Let’s be honest some sequels just flat out out don’t deserve to exist and now we are going to talk about franchises and sequels that in our heads at least, never happened.
I’ll open with a big one for me the Alien franchise, it’s one of my favourite film series ever up until the third entry anyway. The theatrical cut of the third was subject to a fuckton of executive meddling which left it a bit of a weird disjointed mess so much so that David Fincher practically disowned it. thankfully the excellent assembly cut ties it all together much better and redeems the film.
After this we get into straight hot garbage, Resurrection is a frankly a shameless fucking cash grab and I hate it intensely, which is a shame as they brought in a damn fine cast, Ron Pearlman and Winona Ryder both carry their parts well and I have always held Brad Dourif in high regard as a damn fine actor. If anything though it’s Sigourney Weaver who steals the show with a far darker, more feral portrayal of Ripley than anything we have seen so far,.
Unfortunately the cast is not enough to redeem what at this point is effectively a bad parody of prior entries in the series. the other characters suffer poorly from lack of characterisation and the different Xenomorph Variants introduce I found to be more laughable than anything else in all honestly.
Moving on from Alien Resurrection, we ger the return of Ridley Scot, like a lot of fans, I was hopeful the series creator would right the ship, but no. I’m largely going to ignore Prometheus here as the Alirn connection is mostly absent in this film right until the very end, this is more the story of the Engineers than anything else.
Now on to the film I hate more than any other instalment in the series, Covenant, for a number of reasons which we will get into right now.
David - this is by far and my biggest issue with this film, the idea that David is the creator of the xenomorphs is one absolutely detest and refuse completely to accept. The only theory concerning his involvement I will entertain is the notion that somehow the Xenomorph species has become dormant or nearly and he resurrected them somehow. An early version of the scripts supports this idea by David show Walter an old fossilised Alien egg and dead face hugger he found in the Engineer home world.
I get what Scott is going for here, the irony of humanity’s own creation in turn creating a species that will be one of the most grave threats to all of humanity, is deeply ironic. It’s also something of a fable regarding society moving away from religion in turn effectively killing God, a point which Scott makes very heavy handed with the character of the Covenant’s science officer Oram who feels ostracised because of his religious beliefs, also believing that his faith has cost him career opportunities as he has believes he has been held back from promotions for this reason.
However in doing so, he has destroyed any intrigue regarding the origins of the xenomoprhas, this is a case where the horror film axiom “less is more” definitely applies, I would posit that is far better to leave their origins a mystery which we can speculated upon rather than trying to explain the origins in this rather hamfisted way.
In closing to date, I have seen Alien Covenant precisely once and I refuse to watch it ever again. David as the creator is pure garbage and a theory I do not give even the slightest hint of credence to. In my headcanon this film and the events in it are not canon. I am not even going to touch on the two Alien Vs Predatir films as I hate both of them intensely.
I feel I gave ranted long enough now, I have other similarly strong feelings regarding other series, namely Terminator, but I will keep that under my hat for now.
