When Aliens Met Amelie, A Case Study in How Hollywood Treats its Franchises

Rating: 6/10 (26 November 2011)

Everything has pretty much been said about this film, so I would like to take this in a slightly different direction.
Forget the plot. It steals left and right from the other films: the traitor from Alien, the guns and action of Aliens, the color palette of Alien 3... Joss Whedon's screenplay tries to shoehorn in character prototypes from his aborted "Firefly", and Jeunet's bite is less fierce without Marc Caro. Forget the idea of cloning, we've seen this before, and while Sigourney Weaver takes the character to interesting places, the opportunity isn't explored as fully as one would wish.
And therein lies the problem of this film. The Alien saga is unique because it has two central pillars: - strong main character - fascinating mythology left almost completely unexplored
All successful film series built around a recurring film character are either episodically built around a main conflict (Harry Potter) or inevitably are "comedies" because there's only so much a main character can take (Indiana Jones and James Bond, we're looking at you).
The Alien saga could have gone back to the roots of the mythology Ridley Scott and Giger brushed up against in part 1. Instead it tried to emulate what James Cameron did in part 2. It worked in part 2 because Ripley was playing against type, an emotionally limited intellectual having to be a soldier and a mother, and face her worst fears. We were all the better for it.
And then came parts 3 and 4, and while the budgets rose, the ideas dwindled. Attempts to breathe new life in got stiffed, and however bonkers - Vincent Ward's medieval take, watch the DVD special features to believe it - original concepts were better than what landed on the screen.
Maybe, more than anything, this is a perfect case-study for how badly Hollywood can treat its star franchises: with total aversion for risk-taking. Nobody expected the first film, and it reinvented horror aesthetics. Few people knew what to expect from the second one, and James Cameron turned the tables on them. But as the franchise grew in fame, so did the stakes, and for all the talented people involved behind the camera - Giger, Fincher, Jeunet, Ward... - the series lost the power to awe and terrify us.
And now, after all these years, we are headed back to the darkest recesses of Scott and Giger's minds, with Prometheus.
We will see what that brings. Its colossal budget might bode ill, its refusal to claim too close a relation to the Alien universe is probably wise. Until then, we will have the sometimes fascinating wreckage that are Aliens 3 and 4 to marvel at.