The longer a film franchise goes on, and the more people that get involved, the more difficult it is to keep it from becoming a complete disaster. The Alien franchise is a hot mess. Is that ok to say? While the first two films are solid cinema, after that the entire thing goes off the deep end. A new video now tries, and fails, to make sense of it all. Check out the new TL; DW for the Alien franchise.
The video series, created by Mashable, is called Too Long; Didn't Watch and exists to get you caught up on the pop culture that you never quite got around to. We certainly hope most movie fans have at least seen the first two entries in the series, as both Alien and Aliens are classic films. Whichever one you happen to like better is really only a question on the number of machine guns you prefer in your cinema. After that, however, everybody is pretty much excused from class. Even the guys who made this video, which is designed to clue you in on the parts of the franchise you didn't see, can't really wrap their heads around the later Alien movies, especially Alien: Resurrection which, as they point out, just doesn't work...at all...as a concept. It's terrible.
From there, we jump into the Alien vs. Predator movies. In them, Xenomorph's fight Predators. That's... pretty much it. There's not a lot of world building going on to say the least. Now, of course, we have the whole Prometheus thing, which is so confusing that up until we actually saw it, we weren't entirely sure whether or not it was part of Alien film series or not. Even after we saw it, we weren't quite sure what was going on. Maybe all will be explained in the sequel, Alien: Covenant, which is already an improvement, since it, at least, has Alien in the title. That film will see the crew of the spaceship Covenant, including Demian Bichir, Danny McBride, and Katherine Waterston, as they discover an apparently uninhabited planet ripe for colonization. We're guessing the planet will probably turn out to be inhabited, probably by face-hugging aliens with acid blood. Probably.
We also have to point out that there is actually a ninth movie still on the way as well, as Neill Blomkamp's Alien movie is far from dead, it was simply delayed so that we didn't have two, completely independent, entries in the franchise hitting within a few months of each other. Even for fans looking forward to new films, that would likely be a little much.
Have you seen every movie in the Alien franchise? Are you excited that it's not over yet? Let us know what you think in the comments.
