[Just your average movie goer]

ALIEN

I’ve seen a few articles around recently suggesting that Ridley Scott is working on something that may turn out to be a prequel to Alien. Apparently, now it’s titled Prometheus and is about the titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals and was… Sorry, wrong story. No, apparently, it’s still an Alien prequel of sorts, but not a direct one… or something. The space jockey from the first movie will get a nod apparently, as his kind will be appearing. As for the titular Alien, or the Xenomorph, as it came to be known from Aliens onward, it is rumoured to appear as well, but not as we know it. Whatever that means.

Anyway, with all these rumours around, it seems that an appropriate measure for breathing life into these forums might be to open an Alien thread, where we can discuss various things related to that 5-star classic Alien and its sequel Aliens. However, I hope we can all agree that for the purposes of most of our discussions, Alien3 and Alien Resurrection don’t exist (unless as fodder for merciless criticism). Ditto for Alien VS Predator movies.

Actually, let’s take care of the Alien VS Predator concept right now before doing anything else. You see, the premise is rubbish from the outset. These two don’t belong in the same reality. A predator would be more natural in a Star Trek movie, to be honest, since these things are so obviously human-like aliens. Putting them next to Giger’s genuinely A-grade alien creature only draws attention to how inadequately alien predators really are. They’re also obviously B-grade, literally ogres from outer space, and the entire franchise is an imitator of its predecessor to boot – the poor man’s Alien.

Seriously, putting those two together is tantamount to something like Batman VS Daredevil. Now, that’s not to say I don’t like Predator, because to be honest, I like it a lot. It’s great fun – but it’s great B-grade fun. Hell, even the sequel has its moments (admittedly scattered throughout a movie that is largely unwatchable). However, it simply doesn’t compare to Alien or even Aliens (which is itself a lightweight popcorn movie compared to its predecessor).

Also, sorry Predator fans, but the outcome is so obvious that it’s not even a contest. The alien doesn’t hunt by sight for one thing, so it would render the predator’s cowardly cloaking device useless. It also requires no weapons because it is a goddamn weapon with its bolt-like mouth-within-a-mouth, claws, spear-like tail, its ability to tear through metal doors to reach its prey and of course, its blood that can eat through layers of metal in seconds. The predator on the other hand requires lots of weapons and as its only practice in fighting is stalking people who don’t even know it’s there and shooting them from a safe distance, it would be no match for the alien’s natural instincts (and remember the creature in the original movie only fights Dutch unarmed after determining that Dutch is smaller than him). It would be completely outclassed in a fight with the alien. The alien in the original Alien slaughters the crew of the Nostromo when it was not even a day old. That’s right. That was an infant stalking Dallas and his crew! Also, it doesn’t even die at the end. It survives the lack of air, pressure etc in the total vacuum of space and even survives being blasted by the engines of the shuttle.

Yes, aliens get taken down a notch in Aliens but that’s the fault of James Cameron being disrespectful to the first movie as opposed to any fault of the xenomorphs. Still though, at least they were being taken out by people with futuristic weaponry. A predator wouldn’t stand a chance in such a situation. If it was fighting people with space-faring technology and futuristic weapons, that would be frighteningly close to an even contest, and we know how much those cowardly predators dislike level playing fields. So, sorry Predator fans. The first movie in your franchise is terrific fun, but your title monster just doesn’t measure up to the original and clearly superior alien.

(Oh, and on the subject of Predator, don’t ask me for an opinion on Predators because I haven’t seen it. I’ve already seen a movie about a group of people being stalked through a jungle by a predator. It was this film that came out in 1987 called Predator so I don’t really need to see another one)

All right, now that we’ve got that out of the way, lets have a look at this idea of an Alien prequel. Now, on the one hand, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that a part of me was excited by this idea. I haven’t liked anything that Ridley Scott has made since Alien actually, not even Blade Runner (I thought that was a good idea poorly executed). However, as the director of the original, a part of me suspects that he’s got a good sensibility for the material. Also, a lot of his opinions on the Alien sequels mirror my own. For instance, I like Aliens a lot. It’s a very entertaining action film, but taken as a sequel, it doesn’t hold up. I always have to wait some time after watching the original before watching it to adjust my mindset for the reduction in awesomeness. I might say some more about that in my next post. Anyway, Ridley Scott believes that the sequel doesn’t really explore the concepts of the original film and he’s right. It rehashes the original story, but makes everything bigger (but not necessarily better) and ditches any further exploration of the concept in favour of big loud action. It’s a riot, no doubt about it, but it’s also something of a missed opportunity. The fact that Ridley Scott sees this tells me that he might have something on the table to offer viewers.

That said, a part of me is also dubious about this new development. We’ve famously seen prequels before and these kinds of fill-in-the-gap stories have proven disastrous. Often we’re better off filling in the gaps ourselves and in the case of a certain series of movies I don’t even want to discuss here, these stories can be flat out contradictory.

I suppose the biggest failing of Aliens is that it shows little interest in the mystery – and the first act of Alien is very much a mystery story. Why were the crew of the Nostromo woken up almost a year before they were supposed to arrive back on Earth? What is the meaning of the signal they have intercepted? Is it a warning? What for? Who are the aliens who built the ship that they discover? Why is there a gaping hole in the chest of the only specimen discovered? You get the idea, and unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for thirty years, you probably already know the answer to a lot of these questions.

However, there are questions that are not answered. As I’ll be discussing two alien species here, let’s use the term xenomorph and space jockey to avoid confusion. Why are there xenomorph eggs in the space jockey’s ship? Were the space jockeys keeping them contained for quarantine reasons? Were they studying them? Worse, were they breeding them or did they, as has been suggested by some fans, create them? Then another question raises itself – how did the company know about the xenomorph? How did they know about the derelict ship and that it had those eggs on board?

