There is a trend lately where sequels are made that ignore some of the earlier sequels. The most recent Halloween and Terminator sequels come to mind, but they aren't the only examples. I kind of respect that - working off the canon that supports the story you want to tell - but 100 years from now it's going to make things confusing. I can only hope future archivists are extremely well organized.
I've heard some people say that certain movies just shouldn't have sequels. Some movies are such perfect self-contained stories that sequels can only make the story worse. Highlander, for instance, ended with Connor being the last immortal, and some of the sequels had to be very contrived to keep the story going.
But you know my feelings on sequels. You miss all the shots you don't take, so if you think you have a good idea for a sequel, film the sucker. If people don't like it, they'll just declare it non-canon. I'd rather live in a world with a thousand Highlander 2's than to live in a world without Aliens.
Aliens is a good example, because the first two are decent movies, and the rest are... well... of varying quality. Some people hold this up as an example of a series that didn't need more sequels. I disagree. The existence of a bad sequel doesn't mean a good sequel couldn't have been made.
The problem is everyone keeps trying remake the first Alien movie. The writers just can't get past the concept of an isolated crew being picked off one by one by a monster. That plot has already been done to perfection. And the monster isn't nearly as scary now that everyone knows what it looks like.
But in high school, I used to read Aliens comics by Dark Horse, and some of those took the universe in all kinds of interesting directions. People locating the original xenomorph homeworld. A grown up Newt dealing with her inner demons. An egocentric general trying to train xenomorphs for battle. Learning more about the elephant-like species that transported the eggs to LV-426. A scientist designing an artificial xenomorph to infiltrate a hive, harvesting "royal jelly" to use as a steroid on humans.
Sadly, not only did the script writers ignore a wealth of interesting plot ideas, but Alien 3 and Prometheus directly contradicted (and therefore erased) the comics canon. The comic writers decided to go with the new canon, even going as far to re-release the older comics with Hicks and Newt getting renamed in the dialogue. Ugh, just accept that it's an alternate canon, people. I'll admit it, that's one of the few times my "bad sequels don't hurt anything" rule was proven wrong, since it introduced canon that ruined the spin-offs.
I would love to see a future Alien movie where an aging Ripley talks about the bad dreams she had in hypersleep - crashing on a prison planet, getting cloned, etc. Picking up about 40 years later, people still don't believe Ripley, Hicks, and Newt, but the trio still managed to live long, happy lives thanks to an undisclosed settlement they received from Weyland-Yutani. But Newt's now-adult daughter hears rumors about some disappearing colonies (a la Roanoke), and gee, some of the details are awful similar to the crazy stories Grandma Ripley used to tell. Curiosity leads her... well, literally anywhere as long as it's not just another "seven people on a ship get murdered one by one" story.
But anyway, the screenwriters think there's only one way to write an Alien movie. Which is funny because the first two Alien movies are as different as night and day. Aliens took a risk when it turned a horror story into an action movie. But later sequels refused to take risks, and are all the worse for it.
Terminator is the same way. I also read Terminator comics in high school. Some of them took place in the war-torn future, which sounded like a great idea for a movie until Salvation came out and soured the concept. I still think a good war movie could be made from the franchise, though. If the writers could just get past the idea that every Terminator movie requires time travel, and approach it as a war movie first and a Terminator movie second, then something really cool might get made.
The bottom line is, the existence of bad sequels doesn't mean a sequel shouldn't have been attempted. It just means the producers should be more selective about which script they pick.
No comments:
Post a Comment