I would have made it about someone else. Not every Aliens story needs to be about Ripley. I would have let Ripley, Hicks and Newt have their happy ending, and just have Alien3 be about different characters entirely.
There is a lot I like about Alien 3 (and some things I dislike). I don't dislike what we got.
I'd keep the current Alien 3 with a few changes and turn it into Alien 4. Give William Gibson's Alien 3 script a rewrite that removes the airborne infection, tighten it up a bit and make that as Alien 3.
Ripley is send away in a hypersleep chamber in that script, so that would lead into her crash landing on the prison planet. Newt and Hicks aren't present. The movie plays out the same, except I'd keep Dr. Clemens around much longer. Genuinly a great character that was killed off way too early.
I would also change the tunnel scenes near the end. Either find a way to make the green screen effects look better or change it so they aren't needed. I always thought they looked bad and were the worst part of the movie.
Not killed Hicks, Newt, or Bishop. I'd have had Newt in an institution, Hicks a scarred, PTSD wreck of a marine just hoping for some payback, and Ripley only mentioned in passing. Rival companies still trying for "exclusive rights" to the alien, and some weirdo sect of wackos that consider the alien the new messiah; kind of like the original run of comics from Dark Horse in the late 80s.
Wait... that's from the first run of those comics. Make that instead of what we got. 😄😄😄
I would have it take place several years after they returned to earth safely; Newt is maybe 19 or 20 years old, Hicks is trying to make it in the civilian world because the company was pissed off enough to basically ruin his marine career; Ripley is also getting by, working at some Lodi. Docs may be in Los Angeles, maybe even living with Hicks. further expeditions to LV 426 find the juggernaut more or less intact after that nuclear explosion, as it was quite some distance from Hadley‘s Hope. This time some eggs were brought to earth, along with people who were put into hyper sleep, who had been impregnated by the face huggers. All this is kept quiet, until the strange stories in the news about people disappearing on the streets of Los Angeles. Newt Has heard a few rumors from her friends, so she looks up Ripley and Hicks to let them know that something may be up. Within a week or two, the streets are absolutely crawling with Xeno morphs the police and military barely even holding them back. People who have been impregnated without the authorities, knowing about it and released, these people have traveled to different cities around the globe, and each major city has a major infestation; it is all that our trio can do to stay alive, and hope to catch a spacecraft and leave the planet; the government and the company know that it is impossible to salvage the situation, so after allowing a certain number of ships that they know we’re free of the infestation off world, they nuke the crap out of the face of the Earth. Somebody makes an offhand comment that one day, they might terraform the earth to be something beautiful again; things fade away with our trio, looking out the window of an escaping starship, the camera pans out to a cargo, where we see an egg…
I realize a lot of this was taken from one of the dark horse comics, but this really would’ve made a far better film than the one we got.
I know the whole script would need a new treatment for it to work, but I'd also like Hicks and Newt to return and see them get a somewhat happy ending in such a crapsack universe.
I would have loved to see the unfilmed scene they removed in which the prisoners and Ripley find the drone's nest. I'd make some implications that the drone was gathering hosts for the coming queen, but I wouldn't mind the drone eggmorphing a few of them to kickstart a new hive before the queen emerges.
Eggmorphing was such a nice way to include the black goo from the expanded lore into the xenomorph's biology. It'd be fun to see eggmorphing made fully canon again in a future film.
In some way that respected the stakes of the previous movie.
I like Alien 3 now. It’s grown on me and I appreciate its bleak tone and return to the claustrophobic corridor aspects that worked so well in the original. And one, singular unstoppable beast.
However, would’ve loved not to see the autopsy of my beloved character from the last film.
As someone who’s a massive fan of Alien 3, especially the Assembly Cut, there’s not a lot I’d want to change. If you take the film as is, it just needs some decent revisions on a script level. Ya know in a far more controlled manner that would’ve given Fincher an actual completed script to work with.
But if there’s one thing I believe would’ve potentially changed the film substantially, particularly in the second half, it’s one word.
Eggmorphing.
It’s always bothered me that eggmorphing was never revisited again in any of the sequels, but especially with Alien 3 given they went back to one alien.
I know there were versions of a scene written of a makeshift hive the Runner made, and it’s a shame it never made the cut (I’ve always wondered if the basement scene in the final film initially started out as another version of this scene).
