Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Betsy Palmer not coming back as Mrs. Voorhees one last time.

True, especially just for a voice

 

[CervixHammer]

And here's the Badlands trailer:

 

[DapperShark]

And here's the Badlands trailer:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=43R9l7EkJwE

I just can't take that zoomer Predator seriously, he looks retarded.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I just can't take that zoomer Predator seriously, he looks retarded.

I keep reading it as some gag about Dave Lister turned into a Predator

 

[CervixHammer]

I just can't take that zoomer Predator seriously, he looks retarded.

If you like that, you're gonna love this:

That's right, Badlands is going to have a Groot or a Baby Yoda or whatever (supposedly its name is Bud) apparently, based on toy reveals. Or, as my immediate reaction went:

 

[Adamska]

I hate that thing even more than I hated the braindamaged predator dog whose sole purpose was to vomit up items that the characters needed for the plot to happen in the Shane Black movie, and I'm only just looking at it.

The person who made that should never be allowed to touch clay again. The person who okayed this idea needs to be skinned for a war trophy, since that was enemy action as far as I'm concerned.

 

[CervixHammer]

This is goofy as hell. It sounds like he's speaking Huttese (the glowing sword really isn't helping here.)

Uh, de wanna wonga? Oota goota, Solo. Ho ho ho.
Also, brighened up a screencap from the trailer: that looks like a cross between the Power Loader from Aliens and a Dreadnought from 40k.

I'm guessing the odds of a Xenomorph/XX121/whatever-the-fuck we're calling the Alien from Alien(s) these days showing up in Badlands are at about 99.9%. Especially considering this quote from an interview with a studio exec, re: "will we eventually see another AvP movie?":

It wouldn’t be in the way you think. That’s the thing. Not in the way that it will just be called Alien vs. Predator or anything like the original movies. If we do this, they’ll be organically created out of these two franchises that we’ve continued with characters that we fall in love with and those characters will combine…perhaps.

and Fede Alvarez talking about his idea for how to do an AvP:

“The way I would do it, most likely, if it could be done this way… It’s harder to keep secrets online… The best AVP will be the one that you don’t know is AVP until the other guy shows up. You think you’re watching a Predator movie, and then they land in some place and there are creatures, and fucking hell, it’s a Xenomorph. That would get me. ‘Fuck yeah!’ You’d go crazy. Or vice versa, you’re in an Alien movie, and then suddenly a mysterious creature is there, and you can hear that sound, and you see the cloak, and you go, ‘Is that a fucking Predator?’ And then turns out it is. That would be the way to do it, don’t you think? Once you put it in the title, it’s like, ‘Spoiler alert.’”

I'm getting the impression that the next AvP movie would be "Badlands 2" and perhaps also "Romulus 2". The main Predator character in "Badlands" is supposed to be a youth on his first hunt, so this is like a Predator coming-of-age story, and maybe AvP 3/"lets pretend those other movies didn't happen" AvP but not called AvP could involve Dek, Elle Fanning with a new lower-half, Andy and Rain vs a whole shitload of aliens (they haven't had a Queen in a while, and with modern special effects maybe they could do something more like the AvP comics and have the Queen fight like an absolute maniac).

Quality would greatly depend on whether or not that fucking little monkey shit Bud gets smeared into paste or chestbursts in Badlands.

 

[CervixHammer]

The first episode of Alien: Earth was shown at Comic-con (gaaaayyyyy), and somebody from AvPgalaxy wrote a quick review of it and the "interactive" silliness. Wouldn't mind having one of these prints, would mind having to go to Comic-Con to get one:

No real spoilers in the review (seems like it's mostly set-up with children transitioning into synthetic bodies while shit goes awry on the ship so that it can crash and make the rest of the season happen), but this will make redditors mad:

Speaking of the expanded universe… let’s get this out of the way. If you really care for the intricacies of the continuity and specifics of the Alien universe that you might find in Free League’s collated in the Alien RPG, you’re going to have problems with Alien: Earth. It’s clear right off the bat that corporations rule the world and at least in the first episode we’ve seen no mentions of governments like the United Americas or Three World Empire which were present (albeit in the background) of the first two Alien films.

Seems fine to me, none of the movies ever really implied nationality or governments mattered all that much. It was all The Company, with some bureaucracy. ICC quarantines and such, but W-Y could just "borrow" some marines and they never followed up on whether or not there were any consequences for "losing" them. (This is kind of where my gay headcanon/fanfic ideas for what happened after 3 would have been, had they made a fourth Alien movie instead of prequels. Because they definitely did not make an Alien movie set like 200 years later and release it in 1997. That would have been crazy.)

