All in the same universe?

[Graham Kennedy]

Premise : Commando, the Predator movies, the Alien movies, Robocop, Blade Runner, and Avatar are all set in the same universe.

First, Commando. Set in 1985 (when the movie was made). John Matrix is a retired special forces operative who worked in black ops, toppling dictatorships and generally being a badass. He gave it up because he promised his daughter he wouldn't be that violent / borderline bad guy any more. His CO tries to convince him to come back to work at the end, which he refuses.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a Terminator arrives to kill Sarah Connor. It fails, but its remains fall into the hands of Cyberdyne, who begin to research exotic technology.

Predator. Happens in 1987 (Agent Keys in the 1997-set Predator 2 says it happened 'ten years ago'). We find that after Commando, Matrix DID agree to return to duty because having his daughter held hostage made him realise that he couldn't live with the fact that other people out there were suffering that fate. So he agreed to return only on the condition that he would do rescue-type missions - which is why, as he said in Predator, "we're a rescue team. Not assassins." He adopted a new name as part of his cover and assembled a new team, spending the next two years rescuing people from various bad places.

In the aftermath of Predator, the US government learns that alien life forms definitely exist and visit Earth. This is communiated to Weyland-Yutani, a major defence contractor, sparking their interest in acquiring any forms of alien technology that they can. Remember the bio of Agent Keys in Predator 2? "Hot out of college and into the Strategic Defense Institute. Then two years later commissioned as a captain in Air Force Intelligence." Weyland-Yutani was the defence company Keyes went to work for out of college, where he was assigned to try and recover alien technology. He was commissioned into Air Fore intelligence to facilitate this mission - a classic example of the intertwining of the military inductrial complex.

In 1995, another Terminator arrives in Los Angeles to kill John Connor, this one a T-1000. It is destroyed. So is the Cyberdyne researh facility, in a terrorist bombing. Cyberdyne stock value plummets, and it is subsequently bought out by the giant corporation, Weyland-Yutani. The timeline is altered, delaying Judgment Day. (Each iteration of the Terminator movies seems to alter the future, moving the date of Judgment Day - with Genisys making it so that it will never happen at all...?)

Predator 2. Happens in 1997. Weyland Yutani are disappointed to fail to recover alien tehnology, yet again. But they keep trying. Note that society is depicted as being increasingly crime-ridden and violent.

Alien Versus Predator. Happens in 2004, when the movie is set. Weyland has become especially interested in the idea of alien technology as a possible way to save his life after he develops lung cancer. He fails to get the tech and is killed by a Predator.

Alien Versus Predator : Requiem. Happens just after Alien Versus Predator. And at the end, finally, Wyeland-Yutani get hold of some Predator weaponry. They set about reverse-engineering it.

Terminator 3. Set in 2004. Cyberdyne is finally working on producing the Terminators, choosing as the model what it deduces to be the most effective soldier in US history - John Matrix. Judgement Day finally happens.

In the aftermath, Skynet is defeated after a brutal war. Civilisation rebuilds over the next few decades.

Robocop. OCP, a subsidiary of Weyland-Yutani, produce the first offshoot of Predator technology - the materials technology which produces Robocop. Society continues the attempt to recover, but is still a violent, chaotic place. Robocop is intended as a way to combat this. Detroit is actually one of the nicer cities of those left in the US, thogh.

Blade Runner. By 2019 society is still struggling on Earth; Los Angeles, hit during Judgment Day, struggles to even survive as a city - far worse off than Detroit. But the alien technology has spun off some new applications. Replicants are born. Interplanetary travel is common, allowing many who can afford it to move to the off world colonies, escaping the radiaion and chaos on Earth - orbital space habitats and colonies on Mars, the asteroids, Titan, etc.

Avatar. Matter/Antimatter systems have been developed by 2154, allowing interstellar spaceflight. The first inerstellar colony has been founded by the Resources Development Administration, the interstellar arm of Weyland-Yutani, and unobtanium - a material first found in the Predator weapons - is being mined and shipped to Earth. But the Na'Vi rebel and kick the RDA forces off the planet. With interstellar travel so expensive and difficult, Weyland-Yutani has no way to fight back.

