The military scientists in 4 were awfully sure that LV246 had no living aliens, and no clonable alien DNA.
I hate this idea. ‘We can save the franchise by making the movies about some other new monster!’.
If you’re making a movie about a new monster, what do you need the aliens for?
Why? Because the best part about the original Alien — and of the original Freddy Krueger, the original Michael Myers, the original Darth Vader — was that we knew nothing of them. You had to subscribe to Phantasmagoria just to see a full-body photo of it.
The genie’s out of the bottle now for the original Alien. We know too damned much about it. You can get collectors cups with the Alien on it. You can buy Alien action figures. Grandmothers in the street can recognize it. It’s been turned into a slasher monster — it just needs the red and green sweater.
If they wanna get back to the roots of the thing, they gotta bring back the mystery, and there ain’t none left in the Alien itself — unless they branch out, in my opinion, into a larger mystery.
If Ridley Scott said in his commentary that he imagined them as shock troops, then in four movies why haven’t we explored the question “shock troops for whom, and against what?” That’s a good mystery to follow up on — except when Aliens 2 came out and followed the dunderheaded idea that “if one alien is scary, then 100 aliens is 100 times as scary! Yay!”
I didn’t like what Aliens 2 did to the series, frankly. It was a good movie in its own right, but not the same flavor at all.
Again, if you want to make a movie about a new species, what do you need the Aliens for?
If there is no mystery or fear left in the Aliens, why continue with the series instead of just making an unrelated movie?
Pffft, it’s never stopped Hollywood before. If they wanted to make money off the franchise name, and they paid me, I’d go back to the “shock troops” idea and see where it took me. At least that’s from the source movie.
I’m not advising or encouraging an Alien V, mind you.
But also — as I said — I think the franchise went the wrong direction starting with II, so I wouldn’ta voluntarily made any of the sequels, with those concepts.
And we could call these new alien beings “Predators,” and we could have them fight – vs each other, if you will. It’s a can’t miss concept and I believe it will breathe new life into the franchise!
Ok, in all seriousness, I think that Alien and Aliens played out the concept. There’s only so much you can do with slavering monsters who kill everything and incubate their young in their prey, and the first two movies pretty much covered it. It’s why at best Alien 3 and 4 can be seen as trying to recapture some of the magic of the original 2, and why there’s no way to do a part 5 without it being reduntant on arrival, or not about the Aliens and therefore not really part of the series.
I never saw AVP. It never happened, either. 
But the point is, AVP was a stupid crossover idea bound to fail, and which bit heavily into the backstory of what might have been the most interesting unexplored mystery remaining about the Aliens. Now there can be no movie about it, because of AVP. The comparisons are inevitable. Sad, really, since the original movie was fantastic.
The idea of AVP came from Dark Horse. They owned comic rights to A and P, so they did a crossover. I have the comic miniseries, which bears almost no resemblance to the movie. Since Predator 2 was largely an adaptation of a Dark Horse miniseries, I don’t know why they didn’t use more of the AVP miniseries as basis for the film.
Disclaimer- I haven’t seen the AVP movie. I’ve read reviews and threads.
No spoilers.
The comic series is set on a planet with a fairly new human colony. The planet doesn’t hold any nasty surprises. The only notable fauna is rhinth, basically alien cows. However, the Predators occasionally seed an area with Alien eggs in order to hunt. There is no hidden pyramid/temple.
Well, except for the primary human character. Possibly they didn’t go for the offworld colony idea because building some loopy pyramid set was cheaper.
The colony in question is located on a planet which is mostly desert. The American Southwest has plenty of land that could have been shot on. Building exteriors could be slightly modified prefab units.
Yeah, but alien cows? Hundreds of colonists? That stuff ain’t cheap.
I always thought it would be a lovely idea if you had an “Aliens”-type movie in which humans were the violent, feral predators, perhaps preying on some race of small, peaceful furry things on a forest moon somewhere. Doublepluspoints if somene can work Charleton Heston into it alternately screaming, “Get your paws off of me, you damned dirty Ewok,” and “Soylent Green…it’s people!” while running away from half-human/half-cyborg zombies that are the product of combining the DNA of humans, insects, and Aliens in 1/3 portions each. Think of it as the mother of all overused sci-fi clichés. Oh, we also need to throw in a couple of cute robots and a black hole. Vin Diesel can star. Maybe we can base it (in name only) on the title of a Philip K. Dick novel; I don’t think anyone has ripped off The Divine Invasion, have they?
