Comment by loudmax
3 days ago
I tend to agree with your take on these movies, but I find I can enjoy some of them to a greater extent by rejecting the notion of what's "cannon".
For instance, I like the bleakness of Alien 3 opening with Newt and Hicks both dead. That doesn't spoil my enjoyment of Aliens, which ends on a triumphant note. These are different stories, and they can be treated on completely different planes. If you want, you can imagine the movies as representing alternate branching universes, where one branch led to Newt and Hicks dying in hibernation, and in some other branch that's too uninteresting to be put to film, they live happily ever after.
I also liked Blade Runner 2049, but I don't need to retroactively reevaluate the original Blade Runner in light of any of the questions that are settled in the sequel. In Ridley Scott's original film, Deckard's humanity is still open to question, regardless of what's presented in Villeneuve's version.
Of course when the sequel is complete trash, it's easy to ignore entirely. Terminator 3 being the obvious example.
While I agree that you can just mentally split the continuity and thus spare Newt from her fate, in doing so it means that the continuity after is meaningless. I did something similar with Star Trek Nemesis. It wasn't a great movie so I just rejected that Data died at the end. Everything else after is fan fiction and it's irrelevant whether there's some other android who carries his memories and returns.
I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.
> I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.
In a way, I feel like this makes it the comic-book movie that's spiritually closest to the comics.