Alien/Predator Thread

Hi everyone. To avoid going off-topic in already established threads, I decided to establish a thread for both the Alien and Predator franchises to discuss the lore both franchises have as well as their connection. For those asking, here are what I saw so far:

1. Alien and Aliens as a kid, though memory's hazy.

2. Alien vs. Predator and most of Requiem on TV.

3. Prometheus

4. Predator and Predator 2

Planning on rewatching Prometheus, the first two Alien films, and the AVP duology sometime.

Now then, first order of business: While Prometheus kicked the AVP duology out of canon on when Weyland-Yutani had its origins, would the Predator trilogy (soon to be a tetralogy with that fourth film coming for a 2018 release) still be in the same universe as the Alien films?

I guess it depends on if you accept Fire and Stone into your own canon.

And whether you want to count the Alien Skull inside the Predator's ship at the end of the second movie canon evidence that the exist in the same universe or merely a humorous sight gag homage or shout-out.

I do. As for the AVP duology, I'll just kick them out of canon.

Speaking of Predator 2, anyone notice the last third of the film became Aliens? Here's why:

1. Keyes and his men heavily armed and in futuristic hazmat suits that are thermally insulated.

2. The tussle with the predator being in a close quarters environment, with the Predator managing to slaughter Keyes' men easily.

3. Harrigan having a Lock-and-Load Montage, with his CAR-15 having an underslung armament like the M 41 A Pulse Rifle's U1 Grenade Launcher.

Is this thread strictly for the movies, or can we discuss the AVP games too?

Dunno. It doesn't say Alien/Predator "film" thread so there's that, I suppose.

Anyway. I'd like a straight adaptation of the original first-run Av P comics. Because they were brilliant and didn't take executive-sponsored rage-dumps on the franchise, like what the follow-ups to the original Aliens comics - which had Ripley, Hicks and Newt in them - did when the scum in charge of Fox decided to torch that continuity in order to pave the way for that shitty Fincher follow-up which I'm not even going to name.

I personally would like a ground-up remake of the AVP arcade game as a full-3D game, in the same way that Oddworld: New 'n' Tasy is one to Abe's Oddysee (i.e. same essence of the original plot and setting, but bigger and better). I fell in love with the characters of Linn Kurosawa and Dutch Schaefer when I first say the game back in middle school, and the two Predator heroes weren't shabby either; imagine the human cyborgs in a third-person "shooter" version of their debut game, fighting with both brute force and cunning finesse against hordes of Xenomorphs and government/corporate conspiracy-employed human soldiers alike, appropiating a variety of weaponry from the field (including a near-limitless range of possible improvised implements), occasionally performing cool-looking Finishing Moves in the right circumstances, and much more epic boss fights.

edited 3rd Apr '16 2:14:26 PM by MarqFJA

Predator starts filming this fall. Thoughts?

I hope it actually lives up to the hype as well as the legacy of the original Predator movie.

Updating the Predator costume.

New release date.

More on "The Predator".

In an attempt to revive this thread, I'd like to ask... Is Prometheus officially a prequel to the Alien quadrilogy, or is it just a spin-off set in its own separate canon like the AVP universe is^note AFAIU, there are three separate canons: the Alien canon, the Predator canon, and the Alien vs. Predator canon which considers both of the previous canons as taking place in the same setting.? Because while I haven't seen the movie yet, all the second-hand sources that I've gotten my hands on painted a picture that makes highly tempted to call Fanon Discontinuity against the idea that it's an actual part of the Alien canon.

... <sigh> Alright, another attempt at reviving this discussion.

Recently I've been contemplating the anomaly in Xenomorph life cycle that is the Facehugger; it's so different from the subsequent life stages that it's easy and understandable for someone who has zero knowledge of how the species' life cycle works to mistakenly deem Facehuggers and typical Xenomorphs as wholly different species (the corrosive blood could be chalked off as convergent evolution). ^note God knows we did that IRL with several comparatively less complicated species, with one especially notable case where it took more than a century for taxonomists to realize that they had wrongly classified the adult male, adult female, and juvenile forms of a single species as three different families. And then there's the absence of concrete evidence for an actual larval form being delivered by the Facehugger into a subdued host in the quadrilogy; some Expanded Universe sources actually make this into an explicit lack of such a thing, having it that rather than the Facehugger implanting a larva, it instead delivers either a viral agent or a specially tailored malignant tumor (i.e. cancer) that forcibly restructures surrounding host cells to form the larva's body, which subsequently proceeds to grow into the infamous Chest Burster.

I couldn't think of any equivalents for the above in real-life biology, so I finally decided to google real life equivalent of Facehugger to see if there were already discussions / unofficial analyses on the topic. Lo and behold, there were, among which the following links piqued my interest.

