alien prequel dead

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The Freeman
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Is Noomi Rapace becoming a Hollywood star? That's certainly an unexpected turn of events.
 
Indeed, I didn't really like the idea of a prequel - not saying I wouldn't watch it - but a spin-off (I guess) by the original director sounds really cool! I hope Giger is back!
 
It's true, Fox confirmed it on twitter. ****ing gutted as it stood a chance with Ridley at the helm. It's not dead they simply rebranded it as prometheus and probably changed the alien creature. More details can be found on AvpGalaxy.net.
 
Seconded

I wouldn't object to a remake/update/reimagining if they wanted to down that route (and it honoured the principles of the original), but a prequel never really made much sense, and I'm glad they killed it off. It had all the possibility of being as bad as the Star Wars Prequels, where in the digital effects diminished the original films.
 
It's true, Fox confirmed it on twitter. ****ing gutted as it stood a chance with Ridley at the helm. It's not dead they simply rebranded it as prometheus and probably changed the alien creature. More details can be found on AvpGalaxy.net.

It's dead. They're just salvaging what they have already invested and converting into a whole new project. It's been done countless of times before.
 
It had all the possibility of being as bad as the Star Wars Prequels, where in the digital effects diminished the original films.

Steady on. It was never going to be as bad as the Star Wars prequels.
 
Steady on. It was never going to be as bad as the Star Wars prequels.

Half their problem is the fact that they are far more spectacular than the films that proceeded them because of the advances in digital effects, and in a way therefore undermine them. The same issue would also plague an Alien prequel. A lot of the technological assumptions in Alien were rather quaint (for example the 'mother' room was like something out of 2001 with it walls of meaningless lights), and making a film set before then devoid of mobile devices, touch screens and all of the technology we take for granted today would be at odds with the modern public's perception of what would still be a future scenario.
 
Special effects per se weren't the problem with the Star Wars prequels, it's how they were used. Over-long fight and chase scenes were shoe-horned in everywhere just to have a spectacle. They were a substitute for good plot or character development - or indeed pacing. Because George Lucas.
 
Special effects per se weren't the problem with the Star Wars prequels, it's how they were used. Over-long fight and chase scenes were shoe-horned in everywhere just to have a spectacle. They were a substitute for good plot or character development - or indeed pacing. Because George Lucas.

Note, I said half the problem. Red Letter media covers all the bases with respect to what's wrong with the films themselves. My point is more that any production is a reflection of the time in which it was made, both in terms of the technologies available, the cost of those technologies as well as the cultural mindset of that period, out of a necessity to compete with present market forces.

Purely from that perspective there exists a jarring disconnect between the scale, scope and pacing of the original films Vs those of the prequels, that undermines the intensity of them. When the original trilogy came out the technology was viewed as pretty intense, but naturally given the success of the films, that became the bar to which all other special effects films aspired to surpass. To the extent that the prequels had no choice but to go beyond the original trilogy, and in doing so render them kind of mundane as a result. You only need to consider how fundamentally the release of Half-Life impacted game design to see how if Half-life 2 had been made as a prequel (forget the storyline, just consider the technology) it would have created created such a disconnect.

Personally although I'm interested in Deus Ex 3, I can't help but feel that in many ways that it is going to do the original game a dis-service because it's going to be bigger bolder and more action packed than what it is attempting to proceed. Deus Ex was a product of it's time. It's game design that was built within the technological constraints of the period both in terms of level size, polygon counts, AI intelligence, storage medium, etc etc. Deus Ex 3 might well turn out to be a great game, but it's extremely unlikely that it will feel like a prequel to the original game.

Even if all the flaws of the Star Wars prequels raised by Mr Plinkett over at Red Letter Media had been addressed (including my personal favourable, the absurdity of the whole 'Clone Wars' storyline), they would still have felt at odds with the original films. The same would also be true of an alien prequel. You can only really move forward with storytelling (save with literature).
 
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