Quote from: Highland on Aug 20, 2021, 12:13:37 AM
Quote from: TC on Aug 19, 2021, 01:39:20 PM
Quote from: Highland on Aug 19, 2021, 12:56:29 PM
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If I was asked to reboot the original films (conveniently ignoring Resurrection), my way of making Alien 3 an "installment in a bigger picture" would be to make it the 2nd film, then cap the trilogy off with Aliens.
George Lucas had the right idea with the OT Star Wars films: Act 1 A New Hope, Act 2 Empire, Act 3 Return of the Jedi. The 2nd act is always the darkest one.
TC
This is exactly what I was about to write. Aliens is the last film. That's when she wipes out the Planet, Queen and all and essentially gets a new family. That's a win.
Also the "other Ripley" part was more about in the past , not now. She wouldn't fit into a movie now.
Alien3 was a last ditch job with an average script saved only by the people involved, the soundtrack and made multiple times better by the passing of time.
Well, there is a movie that is no longer
"Ripley vs. Alien" with the bad guy winning at the end. It's like
Revenge of the Sith from Alien.
Now Going back to the original series, it could be said that we have the optimistic happy ending and the depressive happy ending with
ALIENS and
ALIEN³ respectively. In Cameron's movie, Ripley destroyed the Aliens and won a family. It will sound controversial, I know, but maybe that should have been the end of Ripley. Then they could have explored other things, like the Space Jockey, maybe another Derelict, and a story with new characters.
But yes, probably back then, for FOX an Alien movie without Ripley would be like Return of the Jedi without Luke or something. And so came the Fincher movie, with all the problems of its development as the true closing of Ripley's arc, a darker and more depressing one as you have already pointed out.
Maybe Ridley Scott was unsuccessful, but he was the only one who tried to do something different. Although I wonder if Shaw and Daniels were attempts to create a new Ripely, but for better or worse the prequels ended up being the arc of a villain rather than a hero. It's like having Ash as the lead in the original movies
and that's without mentioning the controversial direction that the director took with the concepts that years ago seemed more striking; the Space Jockeys and the supposed origin of the Alien.
I still think you can have a good Alien movie if you go back to basics, without Ripley of course. New characters, Giger's Alien (seriously, we've already seen so many variants and abominations, that I think it's time to go back to the beautiful original design
), the tension and the grity setting of the two first flicks. Not LV-426 offcourse, but something that trully looks otherworldly, weird, ghostly, or uncanny.