All these questions and more are ignored by Aliens in favour of making a somewhat dumbed down – albeit fun – action movie.

Like all Alien fans, I’ve got a few ideas of my own about these things. It always seems to me that the blue mist over the eggs suggests that the space jockey’s crew were keeping the eggs secure. The sound that the mist makes when penetrated seems somewhat like an alarm, as if the owners of the ship wanted to be alerted if any face huggers hatched or if anyone tried to get to the eggs. My reading of the situation was that they were knowingly carrying dangerous cargo and we know that at least one of those face huggers hatched. Maybe this was the reason why the ship crashed. However, as to why they were carrying the eggs in the first place, I have no idea.

Now, according to what I’ve found out about this Prometheus project, Ridley Scott wants to go back and explore some of these questions and that could be interesting. However, there’s a slight catch; I actually prefer having some of these things remain unexplained. I like the fact that we have no idea what the space jockey crew was doing transporting all those xenomorph eggs. It makes the universe seem like a bigger and scarier place. This is all supported by the visual narrative as well, with the space jockey being far larger than Kane, Dallas and Lambert. Seeing them in the gigantic ship, we see surrogates for the entire human race and the message is powerful. The society these characters come from is only a small player in something far larger – and that these characters cannot comprehend what they are getting into. In short, the vast regions of outer space are too big for us. We don’t belong there – and indeed, when the three human crew members explore the derelict vessel, they look way out of their element.

Now, I have another concern as well – and this comes from the question about how the company came across information about the xenomorph and how they could obtain it – ie. that there was a derelict vessel containing the xenomorph eggs and that it was emitting a signal into space. Then they could either make up a rule that such signals were to be investigated at the risk of total forfeiture of shares for non-compliance or the rule could be one in place already that simply fits their purposes. Anyway, the problem as I see it as that the only way they could discover these things would be to have an incident that would mirror the events of the original Alien so closely that it’d be pointless to make the film. Consider it. A shipboard computer picks up the signal from the derelict spacecraft. The crew on board go down to the surface to investigate. Face hugging, chest bursting and cat-and-mouse games ensue (with the option of throwing a literal cat into the proceedings) and a survivor goes back to Earth to tell the company what a unique creature they discovered on their trip home. In short, you’d have Alien, minus the Ash subplot. So what would be the point? Sure you could vary the formula, you could have more survivors, more aliens, an outer space cruise liner, the cat and mouse game could be played out in its entirety on the derelict space craft… but you’d still have the same story. Actually, you’d have a weaker story because you wouldn’t have all the extra layers of the Ash subplot and the sinister typed exchanges with Mother.

Finally, there is the fact that it’s difficult to make a movie over thirty years after the original and maintain a look and tone that is consistent with that original. Hell, they didn’t really maintain those things all that well with Aliens – although a lot of that was down to things like that awful grainy filmstock they were using and some of it was probably deliberate to convey the sense of 57 years having passed between the two films (the change in the xenomorph’s look however was deliberate enough… and questionable). Anyway, I think it’d be tough. Now, I’m not suggesting that Ridley Scott would do something like put in flashy monitor displays that are completely at odds with the computer screens we saw in Alien or anything like that. I think he’s a smart guy. He’s not like a certain talentless hack who butchered another film series. I don’t worry about that. However, even though I’m sure he’d try to match the look and tone of the original, I think it’s just a difficult task.

Now, having said all this, I’m still excited about this project. This is after all coming from the guy who brought the original film to life. It’s the one that is the best of the series, a five star classic that ranks among the best films ever made. In fact, I’ll let you all in on a little secret here – it’s actually my favourite movie. So it’s hard not to get excited about this. However, there’s a part of me that’s nevertheless a little apprehensive. What if it falls short of expectations? What if it’s merely good or not bad? In the end though, the big question for me is do I really want the mystery from the original to be unravelled?

No doubt, whenever this thing comes out – possibly next year, possibly never – I’ll be lining up to see it in the cinema. I’m also going to be avoiding spoilers as much as possible so I can enjoy it all the more (difficult with the Internet being what it is, but I’ll try). However, I can’t help wondering if the original may be better off left alone.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 17 April 2011 - 04:47 AM

[Just your average movie goer]

All right. Here is the second post that I said I would make. Now, this was six pages or so in the word document I typed it up in, so it's pretty long. You might not want to start reading this if you're about to leave the house. However, that said, here it is.

ALIEN: On the subject of Aliens

Aliens is a terrific piece of entertainment and there is no denying that it’s a crowd pleaser. However, while it ups the ante over its predecessor in scope and action, there is – as mentioned in my previous post – a reduction in awesomeness.

Now before we get started, let’s get something out of the way regarding facts and opinions.

“I like Alien more than Aliens” is an opinion.
“I like Aliens more than Alien” is an opinion as well – and a completely valid one.
“I like Alien3” or “I like Alien Resurrection” are also opinions. They are simply the opinions of people who will never get to host a movie night.

“Alien is better than Aliens” however is pure solid fact. People can dispute it but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Facts are like that.

You see, the thing is, Alien is an example of a perfect movie. To begin with, it’s flawless in every aspect of its execution. This gets a movie a long way… but it doesn’t make it a five star gem in and of itself. The next consideration is whether the movie fully explores the depth of its concept and Alien passes this step with flying colours… and finally, it is a rich, layered experience which is why it stands up to the ultimate test. This is a movie that rewards repeat viewing and is rich enough that you can take away something new each time you see it. The movie draws you in and you are involved from the very first frame until the very end and it takes you on a journey. This is not a safe “I can watch this from my couch” film. This is a movie that drags you in and you are just as much a part of the Nostromo’s crew as Ripley or Parker is.

