[SPOILERS] So Covenant confirms that AvP and AvPR are not canon films.

[YutaniDitch]

I stopped caring about canon for this series because it's obvious Fox never bothered to care. All they care about is getting your butt in the theater. Any careful or respectful approach to this series is meaningless to them. Remember when Aliens: Colonial Marines was going to be canon?

The hilarious thing is that this ALIEN franchise doesn't not even make that much money for FOX, and if they are going to make dull, predictable movies, just as money grabbers, they ought to find it somewhere else... Sacrificing the story of the first movie to give instead a generic slasher, Dr Moreau cliched villain, now conveniently the creator of the title creature, shows how little they respect their very skeletal cash cow... It is no coincidence they are also poking a new PREDATOR movie... Hard to make good movies when they are doing it for the money and not for the art... No risk, no imagination, no guts...

[klesk4ever]

Lazy creative abortions like retcons and remakes mean nothing to me... ALIEN COVENANT making a man-made android behind the creation of the Xenomorph is lazy writing at best, and intellectually offensive at worst... The Xeno had his underlying human-like skull because of the Engineers, not because of some farfetched insemination of wasp DNA mixed with the deus ex machina black goo (still find it a very slow, inconsistent weapon to be used... A chemical weapon would be far more efficient and far less likely to backfire like it did to the Engineers on LV-223...

But going back to the topic at hand, yes, there is an awful lot of confusion as to what truly makes the canonical Alien saga... I believe it is the movies and so far, none of the movies have addressed nor expanded any content present in the games, comics, novelizations, etc... That is why I do not consider any other media besides the movies to be canonical, for the simple reason that their content has never been addressed nor confirmed in the movies that constitute the fundamental core of the Alien saga... I understand that fans want to consider what they liked best to be part of canon, but that is not what canon is and is supposed to be as I have mentioned in my previous post...

Also, David creating the Xenos, unless Ridley steps back and actually states that he did not create them but just recreated, conflicts directly with what the Nostromo found on the Derelict... I think it was an utter mistake to dismiss Prometheus like that, to do an 180 on where the story was going, and ktherefor missing a golden opportunity to make the sequel better... The story was not perfect, but it had a lot of potential, which Ridley gave up on just to focus on the most unbelievable android I have ever seen onscreen... A crying android, a psychopathic android, a grinning, sarcastic android, is not an android... Feelings like rage, anger, are based on emotion, something unprogrammable, as emotions are often triggered by hormonal unbalances... I have always despised the ways androids are portrayed onscreen... Androids do not feel rage and certainly Weyland did not program David to do self thinking... This is why David, which I considered the worst part of PROMETHEUS, is even worse in COVENANT... Ridley just ought to do what he set out to do with PROMETHEUS and not retreat 'cause of bad reviews... An artist should stand for his creation regardless...

I fully agree with almost everything you had said.

Prometheus was... well it wasn't a good movie. It had great visuals, however it was incoherent, it had bad acting, bad editing etc. and the zombie Fifield scene? WTF?
However it did set the stage for what could be a EPIC saga that leads to the Alien.

At this point all we do have is... potential, and feeling that this potential is most likely going to be wasted.

If the next movie doesn't give some deeper story, and some explanations, I'm putting the whole prequels thing in a trash bin, and Scott is a moron.

[PsyKore]

I stopped caring about canon for this series because it's obvious Fox never bothered to care. All they care about is getting your butt in the theater. Any careful or respectful approach to this series is meaningless to them. Remember when Aliens: Colonial Marines was going to be canon?

They do care, but Fox can't help if people handling their property like Randy Pitchford are lying bastards.

just to focus on the most unbelievable android I have ever seen onscreen... A crying android, a psychopathic android, a grinning, sarcastic android, is not an android... Feelings like rage, anger, are based on emotion, something unprogrammable, as emotions are often triggered by hormonal unbalances... I have always despised the ways androids are portrayed onscreen... Androids do not feel rage and certainly Weyland did not program David to do self thinking... This is why David, which I considered the worst part of PROMETHEUS, is even worse in COVENANT...

Ridley's interest in androids and their underlying conflictions goes back to Blade Runner and of course Ash in Alien - I feel David in Covenant touches on similar notions.

[YutaniDitch]

Ridley's interest in androids and their underlying conflictions goes back to Blade Runner and of course Ash in Alien - I feel David in Covenant touches on similar notions.

