Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

[umseriously]

I like the concept of the black goo, and how it changed in the Romulus. Instead of it being a thing where the alien was engineered by David, the black goo itself is inherently the alien's own creation. Anything it touches it warps into its own image. So David more or less recreated the xenomorph that had already existed for centuries before he came along.

Though I do wish we could have gotten a movie just focusing on big chap. Seeing the hint of the chaos he unfolded on the ship makes me think it would have been a much better thriller than Romulus plus it's better memberberries than Ash coming back yet again just for nostalgia bait. Though, it does make me wonder a lot about Big Chap and how he acted in the first movie, as he's really the only xenomorph in the franchise to act very stealthy and quiet. None of the other xenomorphs showed the restraint he did in the first movie. If any of them were dropped into the first flick, Ripley would have died instantly from them bumrushing her and her whole crew.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I like the concept of the black goo, and how it changed in the Romulus. Instead of it being a thing where the alien was engineered by David, the black goo itself is inherently the alien's own creation. Anything it touches it warps into its own image. So David more or less recreated the xenomorph that had already existed for centuries before he came along.

Though I do wish we could have gotten a movie just focusing on big chap. Seeing the hint of the chaos he unfolded on the ship makes me think it would have been a much better thriller than Romulus plus it's better memberberries than Ash coming back yet again just for nostalgia bait. Though, it does make me wonder a lot about Big Chap and how he acted in the first movie, as he's really the only xenomorph in the franchise to act very stealthy and quiet. None of the other xenomorphs showed the restraint he did in the first movie. If any of them were dropped into the first flick, Ripley would have died instantly from them bumrushing her and her whole crew.

part of that is probably because in the original idea it was cocooning them to make eggs instead of just killing everything?

 

[Spirit of Fire]

part of that is probably because in the original idea it was cocooning them to make eggs instead of just killing everything?

The way the xenomorphs have been portrayed and their origin stories have not been very consistent even by Ridley scott himself.

First it was this idea where they were truly alien life forms that cocoon prey and the decomposing bodies get processed into xenomorph eggs,
Then it was now they have a queen and are like giant ant colonies in Aliens. Hence the term "bughunt" when fighting them.
After that it was "actually they were a bioweapon made by other aliens meant to kill everything and die off quickly afterwards" as a way to explain how humanity never saw them before the events of the films, as if they weren't so damn common that every weyland yutani exec has been in charge of some kind of live specimen xenomorph program at one time or another.
Finally, they tried explaining "it was the predators who bred them so they could git gud or die trying against a worthy foe." in the AVP series.

Now some decades later, its some "black goop created by alien terrorists that also seeded human life too somehow" nonsense that I'm disappointed isn't a "alien nanomachines son" kind of meme. With several "totally not xenomorphs bro" creatures like that weird human looking xenomorph hybrid thing with the bloody leech face that is never once mentioned by name in the movie but all over the trailers and only kills one person before fucking off for the rest of prometheus. Just to be upstaged by a giant starfish that kills the alien terrorist.

Prometheus was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Zero tension and just a boring space roadtrip with some zombies in it. Not a single actual Xenomorph and the protomorphs were barely even in it. I refuse to believe it can call itself an alien movie.

 

[Adamska]

Again, I consider the black goo one of the worst things they introduced, and that's telling given you can make a 7 hour video essay on why this series is fucked and what were the worst things added to the series. It's just such a blunt attempt to forcibly edit the setting in a stupid way. The true mystery was the better option. Are they an eldritch leveler? Maybe. Bioweapon gone wrong? Perhaps. A natural species weaponized and went feral? Possibly.

Also gonna be blunt, I dismiss most of Scott's comments and ideas at this point. The original film was Dan O'Bannon, the FOX producer who was on staff, and HR Giger's baby more than his. Cameron made the setting more than him by a fucking country mile. I consider him a secondary source due to that and the ex cathedra retcons that has him arrogantly claim to be the sole mind behind it.