Now, that’s a hell of a lot to live up to – and I think one thing I can say to Aliens’ credit is that it doesn’t try to outdo its predecessor in terms of being a cinematic masterpiece. Despite some misunderstanding among the fans of the “Aliens is better than Alien” variety, I don’t believe the people behind the movie had any such pretensions. More to the point, they achieved what they set out to achieve. The first movie is a horror and suspense film. The second is an action film. That’s what James Cameron and his team from The Terminator (complete with Michael Bien, Lance Henrikson and Bill Paxton) set out to make and that’s what they delivered. I can’t fault them on anything there. The final product really is terrific entertainment (that’s the final theatrical product, mind you, not that stupid special edition that came out later). Anyway, it doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not.

That said, there are a few things that jar me about the movie. I’m not saying here that I dislike it because that couldn’t be further from the truth. I love it. However, I feel it could have been a better movie than it was. Let’s get one thing out of the way straight up though – I won’t be discussing the film stock they used beyond this point. It was grainy. Everyone knows this. No one on the crew was happy with it and if they had known about Kodak’s recall on the product before it was too late, they would have sent it back. So right off the bat, the movie doesn’t look as good as its predecessor. However, that really wasn’t the fault of the people behind it.

All right, without further ado, let’s get started. First up, the premise. This is a little jarring for a number of reasons. Consider the colony. Why would it be there in the first place? The planet’s a literal rock and it’s in the middle of nowhere to boot. What possible reason would anyone have for wanting to settle there? The only plausible explanation that arises is that the company was having another attempt at acquiring a xenomorph for its weapons division – but isn’t that a rather elaborate, time-consuming and expensive way of going about it? Also, how is it that the colonists came to the planet with their numerous ships and examples of high-technology and completely failed to notice the transmission from the derelict spacecraft that the Nostromo picked up in the first movie? They also failed to notice the derelict spacecraft as well.

Next, just what was the position of the company at this stage with relation to its failed plan to acquire a xenomorph in the first movie? Is the acquire-a-xenomorph program still on its agenda? Have the new company board members forgotten about this little project or is it still on their list of things to do? Is the meeting where they dismiss Ripley’s account of the alien a cover-up or do they genuinely not believe her? The movie handles this very poorly and it never becomes clear. Ditto with the colonial marines. If the suits don’t believe Ripley’s story about the aliens and by extension see no link between this account and the fact that they’ve lost contact with their colony, why do they send these colonial marines out at all? If they do believe in xenomorphs and realise that they’ve attacked the colony, why don’t they send a larger and more competent group of soldiers? Whether they want to protect the colony or harvest xenomorphs, the group that they send in the movie doesn’t make any sense. Now some fans seem to think that these are badass soldiers of the future, but all the evidence in the movie points to these guys being complete dunces. They are hopeless. They are dregs. They are the misfits who get turned away from this future society’s equivalent of the French foreign legion. Just what is the company’s line of reasoning with any of these things?

So, off we go to a shaky start – especially since it involves a stupid, stupid, stupid nightmare scene. I mean, the movie loses any chance of getting five stars right there and then. What a cheesy and pathetic little gimmick. Ugh. Okay. Now, where were we? What about Burke, you ask? Isn’t he evidence that the company is still trying to acquire a xenomorph? Well, wait a moment; I’ll get to him in a bit. However, it seems as though he was really acting on his own volition in that plan he carries out near the end of the film – but we’ll talk about that later.

After a series of narrative missteps including another dumb nightmare scene, we find ourselves aboard the Sulaco and the actual movie begins. The colonial marines wake up and start sprouting dumb lines to show what type of characters they are. Without any prompting or context, they say things like “They ain’t paying us enough for this” and “I hate this job”. You hate this job? Why? So far, you’ve just woken up and now you’re going to have breakfast. Yeah, that’s rough. I hate free bed and breakfast, don’t you? Then later on, we find out something else about these colonial marines...… most of them are jerks. They are dislikeable, arrogant, disrespectful, smug little jerks. Just consider the briefing where Vasquez cuts Ripley off mid-sentence. Ripley is stumbling over her account at this point because the memories are quite clearly painful and upsetting to her. You don’t need to be familiar with the events of Alien to be aware of this. You just need to have a basic understanding of people skills. You know, the stammer, the averted gaze, the wavering voice…... these all indicate that Ripley is struggling with something that is quite upsetting for her. So in comes Vasquez to offer some comfort acting like a jerk: “Look, Ma’am. I only need to know one thing…... where they are.” Then her jerk friends join in and act like jerks as well… and what does their commanding officer do about this? Well, he just watches and when Ripley tries to get things back on track, he then joins in as well and dismisses her. “Yep, right. Thank you, Ripley.” Nice. Also, incidentally, what’s the point of bringing a consultant if you’re not going to listen to them?

Oh, and before we move on, Aliens introduces us to another robot/synthetic/artificial person (pick whatever term floats your boat). However, James Cameron doesn’t have anything to do with this character. He just wants to capture some of Ash’s awesomeness – and while Lance Henrikson has awesomeness of his own (or did until he starred in Alien VS Predator), it’s just not in the same league as Ian Holm in that truly delicious role. The job of this character, Bishop, involves the following:

1. Be mistrusted by Ripley due to his artificiality and act as a red herring. Then save the day at the end so the audience can learn a valuable lesson about discrimination and prejudice and come away from the experience as better people (but curious about the fact that a movie that preaches against discrimination kills off its two African American characters in its first action scene).
2. Provide an action scene with the Alien Queen that would have been too gory had it involved a human character – and also make an opening for nerdy ‘Queen takes Bishop’ jokes.


The drop ship heads down to the colony. Is it too early to hate the irritating cocky pilot yet? No? Good. So we can look forward to an alien visiting her in the cockpit. Okay. The jerks disembark. At this stage, there are only about three of these people who are in any way likeable. We’ve got Sergeant Apone, Private Frost and Private Hicks. Don’t get too attached to the first two though. Although, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that Private Hudson and Private Vasquez are an amusing pair from this point on… and to be fair, Vasquez improves dramatically once she gets her reality check.