Warning: Some/all of the links may contain disturbing images involving the more explicitly gruesome aspects of Xenomorph biology, as well as gruesome aspects of real-life biology and really up-close images of downright-ugly arthropods. View at your own discretion.

• Monster Science: Monstrous Sex Ed: The Alien Facehugger | Stuff to Blow Your Mind
• Aliens and parasites: life cycle similarities | Deep Sea News
• alien franchise - Is the Xenomorph life cycle based on the life cycle of a real world species? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
• alien franchise - Are facehuggers and xenomorphs the same species or a symbiotic relationship? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
• The Horror of “Alien” Reproduction

The first and last links actually led me to a horrifiying realization about the exact nature of the Facehugger: It's a macroscopically multicellular version of a sperm cell in both shape and function! The damn thing is probably not even sentient, let alone sapient, in contrast to the true Xenomorphs which definitely qualify for the former and arguably do too for the latter (the Queen caste definitely does, at least). And it even fits with the deliberate sexual overtones of Giger's designs of the creature!

edited 9th Feb '17 3:39:34 PM by MarqFJA

First of all, you should see it. Second, I've been wondering about that myself. Given that every film in both franchises had different directors, who maintains the lore for both? Heck, if Fox does, do they still maintain that Alien and Predator are in the same canon?

Oh trust me, I am planning to do so. My only gripe is with the idea of it being a prequel to the Alien quadrilogy; if one considers it as an unrelated movie and handwaves all references to the Alien franchise as merely a case of reimagining the Alienverse on the principle of "this an alternate universe where things went differently", it still seems good.

BTW, what do you think of ?

And on a different note, I dislike the idea of using either "Space Jockey" or "Engineers" as a human-coined name for the race in question, because they're too bland IMO despite (in the latter case) being technically fitting. I'm thinking of using one of the following instead:

• Ingeniators, a Latinization of "Engineers" that maintains the meaning but adding mystique to this species that befits their status as Precursors who seeded many worlds with life, for good or bad. Bonus points for being directly related to the Latin word ingenium, which among other things means "intelligence, a genius".
• Prometheans, after both the title of the film and its mythological namesake. Yeah, the Prometheus crew in particular and humanity in general's relationship with the Engineers does play up the aspects of Prometheus' myth involving defiance of the gods and the gods' intent to limit their creations, but Prometheus himself is known as the creator of mankind, which is what the Engineers exactly are. Thus one could argue that the extinction that befell the Engineers is the price for their own hubris, a punishment for them playing God (which would count as a flagrant defiance of whatever real gods that exist in the setting).^note Not so much because Creating Life Is Bad, but because their intentions behind it are apparently far from benevolent, judging by their seemingly callous decision to exterminate humanity and the Last Engineer being unconditionally hostile to the humans it encountered despite not being actually threatened by them. Compare the eponymous Precursors from Halo.

edited 10th Feb '17 5:16:31 AM by MarqFJA

... Wow, this thread is really dead, huh?

One last try at revival: To anyone here who has access to Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report, what does said book say about the history of the United Systems?

edited 31st Aug '17 6:21:31 PM by MarqFJA

Sorry about that. As for that guide, I'm also sorry that I can't provide a link to find it.

Now then, something that concerns me: Given how all the films have different directors, Ridley Scott directing Alien, Prometheus, and Alien Covenant, has Fox established a committee of sorts on which films and other media are canon?

Beats me.

... And I'm still waiting for feedback on this post. Not , though, since I've actually found an even better choice of name: Demiurge.

edited 31st Aug '17 9:39:00 PM by MarqFJA

Read some of it, can we say Truth in Television?

Also, new agenda: How long will we start treating these prequels directed by Scott the same way the Star Wars prequel trilogy was treated a decade back?

I have no idea what you're talking about regarding Star Wars, so please enlighten me.

I was referring to the prequel trilogy and whether Scott's prequels will end up bashed on by loony fans of this franchise.

Anyways, getting back on-topic, I've always wondered about this bit on the lore: Given how we have the United States Colonial Marine Corps, does that mean that despite the setting in space and the attempts to colonize other planets, the whole world is still divided?

edited 1st Sep '17 4:58:19 AM by HallowHawk

It seems so. From what I could tell, though, at some point the countries of the American continents formed the United Americas bloc, with the USA becoming its de facto leader. It was apparently a response to the emergence of the Three World Empire.

And then there's the rather mysterious nature of the United Systems Military; is the "United Systems" an evolution of the United Nations that happened to gain its own military arm, or did the countries of Earth (and presumably, many/all solar and extrasolar colonies) really unite into a single superstate?

Just noticed that Noiseless Walker has been launched almost two weeks ago, and I'm start to wonder whether it's applicable to any of the Aliens' appearances.

The Alien does tend to do noiseless drops more than anything. They seem to uncurl from walls - but then again they seem to be able to sneak up on the Marines in Aliens whilst crawling.