I actually dismiss the eggmorphing as my ideal headcanon simply because it was cut out and the directors cut fucking botched its' reintroduction. Should've been after Lambert and Parker get dropped, but before the self destruct. It's nonsense that you slow down the pacing at that point. It's so forced it ruins my appreciation of the idea, and I will always pick the Theatrical cut over the Director's Cut due to it.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

and I will always pick the Theatrical cut over the Director's Cut due to it.

tbh last time I saw it as a "director's cut" it was the cut scenes sorta awkwardly shoved in the spot with no additional polish, so all of the sudden all the background noises stop existing and shit

but yeah as cool as the extra footage is in both Alien and S, the pacing from the cuts really is a big help to the movies

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

I think the general issue with black goo, spores, bloodbursters and whatever, is that the xenomorph has been the focus of the story for far too long. Suddenly they're trying to go "Uhh actually this part before the xeno is actually 80% of the story and xenos are just the ground force of this big political undertaking that-".

Either do an all-out series exploring what led to the xenos, ie. black goo or whatever, or shut the fuck up and keep just doing "xenos fucking up shit" with a few variants. At this point I'd rather see more gameplay-oriented xeno development like brutes, rammers and all that, than novel-tier made-up semi-canon bullshit about how they came to be.

 

[CaptainAutism69]

I think the general issue with black goo, spores, bloodbursters and whatever, is that the xenomorph has been the focus of the story for far too long. Suddenly they're trying to go "Uhh actually this part before the xeno is actually 80% of the story and xenos are just the ground force of this big political undertaking that-".

Either do an all-out series exploring what led to the xenos, ie. black goo or whatever, or shut the fuck up and keep just doing "xenos fucking up shit" with a few variants. At this point I'd rather see more gameplay-oriented xeno development like brutes, rammers and all that, than novel-tier made-up semi-canon bullshit about how they came to be.

Should have just killed the series after Alien 3 and let it RIP.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

iirc, Ridley Scott's always maintained that the theatrical cut is his definitive cut, only doing that shitty 'Director's Cut' to get the studio to stop pestering him to do a new cut of the film so that they could advertise it as a new extra for a home media re-release.

 

[Adamska]

I think the general issue with black goo, spores, bloodbursters and whatever, is that the xenomorph has been the focus of the story for far too long. Suddenly they're trying to go "Uhh actually this part before the xeno is actually 80% of the story and xenos are just the ground force of this big political undertaking that-

It's because it's a clunky and forced retcon that comes out of nowhere. If the movies it came from were better made or written, then maybe it could have been accepted.

But the shit it crawled out of was the divisive Prometheus, and the fuckawful Covenant.

That more than anything else is why the goo is disliked. That and by trying to hyperfixate on these guys' origins, you're killing the mystique and the background. Like, it's a lot lamer now to "know" that the Jockey from the 1st ship wasn't some bioorganic grown pilot to relay things to the stars. Nor is it a weird alien creature that is only vaguely human now. It's just the shitty bio armor of a muscly blue man.

That's fucking lame and gay. Especially if you read the decades of comics that fucking came out before that wet fart of a retcon shift.

 

[Cnut]

iirc, Ridley Scott's always maintained that the theatrical cut is his definitive cut, only doing that shitty 'Director's Cut' to get the studio to stop pestering him to do a new cut of the film so that they could advertise it as a new extra for a home media re-release.

Well it was released theatrically and I believe I saw it Halloween 2003 at some multiplex off the interstate. At the time I didn't even consider the reasons for Fox to make the cut, just something fun. And it was a perfect time on Halloween since that version kind of accelerates more. Also being 2003 it was on film, unlike rereleases or repertory showings these days. (I wish I paid closer attention to how good/bad the film presentation looked.) I've seen Scott's introduction on the Blu-ray where he says it was totally crass but it's still an interesting experiment in editing. Plus some anomalous sfx were fixed like stars going in the wrong direction, and it got the deleted scenes professionally restored which is cool. Not sure what the workflow was since the DC on 4k doesn't have the stars fixed.. it might have been finished in 2k and printed to film. Ok that's my Alien Director's Cut story.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

Here's what I was thinking of:

Upon viewing the proposed expanded version of the film, I felt that the cut was simply too long and the pacing completely thrown off. After all, I cut those scenes out for a reason back in 1979. However, in the interest of giving the fans a new experience with Alien, I figured there had to be an appropriate middle ground. I chose to go in and recut that proposed long version into a more streamlined and polished alternate version of the film. For marketing purposes, this version is being called "The Director's Cut."