Entering the colony is good. The motion trackers are nicely done. The atmosphere is suitably foreboding. The scene in the med-lab is great. I like the “love at first sight” joke. All good here. The movie is coming together.

Then we meet Newt. Why? Why, oh why, oh why? Do we need this character? What’s the point? Don’t tell me that we need her as a daughter surrogate so we can give a maternal subtext to the scenes between Ripley and the Alien Queen. We don’t – because we don’t need that maternal subtext. Besides we can pick up on the Alien Queen’s maternal love for her brood without that. Oh, you want that moment where the alien-human duality is suddenly inverted? Oh, for the love of…...

I’ve heard that some people don’t like Jones the cat in the first movie. Let me tell you, Jones is ten times the character Newt is. He also serves a purpose, despite the fact that some people think he’s there for cheap gimmicks. He’s the other unpredictable element in the film to counter the alien. He and the alien are the unknown variables and their scenes together are actually quite interesting. Also, Ripley’s compassion for Jones – a compassion that overrides her usual practical and logical nature – is a human touch in a cold, clinical and lonely environment. Is it the most sensible decision under the circumstances for Ripley to go looking for him minutes before she intends to abandon ship? Probably not, but it’s genuine.

Newt, now she’s just annoying. She is shoehorned into the role that Jones filled in the first film, but Jones had subtlety. Newt is just one big contrivance. Remember that part when she slides down that chute? Was that believable for a second? She just slides out of her jacket? Come on. Also, she’s got a limited range of exp​ression:
1. Creepy: “They mostly come at night. Mostly.”
2. Needy: “Ripley!”
3. Screaming: “(Insert high pitched squeal here)”

Were there any kids in Alien? No. Did we need any? Again, no. Would we have liked a kid in the movie? A resounding no. Also, Newt? Newt?

“Nobody calls me Rebecca, expect my brother.”
“Well, get used to it, kid, because I sure am hell not going to embarrass myself by calling you Newt for the whole movie.”

Moving on – the nest scene. Lieutenant Gorman tells everyone that there’s to be no firing in the place. The marines are a little confused over this. Sergeant Apone even asks what’s up with it. The lieutenant goes all power-trippy and tells them to just do it. Um…... would it have killed him to explain the reason? It’d only take a couple of seconds. Then you wouldn’t run the risk of Vasquez shouting out “Let’s rock!” and doing something stupid (well, more stupid than shouting “Let’s rock!” I mean).

The chest-bursting scene. You know, James Cameron himself said he couldn’t top the scene in the first movie so they didn’t intend to even try. Commendable. However, knowing that, why couldn’t he have left this B-Grade little contribution out of the proceedings? A character who we’ve got no emotional investment in suddenly has a chest bursting moment – right at the exact point the marines find her. How about that? What convenient timing! Perhaps James Cameron could have just assumed that anyone watching this movie had seen the first one and were therefore familiar with the alien’s rather unusual life cycle. Also, the fact that the victim is female is a weak move. The entire point of Kane being a male character was to invert the horror cliché of women being the victims all the time, while also playing on the deepest fears of the male demographic in the audience. Unfortunately, subtlety was never one of Cameron’s strong points.

Anyway, the movie kicks into high gear at this point. The fat is trimmed from the cast of cardboard cut outs, the smug grin is wiped off the face of that annoying pilot from earlier, explosions ensue, we start moving towards the climax, Burke wants to bring the face huggers in the medlab back in stasis to return to the company labs… Sorry, what?

All right. Now, let’s talk about Burke. For the most part of the movie, Burke comes across as something of an awkward guy, but a well meaning guy. He is actually convincing in this capacity. He genuinely cares about Ripley at the start and although we know sparks are not going to fly, he really works in this capacity. Then for some reason, James Cameron decides that if he’s going to mine everything he can from the first movie, he’s going to mine that part about someone jeopardising the others in order to bring back an alien specimen… and Burke just does a complete 180 degree turn. The resulting scenes are tense… but why does Ripley struggle with all her strength to hold back her face hugger, while Newt is able to hold one against the wall with a plastic trolley? Um, anyway, yeah. The resulting scenes are tense but are they necessary? Aliens by my reckoning is a 137 minute movie. Surely omitting this wouldn’t affect the movie much in any way. I feel sorry for Burke. I really do. Not because he’s done in by an alien, but because the writers do in his character – a total character rewrite in the movie’s final third.

Now, one more thing before we move onto two final points – what was up with Private Hudson’s F-word clusterbomb in the alien attack? I feel embarrassed watching it. He actually starts to grow on me by the time this point of the movie comes along, but after listening to him swearing his head off like some kind of demented moron, I’m kind of relieved when the aliens drag him under the floor. You know the kind of relief you feel when the noisy neighbour finally turns down their stereo? It’s the same kind.

Well, here we are. The final two reasons why Aliens can never be the movie its predecessor is…

Reason one: It rips off its predecessor too much and it’s painfully obvious. The whole processing plant is going to blow up… just like the Nostromo was when Ripley set the self-destruct. When she should be high-tailing it out of there, Ripley goes back to rescue Newt… kind of like how she goes back to rescue Jonesy. Hell, she even jettisons the Alien Queen from the airlock. This one’s particularly bad because this time, she ignores various scientific rules governing explosive decompression and the vacuum of space (good rules too!). The movie ignores them too. Incidentally, if anyone wants a laugh, check out the How It Should Have Ended take on this: How It Should Have Ended. In the first one, she suits up beforehand. I’m sure you remember. Oh, and in the middle of an abysmal score by James Horner, James Cameron inserts one of the cues from Jerry Goldsmith’s superior score for the original. Actually, on that note, why if Cameron was recycling so many other things from the first movie didn’t he bring back Goldsmith?