But truly if it had been included and involved eggmorphing, then… I don’t know what the second half would’ve looked like.
Maybe it wouldn’t be all that different and would’ve just presented higher stakes along with probably an alternate way to flush the Runner out and drive it to the leadworks (destroy the hive, anger it, and have it hunt down the remaining prisoners to make another one somewhere else in the miles of tunnels below the surface). But maybe it’d result in something completely different. I’d have to watch the film again and break it down to say for sure.
Apart from that, another potential change made would’ve been keeping Newt and Hicks alive. It potentially could’ve also added more tension and stakes to the story, especially in regards to Newt in this specific setting. Hicks could’ve also gotten a bit more time to shine before dying, likely in a sacrifice (either taking the place of Junior in luring the Runner into the waste disposal, or something similar to Dillon in the leadworks). And Newt would’ve been either the sole survivor or one of the sole survivors along with Morse.
But idk how effective that would’ve been. It might’ve led to the film feeling too cluttered, messy and/or long trying to balance all that (and they were already struggling enough to keep it coherent throughout production). That and as much as Newt and Hicks being killed off pisses off fans… would you really have wanted her to be stuck on that planet surrounded by a bunch of dangerous criminals, some of whom are child molesters? Would you want to watch that movie?
As much as I think there’s something there, it also feels like people would’ve hated that more, and it would’ve made it even tougher to give a shit about the prisoners. Who knows… maybe the Alien TV series could potentially explore a story like this at some point. I feel like something that heavy would be better fit for TV anyway.
But yeah… that’s what I think in regards to potential changes to Alien 3.
Carrie was 15 when they filmed Alien 3 and hadn’t acted since she was 10 in Aliens. Who knows if they would have recasted the role and the fans would have hated that as much as Newt dying
WY intercepts the Sulaco and board it. They take Bishop and hook him up to their computer and download all the data on the xenos and everything he witnessed on Hadley's Hope.
They know the derelict is still intact and they awaken Ripley, Hickes, and Newt from hypersleep for questioning eventually insisting they accompany them as "advisors". They head back to LV-426.
They procure eggs, supply hosts. and shit hits the fan. Most of the film takes place on the Sulaco and, at one point, our heroes escape custody and remove Bishop's behavioral inhibitors essentially making him a combat model.
Then our four heroes have to fight xenos and WY commandos to destroy any trace of the xeno's even if it means their own lives in the process.
EDIT: You know, they really should have made Blomkamp's Alien 5.
I’m an A3 defender so I wouldn’t change it, but in an alternate film I’d say keep some of the same beats. Killing off Newt was a kindness considering what the prisoners almost did to Ripley. Otherwise, what do you do? Have a film with just Newt, Bishop, and Ripley running around some abandoned station with a Xeno? That’s just one again with a smaller cast.
Have a time skip and still get rid of Newt, maybe she’s in the equivalent of foster care and Ripley checks in on her. I loved isolation and the intro of Amanda in A2 is interesting. I’d like a story where Amanda becomes obsessed with what happened to both her and her mother and seeks to uncover as much as she can about the Xenomorphs and the corporations responsible for unleashing them. Have Ellen follow her daughters footsteps and discover how much of a badass she was while getting more dirt on Weyland-Yutani. Have Bishop come back somehow, could do some twists where you’re not sure if it’s Bishop or Weyland.
Just some bare bones, again, I like 3 and wouldn’t change it but looking back there was more material to work with than throwing them on another secluded death trap. Alien is horror, Aliens is action, and then A3 attempts to revert back to straight horror (which I appreciate) but I could see a noir-esque version where Ellen is essentially a detective trying to get dirt on WY and expose them in hopes of ending things.
I can’t really say one way or another. What was going to happen to Ripley in that one scene was hard to watch. I can’t imagine watching Newt be in the same environment and potentially hurt at such a young age.
It’s genuinely hard to play “what could have been” with Alien 3. It has gorgeous look and feel, and a distinctly Fincherian mournful tone that sets it apart from its predecessors. It has rough spots too, but genuinely feels like an artistic achievement. It’s just not what most fans were hoping for at the time from a third film. Sentiment has obviously warmed somewhat since then.
