The answer is that there is no Alien Universe. There are various movies and comic books and games and other spin-offs, and they don’t add up to single, coherent story. If someone wants to write an Alien show with Wookies (both belong to Disney, so why not?) then that version of Alien has aliens.
But if you insist on assuming a continuity shared by all installments, the bits about Arcturans and bug hunts seem to indicate that yes, there are Star Trek style aliens around. Aliens would have been a better movie without them, but it would take some mental gymnastics to dismiss them as something else.
Pretty much. The Company wasn’t shocked that Ripley found alien life, they were doubting the details of the alien life she found. So alien life was obviously something so common it didn’t even raise eyebrows for them. To the point that they were basically saying: “we have reports of alien life, but none of it is anything like the crazy shit you describe in your report,” in her debriefing.
I mean even when Dallas and co. explore the Space Jockey ship they are moderately blasé. Their reaction is like if a present day tanker crew found a 16th century pirate ship, or something. A big deal, an exciting discovery, but not earth-shattering.
The alien ‘universe’ has never been super well fleshed out although I suppose you could cobble together the best bits from the good movies, Alien Isolation, those Dark Horse comics, and whatever else to come up with something coherent.
What the three major Alien texts (Alien, Aliens, and Alien Isolation IMO) have for me is a unified atmosphere as a kind of counterpoint to the Star Wars and Star Trek universes (themselves quite distinct from one another). It’s not hard SF, but it’s not super whiz bangy. Interstellar travel is still a hassle. There’s an infrastructure among the stars but it’s loose and porous. Earth is probably modestly dystopian and corporations seem to have outsized pull. (Even the Colonial Marines seem to be acting as much at Weyland-Yutani’s behest as the U.S. Government’s.) Space is vast and threatening. And the janky green CRT display never went out of style.
I absolutely love that vibe, that style, that atmosphere; I’ve been hooked since I saw the first two films on VHS aged 12. But I don’t know that it’s particularly extensible or that it needs to be. I’m always open to new good Alien stuff coming through the pipe but I’m content to leave it where it is too. (Studios will always be tempted to take it further because of money, which I say not judgmentally but simply as a matter of fact.)
I think the skepticism was about the nature of what she described.
Basically a near-perfect killing machine with acid for blood. They’d never run into anything like that.
It was probably mostly normalish stuff, not some insane creature that uses other creatures to gestate, grows to larger than a person almost instantly and has acid that melts through multiple decks of a starship in seconds. That’s pretty crazy shit.
They’d found all sorts of relatively mundane life.
They even ask: “Are there any species like this hostile lifeform on LV426?” “No it’s a rock, no indigenous life.” In other words, they’ve run across indigenous life before. Just nothing remotely like this crazy fucking thing. Then they go on about how they’d never recorded anything like it (again implying they’ve found plenty of other stuff), not even remotely phased by her mentioning an alien spacecraft. An alien spacecraft that the people on LV426 went and found, no less.
So potentially space-faring alien races is basically a “meh” from them. And in the director’s cut they show Newt’s parents going to that spaceship, so it’s still there and still not that big a deal apparently. If this was a First Contact type scenario you’d think the reaction from Weyland would be bigger than “have some randos check it out”. They didn’t even seem to care it was out there. Burke had to personally futz with things to get anyone to even go look at it.
Like I said, if everything that happens in a given installment of the franchise holds as real for the rest of them, Aliens provides unambiguous evidence that aliens are known and are relatively common to the universe.
But I dislike the whole idea of a fictional canon, and for Alien in particular, that was written over decades, by many different individuals working in different genres, it just can’t really bear the weight of piling an ever increasing number of works and expecting something coherent to emerge. The individual parts only suffer if we try to look at them as a single continuous story. For me, intelligent alien life is unknown in Alien, and treated as ordinary in Aliens. I don’t remember any mention in Alien 3 or Resurrection.
Given that the fourth Alien movie is hundreds of years in the future, does it have anything to say on the subject? I don’t remember a lot of specifics about that movie except the European cast, the underwater scene, and synthetics being really good at basketball. Also Brad Dourif being not very good at science.
The Aliens: Fireteam Elite game has a bunch of lore about Weyland-Yutani and the Colonial Marines, including a history of fighting wars over colonies. It’s even got Prometheus and Covenant stuff in it (the rogue AI in the game tries to do to Earth what Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbinder did to the Engineer planet in Covenant). There’s no reference to other intelligent life forms, but there are a couple of native life forms from the local planet that you have to fight. Dumb beasts, really.
What really breaks canon in the Alien-verse is including predators. Thanks, 20th Century Fox. Just one more way Rupert Murdoch screwed over the modern world. Predators are basically the klingons of the Alien-verse. Or are they the romulans since they have cloaking devices?
I mean, if you’re talking James Bond movies or Mad Max movies, then canon doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the Alien movies are built as interlocking parts, they build upon each other. It’s impossible to say there’s no canon, unless you’re just going to say that Aliens happens to have a character also named Ripley who also looks a lot like Sigourney Weaver and also had a really bad experience with an alien and also happened to put herself into hypersleep. Which I mean, fair play if that’s how you want to look at it, but I’ve never heard anyone seriously try to claim such a thing.
But no, I’m pretty sure the fourth movie didn’t have much to say on the subject, but then again I’m not really willing to rewatch it to find out for sure. And I can’t honestly say I take the Alien vs Predator movies seriously enough to throw them into the canon mix. Hell, I forgot they existed until Tom brought them up.
I get what you’re saying, and from a creative perspective, I completely agree.