Moving on.

Reason two: This movie completely trashes the titular alien. Gone is the elegant creature from the first movie, “the perfect life form”. In its place, we have cannon fodder – disposable movie monsters that are barely above predators in the food chain. They are taken down far too easily and far too frequently. I don’t mind that some of them went down, but really, I wish James Cameron had had some more respect for the creatures. As I mentioned in my first post, the first one survived the jet blast from the escape shuttle’s engines – and that was an infant. The design is also changed for no reason as well. The acid too is treated in a strange manner. Basically, its corrosive properties vary depending on what James Cameron wants at any given moment. If he wants it to eat through five levels of a building, that’s what it does. If he wants to injure one of his protagonists but have them shrug it off, why the acid can do that too. Hell, Hudson can blast a face hugger two feet in front of him, spraying bits and pieces of it everywhere and without any ill effects at all. Seriously, for all the care James Cameron takes with presenting the aliens, he may as well have called his movie Colonial Marines because the aliens may as well be little green men for all the difference it would make. I guess he was probably playing them down so he could blow us all away with the Alien Queen, but that wasn’t the right way to do it. Also, as cool as the Alien Queen is, we don’t really need her. Also, she serves to lessen the stature of the other aliens as well. She’s a beautiful creature but she seems to owe her entire existence to the ‘bigger is better’ philosophy that James Cameron used for this film (as well as subsequent films, like that utterly overrated piece of trash Terminator 2, a.k.a Baby’s First Action Movie).


Actually, come to think of it, Terminator 2 does a lot of the same things to The Terminator that Aliens does to Alien, only it truly sucks where as Aliens stands up despite its flaws. Maybe this is because The Terminator was a stand alone movie that was actually wrapped up completely with no avenue for a sequel (the time machine was destroyed after Reese went through), while Alien, also a stand alone movie, left the possibilities for further stories open. Or maybe it’s because as annoying as Newt gets, she never comes anywhere near being as annoying as John Conner.

Anyway, Aliens succeeds despite all of these things. I can’t bring myself to hate it because as much as I dislike a lot of things about it, it’s still damn entertaining and I’d be a pretty heartless bastard if I didn’t concede that. However, imagine what it could have been like without these issues. Imagine if it had been a little more original, if they had kept Jerry Goldsmith, if James Cameron had known how to use the aliens properly, if there had been no unnecessary child character and if we had actually cared about all the various individuals who made up the colonial marines. What a movie that could have been.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 17 April 2011 - 09:29 AM

[azerty]

I never thought about many of those points before. I guess that means you made a good post.

I can't argue with you... but I still prefer Aliens. In fact, until you made your points, I would have said that it was a perfect film. Ripley is found drifiting in that shuttle. Unbelievable, but neccessary for purposes of the plot. She is fired, believed to be insane, unable to find proper work. She runs those loaders. Burke is an excellent character... sleazy and semi charming at the same time. Ripley, however utterly dismisses him . Even though she is at the lowest status level in that society she maintains a believable force of personality. I find her convincing in every way.

I believe that the company does NOT know about the xenomorphs. It must have been a secret operation that has been somehow forgotten in the last 57 years. Burke, however thinks it is possible, and devises his scheme to get rich with the email to the planet. Doesn't cost him anything, might pay back big bucks. When it goes wrong (or right) he sees his chance. Ripley is the one person who knows something about aliens, bring her along. Like in the sequel to the novel Ringworld, in which the same characters are forced to do the same things in the same place all over again (and remark disparigingly about this fact), the main instigator states "Why would I discard a winning strategy?"

Of course, Ripley has no wish to go. Her nightmares are neccessary because I can see no way to get her to return to that planet other than the 3 that are used: Get sanity back by facing fears, kill all the aliens, get flight status back.

The marines are slightly unbelievable. However, I like the point that the heroes are NOT going in at contrived disadvantage. That was one of the main problems with Aliens3. It's true that most of them have to die in order for them to see the seriousness of the situation. There is a contrived disadvantage about the no firing, but they ignore that and fire anyway. But from this point on the movie seems relentlessly logical. Get off the planet fast. Nuke the sight from orbit.

A good plan, except for the problems which keep turning up.

I like some of the threads. Ripley has to work the loading docks because of the insanity thing. This gains her points with Apone (and Hicks) on the Sulaco. It explains her kicking ass in the end. I like the dead daughter and the Newt thing. I like Burke's character, as totally believable as basically every person I ever met who studied business is school.

I like Vasquez. I like Hudson. I like Gorman. I like Hicks. I like the new queen alien. I like the truce that either the queen or Ripley breaks. I like the rising tension of the film. Problems are solved, and then it turns out that they are not solved. The marines don't plan to hang around, but the irritating rescue pilot gets eaten. She's pretty quick with her sidearm, but gets eaten anyway. They plan to get the spare drop ship and barricade themselves in and wait patiently, but Burke screws that up. Everything seems to slowly get worse - but if they stopped the film at any crucial decision point and asked the audience "Anybody got a better idea" you would have to say no, I think you've got it covered.

I like little things like the elevator button that Hicks has to push twice before the door closes. (I wonder if that was in the script?) I like that the only romance between Hicks and Ripley is that they tell each other their first names. I like when Ripley says to the insanity board "That's because I blew it out of the Goddamn airlock!" It gives me goosebumps. I like the fact that mostly the only characters that are really worth anything are female.

As for Aliens3, there are parts that I like. The fact that Newt and Hicks are dead in the first 60 seconds is fantastic. I also like the fact that the set up seems to take the first half of the film. I like not knowing what the film is about. Too bad that when I did know, it kinda sucked. Except killing Ripley was a good idea.