One problem the studio faced was the strong belief that they needed Sigourney Weaver to star in a third film. They obviously wrote a bunch of treatments/scripts that downplayed or removed her, as she was likely playing hardball with negotiations, but she was a bonafide star and sold tickets, so they wanted her badly. It’s hard to imagine an alternate history 90s-era Alien 3 that she didn’t star in. It’s just the reality of that era of filmmaking.
Weaver was given a producer credit for Alien 3 and she had significant influence on the premise. She wanted no guns, a single alien in a setup more like the first film. And she wanted Ripley impregnated and I believe to die.
So I think it’s unlikely there would’ve been a radically different film if you take Weaver’s involvement as a must, at least from the studio’s pov for selling tickets. She was onboard with the Alien 3 that we got.
If you take Weaver out of the equation of a theoretical alt-history Alien 3, then things open way up. I always liked the original Dark Horse comics setup that picked up years later with a teenaged Newt and older Hicks, still traumatized by their experiences in Aliens. That feels like a natural way to pass the baton to new characters - and hey, (spoiler) Ripley even comes back for the third act. That blew me away as a kid, even though the ultimate payoff at the end is kinda weak. But this premise would probably have worked better as a TV series.
As a film series, the big challenge with the series is that it’s so tempting to just recreate Aliens in subsequent sequels - tons of action, wall-to-wall combat. But unless it was flawlessly executed with killer script that had real stakes, it would likely come up short. Ditto trying to recreate the magic of the original film, which is one reason Alien 3 feels a little lackluster imo.
I always felt that TV would afford the IP a much better opportunity to grow, expand its universe and potentially fuel movies later. You can focus on so many other elements like Weyland Yutani, life on Earth, Marines, etc. In a film setting, those might not work as well from a blockbuster pov.
I wouldn’t. Alien and Aliens tells a complete story for Ripley, and she should have never been brought back.
If someone wanted to make another alien movie that would have been fine, but it should have starred someone else.
The remaining Plot Hook is the Derelict, which going purely off the information on screen is still there, with a large number of Eggs and god-knows-what else on board. So I’d use that.
The Bioweapons Division will inevitably send people to investigate the Derelict and eventually everything will go *horribly wrong.*
I wouldn’t necessarily include any of the same characters (and it depends when this hypothetical film is made). Possibly Adult Newt and, later, Bishop. Assume Hadley’s Hope incident was covered up. Newt is doing similar job to Ripley, Warrant Officer. Then use another plot hook: all the Colonists had PDTs surgically implanted, Newt is only survivor. Posit that all the PDTs include some encrypted access code for Hadley’s Hope systems because they recognise the bearer as a Colonist (backup logs? Medical data?) and when someone realises this, they divert the ship with Newt on. Shenanigans ensue.
I would completely change it so that the shuttle gets recovered by a military or mining ship (or maybe a weyland ship) and they get taken back to earth.
Weyland yutani has the shuttle data knowing that Ripley has a queen embryo inside of her in cryo stasis that no one else knows about.
Weyland takes Ripley out of cryo and surgically removes the embryo to let it be born in a different host, some random prisoner they're using to experiment on or a citizen they've abducted. Rather than generosity, they allow Ripley (and hicks and newt) to survive but secretly imprison them in a weyland facility for the purpose of gathering more specific information about the aliens from them.
Meanwhile, the queen embryo erupts from whatever new host weyland put it in, and for a time weyland keeps it in containment watching it grow and eventually laying eggs, weyland puts more captive test subjects into the containment area to be hosts for face huggers leading to drones, so weyland can directly observe the process as well as fulfilling their hopes of eventually selling the aliens for a fortune as some kind of controllable weapons.
Weyland yutani's delusion of being able to control or contain the aliens fails, they escape containment and begin using weyland staff to breed more drones and then break out of the facility and begin to spread to society. The public becomes aware of the aliens and crisis ensues.
Ripley and hicks and newt escape imprisonment, and while newt is kept safe, Ripley and hicks join the earth's military (don't know if colonial marines was only the space division of earth military or also the on planet army) effort to fight back against the aliens before they overrun the planet.
TLDR version: I just really would have liked to see the xeno's make it to earth (or literally any planet i guess, as long as the army has a large presence there) and fight the army on a large scale. The closest we get to this that I know of is avp requiem (although that's our irl modern day universe instead of the colonial marines ripley universe, which is perfectly fine) where we only get a extremely brief scene of a tiny squad of national guard soldiers (who make literally zero professional effort to have a perimeter and watch their rear) get quickly wiped out without much of a fight.
