Should there be an Alien-Predator Multiverse?

[Samhain13]

I don't think you know what you've unleashed.

They unleashed the Canon Wars once again. Its inevitable. A force of nature bound to reappear.

[Oasis Nadrama]

Should there be an Alien-Predator Multiverse?


There shouldn't. In my opinion the Alien and Predator materials do not fit together at all.

Some writers did amazing work to write good Alien VS Predator stories. But in my opinion, all of these efforts were working against a fundamental incompatibility.

Predator is a straight action/horror flick featuring some random alien hunter in a jungle. Quite good. Well-written, masterfully directed. Very brutal. But it's just that. There's virtually nothing to distinguish the McTiernan movie from, let's say, the older Without Warning. And the sequels are... Well, Predator 2 was nice, yeah. Nice, just that. It's basically the same thing in a big city. I'll be happy to ignore the following... movies?

Alien is on another level entirely. It's the unique reunion of various very talented and unique artists, creating a masterpiece. They came from vastly different backgrounds, there's not the kind of staff Hollywood usually assembles. Giger particularly had never worked on a real movie before, and almost never worked on real movies afterwards, at least not with this level of implication. Moebius rarely worked on movies, too. Ron Cobb was used to work with Hollywood, but was a very particular artist nonetheless. Etc. And it was one of the only horror movies with Shakespearian direction, and Scott's first feature film. In many respects the very genesis of Alien is already an unique alchemy, explaining its audacity. It's just so original and powerful it cannot adequately be expressed with word.
AlienS and Alien 3 are exceptionally good movies, too. We're used to people shitting on Alien 3 in the fandom, but it's worth more than a thousand Predators or The Predators, it's even worth a lot more than f**king Predator 2.
Even Alien Resurrection is nice in some respects, and Prometheus has very interesting ideas (but I understand other people may disagree, it is certainly very badly written  ).
These movies do not merely feature an alien hunter with no real specificities, they feature a complex alien lifeform with an elaborated, dangerous and evocative life cycle, and the best creature design movie history has ever seen, surrounded with powerful mythology (the Space Jockey, the Derelict, the Weyland-Yutani, the androids with milky blood, the Queen, the prison planet...). They evoke powerful thematics, political ones as well as existential ones.

That's just not the same thing. When people work on an Alien-Predator Multiverse, they try to attach Citizen Kane to Transformers.

[TurokSwe]

Yes, they're talking about you.

Yes, we all know, no need to repeat. ^^

I don't think you know what you've unleashed.

They unleashed the Canon Wars once again. Its inevitable. A force of nature bound to reappear.

You bet!

[SiL]

Yes, they're talking about you.

Yes, we all know, no need to repeat. ^^

You seemed desperate for the validation when you posted the same thing twice, I just wanted to help.

[Xenomrph]

Predator is a straight action/horror flick featuring some random alien hunter in a jungle.

There's a lot more to Predator than many people give it credit for. It's a deconstruction of 80s action movies and over-the-top macho masculinity. It starts like a typical 80s action movie, with one-liners, bravado, and ultraviolence against a ton of random "bad guys", but then the tone shifts once the characters start getting picked off one by one and all of their 80s action tropes are utterly ineffective. I mean by the end, the muscle-bound protagonist barely survives getting his ass kicked by a monster with a vagina for a mouth.

What I'm getting at here is while you're right that Alien and Predator are massively tonally/topically different, acting like 'Predator' is inherently inferior and unworthy of the Alien "pedigree" is to do Predator a massive disservice, especially when many people would argue that the Predator series ultimately has a better track record than the Alien series does.

[The Old One]

Should there be an Alien-Predator Multiverse?


There shouldn't. In my opinion the Alien and Predator materials do not fit together at all.

Big this, one of my favourite posts from Reddit;

Spoiler

@You've got to give AvP credit...

TheVetSarge •    
I mean, I guess. We've gotten 6 bad movies out of it.