Here are 2 pieces of extranous information... I met Jenette Goldstein and didn't realize she was Vasquez for a long time. I thought she was the Irish immigrant whose big subplot was trimmed to zero in Titanic. Also, you should watch the film Darkstar, which is Dan O'bannon's first attempt at writing the Alien story, only in comedic version, 1974. It's low budget, but semi amusing. You can get it off the torrent.

The original Alien never did much for me, unfortunately. I'm obviously going to have to watch it again now...

[Just your average movie goer]

Hello discussion. Hey there, Azerty. Good points. I agree with you that the most likely scenario with regards to the company suits is that the acquire-a-xenomorph program was a secret operation that they're not aware of. I just thought the movie could have done a better job of getting that across. Although I suppose the suits we meet aren't exactly sinister by any stretch of the imagination and the kind of person who could put out a "Bring back lifeform. All other priorities rescinded" order would really have to be a bit scarier than the guys in that court martial scene.

As for the nightmares, I've got no problem with the fact that Ripley has them. I just think they're handled really badly. The first nightmare scene is a cheap seriously B-grade gimmick - oh, my god! She's got an alien in her chest! Oh, it was just a dream! Well, wasn't that clever? - and the second one isn't much better. I don't know about you, but I'm no stranger to nightmares. However, not once have I ever sat bolt upright after one, gasping in shock. Neither has anyone else on the planet, I'd wager. Sigourney does a good job of selling it (this is why she's such a renowned actress - she can sell almost anything) but it doesn't work.

You raise a good point however on how the characters in the film are logical for the most part - and here, the movie can match Alien on one point. It doesn't make much sense though for no one to stay on the Sulaco as back-up, but that's a nitpick. It is a plot contrivance, no doubt about it, but without it, the movie would be a pretty short and fairly unexciting string of events. I think logic goes out the door a bit when Ripley breaches the truce with the Alien Queen (yeah, that was Ripley who did that). Despite what the aliens have done to the colonists and the marines, it seems a little dishonorable for Ripley to scorch all the eggs and blast everything in sight. Also, the whole place was about to blow anyway so it was unnecessary. Then finally, it is only bound to just tick the Alien Queen off and make her come after her and Newt (thankfully, the Alien Queen retains the some of the original alien's imperviousness). However, it only fazes me a little - as we can put that down to Ripley just cracking from the stress and going nuts. You know, a moment of madness. Logical? Perhaps not. Understandable? Well, sure.

Oh yes, and I liked that bit with Hicks and the delayed elevator door. Great moment.

Now, regarding something else, I can see why you wouldn't peg Jeanette Goldstein for Vasquez. She actually put on a bit of bronze makeup and made herself look the part of a Latin American, when she isn't. Actually, there's a nice in-joke in the movie about that. You see, when she auditioned for the part, she actually thought that the movie was about illegal aliens, and so she came pretending to be Latin American. James Cameron loved it apparently so he put her in the movie in that kind of capacity, but just made a few changes - like swapping high heels for army boots. Anyway, that part in the movie where Hudson says "Yeah, someone said alien and she thought they said illegal alien and signed up" is a little reference to that. I'm not sure how PC that little in-joke is, but I can see how the cast and crew probably had a little fun with that. So you met her, hey? That's cool. In the extras on my DVD, she comes across as being really nice. Hopefully, she's one of those all too rare people... a likeable celebrity.

Couple of things though - Alien3. Doesn't the idea of killing everyone off seem to negate the entire first two movies in the series? I think it's cheating the audience as it's basically saying Ripley may as well have blown up with the Nostromo or if she did not, then she, Newt and Hicks may as well have saved themselves the trouble of getting off the planet in the second movie. Also, there's no plausible explanation for any of the catalysts that lead to the events in the film - no face hugger on the Sulaco, no alien inside Ripley, nothing. Also, it's just dreary dreck. Now, some people may argue that Alien isn't exactly a barrel of laughs and they'd be right. However, it's not an entirely grim affair and it does have its moments of humour. Parker and Brett for instance are quite amusing in their various exchanges and antics - and I love that bit where Ripley points out to Parker that Brett just follows him around and says "Right" all the time. It's great.

Darkstar - yes, I've learned about it on my DVD extras but I've never seen it. I'd like to check it out sometime. However, Dan O'Bannon's role in Alien is not as large as some may believe. He came up with the bare plot, but the characters were pretty dull, as was the dialogue. The Ash subplot as well was added in later. Also, all the characters got better names. Dan doesn't think names make much of a difference, but having seen bits of the original script, I'm inclined to disagree. Anyway, Alien was a collaborative effort.

Lastly, you mention a few points like Ripley's daughter which were in the special edition. A lot of fans seem to like the idea of Ripley's daughter. You obviously do too. Personally though, I can't really reconcile this with Ripley as I know her. She just seems like a single woman in Alien. Sure, there's this vibe between her and Dallas that suggests they might have had something going on, but a daughter? I can't buy that. Also, for the daughter to be dead after the 57 year time gap would mean that she'd really have had to be an adult before Ripley left on the Nostromo and Ripley doesn't seem old enough to have a grown-up daughter at that point. I don't know. I just doesn't work for me.

Also, in the special edition, I hate the auto turrets. Some fans go off on this scene, calling it 'cool', 'awesome' and 'badass' etc but it's a tension killer. If the theatrical version turns xenomorphs into cannon fodder, the special edition exacerbates matters ten times over.

A little note on special editions though. Both the newest Alien and Aliens DVDs have special editions included (in the first film's case, it's called the Director's Cut, even though Ridley Scott's preferred version is the theatrical edition). They have 'The Director's Cut' and 'Special Edition' on the cases respectively. However, they also include the theatrical versions on the same disc as the new versions. In each case, both versions are presented in the best possible way and are seamlessly integrated through DVD branching technology, allowing viewers to watch whichever one they prefer. It's just a small closing thought, but it seems to me that a certain Hollywood hack could take a lesson from this.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 17 April 2011 - 10:47 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Hey MG, nice to see you back! And another great, long post with lots of stuff in it to talk about. I am going to get into it a bit, which is I hope what you were looking for.

