern FX will be all that better than the old.

Heck, it's still damn good in this time. I think the limitations in FX just made the movie more suspenseful and mysterious. They had to be more creative in the way the alien was portrayed so that you didn't lose that realism which makes the movie scary.

IMO a lot of movie makers have become lazy and just throw everything out there without considering how to tell a story the right way. The FX toolbox has gotten better, but you don't necessarily have to use every tool just because you can. Many neglect the story just for the sake of being able to highlight the special effects.

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Heck, it's still damn good in this time. I think the limitations in FX just made the movie more suspenseful and mysterious. They had to be more creative in the way the alien was portrayed so that you didn't lose that realism which makes the movie scary.

IMO a lot of movie makers have become lazy and just throw everything out there without considering how to tell a story the right way. The FX toolbox has gotten better, but you don't necessarily have to use every tool just because you can. Many neglect the story just for the sake of being able to highlight the special effects.

TESTIFY BROTHER!!

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There are rumors that Alien is up for being remade, begin swearing now.

You do realize that Alien was itself a re-make of "It! The Thing From Below" don't you?

That was and still is a fantastic and haunting movie, despite being made in - what - they 50s?

The key, of course, is not FX, but the fact that you barely get to see the Alien at all added to the claustrophobia.

Aliens (2) managed, on the other hand, to be good on account of being a kind of "war movie" type film - but that trick only works once.

Aliens3 I enjoyed due to the religious themes and the context of prisoners/convicts/criminals and redemption. But I do realize that what essentially happened was that Alien 3 basically tried to use the "tricks" of Alien (don't see the Alien much + claustrophobia) while Alien 4 tried to do what Alien 2 did (war movie - just better FX). In both cases, 3 and 4 basically fell flat and couldn't really stand on their own merit because they were just a re-imaging of the basic concepts from 1 and 2 albeit with better tech/FX (which didn't help).

I kind of actually regret 4 the most because it had slight strains of the plot from Darkhorse's ALien: Labyrynth, which to me was one of the best stories. The concept of scientists doing crazy experiments and it all going afoul is great - but I just got the feeling that while 4 might have gotten off to a good start it just ended up getting way too ...I dunno...the plot just fell to pieces and there was too much going on - hard to say. Winona Rider didn't help with her bad acting either....

Anyways - considering that Alien was made in 1979 (so about 30 years after "It: The Thing from Below") - making A NEW Alien movie 30 years after the Ridley Scott version is not cause for alarm or unheard of.

Which doesn't mean it'll be good.

Pete

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Looking forward the quadrilogy on BluRay.

I only own Aliens Director's Cut on DVD and AVP:Requiem on BD (yeah, I liked it, now stone me to death) :p

I'm totally with you on the Blu-Ray, but if the first release is anything less than the BD equivalent to the full 9-disc set I'll wait. At least with the DVDs, Fox has been good about releasing full-featured sets first, then slimmed-down packages afterwards. Hopefully they'll give us the same respect on Blu-Ray. I've seen way too many BD releases that are bare-bones when there are full-featured DVDs already out.

I liked AvP:R too. Simple, dumb fun, and a step up from the first AvP which was kinda a yawner. Then again, I'm fairly lenient as a judge. It's damn hard to equal Alien and Aliens, let alone top them, so I'm pretty tolerant.

Thinking back, the quadrilogy was what triggered my first DVD player purchase. I had resolved to buy a DVD player once Star Wars, Macross Plus, or the Alien series came out on DVD, and Alien was the first. :D Personally, I really liked the menus on that first set better than the ones in the 9-disc set, especially the hidden personnel profiles on the Alien disc. Then again, as my first DVDs, they totally blew me away anyway. ;)

I'll never forgive Fox for not releasing the Alien Head quadrilogy case in North America, though. Had to pay a pretty penny for an R2 version from Amazon UK. :p

Edited by Penguin
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I seem to recall reading that the makers of "Alien" were sued by the author of The Voyage of the Space Beagle (specifically, the "Discord in Scarlet" chapters), A. E. van Vogt - and the film mentioned before It! The Terror From Beyond Space [1] also took the book as an inspiration!

[1] Edit: ah, film mentioned earlier has different title - variant?

Edited by F-ZeroOne
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It's sad that there's only one James Cameron.

He won't do an Alien Prequel, so then we're left with, well, everyone else . . .

Oh, I don't know, Ridley Scott did a fine job on the first one. It's too bad he won't be directing the prequel either.

James Cameron does have a way of kicking ass though. ;)

At least we can expect a new sci-fi movie, Avatar, in the future.

http://scifiwire.com/2009/05/new-concept-art-images-fr.php

You always here stories about seemingly good movies on paper that turned out bad becuase the Hollywood producers and execs changed things around for various reasons. Why can't the Hollywood execs ever mandate that all future movies don't suck! :p Is that really too much to ask?

