These movies have fallen prey to the contiguous need by people to explain things.
Don’t make scientists experiment on them. It’s a bad premise and implies that these things can be understood or manipulated. Don’t give me 60 minutes of boring shitty backstory about the creators that are somehow also humanities creators but don’t like humanity etc etc… None of that is useful to me or to making a tight horror film. It just muddies the water. Also, don’t have people act like absolute idiots for no reason so that your story can happen. The space truckers in the first movie were in over their heads and made realistic mistakes and the marines in the 2nd movie were overconfident going in and were gonna serve the company if they lived or died. Both was believable. The hand-picked crew of your trillion dollar expedition to make first contact with aliens being a bunch of fuck ups is not believable and makes your movie instantly annoying.
Arguably we don’t need more of these movies at all. You won’t recapture the lightning in the bottle a third time and all the attempts make the franchise worse and worse.
But if you do need to make another one (and we all know Hollywood is out of ideas): No one cares who made the aliens. No one cares why they made the aliens. I don’t care about architects and their goo. Just tell me a tight horror story with a new twist on the Xenomorph. Like say an egg finds its way to some planet with alien fauna that gives the Xenomorph new powers and now the colonists have to escape before the whole-ass planet is overrun by them. Imagine dino-sized xenomorphs or something.
I went in with really low hopes, but ended up liking the new Alien Romulus movie, due to some of the reasons you outlined.
It’s not perfect and has its dumb choices (uncanny valley de-aged android from Alien, stupid callback lines). But the characters are generally all solid, and there’s just enough world building without getting too expository. And there’s a new twist on alien morphology that was interesting and straight up good horror.
These movies have fallen prey to the contiguous need by people to explain things.
Don’t make scientists experiment on them. It’s a bad premise and implies that these things can be understood or manipulated. Don’t give me 60 minutes of boring shitty backstory about the creators that are somehow also humanities creators but don’t like humanity etc etc… None of that is useful to me or to making a tight horror film. It just muddies the water. Also, don’t have people act like absolute idiots for no reason so that your story can happen. The space truckers in the first movie were in over their heads and made realistic mistakes and the marines in the 2nd movie were overconfident going in and were gonna serve the company if they lived or died. Both was believable. The hand-picked crew of your trillion dollar expedition to make first contact with aliens being a bunch of fuck ups is not believable and makes your movie instantly annoying.
Arguably we don’t need more of these movies at all. You won’t recapture the lightning in the bottle a third time and all the attempts make the franchise worse and worse.
But if you do need to make another one (and we all know Hollywood is out of ideas): No one cares who made the aliens. No one cares why they made the aliens. I don’t care about architects and their goo. Just tell me a tight horror story with a new twist on the Xenomorph. Like say an egg finds its way to some planet with alien fauna that gives the Xenomorph new powers and now the colonists have to escape before the whole-ass planet is overrun by them. Imagine dino-sized xenomorphs or something.
I went in with really low hopes, but ended up liking the new Alien Romulus movie, due to some of the reasons you outlined.
It’s not perfect and has its dumb choices (uncanny valley de-aged android from Alien, stupid callback lines). But the characters are generally all solid, and there’s just enough world building without getting too expository. And there’s a new twist on alien morphology that was interesting and straight up good horror.