I should start with this bit:

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“I like Alien more than Aliens” is an opinion.
“I like Aliens more than Alien” is an opinion as well – and a completely valid one.
“I like Alien3” or “I like Alien Resurrection” are also opinions. They are simply the opinions of people who will never get to host a movie night.

“Alien is better than Aliens” however is pure solid fact. People can dispute it but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Facts are like that.

This is cute, and deliberately provocative, and I love that. But to say that one movie is factually, indisputably better than another film is the stuff of the legendary internerd. I also like Alien more than Aliens, but it has problems. The first and most important, and you go crazy trying to justify it, is that fucking cat. That cat should not only not have been there, but its purpose was to feed the alien and let it get bigger, only it didn't do that. Instead, it serves as the comical distraction, luring crewmembers to their deaths. "where's that cat? oh no! death!" Meanwhile the chestburster goes from newborn to a 7-foot-tall monster before it kills even one crewmember. There are laws of conservation of matter and energy being broken here. Then there is the danger of the animal itself: there is the danger of cutting the alien, because of the acid blood, and they have no weapons (apart from a flamethrower), which is why it's so deadly. Then, at the end of the film, as you point out, even the blast of burning rocket fuel, burning at a heat that would melt steel, doesn't destroy it. So, if a knife was able to cut the facehugger, and if all of the matter is organic, what is it composed of? What elements make up the xenomorph such that it can survive a rocket thrust? You might need to acknowledge either that the alien is meant to have died in that engine blast, or that that element of its indestructibility is needlessly silly.

I like Alien a lot, but to call any horror film "perfect" is deliberately silly. You praise its use of unanswered question, like what were the eggs doing on the space jockey's ship, or the open question of what the parent company's interest was in wanting the thing, how it may have know about it, from whence it derived its ownership of the lives of the crewmembers ( to the extent that their pay is forfeit if they don't embark on a dangerous salvage mission) ... all of the shortcuts you accuse the sequel of committing, you praise this one for. This is a bias, and you are entitled to it, but you might as well say "I prefer grape soda to orange, because it is better. For a fact."

But I really signed on to address some of your complaints about Aliens.

1) Why would the company allow a colony to form on the planet where the space jockey came from? Yes, this is an error in the original movie, assuming there was any company involvement in the first film. We get it from Ash that Mother ordered the survey, on orders from the company. The company of course needn't have been directly involved. These may have been standing orders. The company may have learned nothing. Or if, in the original film, the company did learn of the discovery, that information was lost. It's been 57 years, and we have no reason to believe that alien life forms or alien salvage are uncommon. Maybe even the Nostromo's report was incomplete and uninteresting to the one person who read it, and so it was not acted on, filed, and lost. So the colonization started without any knowledge of the eggs. It is the setup of the film that the company was unaware of any danger to the colony, which is why Ripley is dismissed and no more is said until they learn that the colony has lost contact. THIS coincidence might have been interesting to talk about, yes. Why did they lose contact 57 years after the events in the first film, why was Ripley available and still the same age, etc, but this is the stuff of most sequels. While a movie about space marines meeting aliens would have been fun without Ripley, conventional sequel wisdom is to use the survivors of the last movie in the new movie. This is the first real problem with Alien3, that it fails to include Newt and Hicks. It has many other problem, and it is a poor horror film (it's not scary), and a more reasonable target of "it was just farming the original" critiques than Aliens. Anyway, problem solved: the company knew nothing of the presence of xenomorphs, but it was interested in the possibility, so it financed a military investigation, and sent a couple of consultants along (Ripley and Burke).

2)

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First up, the premise. This is a little jarring for a number of reasons. Consider the colony. Why would it be there in the first place? The planet’s a literal rock and it’s in the middle of nowhere to boot. What possible reason would anyone have for wanting to settle there? The only plausible explanation that arises is that the company was having another attempt at acquiring a xenomorph for its weapons division – but isn’t that a rather elaborate, time-consuming and expensive way of going about it?

Well I'd almost forgive you for not watching this movie as closely as you did Alien, since you don't like it as much, but you go off on such a tear here that it needs an answer. It is a terraforming colony. The people there are planetary engineers and their families. So even were it not explained, and you were asked to assume that they were planetary miners (the Nostromo had been a mining ship, so the idea of farming resources in space has already been established), it's actually established that they are there to take a hunk of rock and to make it habitable. So while you go off on a straw man tear to assume a corporate conspiracy - and then to say that the conspiracy you invented is stupid, there was already a reason for them to be there. In a unnecessary deleted sequence, a family is seen discovering the ship from the first film, and facehugger scene occurs. While this scene is unnecessary, it can be interpolated from information that at some point someone encountered an egg, and things got messy. Nothing wrong with the premise.

3)

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They are hopeless. They are dregs.

You spend a good deal of time too questioning the competence of the marines. You use this as evidence that the conspiracy scenario that you invented is stupid. I didn't see the evidence that they were bad soldiers, only that they had an unseasoned Lieutenant and that none of them, from command down, believed Ripley's story. So the Liutenant was looking for command experience, and they behaved in an undisciplined manner. Gorman's error with Vasquez, of course, is that he did not discipline her for speaking out of turn, but apart from that they behaved more or less like soldiers in real life and in many other military movies.

4)

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Then we meet Newt. Why? Why, oh why, oh why? Do we need this character?

