Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Apr 10, 2015, 07:11:45 AMI know that this is all just fiction but the series carried itself in a very serious fashion. Alien is often applauded because of its realism, the way the characters felt like genuine people, how a big deal wasn't made of all the fantastic technology, etc. It was grounded in realism. Every film had an impact, something that effected that made-up reality.
Particularly this. People keep bringing up
Godzilla or superhero and horror film series that have done retcons, but tonally they come across as totally different to the
Alien series. They're just a different kettle of fish. No one talks about the serious continuity of
Halloween. No one cares about the over-arching story of
Godzilla, after the first couple it's just about big monsters smashing stuff up (which applies equally to the retcon series). Superhero stories are notorious for arbitrarily undoing things like death (a reason I generally dislike the genre - if characters just come back all the time, what threat does death pose?)
Alien is different to those franchises. The films, despite being sci-fi, are grounded in a very serious reality and form a continuous story, half of which they're apparently now saying, "Nah, didn't happen." I just don't personally think an alternate-history retcon fits into the
Alien franchise in an intelligent way. It really does come off as cheap fanfic stuff. I mean, they could
so easily just ignore the current films and go somewhere else in an unobtrusive way, and make a great film. So why go down the route of just writing off stuff when it cheapens everything?