I agree. For me, for example, Alien had no sequels, Star Wars 1,2,3 came out in the late 70's early 80's and had no sequels, and Robocop and Total Recall were great 80's movies that were NEVER remade.

You never have to accept ANY followup to a piece of media that you love as canonical. It's all fiction, you get to define your reality.

If you ignore the first 5 minutes of Alien 3, (where the escape pod crashes) the last 10 minutes, (when real-Bishop shows up) and imagine that Ripley is a totally different character that just happens to be played by Sigourney Weaver, it's actually quite good. It's terrible as part of a series, especially considering how they killed off hundreds of possible plotlines DURING THE OPENING CREDITS, but as a standalone movie it's pretty good. I found it to be a good blend of the genres of "all horror" from Alien and "all action" from Aliens.

Resurrection is a terrible movie no matter HOW you look at it, though.

I believe it was a problem with a script, they rejected an awesome script written by IIRC William Gibson and substituted it with...that.
As a standalone movie it's ok, but as a part of alien series it's subpar.
After 30 minutes of ressurection I was ready to leave the theater. I stayed only because I wanted to see how bad it could get. Was rooting for aliens all the time XD
It was better than Prometheus btw :D

Nope, there was one way to look at it that wasn't horrible:
Did I get to see Sigourney Weaver kick ass? Yes? OK, it wasn't terrible.

.. For the most part, I agree. The 4th sucked balls, but from the perspective of someone who enjoys bad sci-fi.. it was pretty good. But bear in mind that bad sci-fi are a guilty pleasure of mine, I love them, I'll even sometimes watch Sci-Fi .. I'm sorry 'SyFy' original movies. >.>

Well part of the problem with the original script was that the actress who played Newt had gone from being 10 to being 16, and looked absolutely nothing like herself... but she was supposed to be in stasis. So they either would've had to get rid of her character anyway, or find another younger actress for that character (which might not have been possible due to contract stuff). I'm not sure why they killed off everyone else, though, or why they needed to do stick in yet another "bad guys want a bio-weapon" plot. The "stuck on a prison planet with a horrible monster" plot was plenty enough to sustain the movie, IMO.

But if the whole Ripley-vs-aliens&bureaucrats theme was stale in Alien 3, it was downright RANK by Resurrection. So while I'm glad they started up Prometheus with a different story with different characters totally unconnected to LV-426, I'm sad that Prometheus made no sense whatsoever. At least Resurrection had characters and plots that made sense, even if they were terrible.

I wouldn't go THAT far.

Sadly, 4th alien has better continuity, better characters and setting than prometheus. AND IT'S A BAD MOVIE.
Plus, I don't believe Alien's protagonists would run from gigantic wheel DIRECTLY IN IT'S PATH

XD

The better version of the movie was the original "directors cut" that for some reason was called "The Chronicles of Riddick". True story. That was originally Alien 3.

It is better than nothing, in my opinion.

Well, that's all good and dandy, but keep in mind that the arts are mainly a form of communication between individuals. Isolating yourself from the rest, rips a very important part of the experience.

Of course the specific examples you mention are shared and accepted by a large number of people (I for example agree on all four counts), so there are many cases where you are hardly alone.

But in general you can not rely on the "ignore what doesn't suit you" proposition and still stay relevant with the specific work. The need and satisfaction to share the experience is there and sequels, reboots and remakes can ruin it -if their are done badly-, so getting angry about their mere existence is something that I find quite understandable.

Exactly. Before falling asleep, yesterday, I had been typing more or less the same thing :


I think it can be more awkward than some people assume. Fictionnal characters have an independant life, defined like collective myths. Luke Skywalker is largely defined, as a part of our modern mythology, as [SPOILERS] the son of Darth Vader. If you decide that Empire Strikes Back never existed, Luke Skywalker means something quite different for you, We can question if it's the same character, or only yours. In any way, you'd lose a common reference with the rest of the world. Isolated, it's not an important issue (we all do that), but it means you'll keeop bumping into occurences of, and references to, a Luke Skywalker, and a star wars background story, that is very far from yours. You lose the freedom of accessing freely to the shared, autonomous, outer, existence of these characters and story - which is, in my opinion, a nice aspect of public tales. If you make a habit of it, you can shut yourself into a weird bubble. Not all people wish to do that. Some are annoyed to see a "shared story" (after all, as a culture, we're partly tied by these shared stories) become something that separates us. Like when they made Bible 2, with [SPOILERS] the adventures of God Jr. and some mild retcon, some people decided to just blank it out and to stay with the original story, but doing so, they severed themselves from all the tie-in stuff that refer to both parts as a whole, and this lead to some awkward moments. Yet, of course, there can be situations of greater consensus, that make things more comfortable : many people agree that there was only 3 star wars, or only 3 indiana jones, only a couple of Jaws at best...

The stances in this thread are not mutually exclusive. I consider that Robocop is just one movie and that [SPOILERS] Lewis dies at the end, I consider that the James Bond series ended somewhere during Brosnan's run, I consider that Tolkien has never been adapted to cinema, that there are only two Terminator movies, etc. This doesn't mean that my position is quite as cosy as if it was technically true. When I'm exposed to Star Wars, it's most of times to stuff I don't relate to ("ooh, yes, star wars, coo... uh, why is boba fett everywhere ? what are we talking about, again ?"). When I hear of James Bond nowadays, it's to see some ramboïdal smerch henchman's mug everywhere. I can opush these aside, and I do, but I would have prefered a world where these concepts could be shared without second thought, or be offered to other people's discovery without having to specify "it's especially cool if, uh, you stop over there, but, well, for most people the story continues, and actually, this meaning here gets retroactively changed, and"...

You can block out some sequels, but having to do it is still an inconvenience. And whenever it happens to one more universe of yours, it's a valiud reason to sigh and roll eyes.

I don't deny any existance of fiction or art and I don't feel the need to fit in some kind of social circle for an collective agreement that e.g Star Wars prequels never existed or Blade Runner 2 shouldn't be released in case of failure.

Bring out torch and pitchforks and let us punish this blasphemer!
:D

Prometheus might have worked better if it had been set to an underground temple on Earth just like AvP, as then it could have been plausible that the people stumbling upon the tomb of the creator race would be so amateurish that they would not wear full hazmat suits as soon as they have any clue that there might be a reason not to contaminate the place. Scientist today are arguing whether the meteorites with signs of bacteria have being properly handled so you would think that an expedition to another solar system for search of extraterrestrial life would know better than open their helmets or at the very least that would bother some of the audience and the script can be written to allow the actors show their faces in other scenes?

Prometheus is a very bad sci-fi movie as it just wants to move a handful of people to another solar system and then ignore all the ramifications that should come with that decision like you would not bring a pothead on a space mission or a biologist that is scared of corpses yet soon after goes to a Steve Irwin mode when he sees a space snake. Instead there would have been elite soldiers and more androids as nothing less would have made sense for the old guy to take along to ensure that the mission goes as planned. At the beginning of the movie the expedition might just have been wishful thinking that a dying man would spare some funds, but later it just doesn't add up that he would have allowed it in the hands of so incompetent crew.

I'd be interested in seeing how this "classic" can be ruined.