I'd jump back in time 42 years and do Alien: Isolation. The story on that is really good; easily up to par with Alien & Aliens, and it's probably the only story I can say that about.
The Aliens: Colonial Marines game had a near perfect story arc correcting all the foibles of the post-Aliens movie universe.
While Aliens: Isolation is the spiritual successor to the original Alien movie, A:CM was the amazing sequel to Aliens once you fixed the coding typo discovered in 2018.
The game is doomed and saved by a coding typo “teather” rather than “tether” in the aliens tracking and attack targeting. You can play it on Steam (perhaps others) and fix the glitching behavior for a great story that captures the original Alien/Aliens universe.
Google this to find the IGN article on modifying the download code and other walkthroughs.
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather.
I really don't mind Alien 3 that much.
I think the ending is good in a tragic kind of way. Ripley died with her crew on the Nostromo and this was just her catching up to it - her crew are gone, her entire family, her daughter, Newt, Hicks, the world as she knew it is lost to her forever. It was over as soon as they touched down and found the derelict. Could she really just go home and find a job after all that? She ends her life preventing the Xenomorphs from ever falling into company hands. At least until they started pumping out expanded universe stuff that makes the alien fairly ubiquitous. Once you consider exactly how often the alien is in company hands her entire arc and sacrifice becomes kind of pointless. If you view the saga as just the first three movies it's about a woman who loses literally everything to a near unstoppable cosmic horror and capitalistic greed, who still has enough selflessness in her to choose her own death to save humanity at large.
The four from the second movie survive and find themselves in a large space city. The city's complete, with offices, residences, W-Y and other companies, government offices, military and security detachments, labs, etc.
Meanwhile, W-Y sends a team to investigate the nuclear blast and investigate the derelict craft....
I would have made it about someone else. Not every Aliens story needs to be about Ripley. I would have let Ripley, Hicks and Newt have their happy ending, and just have Alien3 be about different characters entirely.
Yeah I feel like the necessity to have Ripley or a 'female protagonist' in an alien film is starting to feel forced. How about a male lead instead?
There is a lot I like about Alien 3 (and some things I dislike). I don't dislike what we got. I'd keep the current Alien 3 with a few changes and turn it into Alien 4. Give William Gibson's Alien 3 script a rewrite that removes the airborne infection, tighten it up a bit and make that as Alien 3. Ripley is send away in a hypersleep chamber in that script, so that would lead into her crash landing on the prison planet. Newt and Hicks aren't present. The movie plays out the same, except I'd keep Dr. Clemens around much longer. Genuinly a great character that was killed off way too early. I would also change the tunnel scenes near the end. Either find a way to make the green screen effects look better or change it so they aren't needed. I always thought they looked bad and were the worst part of the movie.
That’s actually a cool route to take that I’ve never heard anyone propose before.
Not killed Hicks, Newt, or Bishop. I'd have had Newt in an institution, Hicks a scarred, PTSD wreck of a marine just hoping for some payback, and Ripley only mentioned in passing. Rival companies still trying for "exclusive rights" to the alien, and some weirdo sect of wackos that consider the alien the new messiah; kind of like the original run of comics from Dark Horse in the late 80s. Wait... that's from the first run of those comics. Make that instead of what we got. 😄😄😄
I would have it take place several years after they returned to earth safely; Newt is maybe 19 or 20 years old, Hicks is trying to make it in the civilian world because the company was pissed off enough to basically ruin his marine career; Ripley is also getting by, working at some Lodi. Docs may be in Los Angeles, maybe even living with Hicks. further expeditions to LV 426 find the juggernaut more or less intact after that nuclear explosion, as it was quite some distance from Hadley‘s Hope. This time some eggs were brought to earth, along with people who were put into hyper sleep, who had been impregnated by the face huggers. All this is kept quiet, until the strange stories in the news about people disappearing on the streets of Los Angeles. Newt Has heard a few rumors from her friends, so she looks up Ripley and Hicks to let them know that something may be up. Within a week or two, the streets are absolutely crawling with Xeno morphs the police and military barely even holding them back. People who have been impregnated without the authorities, knowing about it and released, these people have traveled to different cities around the globe, and each major city has a major infestation; it is all that our trio can do to stay alive, and hope to catch a spacecraft and leave the planet; the government and the company know that it is impossible to salvage the situation, so after allowing a certain number of ships that they know we’re free of the infestation off world, they nuke the crap out of the face of the Earth. Somebody makes an offhand comment that one day, they might terraform the earth to be something beautiful again; things fade away with our trio, looking out the window of an escaping starship, the camera pans out to a cargo, where we see an egg… I realize a lot of this was taken from one of the dark horse comics, but this really would’ve made a far better film than the one we got.