Stranger
Pretty much. Alien was scary because you had no idea what the heck this thing was. All you knew was that it was mean and the crew of the Nostromo were stuck with it.
Aliens continued the story and made it an unending hoard of aliens instead of just one lurking about. Kind of like kicking over a hive of wasps except the wasps are nine feet tall and pissed.
There was no point to Alien3. Ok so Ripley sacrifices herself to kill the last alien. Big deal. It was just a rehash of the first movie except the alien was faster and the characters fairly anonymous. Basically it was two hours of dudes with shaved heads getting ripped apart.
Alien4 had even less point as the story had concluded. Just another excuse for an alien to run around a gigantic yet claustrophobic ship killing humans.
AVP also added nothing except providing a convienient arena for yet another spectacle of aliens (and Predators) killing humans. Other than giving us the orgins of the Wayland-Yutani corporation, it did little to add to the story of aliens or predators.
I mean what more is there to tell? A movie is a story about people. Aliens, Predators, slasher-monsters, robots, etc, as cool as they look, are just there to provide conflict. You can’t tell a story about them. And that’s what another Alien would be. Two more hours of figering out various grotesque ways to kill someone with a nine foot bug.
In order to make Aliens 5, wouldn’t they need to make an Aliens 3 and Aliens 4? Or is this some sort of silly out-of-order numbering like Naked Gun 33 1/3? 
And certainly Sigourney Weaver is aging, and she’s not as incredibly babelicious as she was back in the 80s. She’s still hotter than most of the manufactured fluff-pop icons of today. Among all the things which should be an obstacle to another Alien movie, that isn’t one of them.
Sigourney Weaver’s looks should have nothing to do with it. It’s not a sexy role. Besides the underwear shots late in the first movie, I can’t think of a single other scene in the whole franchise where I noticed her attractiveness.
The biggest obstacle is HER CHARACTER IS DEAD. That ridiculousness where they cloned her to get an alien out of her is one of the stupidest things in any movie, ever. If I get killed by someone shoving an armadillo through my chest, my clone will not have an armadillo in its chest too.
Yeah, you can wave it away with some bullshit about the alien inserting its DNA into hers after she got “impregnated” or some such crap, but it’s still stupid. It was a bad plot device, and there are a probably a dozen better ways to get a Ripley clone into the picture, even one with “super Alien powers” if that’s what you want. How about if they clone her simply because they know she defeated these things before, and need her as an emergency contingency plan? And they enhance her, so she can battle the bugs even more effectively, possibly even with alien DNA. They intend to keep her in her vat until they need her, but she is woken accidentally too early (to get her in the plot before the aliens escape).
The alien lifecycle as portrayed in the movies generally seem plausible to me, except for whatever made Ripley’s clone have an alien in her too.
CGI the rhinth. Hundreds of colonists who don’t have lines or do anything important are just extras.
That’s waaaay too expensive for a multi-million dollar sequel to a franchise pushing close to a half a billion (or so) in earnings. It’d be cheaper just to put hamsters in rubber suits. 
Hmmm. My having reservations about Weaver looking middle-aged has nothing to do with her ability to give me a boner. It’s because Ripley is now an alien-human hybrid with the strength of ten men. Had someone not comitted the insane crimes against the franchise necessary to leave the Ripley arc in this absurd predicament, the fully human Ripley (say Alien^3 ended differently) could very easily have been played wonderfully and compellingly by Weaver. Ripley as a tough middle-aged broad on a mission to wipe out the Alien hoards would have been brillaint. The realities of her age could have been incorporated into the character with great effect. But now Ripley’s a superhuman action figure. A bizarro cloned lifeform who can take a dumbell to the face and whoop any space pirate alive. Crows-feet and incipient jowls are not going to enhance the audience’s already strained ability to suspend disbelief yet again.
I think it’s time for the aliens to rain down on earth.
Alien 5 - Alien Infestation!
The Orkin man sure would be busy.
And to come back to my partisan side of the issue…
Yes, it’s played out. And it has been for a while. That’s why it’s necessary to turn it on its head if you want to extend the franchise. Show some more dimensions to the aliens. At this point we still know little about the aliens, their culture (if any), the culture that made them (if any still exists), etc.
Use that to build the structure of a new movie around. There’s loads of potential there.
For those saying ‘the best thing was the spookiness’ and such let me say this: That’s been done! There’s little point in a sequel that recycles the old. I heard this argument when Aliens came out…that it was just Rambo in space and had none of the ‘haunted house’ stuff that made the first one work. That’s true. Which makes it a better movie than a sequel that fed the same thing back would have been.
Nor are they very tasty, precious.