*BEWARE SPOILERS* Alien: Romulus

[MeatHookGekko]

What’s the point of this film?

Clearly no point for you. And that's OK. But there might be a point for other people.

Romulus was a moderate financial success, especially with IMAX, and it's placement in the timeline, within the current lore, opens up some fertile ground for new stories. We might even get some Colonial Marines showing back up, and if that's so, while that might end up being a hit or a miss, it could trigger the release of some 1/6th Colonial Marines again for our hobby, where some collectors would like to see a new opportunity beyond what Hot Toys made over 20 years ago.

Brother, you do you. That's OK with me. Love it or hate it or anything inbetween, that's all for you and your fandom. Or not. I'm not judging future Alien stuff on what it's not from the past, I'm leaving room to be pleasantly surprised. Like Billy Beane told David Justice in Moneyball. He's not paying for the player someone used to be, he's paying for the player that you are today. At minimum, the true bonus that people have here as collectors, is even if everything flops, we might get cool toys out of it.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

Just curious.

IMHO, where Ridley Scott would have likely taken the Alien franchise, had he had more time and was able to get the financing/distribution to make more films with full creative control, is more readily shown in the short lived TV series, Raised By Wolves. Which actually does cover more ground in some core Book of Enoch concepts.

Could you fit the Alien lore within the common themes that Scott clearly wanted to shift towards? Maybe. But it's a big pull away from what made the Alien franchise so successful in the first place. So, as a high level creative, Scott can make and tell whatever story he wants, but the "tone" shifts pretty dramatically in Prometheus and some parts of Covenant. In effect, Ridley Scott is pulling a Kangaroo Jack on the audience, Alien fans and the studios. The Alien lore was only a thin proxy to tell the stories he really wanted to tell.

I mean Ridley Scott could have just told what he thought plainly, likely in a book format. But then he would have been treated like L Ron Hubbard and any discussion he wanted to have would be compared to Battlefield Earth. You can only bait and switch an audience only so many times with the same franchise.

If I am going to be fair, and give a little grace to the situation, the likely case is Ridley Scott is simply too far ahead of his time. The current mainstream audience really can't and won't handle these kind of origin themes very well. Society will likely be more ready to accept some of the main discussion points that Scott wants to cover in about twenty years, but he'll be dead by then. And our society might not last that long.

I agree there are some incredibly interesting themes in Prometheus. IMHO there is enough material to make four different films. The problem is there isn't a cohesive single film to start. Ridley Scott did what George Lucas did and Zack Snyder did, took a long simmer concept, spanning decades, then started filming an outline. Not a real script, just a rough outline from bits and pieces of self imposed lore created over the years.

More to point, if the conversation shifted as to why Raised By Wolves didn't work or became increasingly non marketable, it would better explain why the Alien franchise was taken out of Ridley Scott's hands.