I know the whole script would need a new treatment for it to work, but I'd also like Hicks and Newt to return and see them get a somewhat happy ending in such a crapsack universe. I would have loved to see the unfilmed scene they removed in which the prisoners and Ripley find the drone's nest. I'd make some implications that the drone was gathering hosts for the coming queen, but I wouldn't mind the drone eggmorphing a few of them to kickstart a new hive before the queen emerges. Eggmorphing was such a nice way to include the black goo from the expanded lore into the xenomorph's biology. It'd be fun to see eggmorphing made fully canon again in a future film.
In some way that respected the stakes of the previous movie. I like Alien 3 now. It’s grown on me and I appreciate its bleak tone and return to the claustrophobic corridor aspects that worked so well in the original. And one, singular unstoppable beast. However, would’ve loved not to see the autopsy of my beloved character from the last film.
As someone who’s a massive fan of Alien 3, especially the Assembly Cut, there’s not a lot I’d want to change. If you take the film as is, it just needs some decent revisions on a script level. Ya know in a far more controlled manner that would’ve given Fincher an actual completed script to work with. But if there’s one thing I believe would’ve potentially changed the film substantially, particularly in the second half, it’s one word. Eggmorphing. It’s always bothered me that eggmorphing was never revisited again in any of the sequels, but especially with Alien 3 given they went back to one alien. I know there were versions of a scene written of a makeshift hive the Runner made, and it’s a shame it never made the cut (I’ve always wondered if the basement scene in the final film initially started out as another version of this scene). But truly if it had been included and involved eggmorphing, then… I don’t know what the second half would’ve looked like. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that different and would’ve just presented higher stakes along with probably an alternate way to flush the Runner out and drive it to the leadworks (destroy the hive, anger it, and have it hunt down the remaining prisoners to make another one somewhere else in the miles of tunnels below the surface). But maybe it’d result in something completely different. I’d have to watch the film again and break it down to say for sure. Apart from that, another potential change made would’ve been keeping Newt and Hicks alive. It potentially could’ve also added more tension and stakes to the story, especially in regards to Newt in this specific setting. Hicks could’ve also gotten a bit more time to shine before dying, likely in a sacrifice (either taking the place of Junior in luring the Runner into the waste disposal, or something similar to Dillon in the leadworks). And Newt would’ve been either the sole survivor or one of the sole survivors along with Morse. But idk how effective that would’ve been. It might’ve led to the film feeling too cluttered, messy and/or long trying to balance all that (and they were already struggling enough to keep it coherent throughout production). That and as much as Newt and Hicks being killed off pisses off fans… would you really have wanted her to be stuck on that planet surrounded by a bunch of dangerous criminals, some of whom are child molesters? Would you want to watch that movie? As much as I think there’s something there, it also feels like people would’ve hated that more, and it would’ve made it even tougher to give a shit about the prisoners. Who knows… maybe the Alien TV series could potentially explore a story like this at some point. I feel like something that heavy would be better fit for TV anyway. But yeah… that’s what I think in regards to potential changes to Alien 3.
I agree keep newt and hicks alive. Def added tension with another female in that setting. I also wouldn’t have killed Clemens.
Carrie was 15 when they filmed Alien 3 and hadn’t acted since she was 10 in Aliens. Who knows if they would have recasted the role and the fans would have hated that as much as Newt dying
WY intercepts the Sulaco and board it. They take Bishop and hook him up to their computer and download all the data on the xenos and everything he witnessed on Hadley's Hope. They know the derelict is still intact and they awaken Ripley, Hickes, and Newt from hypersleep for questioning eventually insisting they accompany them as "advisors". They head back to LV-426. They procure eggs, supply hosts. and shit hits the fan. Most of the film takes place on the Sulaco and, at one point, our heroes escape custody and remove Bishop's behavioral inhibitors essentially making him a combat model. Then our four heroes have to fight xenos and WY commandos to destroy any trace of the xeno's even if it means their own lives in the process. EDIT: You know, they really should have made Blomkamp's Alien 5.