Alien. Weyland Yutani has finally cracked FTL travel, allowing them to spread their resource-gobbling ways across several solar systems. Interstellar war is still too expensive, though - but when a ship picks up a broadcast from an alien vessel and translates it, they stumble across the possibility of aquiring the ultimate biological weapon. They direct the Nostromo towards the planet with orders to recover a Xenomorph; it is their hope to send a small mission to Pandora and drop an alien there, expecting that it will reproduce and overrun the planet eventually. Without hosts, they hope the Xenomorphs will then die out. A conquest without an expensive war.

Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien : Resurrection then follows on as expected.

One could work Prometheus in here, but it causes difficulties. Primarily, we are given a concrete date of 2093 for the arrival of the ship at LV-223. Since the Prometheus was an FTL ship, how is it that the Pandora run was made by STL Matter/Antimatter ships? One possible explanation is that FTL travel is possible, but prohibitively expensive; the Prometheus was said to have cost a trillion dollars and could only do 16 x c.

What say you? Can we work anything else in?

[Mikey]

I have a bit of a nitpicky issue with the Blade Runner treatment in particular. Even if we ignore the background material in the source novella, we know from the film that a) replicants are produced by the Tyrell Corporation, and b) said Tyrell Corporation is a majority-owned public corporation, if not a simply wholly-owned propietary corp - patently NOT a subsidiary or piece of a conglomerate of which Weyland-Yutani is a member or owner.

If you did want to continue adding properties to this thought experiment, though, I'm sure it would be easy enough to add the other Phillip K. Dick major film adaptation Minority Report - for example, Pre-Crime could have been a spin-off of the branch of law enforcement that gave rise to the blade runners. I don't recall if a sponsor company was ever mentioned in the great yet vastly-underrated John Carpenter/Dan O'Bannon vehicle Dark Star, so that could have been a mission owned/sponsored by Weyland-Yutani, perhaps in a similar vein to the Alien films. The Dark Star's mission of bombing the shit out of planets which were potential threats to colonization sounds like their type of bag. In fact, the state of the Dark Star itself could be construed as something of a sarcastic in-joke concerning the company. In the 1972 SF great Silent Running, the order Bruce Dern's character received to exterminate the last examples of Terran botanical life sure as hell sounds like something that Burke from Aliens might have issued. The Valley Forge was, IIRC, an American Airlines ship, but the domes might have been W-Y property or the corp might have joint ownership of the mission.

[Graham Kennedy]

Fair enough on Tyrell - they could have stolen some tech via industrial espionage, or developed the Replicant tech themselves (whilst I think about it, in Predator Anna wipes some Predator blood on her pants. Since she survives to be rescued, perhaps Predator DNA is recovered? Could this be the basis of the biological advances which lead to Replicants?)

I think it's fun to incorporate a few of the "big bad corporations" as different branches of W-Y, but there's no reason at all W-Y has to encompass every company in the timeline; you could, maybe, interpret the world of Alien to be a monolithic corporate state in which a single company runs everything - and that's why people almost always refer to it as "The Company", as if there were only one. But I can certainly buy that there are perhaps a handful of competing companies, or even thousands. I just enjoy a more conspiracy-minded world.

I like the idea of incorporating Silent Running. Remember the line in Avatar about how "she can show you the world we come from. There's no green there." That would fit perfectly with the Silent Running concept, in which there was literally no more plant-life on Earth, and with Blade Runner (sans the happy ending on the theatrical version), in which IIRC no plants are seen and real animals are considered an extreme rarity.

Dark Star could easily coexist with the Alien universe, too. It has the same run-down aesthetic. Hell, Alien practically span off of Dark Star as it is.

Oh, one thought. In this timeline, Bill Paxton is a young punk (literally) in 1985, maybe 21 years old. He and his friends like to hang out at the Griffith Park observatory. One day he has a violent experience in which he is knocked out by a naked stranger, only to wake up and find his friends dead. It scared him straight. He went back to school, where he did well, and eventually signed up to the Police academy (no, Im NOT including those movies!!!), and became a cop. By 1997 he's 33, when he joins Danny Glover's unit in Predator 2.