It's apparently out of the booklet that comes with the Alien Quadrilogy DVD Boxset, which the 'director's cut' was made for. The theatrical release for of the director's cut was supposedly pretty much an advertisement for that boxset, which was released a month later.

 

[Adamska]

Like in 99.999% of cases its gonna be a ridiculously cheaper, quicker, more effective, and more logistically easy to just send a bunch of guys with guns to take out a target rather than sending some uncontrollable gibbering penis monster and its team of tard wranglers to slowly pick the target off one by one assuming everything goes exactly according to plan, and should things fuck up it then turns into a massive fucking PR and cleanup nightmare at best and at worst results in shit going apocalyptic and thus any and all profit ever made ever going up in smoke along with society.

Going to continue this one here, since this is a better field to talk about it without shitting up the Star Wars thread with anything but Star Wars.

In the first movie it is entirely due to the company and the haulers not knowing about what it is. It also is only guessed at by the last three survivors at that point that Wey-Yu wants these things for their bioweapons research division. They do not know this as a fact and are guessing, and Ash is damaged and insane by that point and doesn't clarify.

That's why it could also be wrong; for all we know they might have realized this early on if they got the lifeform and data coordinates to find the ship, and made farms for them on sites for their silicon based shells for hazmat suits due to it resisting their molecular acid blood. Or they farm them to use their polymer secretions for something like construction material for cheap housing for colonial projects or to become independent from oil based plastics. Or their acids for industrial purposes. It was a mildly risky probe that at worst would net them the loss of a freighter, and those can happen from time to time.

Burke is also explained by his corporate raider persona, as well as it being the case of a Junior department executive trying to go above corporate on a risky gamble. He was willing to sign off a few lives and due to his greed and because he wanted full credit, gave no precautions. He expected that the colony would be able to contain it, since they're tough folks and there's a lot of them. It didn't work, and the Marines were plan B, which failed due to the Aliens living in the reactor and forcing them to fight on shit terms.

And I've stated before Alien3 always came off to me like a gambit by corporate who is facing some issues at home due to Aliens and the fact they lost a colony; a rather expensive investment in an area needed to be firmed up due to resource extraction (the planetoid from Alien/Aliens is canonically on the way to an important mining and oiling planet). This is them trying to recoup anything from Burke going off handle. They also didn't commit as much as you think, since the planet was owned by them and basically nothing; they only splurged on Bishop's designer and a security team at most.

Also to quote @Ghostse on this, one of the several methods of usage would be to insert silently and just let them wreck shit on a world or installation unfamiliar with them, then using combat data you have on them, send security/mercs to geek them using methods you devise. Deniability. There's also more uses for them that existed in the comics; an entire arc was them processing their pheramones into a combat drug for soldiers for example.

There's actually a lot of potential reasons MegaCorp would want something like the Xeno; it's the fault of modern writing being lazy and stupid they don't explore that.

As for the Resident Evil one, it's literally not Umbrella's goal to make Tyrants. That was an attempt to justify costs internally, since the real reason was weirder; they were seeking immortality for the CEO and his chosen as the New Ubermensch through the research.

Jurassic World is just retarded in general, and the director behind it (who did Rogue One mind you) is pissy his dinosaur weapon is fucking stupid. It's one thing to find an organism with some combat potential and definitely other ones besides that as a MegaCorp with a lot of portfolios. It's another to justify the work for your true goal like Umbrella does.