Yes, I have been thinking a lot about Replicants and Ash, and how ridiculously unscientific they are, androids feeling emotions when they are not supposed to and obviously not programmed to... The last thing anyone would want is to have a construct that is supposed to be logical and unemotional in his actions, to have them have them and virtually or potentially jeopardize their raison d'être... even though Rutger Hauer's and the other Replicants only wanted to outlive their limited lifespan, if my memory does not fail me... I have not seen BLADE RUNNER for a long while... So, one thing is the natural instinct of self-preservation which is an emotional, though instinctive, response, implying self-awareness... Of course, FEAR of death is an emotion, and even though it is a fascinating theme, having androids having it and acting on it, being illogical, too humanly flawed, and actually negating his entire purpose which was to help people, not just Weyland, is utterly preposterous for the simple truth that emotions cannot be programmed in, they are natural hormonal responses to situations that affect our brains... Why would Weyland create an emotional robot...? Why would he allow it AT ALL...? Curiosity...? He stated David had no soul, implying that he was a being of pure logic and would not have neither a good soul nor a dark one... He could be programmed to MIMICK emotions, but actually FEELING them...!? This is why the sarcasm, the grinning, the psychopathic genocidal tendencies, etc, are actually too human to be believable on an android... With Ash, they tried as best as they could to hide him being an android to deceive the audience, hence why he acted, talked and even scolded Ripley like a human, also grinning, being sarcastic when Ripley asked what was the motion sensor tracker keyed on... But that was to trick the audience... This is very different... This is way off programming, and even if he was writing his own programming now, which would have to be enabled from the get go in the first place, which is highly doubtful, there is no way he would go Skynet and go from servicing mankind to destroying it just because somehow he illogically became obsessed about creation, like a zealot or a fanatic, all terms that clearly we do not associate with android, computer behavior...

[irn]

For all we know, the Engineers did create the Alien 2000 years ago and David followed in their footsteps.  Hell, he may have even discovered their technology for doing so by living in the Engineer city for 10 years.  The derelict may have been on Acheron as long as we have been led to believe from the beginning.

This. David may well have been deliberately retreading a scientific route that the Space Jockeys went down a long time ago.

[TurokSwe]

With Covenant taking place in 2104, and David having created the first Xeno via the facehugger that attacked Oram, I guess Covenant confirms once and for all that AvP and AvPR are not canon. AvP taking place in 2004 and AvPR not long after that. Even in AvP they reference 1904 in the film as being a date that the Alien Queen in that film was still in deep freeze.

Good.

Except David did NOT create the first ever Xenomorphs, the movie itself doesn't even make that statement but leaves it up to interpretation, and the official novelization for Covenant even has David explaining that he did in fact NOT create these monsters but the Engineers did, and David was merely using what the Engineers had already created to produce his own variants of the Aliens. Furthermore, the home video release of Prometheus states in Peter Weyland's log "Quite Eye" that the company already detected the distress signal from the crashed Derelict ship on LV-426 before the events of Prometheus/Covenant, and not to forget that Predator 2, Alien vs. Predator, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Predators, and the most recent The Predator (which came out after Covenant and further cements the crossover between the films with its various references to AVP and Alien) clearly disproves the notion of David having created the Aliens. Not to mention the myriad of expanded universe material such as AVP: Evolution and the comic books Fire & Stone and Life & Death. Bottom line, David did not create the Aliens and AVP is still canonical. Period.

[proto leech]

avp movies were never canon in alien. period

[SM]

With Covenant taking place in 2104, and David having created the first Xeno via the facehugger that attacked Oram, I guess Covenant confirms once and for all that AvP and AvPR are not canon. AvP taking place in 2004 and AvPR not long after that. Even in AvP they reference 1904 in the film as being a date that the Alien Queen in that film was still in deep freeze.

Good.

Except David did NOT create the first ever Xenomorphs, the movie itself doesn't even make that statement but leaves it up to interpretation, and the official novelization for Covenant even has David explaining that he did in fact NOT create these monsters but the Engineers did, and David was merely using what the Engineers had already created to produce his own variants of the Aliens. Furthermore, the home video release of Prometheus states in Peter Weyland's log "Quite Eye" that the company already detected the distress signal from the crashed Derelict ship on LV-426 before the events of Prometheus/Covenant, and not to forget that Predator 2, Alien vs. Predator, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Predators, and the most recent The Predator (which came out after Covenant and further cements the crossover between the films with its various references to AVP and Alien) clearly disproves the notion of David having created the Aliens. Not to mention the myriad of expanded universe material such as AVP: Evolution and the comic books Fire & Stone and Life & Death. Bottom line, David did not create the Aliens and AVP is still canonical. Period.

AvP hasn't been canon for some time - Ridley deliberately ignored it on Prometheus - and what ends up on film is what matters to the film division.  If the film contradicts what came out on some Blu-Ray extra, then the film is what matters.

[yhe1]

As the iphone analogy shows, the prequel films never said Xenomorphs can only have one creator. The bootleggers released identical looking iphones before Apple.

[SM]

...

what?

[Voodoo Magic]

*Sigh*.. not that iphone analogy again.

[Huggs]

...

what?

I think David is supposed to be selling knockoff Apple products.

[Voodoo Magic]

@yhe1 - I don't think David is sending his xenomorph creation schematics out for bids to Chinese manufacturing companies like the first generation iPhone, so that won't be a problem. 

[Huggs]

@yhe1 - I don't think David is sending his xenomorph creation schematics out for bids to Chinese manufacturing companies like the first generation iPhone, so that won't be a problem.

Now there's an interesting angle. What if the Russians intercepted the transmission, and that somehow Segway's us into Gibson's Alien 3?

[SM]