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  • 1 month later...
Oh, I don't know, Ridley Scott did a fine job on the first one. It's too bad he won't be directing the prequel either.

Well, there's always Uwe Boll...

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As much as I love the idea of Ridley Scott coming back to do more another alien movie, rather than a prequel I'd much rather see him make a sequel that fits in after second film and retcons the 3rd and 4th movies out of existence.

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I didn't think they were that bad... I only watched the "assembly cut" version of Alien 3, I don't think it still deserve the flak it got back when the original was released. Aliens Resurrection had a bunch of nods and references to the last three movies, though I could do without the baby alien, that thing gave me nightmares...

Edited by shiroikaze
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I didn't think they were that bad...

They were not great but they deserve to be part of the canon of the series. I dunno, as much as I would like to see another Alien film, my concerns about it being stuffed up (even with Ridley at the helm), is enough to make me think that the franchise is best left alone now.

Maybe if the likes of Dan O'Bannon was back on board to script it I would be more hopeful. But even then he has written plenty of crap.

Taksraven

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I didn't think they were that bad...

They weren't. I think that people are so in love with the style of Aliens' storytelling in the 2nd movie that anything that isn't like the 2nd movie automatically loses in people's eyes. I bet that any alien movie featuring pulse rifles, smartguns, Marine-machismo, lotsa' explosions, Alien-caused-gore and most definitely twin robots who talk hip-hop will be a sure success...

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I think after Aliens, a lot of people, myself included, were expecting the 3rd movie to be even bigger in scale and be a direct continuation of the second movie, and focusing on what happens when the Aliens finally make it to Earth. It was also expected that the 3rd movie would continue to feature Hicks and perhaps Newt together with Ripley, struggling to escape an Earth rapidly being taken over by the Aliens.

Instead, the 3rd movie was a step backwards in many ways, being much smaller in scale and directed by at that time a 'no-name' director whose only experience was pop-music videos IIRC.

Graham

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I think after Aliens, a lot of people, myself included, were expecting the 3rd movie to be even bigger in scale and be a direct continuation of the second movie, and focusing on what happens when the Aliens finally make it to Earth. It was also expected that the 3rd movie would continue to feature Hicks and perhaps Newt together with Ripley, struggling to escape an Earth rapidly being taken over by the Aliens.

Instead, the 3rd movie was a step backwards in many ways, being much smaller in scale and directed by at that time a 'no-name' director whose only experience was pop-music videos IIRC.

Graham

Alien 3 was a production hell. Writers/storys and directors changed during the production. The 3d graphic engine wasn't good enough for this type of movie production. At the end, the 3d alien model looked shity. It looked like a B movie. Surely David Fincher was a first time movie director, lack of moive production experience, but he can't take all the blame for the failure of the movie. A few years later, he end up finished some great movies such as Seven and Fight Club.

I think most of the problem are coming from 20th century fox. Look at both AVP moives, they are just destroying the 'Alien' band. Same go to Terminator 3, and Xmen 3. The 'company' control the 'creativity'.

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Alien 3 was a production hell. Writers/storys and directors changed during the production. The 3d graphic engine wasn't good enough for this type of movie production. At the end, the 3d alien model looked shity. It looked like a B movie. Surely David Fincher was a first time movie director, lack of moive production experience, but he can't take all the blame for the failure of the movie. A few years later, he end up finished some great movies such as Seven and Fight Club.

I think most of the problem are coming from 20th century fox. Look at both AVP moives, they are just destroying the 'Alien' band. Same go to Terminator 3, and Xmen 3. The 'company' control the 'creativity'.

Yeah, you're on the right track with that. Alien3 was supposed to be a nightmarish production. Don't forget the crap about the original ending not being to the execs satisfaction, so they had to hire Sigourney to shave her hair again for a dumb reshoot. Also, the stories that guns were not allowed to be used in the third one because Sigourney did not want to be seen as a gun toting hero. (If that story was true, Sigourney must take a lot of the blame for the failure of the third film.

The problem with the Alien franchise is that is lacks a single guiding influence. Every film has been written and shot by different people and as a result they have always been a struggle between style vs. substance since there is no real overriding idea about what should be happening.

FOX just sees it as another cash-cow and they think that by putting the brand name on any old crap it will sell. Thats why I think it might be better if the franchise did not come back, rather than get another crap film to drag it through the mud.

And, to all the "Ridley Scott can do no wrong" worshippers here, I just have one word. HANNIBAL!

Taksraven

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