Oops. =P

: Also, for all of the hate it gets, I though Terminator Salvation was great,
: and Ahnuld showed up for all of 20 seconds in it (in convincing CG).

Yeah... kind of. It's getting hard to believe that every single Terminator unit looks like the same guy. On it's own, it would have been nice. In the context of being the fourth Ahnuldnator in the series, not so much.

: Also, fun fact, as bad as Alien Resurrection was, it had some great dialogue
: and characters, because it was written by none other than Joss Whedon.

"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."

Having read the script for the movie (I think a chase through a pot field happened at one point?) I'm going to say that Aliens: Resurrection is what happens when Whedon is at his worst. There's a lot of ideas floating around in there that were later repurposed for Firefly, but they didn't work well in the Alien universe.

Heh. I like Joss Whedon, but that quote really turned me off. When I sat down five or six years ago and wrote a HaloXAlien crossover fanfiction, the bad guy was a guy named Whedon, and he was chronically incapable of admitting when he'd screwed up.

: Agreed. 343 wanted to unseal the hushed casket too soon after it was shut,
: and well before they could create a decent reason for it. ODST and Reach
: proved that the Halo name could sell without the Chief. Bringing him back
: so soon put too much pressure on them to deliver.

Yup. And it's not just the Chief. If they'd made a game or two with low-stakes plots that focused on the characters, Osiris could have been built into something great. And 343i would have had time to grow and mature as a studio, so the Prometheans may have gotten a polished introduction.

: I'd have been first in line for their desire to take such a risk like that
: alone... But nah, we get a crappy interpretation of Blue Team, and
: terrible fan-fic writing to shoehorn Buck into 343's Halo... The more I
: think about it, the sadder I get.

I was angry, then I was sad, now I'm mostly past that. I wish 343i had done a better job, but que sera sera.