Quote from: Janek on Jun 27, 2024, 02:53:58 PMOn another note do you guys think that Alien: R is canon or is it just one of possible futures for Ripley? Perhaps she stays dead and of course there is no need to make a movie about that. Maybe Alien: R is a "What if Ripley is brought back" scenario.
Depends how we define canon. If its any event that occurred in the theatrical releases of the movie, then it stays canon unless something occurs in a movie after the events of A3 that severely contradicts what could have led to AR.
Being it's so far in the future, the only thing I can think of would be a story that shows the aliens spreading so far and wide that there would be no practical need to attempt cloning Ripley 200 years in the future.
My definition of canon is which events the studio would see as inviolable by a future director or writer. That is because the only value I see of canon is its use in predicting what events cannot be contradicted. According to Alex White, not very much, and they basically couldn't contradict the events of A1 and A2. Even then, it's likely only the major events of those movies count, as the vast majority of audiences are not going to realize if something contradicts a detail like the exact size of a blast radius in relation to the distance of a derelict spacecraft, for example.
Oddly enough, the black goo, an alternative blueprint for the alien as opposed to DNA, sort of supports AR. If the alien blueprint is a radically advanced artificial intelligence, practically the same as the black goo, or the black goo was made from it. In that way, the facehugger isn't laying an egg in the host but rather only needs to get a pinch of its DNA into the host, and the host body grows the alien on its own. Then it makes sense that it reacted to an attempt to clone a host by "xenomorphing" the result, like what happened to Fifield happening to the cloned Ripley fetuses.
If I were writing it, and it absolutely had to take place in the AR timeline, and I needed a source for the aliens, I'd have an android on another station attempt an alternative plan to cloning Ripley and simply inject a human, who shared her blood type, with a micro-dose of her blood, and that person would become pregnant with a non-defective alien queen. I'm imagining the voice of David saying, "Often, the simplest solution is the right answer." That or another Juggernaut ship was recently found crashed somewhere else to take that simplicity further.
As I said before, I really don't see producers restricting a writer or director to treating the events of AR as inviolable, especially as it was poorly received. There is a good chance its existence will be largely ignored, even if not outright contradicted. The movie did have some good moments and had the non-landing humor and silliness like bullet ricochet bouncing been removed, it would have been much more enjoyable.
My take on the franchise is Alien was like a haunted house, Aliens was like a rollercoaster, Alien3 was like a funeral, and Alien Resurrection was like a fever-dream.
