When franchises outstay their welcome

A couple of months ago now, I was in my local. The footy was on the big screen and an ad came on for Sky Sports, featuring The Alien from the eponymously titled franchise, and the crab headed Predator – playing penalty shootouts (I think the Alien was in goal).

I think – I think I nearly wept... but wasn't utterly surprised.

I bring this up because the other night me and a friend had a drunken conversation about movie franchises, with particular reference to the Alien Versus Predator films, which are both utter drivel (though I'll concede, I haven't seen the second of the two, I just know it's bad).

I hate it when these tedious money-spinners emerge, intermittently as they do, to tarnish the legacy of what was a great film, and though I wouldn't count myself as a 'fan of the Alien' par se, they are disrespectful to people who care about the films memory.

Mainly though, they're just lazy. Lame and lazy, and represent a complete paucity of ambition or ideas. It's also a bit stupid, as if the suits behind these crappy sequels continue to plunder old themes like this, rather than investing in new, fresh ideas, they won't have any old horses to whip up to the glue factory in ten years time (and please note here that AVP is also an anagram of PVA).

And the original film did have ideas by the score. True, it was a fertile meeting of minds between some creative movers and shakers (Ridley Scott, HR Giger, Dan O'Bannon, Moebius etc. etc.) that doesn't happen everyday, but that doesn't preclude similar projects happening again.

What I think is particularly brilliant about Alien is its sense of style; its look and texture – right down to the Moebius designed ships uniforms, and Giger's trademark biomechanics. Indeed at a lecture at university one of my tutors cited the Alien itself as an important (and tres postmodern) example of a visual cue from that has gone on to influence industrial product design.

And beyond that, there is the point at which its visual atmospherics mesh with its 'world-building': the story is compelling, the characters believable, and more than that entities whose fates we might care about. And in spite of its big ideas, big concepts, and ability to shock, it retains pace and an important lightness of touch. I've heard it argued by no less than Sigourney Weaver herself that Alien is essentially a ghost story in space – or at least more a slasher flick –than the out and out fire-fight that the later episodes degenerated into. Scott's direction reveals the lurking monster in a sort of slow delicious strip, realising as he must have done, that as with anything frightening, the human mind's capacity for imagination is a far more potent tool than any amount of special effects.

If then, the ghost story that Alien comprises a certain sinister eroticism, mixed in with its queasy tropes regarding the reproductive cycle and sexual symbolism, the subsequent potboilers descend into a detached, disinterested, mechanical pornography of screeching beasties and exploding chests.

Granted, while the decaying orbit of the story's arc is at least gently parabolic (the sequel is good, both three and four feel like merely frustratingly squandered opportunities) the final two are just utterly moronic, and represent nemesis to the franchise.

Indeed these latter two were, I believe, ultimately instigated by the scene in the trophy room at the end of Predator 2, where the camera briefly lingers on an Alien Skull, which was a little post modern bit of fun, and that is where it should have started and finished, as just a little tantalising footnote, for stoned nerds to chuckle over.

Instead we get to be bored to death by the science fiction equivalent of a WWF (that's World Wrestling btw) showdown. Intertextuality sounds cute enough, but more often than not, occurs with a watering down of the original spirit.

The only direction that the films now seem to have to go in is whipping out new things for the Alien to impregnate – in a kind of 'pimp my Alien', which while a novel conceit, is no longer 'the big idea' when re-fed through the mangle like this. In fact, I don't know why they don't have and be done with it, and play the ultimate recursive trump card by having an Alien impregnate another Alien! how cool would that be!

What really bugs me though is this: If, as I have said, allusion and hinting at the overall form is infinitely more sexy than spelling things out in mile high neon letters, why do people insist on explicating things in wearying detail?

The best example of this I can think of would be the gag-reflex-invitingly-bad Star Wars prequels of recent years. Apart from the fact that they were dull, and completely lacked any sense of gravitas or kinesis (due in part to the 'look at me wanking' CGI showboating of Industrial Light and Magic), what also got on my tits was the fact that they portray, clumsily, events that were obscurely (and deliciously) referenced in the original films. Who THE FUCK wanted to know what The Force was for example? Why do these loose ends need tying up? can't you just let them dangle?

Not that I'm that bothered anyway (blinks back tear) I'm over it.

I suppose, at least with the AVP films, that what you're getting, is ironically (given the reproductive themes of Alien) a sort of genetic hybrid – the bastard child of two different films.

But confronted with this progeny, I respond as Arnie himself did in Predator, when confronted with his titular foe:

"You are one ugly motherfucker"