Whilst he had a wisecracking and apparently hostile relationship with his collegue Detective Cantrell, it was a love-hate thing; the two had an affair, which is why she was pregnant when the Predator scanned her. His kid was fruitful and multiplied, leading to many generations of the bloodline. Somewhere along the line the family name was changed to Hicks, and by the time of Aliens, a young Hicks who looked just like his great-great-great-great-great-great grandad had joined the Colonial Marines...

Similarly, a distant descendant of John Connor just happened to look like his ancestor, Connor's father, Kyle Reece. His family name got changed to Hicks along the way.

And of course, Sergeant Hal Vukovich looks just like his half-brother, Charles Bishop Weyland - founder of Weyland Industries. And Charles's great-great-great-great-great grandson looked just like him; they used that appearance to make the synthetic, Bishop.

It's scary how well this all fits together!!!

[Mikey]

and with Blade Runner (sans the happy ending on the theatrical version)

I honestly don't recall from the film whether that was from an actual lack of flora and fauna, or due to the fact that (as you say, sans the crap happy ending version) any territory that would feature vegetation simply wasn't shown within the scope of the film. Certainly in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? real animals were just as rare as in the movie but I seem to recall weeds and wild shrubbery growing around the apartment block where Batty et. al. holed up.

Hell, Alien practically span off of Dark Star as it is.

Obviously, Dan O'Bannon was a prime mover in Dark Star and went on to write Alien. From what I've read, in fact, the Alien screenplay was based in large part on the sub-plot in Dark Star of one of the characters' alien "pet" which had gotten loose and was running amok around the ship. I've also heard the story that, upon Dark Star's poor commercial reception (after Carpenter and O'Bannon were required to pad the playing time with crap filler,) O'Bannon said, "If I can't make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream." Thus, Alien and it's famous tag line.

As to the lineage of Hudson (Paxton's character was Hudson, not Hicks,) all I can say is...





wait for it...










"Game over, man!"

[Graham Kennedy]

I honestly don't recall from the film whether that was from an actual lack of flora and fauna

I don't recall seeing any in the movie, though it's been a long while since I've seen it.

Obviously, Dan O'Bannon was a prime mover in Dark Star and went on to write Alien. From what I've read, in fact, the Alien screenplay was based in large part on the sub-plot in Dark Star of one of the characters' alien "pet" which had gotten loose and was running amok around the ship. I've also heard the story that, upon Dark Star's poor commercial reception (after Carpenter and O'Bannon were required to pad the playing time with crap filler,) O'Bannon said, "If I can't make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream." Thus, Alien and it's famous tag line.

Yes, I've heard the same story.

"Game over, man!"

[McAvoy]

Not sure Robocop fits in as nicely as the others. Especially if it's after the defeat of Sky net. But the new movie does show that the US doesn't like robots so there is that. Also the city seems to be too clean and civilized to be right after the defeat of Sky net.

[Graham Kennedy]

Not sure we can get Robocop in before Judgment Day, though. Why is anybody so amazed at the idea of a Terminator, if Robocop is clomping around in Detroit?

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Yeah, maybe Detroit got off 'relatively' lightly compared to the rest of the US?

Anyway, I've read grand unifying guesses like this before. Nice Graham.

[Graham Kennedy]

Of course, after the Predator encounter there was the period where John Matrix and Blaine left the Army and had a brief foray into politics...

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Of course, after the Predator encounter there was the period where John Matrix and Blaine left the Army and had a brief foray into politics...

And went undercover at a kindergarten?

[Graham Kennedy]

[Mikey]

Of course, after the Predator encounter there was the period where John Matrix and Blaine left the Army and had a brief foray into politics...

Matrix also had that foray into the household help...

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Of course, after the Predator encounter there was the period where John Matrix and Blaine left the Army and had a brief foray into politics...

Matrix also had that foray into the household help...

Also had a stint early in hi life where he was under the delusion he was Hercules...

[IanKennedy]

Not forgetting the tiny twin he discovered he had.

[McAvoy]

Wasn't he a barbarian at one point?