Maybe we should be blaming Alien versus Predator for commoditizing the franchise even more.

Because, think of it this way. We had 3 good Alien movies and one bad one. One good Predator movie, and one decent one.

Now we have 3 bad Alien movies and the same 3 good ones. Now we have 1 terrible Predator movie, one mediocre remake, one decent one, and one good one. And two terrible Alien versus Predator movies. What have we really gained? I have not re-watched any of the films we've gotten since AvP in 2004, aside from Prometheus, just to see if I still disliked it (I did).

Then we've gotten a bunch of mediocre comic books, half of which are silly Alien versus Predator versus Prometheus crossovers, and some really bad novels (though I've heard promising things about The Cold Forge). I mean really bad novels. Like Ripley being woken up from hypersleep and Ash having taken over the AI of the Narcissus shuttle bad. Or Empath Ripley-Descendant bad. Or Marines being stationed at Hadley's Hope despite nobody in the second film mentioning them bad. Or anthology stories about Dietrich and Frost getting drunk and fighting monsters bad. Or Hicks having a wife who was killed by aliens bad.

Maybe I was just happy with the license getting a handful of decent games every decade, and the Dark Horse comics were running out of ideas by 1999 anyway.

Edit: I should be fair to Dead Orbit by Dark Horse Comics. That one was pretty good.

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[Xenomrph]

Whole lotta interesting opinions in that reddit post, can't say I agree with many of them.

[Local Trouble]

Alien should've never been polluted with Predator in the first place.

[The Old One]

Spoiler

TheVetSarge • 
What saves AvP, and by "saving it" I mean that in the loosest definitions of the term, is that I just don't care that it is awful. Alien vs Predator has never been a serious license. It has one good story from like 25 years ago. The rest of AvP was just an excuse to make Multiplayer Deathmatch video games and that one amusing side-scroller from the 90s. Aside from that first story on Ryushi, the rest of the comic books are pretty bad. Mostly because nothing that happens really makes any sense in them, and in no small part because the Noguchi character looks ridiculous trying to bounce around in her S&M LadyPredator costume chopping up aliens and predators by hand.

So when the AvP movie sucks, you shrug and say "They really should have just made a movie version of that first comic book story."

Alien Resurrection tainted everything about the Alien continuity, and it sucks. I really don't even get how it can be that bad with that kind of cast. It's why you don't pair Joss Whedon with a French art film director. I have actually enjoyed other Jeunet films. The style and that script don't work with the subject matter... at all.

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Spoiler

Eh, the Machiko story was fine if it had ended at the close of the first series. Her "arc" among the Predators was patently ridiculous.

Her getting respect from a dying Predator for her bravery: cool idea, great imagery.

The Predators coming back to invite her to go hunting replete with a lady-sized high tech S&M outfit which she can apparently use to such proficiency that she outfights some other Predators in hand to hand combat: lol

And it all stemmed from a shitty novel by David Bischoff.

No thanks. The Machiko Noguchi story begins and ends on Ryushi. Everything else is the Alien: Resurrection of the comics series. Kinda cool to look at, but better off forgotten. And that's not a bad thing. Sometimes the best stories are short and self-contained, without any need to be ruined by sequels. The Matrix. Stranger Things.

Sometimes you're Aliens. Sometimes you're Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles or Son of the Mask.

To be fair, I blame the Perrys. The "back story" to the Predators from their novels is the worst shit ever written in science fiction, and all of Noguchi's subsequent adventures are based on that nonsense. It was the Alien: Covenant of the Predator Franchise. Ruining the Predators with a ludicrous back story about an entire spacefaring culture built around trophy hunting, lol. Right.

The Predators were 1,000 times cooler when they were just this mysterious outer space dudes who like to hunt dangerous and sentient alien species for fun. What if the Predators from the films were just their species' equivalent of that dentist from Minnesota who shot Cecil the Lion?

The Predators were so much cooler as Asshole Space Dentists on Safari than anything that ever used the word yautja.