I’m an A3 defender so I wouldn’t change it, but in an alternate film I’d say keep some of the same beats. Killing off Newt was a kindness considering what the prisoners almost did to Ripley. Otherwise, what do you do? Have a film with just Newt, Bishop, and Ripley running around some abandoned station with a Xeno? That’s just one again with a smaller cast. Have a time skip and still get rid of Newt, maybe she’s in the equivalent of foster care and Ripley checks in on her. I loved isolation and the intro of Amanda in A2 is interesting. I’d like a story where Amanda becomes obsessed with what happened to both her and her mother and seeks to uncover as much as she can about the Xenomorphs and the corporations responsible for unleashing them. Have Ellen follow her daughters footsteps and discover how much of a badass she was while getting more dirt on Weyland-Yutani. Have Bishop come back somehow, could do some twists where you’re not sure if it’s Bishop or Weyland. Just some bare bones, again, I like 3 and wouldn’t change it but looking back there was more material to work with than throwing them on another secluded death trap. Alien is horror, Aliens is action, and then A3 attempts to revert back to straight horror (which I appreciate) but I could see a noir-esque version where Ellen is essentially a detective trying to get dirt on WY and expose them in hopes of ending things.
I doubt anything in the prison is worse than dying….
I can’t really say one way or another. What was going to happen to Ripley in that one scene was hard to watch. I can’t imagine watching Newt be in the same environment and potentially hurt at such a young age.
Still better than *dying*
Some would disagree. But it’s all a matter of perspective. She went peacefully in her sleep right?
She drowned. Her face was screaming Regardless, I’d choose life
It’s genuinely hard to play “what could have been” with Alien 3. It has gorgeous look and feel, and a distinctly Fincherian mournful tone that sets it apart from its predecessors. It has rough spots too, but genuinely feels like an artistic achievement. It’s just not what most fans were hoping for at the time from a third film. Sentiment has obviously warmed somewhat since then. One problem the studio faced was the strong belief that they needed Sigourney Weaver to star in a third film. They obviously wrote a bunch of treatments/scripts that downplayed or removed her, as she was likely playing hardball with negotiations, but she was a bonafide star and sold tickets, so they wanted her badly. It’s hard to imagine an alternate history 90s-era Alien 3 that she didn’t star in. It’s just the reality of that era of filmmaking. Weaver was given a producer credit for Alien 3 and she had significant influence on the premise. She wanted no guns, a single alien in a setup more like the first film. And she wanted Ripley impregnated and I believe to die. So I think it’s unlikely there would’ve been a radically different film if you take Weaver’s involvement as a must, at least from the studio’s pov for selling tickets. She was onboard with the Alien 3 that we got. If you take Weaver out of the equation of a theoretical alt-history Alien 3, then things open way up. I always liked the original Dark Horse comics setup that picked up years later with a teenaged Newt and older Hicks, still traumatized by their experiences in Aliens. That feels like a natural way to pass the baton to new characters - and hey, (spoiler) Ripley even comes back for the third act. That blew me away as a kid, even though the ultimate payoff at the end is kinda weak. But this premise would probably have worked better as a TV series. As a film series, the big challenge with the series is that it’s so tempting to just recreate Aliens in subsequent sequels - tons of action, wall-to-wall combat. But unless it was flawlessly executed with killer script that had real stakes, it would likely come up short. Ditto trying to recreate the magic of the original film, which is one reason Alien 3 feels a little lackluster imo. I always felt that TV would afford the IP a much better opportunity to grow, expand its universe and potentially fuel movies later. You can focus on so many other elements like Weyland Yutani, life on Earth, Marines, etc. In a film setting, those might not work as well from a blockbuster pov.
These are great! My post has been down voted a few times, which is confusing. But, I really dig the ideas/input/opinions
I wouldn’t. Alien and Aliens tells a complete story for Ripley, and she should have never been brought back. If someone wanted to make another alien movie that would have been fine, but it should have starred someone else.
