There is no denying the significant place the first two Aliens films has in the history of Science Fiction. They were two very different films that were completely amazing for two different sets of reasons (personally I liked the second one the best). But after the first 2 movies, the franchise sort of begun to get bastardized a bit. In the first film, the Aliens were grim objects of horror… something straight out of a nightmare. But in the most recent incarnations, like the AVP series, the Aliens have become almost like bad keystone cop cartoon characters. Kinda like how Ninjas lost their mystique of mystery and dread somewhere around the mid nineties and just became standard canon fodder for the good guys to fight. Glorified and dispensable henchmen really.
But has it gotten so bad that we could be looking at an Aliens movie without any Aliens? Sort of.
In a recent interview with MTV, Aliens star Sigourney Weaver dropped a hint that they could be looking at doing another Ripley movie, but without any Aliens in it. How strange would that be?
“We’d have to go back to the drawing board on [the alien],” she said. “Ridley said that right away when we first talked about [a fifth film].” And finally, the quote that’s gotten me mighty curious, “What we’re interested in is taking the character of Ripley and seeing what other science fiction story we can tell about someone who has lived several lives.”
Really? On the surface it sounds like a horrible idea to me. But after thinking about it a few minutes, I conceed that it MIGHT have some potential. After all… Ripley is a pretty cool character in and of herself, so maybe there could be a story there to tell. But could a Ripley movie apart from any “Aliens” have any appeal? Would you want to see it?