Shit, I feel dirty just typing that word.

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Spoiler

   
I guess I'm again in the minority, but I thought Zula Hendricks was a terrible protagonist, and thought Defiance was painfully mediocre. Not a lot of faith in the recent Fox-directed continuity. It's mostly trash, other than Dead Orbit and The Cold Forge, from a story perspective.
Hear me out.

Defiance felt like the story revolved around a concept for a character and situation, rather than an idea for a narrative. It couldn't seem to figure out what it wanted to do, other than perpetuate that concept, and used that to drive the story. For example, the protagonist. I mean, aside from the fairly silly notion that the USCM would send a near-invalid that requires regularly scheduled regenerative therapy on any kind of space mission where physically strenuous activity like EVA would be expected, that is. The problem is that the story can't keep up a consistent frame for that, using her disability as a plot device. She wakes up complaining she can barely move, then outfights entire squads of Marines and killer synthetic combat troops. The Marines and the VA have gone to great care and expense to put her back together, but then Major Asshole shows up to tell her how she's a worthless piece of shit for getting wounded... on a mission they sent her on. It's like the USCM just exists to be this mustachioed villain in the background to oppress our protagonist, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. Meanwhile, the VA is actually well-funded and competent, so hey, hooray for the future I guess. In Aliens, when they go overdue, Hicks is confident that it will take about two and a half weeks for a rescue to show up. In Defiance, Zula Hendricks, a Private First Class (one of the lowest entry level ranks), gets sent on a Weyland Yutani vessel where she has no agency or authority, nor any expectation that she could return to base unless they brought her back, and after disappearing for 20ish days, they declare her AWOL and are all "LOL f**k you deserter amirite?" Why aren't the Marines coming to rescue her? They've spent millions, by their own admission, to try to put her back together. Again, because the USCM doesn't exist in the story other than to just do asshole things to our oppressed protagonist and push the plot along.

Zula Hendricks is not a real person experience real situations. She's a nebulous character concept, almost clinically chosen by committee in that she's physically handicapped, a minority, and a woman. Things that she repeats, over and over, even when they aren't relevant to the story. For example, when Davis chastises her for breaking communications silence and possibly compromising their safety, she says, in a thought bubble, that "It's not his business what I do with my body." Except that's not what Davis was talking about. He didn't care who she contacted, only that she used their communications equipment to send an outbound signal that could be traced. There's no logical connection between her internal dialog and what is happening in the story, showing that the author really didn't care what was being told in the story, but instead with the story concept they had created. The interesting thing is that the novel "The Cold Forge" used a nearly identical character (disabled, black and female), but made her feel like a real person and used those aspects of the character to help frame and tell her story, instead of trying to make those elements the full extent of her character. Or, to put more simply, Blue from The Cold Forge is a scientist that happens to be a disabled black woman, where Zula is a disabled black woman that happens to be doing the things in the story.

Without a protagonist I could care about or really even take seriously, the story just becomes a fairly generic retread of earlier Aliens stories.

Pairing her up with Amanda Ripley, one of my other least-favorite protagonists (simply because "Jebus, can something happen to somebody new in this universe, without dragging Ripley's daughter who died in Wisconsin at 67 years old into it?"), makes this a recipe for "Meh"saster.

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[Local Trouble]

Goddamn, those were some beautiful takedowns.

[The Old One]

I know. 

[TurokSwe]

Yes, they're talking about you.

Yes, we all know, no need to repeat. ^^

You seemed desperate for the validation when you posted the same thing twice, I just wanted to help.

That made no sense.

Alien should've never been polluted with Predator in the first place.

I didn't mind it at all. I grew up with it after all.

[Samhain13]

Alien should've never been polluted with Predator in the first place.

Absolute heresy.

[The Old One]

Harsh truth.

[TurokSwe]

Alien should've never been polluted with Predator in the first place.

Absolute heresy.

Agreed!

Harsh truth.

More like steaming BS. ^^