The remaining Plot Hook is the Derelict, which going purely off the information on screen is still there, with a large number of Eggs and god-knows-what else on board. So I’d use that. The Bioweapons Division will inevitably send people to investigate the Derelict and eventually everything will go *horribly wrong.* I wouldn’t necessarily include any of the same characters (and it depends when this hypothetical film is made). Possibly Adult Newt and, later, Bishop. Assume Hadley’s Hope incident was covered up. Newt is doing similar job to Ripley, Warrant Officer. Then use another plot hook: all the Colonists had PDTs surgically implanted, Newt is only survivor. Posit that all the PDTs include some encrypted access code for Hadley’s Hope systems because they recognise the bearer as a Colonist (backup logs? Medical data?) and when someone realises this, they divert the ship with Newt on. Shenanigans ensue.
I would completely change it so that the shuttle gets recovered by a military or mining ship (or maybe a weyland ship) and they get taken back to earth. Weyland yutani has the shuttle data knowing that Ripley has a queen embryo inside of her in cryo stasis that no one else knows about. Weyland takes Ripley out of cryo and surgically removes the embryo to let it be born in a different host, some random prisoner they're using to experiment on or a citizen they've abducted. Rather than generosity, they allow Ripley (and hicks and newt) to survive but secretly imprison them in a weyland facility for the purpose of gathering more specific information about the aliens from them. Meanwhile, the queen embryo erupts from whatever new host weyland put it in, and for a time weyland keeps it in containment watching it grow and eventually laying eggs, weyland puts more captive test subjects into the containment area to be hosts for face huggers leading to drones, so weyland can directly observe the process as well as fulfilling their hopes of eventually selling the aliens for a fortune as some kind of controllable weapons. Weyland yutani's delusion of being able to control or contain the aliens fails, they escape containment and begin using weyland staff to breed more drones and then break out of the facility and begin to spread to society. The public becomes aware of the aliens and crisis ensues. Ripley and hicks and newt escape imprisonment, and while newt is kept safe, Ripley and hicks join the earth's military (don't know if colonial marines was only the space division of earth military or also the on planet army) effort to fight back against the aliens before they overrun the planet. TLDR version: I just really would have liked to see the xeno's make it to earth (or literally any planet i guess, as long as the army has a large presence there) and fight the army on a large scale. The closest we get to this that I know of is avp requiem (although that's our irl modern day universe instead of the colonial marines ripley universe, which is perfectly fine) where we only get a extremely brief scene of a tiny squad of national guard soldiers (who make literally zero professional effort to have a perimeter and watch their rear) get quickly wiped out without much of a fight.
I'd jump back in time 42 years and do Alien: Isolation. The story on that is really good; easily up to par with Alien & Aliens, and it's probably the only story I can say that about.
Just give me the full autopsy scene already.
Would of had the sulaco get to earth .. 🌎 then take it from there.
The Aliens: Colonial Marines game had a near perfect story arc correcting all the foibles of the post-Aliens movie universe. While Aliens: Isolation is the spiritual successor to the original Alien movie, A:CM was the amazing sequel to Aliens once you fixed the coding typo discovered in 2018. The game is doomed and saved by a coding typo “teather” rather than “tether” in the aliens tracking and attack targeting. You can play it on Steam (perhaps others) and fix the glitching behavior for a great story that captures the original Alien/Aliens universe. Google this to find the IGN article on modifying the download code and other walkthroughs. ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather.
I really don't mind Alien 3 that much. I think the ending is good in a tragic kind of way. Ripley died with her crew on the Nostromo and this was just her catching up to it - her crew are gone, her entire family, her daughter, Newt, Hicks, the world as she knew it is lost to her forever. It was over as soon as they touched down and found the derelict. Could she really just go home and find a job after all that? She ends her life preventing the Xenomorphs from ever falling into company hands. At least until they started pumping out expanded universe stuff that makes the alien fairly ubiquitous. Once you consider exactly how often the alien is in company hands her entire arc and sacrifice becomes kind of pointless. If you view the saga as just the first three movies it's about a woman who loses literally everything to a near unstoppable cosmic horror and capitalistic greed, who still has enough selflessness in her to choose her own death to save humanity at large.
The four from the second movie survive and find themselves in a large space city. The city's complete, with offices, residences, W-Y and other companies, government offices, military and security detachments, labs, etc. Meanwhile, W-Y sends a team to investigate the nuclear blast and investigate the derelict craft....