 

[BrunoMattei]

Seems fine to me, none of the movies ever really implied nationality or governments mattered all that much. It was all The Company, with some bureaucracy. ICC quarantines and such, but W-Y could just "borrow" some marines and they never followed up on whether or not there were any consequences for "losing" them. (This is kind of where my gay headcanon/fanfic ideas for what happened after 3 would have been, had they made a fourth Alien movie instead of prequels. Because they definitely did not make an Alien movie set like 200 years later and release it in 1997. That would have been crazy.)

The deep lore of the Alien universe -as written in a bible prepared for the original movie by production designer Rob Cobb- is that there was a galactic civil war among the planets and each one aligned itself with 1 major corporation. This idea was honored in Aliens where we see Weyland Yutani work with the Colonial Marines but James Cameron was kind of vague as to how exactly their relationship worked on the commentary.

 

[Adamska]

but W-Y could just "borrow" some marines and they never followed up on whether or not there were any consequences for "losing" them.

Yes and no. Colonial Authority and Weyland-Yutani had effectively equal shares on the colony, which was why the Marines were going to be sent out to investigate; they would've gone even without Burke telling them too. The corporate influence was having a corporate representative on site to assess damages and advise action based on company interest, though it isn't absolute on the field. Off the field and post operation it's likely more severe and in favor of the company since conduct can be assessed and scapegoats made, but that relationship felt about right to me.

I do think at least on some level you SHOULD have a reference or nod to the governments, as feckless as they are in that time period. But then I don't expect the director or Scott to give a rotten shit about this, since Scott already defiled the film in 2003 by ignoring the lighting specialist they got to intentionally make the film dark to drive tension. So I'm just assuming he doesn't give a shit and told the Director to do whatever.

Also the body dysmorphia was better handled in Ghost in the Shell. It probably was aped from that too.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I wonder if any of this gov stuff was in the ancient Flying Edge rpg

 

[Adamska]

I wonder if any of this gov stuff was in the ancient Flying Edge rpg

In Leading Edge, the Corporations have effectively if not complete control over space faring colonies due to their grip on jump drive technology, and propaganda over finding a new and freer life among the stars. They also have a powerful array of corporate mercenaries and private armies, often used to keep rebellious worlds in line and other corporations from using "pirates" and other scummy methods to rip the planet away.

The Colonial Marines in that setting were funded mainly by the nations as a counterweight in what seems to have been the Torrin Prime Civil War (unnamed, but the most logical flashpoint), which are not clarified mind you, and were upgraded into essentially the UN. Their goal is to limit inter-nation, inter-corporate, and colonial strife in general. The nations of earth still exist in some form, and they even clash with corporate authority, even if they can't really stop them any more.

Since Alien: Welcome to Earf still happens on Earf, nations would still matter since while defanged, they still exist, and since this shit happened before Alien, they'd have more power than they would if it was post Aliens; they'd actually still be able to fight on some degree the companies. This would be around less than a decade after they actually still tried to shut them down.

What I'm trying to say is that nope, it's still lore breaking. Not that Ridley Scott and the guy directing gives a shit about that.

 

[CervixHammer]

I wonder if any of this gov stuff was in the ancient Flying Edge rpg

There's no way I would have a pdf to pull up and-

Since Alien: Welcome to Earf still happens on Earf, nations would still matter since while defanged, they still exist, and since this shit happened before Alien, they'd have more power than they would if it was post Aliens; they'd actually still be able to fight on some degree the companies. This would be around less than a decade after they actually still tried to shut them down.

I could see some of that being part of a story in this part of the "Alien" timeline, although writing a show where Thailand's government is cucked into letting the Prodigy Corporation turn Bangkok into Prodigy City and filming it in Thailand probably wouldn't be a good idea. MU/TH/UR Grok tells me Myanmar is the neighboring country Thailand has the least-friendly relationship with right now, so sure. That could be a little background detail about a military or corporate security character, holding up a pulse rifle and telling somebody "these came in handy when we were putting down the Burmese Junta" or whatever.
But probably just government officials grumbling and bitching in a meeting while that one guy puts his bare feet up on the table and giggles like David Thewlis's character in The Big Lebowski. Or maybe there's room for one of those "good cop who gets in over his head" types that's in every season of Fargo, since there'd probably still be need for regular law enforcement to write parking tickets and deal with shit that's not "important" enough for the corporations to care about.
Come on, Hawley. Gimme one good solid "O jeez!" reaction to a Xenomorph. You know you want to. A "wat da heck?" is fine too.