But one of the most fascinating elements Alien franchise is how it’s morphed over the years, with changing times and changing authors. It’s a living, growing, breathing entity, and who can resist charting the development and state of that entity? What began as a haunted house about the horror of rape from a male perspective turned into a female-led deconstruction of Vietnam and then a male-dominated bleak prison movie, and then a weird European high sci-fi fantasy, and then a sophomoric mediation on creation mythology, and finally a clumsy Island of Dr. Moreau origins story.
Yet they’re all Alien movies.
And by the way, this is the future of all mythology. From now on, all mythologies will be IPs, developed by people with a commercial interest in their success, almost always at the expense of creative continuity. All mythologies will develop this way instead of organically, from now on. It will be left to us, the fans, to puzzle out how – or even whether – the pieces fit together.
-Tom
“I prefer that we be more capable and prepared than lucky.”
There are only two of them. The whole concept comes from comic books, but I don’t know the comics at all. The first movie is just a typical brainless Paul WS Anderson mess, but the second movie, by the Strause brothers who would go on to do the Skyline series, takes everything much more seriously. I actually like Aliens vs. Predator 2 as an Alien movie. It’s appropriately grim and has some nice practical effects instead of CG (which is ironic, since the Strause brothers come from a digital effects studio).
Some (emphasis on some) of the comics are pretty good. Both from the just Alien(s) comics and the Alien vs Predator ones. I honestly don’t remember them well enough to recommend specific ones, though. And at least one of them does do the “xenomorphs reach Earth” storyline, which I recall being appropriately apocalyptic and horrifying.
Yup, no indication in either movie that extraterrestrial life is unheard of, and ‘Arcturian poontang’ seems to support this (though I suppose it could mean human colonists on Arcturus who have a thing for gender ambiguity, which honestly would make more sense). At the hearing, the smoking lady quite clearly says the thing that was “never once recorded in over two hundred surveyed worlds” is the “creature which gestates inside a living human host,” not any creature at all.
I feel like any expansion of the Alien ‘universe’ has to proceed gingerly. I don’t think it’s a universe that benefits from full illumination. Don’t expand the darkness too much, if you see what I mean, because the essential image of that universe for me is:
Apparently, according to interviews with the actors, that part was ad-libbed and not in the script, which seems to be borne out by this:
Obviously Cameron didn’t care about any implications this change had to his backstory on Arcturus and its inhabitants and their relation to humanity - which I propose was non-existent, with this line just a throw-away Vietnam reference made to sound a bit sci-fi. :)
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. You linked an image that appears to show that the line is actually in the script and was therefore not ad libbed.
I think he means the bit about ‘the one you had was male.’
But yeah, it is all pretty throwaway, and as noted I don’t think Cameron or the actors were sweating the world building too much with that particular beat.
But I don’t care. They don’t fit together, and they don’t need to. When people talk about canon or mythology, those are religious terms. For those who believe in a given religion it’s vital to figure out which piece of scripture or legend should be regarded as true, and work out apparent inconsistencies. For fiction, it makes no difference. How does The Green Knight continuity fit in with Boorman’s Excalibur, or the medieval source texts? It doesn’t, and we shouldn’t expect it to.
With the Alien franchise, the very first sequel isn’t even in the same genre as the original. They both have a Ripley and facehuggers and LV-426, but they are fundamentally different movies. Even those shared elements are changed significantly. They are two of my favorite movies, but they work much on their own than if we look at them as Alien part I and II.
And yes, in the future all popular stories are IP, and the IP holders will add more sequels and spin-offs and cross-overs until the thing collapses under its own weight, and then a reboot will come. Those are the economic realities, but we have no obligation to follow along. We can enjoy Alien, or Prometheus, without caring how the continuity works with Alien Meets Mechagodzilla. In fact its the only way I can enjoy a movie that was successful enough to get a sequel. The alternative is trying to make sense of things like this.
There’s an interesting discussion to be had here. I tried to think of counterexamples of non-IP modern mythologies but couldn’t, though I think fan fiction complicates the picture. But I have a suspicion that even the development of ancient mythologies have some elements of this; Homer’s epics were composed by wandering bards who certainly expected to be paid for their stories. And they’re drawing on older oral traditions whose development was probably influenced by the patronage of powerful civic and religious leaders.
They aren’t religious terms. Paul Bunyan, Casey Jones, Bigfoot and the fictionalization of American historical figures like Cristobal Colon and Pocahontas are all parts of American mythology and none of that is religious. Canon has been used to describe authoritative collections of non-religious works since the 18th century. In the context of film, it simply means “narratively significant during the development of future films.”
Ripley’s role in Aliens doesn’t make any sense without the narrative of the first film. Her reaction to Bishop, the role of corporations, the look and feel of technology, and the location of the planet itself all were drawn from the first film. Sure Alien doesn’t need Aliens, but the reverse is not true. I don’t think our natural inclination to discern continuity and praise or decry the success of it is bad. I don’t think that picking and choosing parts of the fiction that have developed around settings in order to guide future fiction is bad. I don’t think continuity branching and even experimental off-shoots are bad. Fiction doesn’t collapse under the weight of its mythology; it’s enlivened by it.
I’d always taken the Arcturian line to imply some sort of pleasure colony or similar with a reputation for having (offering?) good looking humans or possibly androids. A sapient alien species never crossed my mind.
I’ve always assumed that non-sapient alien species were a common threat in the Alien universe, thanks to the ‘xenomorph’ line as well as ‘just another bug hunt’. Outside of the Engineers, though, I don’t think there are sapient species known to humanity. Though the massive WMD stashes the Engineers possessed in Prometheus would imply that perhaps there are others lurking out there.
Speaking of the importance of continuity, the Alien film I like the least is definitely Resurrected; simply because they wrote out one of the most compelling bits of lore from the universe entirely offscreen. Bought out by Walmart. Walmart! Feh.
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