For various reasons, I've long settled on choosing to view the complete onscreen storyline of 'Ripley' as consisting of the ALIEN and ALIENS movies only...and prefer to imagine that the ALIEN 3 and ALIEN RESURRECTION efforts merely represent a couple of 'bad dreams' she endures on her safe hypersleep homewards.
And I've also decided that the only way for the rest of of the 'franchise' to continue to be watchable in any way is to equally distance those entries from the original ALIEN/ALIENS combination, too...whether it be the likes of AvP or PROMETHEUS...and to look on them as mere 'what if?'- type, 'fan-fiction' scenarios using some of the original source elements and characters.
Although I thought it was a disappointing plot device to begin with, I could have accepted the 'Humans made by Superhumans' premise that Ridley chose to tell with his PROMETHEUS movie...but the ongoing storyline was completely messed - up from the start for me, due to his insistance on totally 're-imagining' one of the best scenes in his original classic.
Sir Ridley is an amazing visualist for sure, but I point blank refuse to look on PROMETHEUS and ALIEN COVENANT as any sort of 'official canon' in my own idealised ALIEN mythos,
The plain fact is that the 'Spacejockey' scene was always one of the most unsettling, and mysteriously-'alien' moments of the original movie for me...and to see it's atmospheric 'Giger-esque' quality diluted in the manner that Ridley chose to go down, was completely ill-judged from the start as far as I'm concerned,
Deciding to turn the 'Spacejockey' into a 'spacesuited humanoid' MIGHT have worked...if it wasn't so bleeding obvious that it was MEANT to be the SKELETAL remnants of some 'otherworldly creature' to begin with! I will never be able to reconcile Ridley's PROMETHEUS storyline as anything more than an 'alternate take' on the source material due to this.
And It's not the mere fact that the 'Spacejockey' is described as 'fossilized' that makes the point.,,it;s the fact that Dallas then states "Bones have bent outward, like he exploded from inside" - that's 'BONES' Ridley. And we then see an extreme close-up of what certainly looks like old bones, rather than some sort of 'calcified', occified spacesuit', And to cap things off, the 'skull;s mouth - area has what looks like actual TEETH in the moody close - up of it, moments before it goes to shadow.
It's a freakin' monstrous SKELETON Ridley!!!...pure and simple.
So yeah, I'll get more out of David's misadventures by looking on his whole storyline as being totally unrelated to the ALIEN movie in the first place, and look forward to what this 're-imagining' brings...
But I certainly WON'T be looking on Ridley's latest additions to the 'franchise' as anything more than yet another 'Expanded Universe' kind of 'Fan Fic' version of the 'Xenomorphs'.