World and its unfortunate sequels is just the idiot director wanting dinosaur fights with weapons and reeeing when people who don't just accept shit because of that slop tell him why it's dumb.

 

[Ghostse]

Also to quote @Ghostse on this, one of the several methods of usage would be to insert silently and just let them wreck shit on a world or installation unfamiliar with them, then using combat data you have on them, send security/mercs to geek them using methods you devise. Deniability.

StarCraft gave us the script with how the Confederacy wanted to use the Zerg: You orchestrate an invasion, and then when your forces show up, instead of being oppressors they are liberators.

Arcturus Mengsk: I'm saying the Zerg are a secret weapon developed by the Confederacy. I'm saying you were all subjects of a Confederate weapons test.
Just as they destroyed Korhal with nuclear weapons to establish dominance a generation ago, they would use the Zerg to put an end to their rivals. Only this time there'd be no outrage; who could suspect the aliens were their creation? No, they'd be lauded as heroes for coming in and destroying the Zerg.

To give an example:
Imagine if the Cold War US military had some weird human-eating alien organism and they air-dropped some face huggers into Cuba. They let the things run wild, and then when Operation Banana Stomp kicks off to rescue the survivors, the US looks like heroes as they rebuild Cuba and take over.

The only reason the that 18 Cool, Buff US Colonial Marines got rocked by the Xenos was because they weren't able to actually fight the xenos due to the hive being in the reactor.

Along with the other things you listed, there's a lot of plausible reasons why a Mega Corp would want some Xenomorphs. The issues past Alien 4 are that its increasingly retarded for people to try.

I'm also going to point out with Burke:
Burke had no idea the colony would be nuked from orbit.
His assumption was the colonists would get his samples and no one would be any the wiser. When the colony suddenly went dark, his assumption was the marines would take care of the threat and he'd still get his samples.
Upto this point, the expensive-ass colony equipment would still be intact. Even if everyone in the colony was dead, they can get more people.
When the bughunt went wrong, his next priority was to make DAMN sure to get off with the samples because he knew his finger prints were all over this, and if he wanted W-Y to protect him he was going to have bring them something worth paying off the survivors of 150-some people, and even if its just for acid blood a xenomorph would almost certainly do that.

Burke existed just be a 80s Corporate Raider stereotype, but when your motivation is "my personal gain. all other considerations secondary. everyone but me expendable." his actions make sense.
The issue is that because Burke was such a good character/villain and given an excellent performance with such positive fan reception even though he's scum, every other lazy ass writer tries to make a Burke Donut Steele and it doesn't work because they just slavishly follow the character's story beats with raised stakes without trying to make their character make sense.

Now some decades later, its some "black goop created by alien terrorists that also seeded human life too somehow" nonsense that I'm disappointed isn't a "alien nanomachines son" kind of meme. With several "totally not xenomorphs bro" creatures like that weird human looking xenomorph hybrid thing with the bloody leech face that is never once mentioned by name in the movie but all over the trailers and only kills one person before fucking off for the rest of prometheus. Just to be upstaged by a giant starfish that kills the alien terrorist.

Prometheus was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Zero tension and just a boring space roadtrip with some zombies in it. Not a single actual Xenomorph and the protomorphs were barely even in it. I refuse to believe it can call itself an alien movie.

Necroing, but Prometheus was all style and no substance. The tech designs were pretty cool, performances were good (characters were pretty bad, but the actors were good) but the story was just utter garbage.

Having the Engineers/Space Jockies be "big, pale, bald humans" is one of the dumbest, most retarded decisions I've ever seen on film. Its so fucking retarded it goes back and makes the whole sequence in Alien also retarded.

Regarding the retarded "black goo" scene, the theatrical version without the whole retarded ceremony I thought that the story was "Space Jesus" was on the alien planet, saw the other engineers were about genobomb humanity, and sacrificed himself to unleash xenomorphs to stop it. Which I still feel would be a better story and more inline with the retarded Religious shit Scott was trying and failing to cram in.