 

[74164978231]

Seems fine to me, none of the movies ever really implied nationality or governments mattered all that much. It was all The Company, with some bureaucracy. ICC quarantines and such, but W-Y could just "borrow" some marines and they never followed up on whether or not there were any consequences for "losing" them. (This is kind of where my gay headcanon/fanfic ideas for what happened after 3 would have been, had they made a fourth Alien movie instead of prequels. Because they definitely did not make an Alien movie set like 200 years later and release it in 1997. That would have been crazy.)

Not being able to incorporate and flesh out the clear allusions to the government/political entities that have been clearly referenced throughout the movies and other media is just very shit modern writing.

Its corpos rule the world because WL being an evil megacorp is one of the things people know about Alien and Aliens. If these wherent inbred 50 iq bleach drinking writers they'd take "inspiration" from a period in human history when private corporations wielded significant power directing the affairs of multiple countries(planets) yet at the same time coexisted with governments doing the same. Aka the fucking east india companies ofthe 15-18th centuries.

 

[CervixHammer]

Also, if they're merging the Alien and Predator franchises, this shot from early in the Badlands trailer seems to imply a date rather than a version number. If it's 2178, a year before Aliens, Alien: Earth is taken into consideration (and Romulus has happened at this point too) Ripley's debriefing scene in Aliens starts drifting into (unintentional) dark comedy.

The lifeboat's flight recorder corroborates some elements of your account, in that, for reasons unknown, the Nostromo set down on LV-426, an unsurveyed planet at that time, that it resumed its course... and was subsequently set for self-destruct by you for reasons unknown.

The analysis team, which went over the lifeboat centimeter by centimeter, found no physical evidence of the creature you describe.

Are there any species like this hostile organism on LV-426?

No. It's a rock. No indigenous life.

And found something never recorded once... in over 300 surveyed worlds. "A creature that gestates inside a living human host." These are your words. "And has concentrated acid for blood."

Never mind that in the past 50-60 years, one of our ships crashed into Thailand and let a couple of them loose, along with four other species of face-raping aliens. Then we found the creature you blew out of the airlock and started cloning it, but it got loose and wiped out everybody on the space station, which later crashed into a ring around a planet one of our shithole colonies is located on. For centuries, another alien race has been visiting Earth to hunt our best fighters one-on-one for sport, and when our people win, they get abducted anyway. Last year, one of them showed up on a planet full of wild alien beasts where we had an all-synthetic operation going on and some other bullshit happened. But a creature that gestates inside a living human host and has acid for blood? You're clearly delusional, Ripley. Get to the infirmary!

Weyland-Yutani: Employer of the Year, all years. Please sit still and try to enjoy the bonus situation.

 

[Adamska]

If it's 2178, a year before Aliens, Alien: Earth is taken into consideration (and Romulus has happened at this point too) Ripley's debriefing scene in Aliens starts drifting into (unintentional) dark comedy.

I'm assuming it's a unit number for a 6000 model, or just gibberish that was spammed on a keyboard. If it's a shitty key jangle then they fucked up since the MU/TH/UR series in Aliens only went up to about 9000 or so by this time (the 9000 series being on the Colonial Marine ships, with 6000, 6500s, and 7000s being in commercial freighters), and doing a star date is stupid if it's hinting that this is before Aliens. Also if it's before Aliens, like right before, then the sleeved transhuman robot child soldiers that were cribbed from Eisenberg/The Major are illegal. Like blatantly illegal.

Also I have negative interest in forcing these two IPs to fuse. As in I'd just duck out after calling it non-canon garbage, since AvP, Predator, and Alien have different appeals to me and I don't want them to always be lumped together.

Never mind that in the past 50-60 years, one of our ships crashed into Thailand and let a couple of them loose, along with four other species of face-raping aliens. Then we found the creature you blew out of the airlock and started cloning it, but it got loose and wiped out everybody on the space station, which later crashed into a ring around a planet one of our shithole colonies is located on. For centuries, another alien race has been visiting Earth to hunt our best fighters one-on-one for sport, and when our people win, they get abducted anyway. Last year, one of them showed up on a planet full of wild alien beasts where we had an all-synthetic operation going on and some other bullshit happened. But a creature that gestates inside a living human host and has acid for blood? You're clearly delusional, Ripley. Get to the infirmary!

