Bring Back The Colonial Marines!

No Marines – no franchise?

I think it’s safe to say that a good proportion of fans of the Alien franchise were won over and/or drawn in by James Cameron’s superior actioner sequel Aliens.  Personally, Aliens was the first in the series I’d seen.  Decades ago on an old VHS recording.  It’s still my favourite.  And the best thing about that film was the military theme and the Colonial Marines.  Seems to me that they are a large part of why three more movies followed but don’t really get credit for it.

Let’s face it, ever since, all of us have been waiting to see them again.

Alien3 was not a bad movie, it was a damned good one in fact.  However one of the big criticisms was the lack of guns.  But what people really meant by that was the lack of Colonial Marines.  They tried to correct the action/weaponry void in Alien Resurrection (another underrated movie, that has aged better than most), but again they missed the point.  Michael Wincott’s crew was cool and all, but they weren’t state of the badass art.  Worse, they blasted the entire series 200 years down the line, way out of the Cameron timeline, where the Marines would’ve surely changed anyway.

“Fucking us over for a goddamned percentage”

Fast forward to 2001.  A drought in Colonial Marines awesomeness (not to mention Predator, left in the lurch since 1990) is abated with the acclaimed Alien Vs Predator 2 video game.  It recaptures the vibe of the Cameron film and the bug hunting is good, so much so that a movie adaptation (of the comic that is) is planned.  Perhaps we were finally going to see the return of the Colonial Marines, not just to the big screen, but to take on the ‘fucking alien’ (as Gary Busey called it)… the Predator.  It sounded too good to be true.

Indeed, it didn’t take long before the most nasty of rumours began to circulate.  That serial franchise butcher Paul W.S. Anderson, who totally ruined Resident Evil by turning it into a Euro dance music video, was pegged to direct.  That fucking cocksucker…

It was around 2003 when things went from bad to really bad.  Someone, I believe it was Harry Knowles, claimed that Anderson had written a story completely divorced from typical AVP lore that people appreciated (i.e. Pulse Rifles vs Predators, thwap!), and had drawn up a story about Predators fighting Aliens in the arctic.  Which excited people about as much as artificial computer villains and wire-fu in a Resident Evil movie.  The torpedo that broke the boats back, so to speak, came with the trailer.  For those who hadn’t heard the penny drop already, the obvious became apparent when AICN debuted an Alien Vs Predator teaser with a generic rock number pumping along in the background.

It was torn to shreds and 20th Century Fox cancelled all preview screenings of the movie.

When the movie came, for Cameron-ites and general fans of  80’s classics, it went down like a turd in a swimming pool, to use a favoured quote of mine from a certain Dirty Harry sequel.  That part of our fondness for the Colonial Marines was history.

“Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We’re in some real pretty shit now man…”

For whatever reason, Fox decided to push on with a sequel.  It’s circa 2006 now and special effects gurus, but directorial greenhorns, the Bros. Strausse, pitch an idea to Fox to film a real AVP movie, set in space with Colonial Marines fighting a suitably uphill battle against ‘fucking lizards’ (Carl Weathers’ particular description of the Predator).  We’re talking dropships and motion trackers here.  Nuh uh, say the bean counters at Fox, that kinda thing costs money.  Write a story based around cheaper filming locations, such as Jerkwater, USA.  Then you might have a job.

What are the first time directors gonna do, turn them down?

That film sucked.  I mean how can you put it any plainer than that?  It was even worse than Anderson’s abomination.  Teenaged angst, rapist Predaliens and a hackneyed attempt to act as Alien prequel.  At least we seen our first Predator in 17 years that looked and behaved as a Predator should, I suppose.  But still no Colonial Marines.

Bring em back – “A day in the Corps is like a day on the farm”!

I knew when Ridley Scott was announced to return for an Alien prequel that not only would we not see our Marines return, but we probably wouldn’t even see a movie that shared the aesthetics of Aliens or even Alien.  That was proven to be correct.  Prometheus turned out to be a good movie, if you ask me, but too much of a departure from the Alien universe so to speak.  Although a slight blip on the radar did occur.  The precursor to the Pulse Rifle, the WSR (Weyland Storm Rifle), basically a black prototype of the infamous Pulse Rifle, reappeared as part of canon.  Unofficially it’s in the  movie (Prometheus), according to the official website, as part of ship security.  But it was never shown on screen.

I suppose that black Pulse Rifle is the only slither of hope we have that one day the grunts might appear again.  But I think we all know it’s not going to be in Prometheus 2.  I think our best bet is some type of reappearance possibly at the end of a Prometheus trilogy, with Fox testing the grounds with perhaps some type of cameo, just to gauge whether or not they could still make money.  By this time, we’d be approaching the original 1979 timeline.

Here’s what I want to see.  I think the ‘Engineers’ must be maintained as a race of antagonists.  It would be a mistake to send Noomi Rapace to their world and have them show her the ways of the universe and whatnot.  They have to be an existential threat.  This would be the perfect way to segue into the introduction of Weyland’s militarisation, introducing the Coloninial Marines.  Even better, have them throw down with the ‘Engineers’.  We’ve seen ’em fight Xenomorphs before, so these new enemies would be fresh.  A mismatch?  Probably, but that’s part of the fun.

Now come on, you can’t tell me that the likes of, say, Karl Urban, inspecting a troop of Colonial Marines, Apone-style, before battle with those bald roid-ridden dudes that tried to WMD Earth wouldn’t be manly as fuck.  I guarantee that the simple ringing of the motion tracker alone would make for a killer teaser trailer.  Something along those lines anyway.  If money is all that Fox cares about, the return of the Marines is a sure fire hit.  Something they seem keen to ignore.

Well, don’t ask, don’t get.  That’s what I always say.  Someone should start a Facebook page for example.  It might prove more popular than you’d think.  Bring back the Colonial Marines!