And regarding the Alien Lifecycle, in Alien/s I got the impression that the Xenomorph in Alien was.... if the queen of a bee hive dies, many times workers will eat royal jelly and turn themselves from infertile workers to fertile queens. And then there will be a civil war where all all but one queen is killed (sometimes the colony will split but usually its a death match). So I just figured if there had been more food on the Nostromo, the Alien's task would be find a nest, coat it in resin, then work on creating a Queen egg. Otherwise, since the crew was small, just creating some more eggs to wait until they were found by some victims with the right conditions.

 

[Adamska]

The issues past Alien 4 are that its increasingly retarded for people to try.

Yeah, there's a reason you have to have a cut off point in terms of the other media sources, since it just becomes comical. I mean for fuck's sake Humanity almost went extinct when they got on Earth and other key worlds.

Even the newer books are dumb as fuck, and actually tend to be more so since they also are dumb enough to play with the shitty black goo that Prometheus added to the nightmare. I think I can count something like three space stations, a couple of key plastic refineries, and several colonies post Prometheus.

It's fucking dumb, and they don't understand why the fuck it's so goddamn dumb.

 

[TheHarbinger]

In the first movie it is entirely due to the company and the haulers not knowing about what it is. It also is only guessed at by the last three survivors at that point that Wey-Yu wants these things for their bioweapons research division. They do not know this as a fact and are guessing, and Ash is damaged and insane by that point and doesn't clarify.

Weyland Yutani only knows that an alien signal has been detected by some probe. In the original cuts they had Ash wake up first from faking being in the pod to show that audience that he knew more than he let on to the crew. And a scene where the crew members explain to each other that Ash was brand new to the ship and the company put him on at the last second, no one knows why their previous science officer was replaced, and that Ash seems disinterested in women or flirting. So before their ship even sets out the company already planned to have them investigate the signal. A lot of that was removed to make the foreshadowing of Ash being complicit in the crews' deaths less obvious.

Why they sent space truckers instead of a science team or military is never explained in the film. Dan O'Bannon said that he wanted the monster to fight regular workers because he liked The Thing From Another World. And how being trapped in a confined area would make things claustrophobic for the viewer. And that scientists and soldiers wouldn't be easy victims for the monster. He wanted every day Americans to identify with the crew of the ship. Hence then being space truckers. The Predator series would mostly go the opposite way and have soldiers and fighters go against the monsters.

In the first film the company hasn't seen the aliens nor the ship. They just know that something is sending out what resembles a distress beacon, acoustic, and alien. So they send the closest ship possible to just lay claim to the area. It's Ash that pushes the mission into dangerous territory and begins killing the crew with help from the alien. Ash is obviously based on the Hal 9000. A robot who misinterprets the 'succeed at all costs' directive and starts killing the crew. There really is no reason for them to even interact with the ship or aliens at all. Just take video footage of the ship, send it to corporate, and let a science team handle things.

Burke is also explained by his corporate raider persona, as well as it being the case of a Junior department executive trying to go above corporate on a risky gamble. He was willing to sign off a few lives and due to his greed and because he wanted full credit, gave no precautions.

Burke is powerful enough to send an entire army to a useless rock with the most valuable terraforming equipment in existence. I hated how he was written as some 'low level executive' yet somehow was able to move trillions in advanced machinery and 160 colonists without any oversight for months on end. He should have been written as someone more powerful. I liked how in AvP they had the person driving the expedition as an actual accomplished and respected CEO and not some conniving pompous suit.

He expected that the colony would be able to contain it, since they're tough folks and there's a lot of them. It didn't work, and the Marines were plan B, which failed due to the Aliens living in the reactor and forcing them to fight on shit terms.

It's implied that the scientists at the colony took tons of risks and began running experiments on their own. And of course it backfired. They basically saw Burke taking risks for his own career gain and followed his example. And all of them end up getting killed by the aliens because of their extreme greed.