Yeah, there's a big reason why for all AvP can be interesting, I have no desire nor interest in making that a completely linked IP rather than the fucking wink and nod that the goddamn alien skull prop was supposed to be in Predator 2.

Also it's funny that we're already getting into why you can only have the Aliens do so much damage before it becomes absolutely retarded. An entire company lost all its assets trying to contain it, or was used by the company to kill it or whatever; I just know the city's going to be fucking nuked by the end of that TV show. Lost a tanker filled with petrochemicals and ore. Killed their CEO no matter the fucking continuity, either early on or on a star voyage. Destroyed TWO GODDAMN space stations AND A THIRD if you include the Five Nights at Freddy's style sequel to Isolation. Then you got the comics which has even more...

What I'm trying to say is that by making all of this shit take place in between these two movies, it's just an unfunny joke and a sign you have nothing to work with beyond what happened before you were even sperm.

 

[CervixHammer]

AvP, Predator, and Alien have different appeals to me and I don't want them to always be lumped together.

Yeah, but unfortunately it seems like they really want it to happen. Which - I don't mind if they did something like the original AvP comic and unproduced script where it's set in space in the future, not modern-day Earth (good on Badlands for that), but forcing a "cinematic universe" is unnecessary. There's no need to explain why Batman had nipples in one movie, was Christian Bale in 3 other movies, then he was Ben Affleck, then the guy from Twilight. Or for the American Godzilla "MonsterVerse" to exist. AvP could just be a self-contained thing with no connection, but they just can't help themselves from doing shit like having Lance Henriksen be the founder of the Weyland Corporation in the first movie and that awkward, forced-feeling line in the second that was just there to have the "...Miss Yutani." drop.

The guy who directed Prey, Killer of Killers and Badlands has some line he keeps using in interviews and Q&As about how he thinks an AvP movie should feel "elegant" and not just like smashing your toys together, but that's almost exactly what AvP should be. Screw canon, just throw some Aliens, Predators and Colonial Marines into an hour and a half of solid middle-brow action. Throw in some goofy shit like the old Kenner hybrid alien designs. It'd be fine as long as it stays out of the way of the core Alien and Predator movies on their own. (And how are aliens beating the shit out of each other "elegant" anyway?)

Although I think I can tolerate Alien(s) in my Predator more than Predator in my Alien(s), if they insist on smushing AvP into one of the two instead of being its own third thing.

But it would kill the tension if, while the latest Not Ripley is trying to sneak around the ship or space station, there's some invisible other-alien LARPing an FPS at the same time. Then it's not "oh how's she getting out of this?" it's "when's the Predator blasting that with his plasma gun or throwing the razorwire net on it?".

 

[74164978231]

The problem with any crossover is they keep making the same fucking movie. It's like Jurassic Park just the same shit over and over so you never advance anything, explore anything or flesh anything out.

It's just so baffling. I really think none of these people actually watched Alien or Aliens or Predator. They're making these movies based off imdb synopsis and trailers they've seen.

 

[regalterry]

Also it's funny that we're already getting into why you can only have the Aliens do so much damage before it becomes absolutely retarded. An entire company lost all its assets trying to contain it, or was used by the company to kill it or whatever; I just know the city's going to be fucking nuked by the end of that TV show. Lost a tanker filled with petrochemicals and ore. Killed their CEO no matter the fucking continuity, either early on or on a star voyage. Destroyed TWO GODDAMN space stations AND A THIRD if you include the Five Nights at Freddy's style sequel to Isolation. Then you got the comics which has even more...

I liked that novel taking place on the Iranian colony where the xenomorph threat is well-understood by the specialist marine unit they send in, to the point the bugs are being actively hunted and corralled with ease.

That's a far more likely outcome than the same organization REPEATEDLY failing to contain a somewhat crafty animal.

The actual threat the xenomorphs pose is that they are an unknown - once humans understand how they work and what makes them tick, they're just another animal to hunt down and subdue.

Just imagine the various space governments releasing a PSA explaining that there's a parasitic critter with acid for blood, and that any crew or civilian encountering signs of it should just call their nearest government representative so an extermination squad could be sent in to wipe out the hive.

Not that any justification for actually trying to study them to such an extent ever made much fucking sense. Romulus was just another in a long list of lame explanations as to why they keep rehashing the same "W-Y + xeno" combo.

 

[CervixHammer]

Oof. I hope this lady has an actual name, because I can't hear or read "Ms. Yutani" without thinking of that clunker of a line at the end of AvP:R that came off like a teenager with no real life experience trying to write a WHAM! Isn't that CRAZY?!? line.