 

[Ghostse]

Burke is powerful enough to send an entire army to a useless rock with the most valuable terraforming equipment in existence. I hated how he was written as some 'low level executive' yet somehow was able to move trillions in advanced machinery and 160 colonists without any oversight for months on end. He should have been written as someone more powerful. I liked how in AvP they had the person driving the expedition as an actual accomplished and respected CEO and not some conniving pompous suit.

I never got the fact that Burke was powerful at all. He was just the mouthpiece for the power of the corporation: he's a low-level exec who sends a colony a mission to check out some coordinates and isn't challenged. You don't need the CEO to approve that. And its not even W-Y who authorizes the mission, the Colonial Marines pick it up when the colony goes dark and Burke likely volunteers to be the company's rep because its their expensive proprietary equipment, so he can cover his ass if needed.
And they hardly send an army, they send a single platoon.

I also never got the impression that LV-426 was specifically targeted. It seems like it was just a terraformable world and was just in the expansion zone in the 80 some years that Ripley was in hypersleep.

I actually thought it was incredibly dumb in AvP and Prometheus that they had a company head on these adventures with a fairly light entourage/security detail. Especially when he has one terminal illness or another.

 

[TheHarbinger]

I never got the fact that Burke was powerful at all.

He's able to send 160 people and enough logistics to colonize a moon essentially without anyone questioning him. He's definitely a major player. He's just not really developed well. In the original Aliens script he doesn't even exist. At some point they rewrote a good chunk of the movie and his character was introduced to accelerate the plot as quickly as possible. He's just there to keep the plot moving. Practically every other scene is him pushing something forward or interfering.

And they hardly send an army, they send a single platoon.

160 people and an ultra expensive and rare terraforming unit is rather signifnicant. Platoons are usually four or five squads so maybe 50 soldiers. The colony was fully operational with entire families living there. How many people can just order 100 employees and their families anywhere without oversight? The character is an executive with enough power pull strings to get Ripley off for allegedly killing her crew even.

I actually thought it was incredibly dumb in AvP and Prometheus that they had a company head on these adventures with a fairly light entourage/security detail. Especially when he has one terminal illness or another.

In AvP the Weyland CEO is on his deathbed so he wants one last adventure. In Prometheus he's on his deathbed as well and wants immediate access to alien technology to save him. It makes sense in AvP and it's a little forced in Prometheus. Almost all Alien and Predator movies have some 'fish out of water' character or secret alliance character that doesn't belong to the main group. Like the pencil pusher in Predator or the serial killer doctor in Predators, Ripley herself in Alien 3, and so on.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

He's able to send 160 people and enough logistics to colonize a moon essentially without anyone questioning him.

As I understand it, he didn't create the colony, he just sent them a memo to go check out the site once he learned of its existence from Ripley's testimony. I think there's a deleted scene with Newt's parents that makes this explicit.

 

[Adamska]

It's implied that the scientists at the colony took tons of risks and began running experiments on their own. And of course it backfired. They basically saw Burke taking risks for his own career gain and followed his example. And all of them end up getting killed by the aliens because of their extreme greed.

The movie tells you directly that they were trying to figure out how to save people who got facehugged after the team sent to the derelict came back with more got. They did that because Newt's dad by that point died as patient zero; the main scientists involved in the project were primarily medical doctors and a terraforming specialist, not xenobiologists or some more clandestine idea.

It's also why it's called the med lab/bay; it was primarily for the colonists who got injured; it wasn't a scientific lab, at least purely so. The only reason why those two specimens were alive was they got them off before they implanted the embryo. While you could argue they did that to try and make something out of it, it's iffy given how shit things got for them.

I also never got the impression that LV-426 was specifically targeted. It seems like it was just a terraformable world and was just in the expansion zone in the 80 some years that Ripley was in hypersleep.

You could argue that it was selected or marked of interest in 2121 by the same execs who got reports of that beacon and who were curious on what the hell happened to the Nostromo. But that would be a different group of people by the 2140s, who'd have been the guys who sent the first wave of colonists.

Acheron/LV-426 also does have the boon of firming up and rendering travel to the American Arm easier. Thedus from the first movie, and the Solomons listed in lore were mining worlds that were out in the sticks, and settlement is rather sparse in between it. It'd actually make good sense to set up a colony there.

And also there's the matter it's about the size of Ceres, just a bit bigger and barely large enough to be a spheroid; but it has near-earth gravity. That implies a highly dense planet that could be of value to the mining industry too.

160 people and an ultra expensive and rare terraforming unit is rather signifnicant.

Burke was a kid at the time the planet was first settled; he had nothing to do with that. The movie directly and bluntly tells you the colony was there for over 20 years with no issues.

Platoons are usually four or five squads so maybe 50 soldiers.

And Platoons in the USMC and in universe are made of two squads. It's partially to show just how much gear, firepower, and tech they have on hand to put down enemies. It was also an attempt to make it easier to respond to threats, since it allows you to have more units on rotation. It also means less paycheck and VA requirements.

He also didn't order for them. The ECA, the colonization authority who cofinanced the colony, was the one who did. He just sleazed his way on as the company rep, which is shown to be basic policy.

The colony was fully operational with entire families living there. How many people can just order 100 employees and their families anywhere without oversight?

Burke can't, he was eight years old at the time. Burke as a Jr. executive of an interplanetary megacorp however has more than enough authority to bluff his way into talking an overworked and lower than him on the totem pole frontier admin to look at a grid and let wildcatters, prospectors, have at it.

It's not hard to grok; it's essentially middle managers being cunts and hoping the peons don't catch them out, a common thing you still see in corporations.

The character is an executive with enough power pull strings to get Ripley off for allegedly killing her crew even.

"How many more hours do you want me to tell the same story?" ~ Lt. Ellen Ripley
"The flight records verify some of your details". ~ Van Leeuwin

Again, directly in the film. She was let go because they realized that she was at least believing in her story, and they did have some evidence that backs up that some of the basics did happen, even if they don't believe it's due to a monster. Also Ripley did not keep her cool and did not listen to Burke; she got pissed. She was also essentially fucked over by the board; they stripped her of her license and deemed her nuts, forcing her to take therapy.

 

[CervixHammer]

So the marketing for the TV show is starting. There was an "event activation" (semi-interactive advertisement installation) at SXSW over the weekend, and there's another one coming up in Las Vegas in May. AVPgalaxy report here/video version. The TL;DR is that you're visiting the crash site of the USCSS Maginot, a Weyland-Yutani ship with specimens on it that crashed in territory held by the Prodigy Corporation, which is trying to figure out wtf is going on. At some point, if you go in the Nostromo-looking hallway and punch "0426" into a keypad, you get to see what looks like a decades-old Playstation cutscene of an Alien dropping from the ceiling on the other side of the door, then getting cranky at it while red lights flash, then you get some souvenirs:

U R not E:

There are also some found footage style videos shot by the crashed ship's cat:

These were first released in a swag box sent to influencers and sci-fi/horror news sites (on the USB stick to the left of the cat collar):

AVPgalaxy article / video.
There was another vague teaser released about a month ago:

And one with actual footage from the show during the Oscars:

All of this supposedly happened two years before the Nostromo landed on LV-426 (and around the same time or just before the Nostromo left Earth for Thedus). If this wasn't the Fargo and Legion showrunner, I would probably file this alongside the AVP movies and Resurrection, but I'm willing to see how the goofy Peter Pan thing plays out. And maybe there will be some sick cover songs from Noah Hawley, Jeff Russo and whoever in the cast can sing in key, even a dance or rap battle between an artificial person and a xenomorph so even if it isn't good, it will be something to watch while absofuckinglutely wrecked on Arcturian Kush. (Obvious cover song guesses: "You Are My Lucky Star", "In The Year 2525")