Yeah, I hate little girls too. Why couldn't they have found a little boy, or a fully-grown, possibly half-dressed woman with large breasts?
No but seriously, I don't understand your reaction to Newt. There is a mother-daughter connection for Ripley, yes, because Ripley's own daughter is now older than she is (and/or deceased, I can't remember). It has nothing to do with your silly Alien Queen analogy. It is also necessary for a small amount of story exposition; without a survivor or two, you can't have a survivor's tale. That it's someone small and quiet is helpful, because with 100+ xenomorphs, a small group would have been incredible. So I think Newt fit the bill: she added a small bit of story, and she gave the marines an actual colonist to rescue. "Jones had subtlety" is just evidence that you liked Alien. I liked it too, but using a cat to lure Brett to his death is actually one of the more painfully stupid scenes in the film. And kids do really just slide out of their jackets. I have seen it happen. Never try to pull someone to safety by their clothing. Grab the person, and try to get them to grab you as well. Anyway your complaints about Newt are just dumb. I get that you don't like her, and maybe even that you don't think kids belong in action/horror movies. But the lengths you go to to try to justify your opinion, from praising Jones as subtle to attacking the quality of child acting to pretending you've cracked a mother-child metaphor between Ripley and the Alien Queen, are all just silly.

5) So too Bishop. Yes his role is repetitive, but to establish the possibility of credible androids in one film and then to forget them in the next would have been worse (Realistically, they also should have found a few artificial people hanging around unmolested in the colony, but I don't mind that omission. Let's just say that whatever the xenomorphs do use as a guide in determining their targets (and it could well be eyes), it's not so precise as to distinguish human from android). The film needed an android just to keep it consistent with the technology of its predecessor. His role apart from that was of little consequence, even including your silly chess joke. Having him remote pilot the dropship was just a screenwriterly way of giving him something to do.

6)

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Also, the fact that the victim is female is a weak move. The entire point of Kane being a male character was to invert the horror cliché of women being the victims all the time, while also playing on the deepest fears of the male demographic in the audience. Unfortunately, subtlety was never one of Cameron’s strong points.

You're absolutely right about Cameron and subtlety, but where do you get this about the "entire point of Kane being a male character?" There are men and women on board the Nostromo, but mostly men. Men are victims and so are women. I think the entire point of Ripley surviving is to invert the stereotype of a man (or a young couple) surviving to the end of a horror film; indeed, after Halloween it started to become a cliche that a single woman would survive (Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween was not the first female survivor, but she was noticed and frequently referenced). But Kane? He's just one of several victims, and I don't think his gender plays any role in his victimization, any more than the numerous male and female victims of the countless slasher films of the late 70s and 80s. I hated the chestburster scene in Aliens as well, but you're out on a limb here with your comparison. The victim in Aliens could have been either male or female and I don't think the difference would have mattered one bit. In fact, you are so out on a limb, you might as well use the gender of the first victim as as element in your "the company was behind everything" theory of Aliens screenwriting.

7) Burke: yeah, Burke is unnecessary, adding a creepy level of detail to an alien chase/horror movie. This makes him comparable in fact to Ash in the first film, a suddenly-revealed piece of technology of which the others on the ship were not aware. And then just like Ash, after revealing his sinister motives, Burke dies. So both characters are unnecessary, with the difference being that Ash is interesting. Not for anything he does, or even for his silly speech about the "perfect life form" (yeah I agree that anything that can grown to full maturity in a day or two, and before it has had one meal, is amazing, but am I really listening to a robot wax poetic about life and its complexity?), but simply for his raw WTF factor. I remember when his true nature was revealed, my reaction was similar to that of the crewmembers. I was like, "well done, movie, you surprised me with that monster bursting out of John Hurt's chest, and now this too. I hope the cat talks in the final scene." No, really, I was 11 and mostly I just thought "wow, cool," but Ash is just a distraction from the fact this is a monster movie, Halloween in space. But yeah, Burke. He's there, like Ash, to pretend that this movie is more than just monsters chasing people. I can't fault the writers especially for that. They needed something. I for one would have preferred a love story.

8)

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This movie completely trashes the titular alien.

I don't know that it does. yeah, it engages the cliche that more of something always makes every individual one weaker (see any monster movie, esp zombie and the older vampire ones, the ones where the vampires were monsters). But it justifies this weakness: the xenomorph in the first film was dangerous because they had no way of killing it at range, it had acid for blood, and they were in space. The acid blood ate away at metal, but naturally it did this slowly, though this is small consolation when a hull breach would be bad. On the surface of a planet, a flesh-and-acid-blood monster is not going to be much of a threat from 30 yards away if I have an automatic weapon. I don't care about his acid blood because it will make a mess of the linoleum tile before it is dilluted by precipitate and no longer a problem. You cite again the inability of blast-furnace temperatures to destroy the creature in the first film. This is a weakness there, not here. Nothing organic can survive that kind of heat. So yeah, bullets can kill these things if they're not sneaky. So Cameron makes them sneaky, which on its own is nuts. The first movie had this problem too, the problem of allowing a 300-pound monster with a tail to sneak around unheard in a small environment which by necessity had lots of airlocked doors separating compartments. Cameron revisits this here, allowing the monsters in one case to crawl along a suspended ceiling and drop in to surprise the marines who are even equipped with a motion sensor. Anyway, I think giving the human guns was a sufficient gesture to level the playing field. I hate monster movies like Friday the 13th that create a villain that cannot be killed by any means. I have an easier time believing in a credible threat. Physics dictates that any kind of organic carapace could only resist so much force; since these marines are firing weapons designed to penetrate body armour, I have no trouble believing they can kill these things. I will not take as evidence of the xenomorphs' superiority or immortality any lines from Ash's silly robot death poem.

9)

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I think logic goes out the door a bit when Ripley breaches the truce with the Alien Queen (yeah, that was Ripley who did that)

Ripley had established communication with the Queen, and threatened to burn the eggs, so the drones backed off. Then just as Ripley and Newt were leaving, an egg opened right beside them. It's been established that these things can sit dormant more or less forever, so Ripley concluded, and we're supposed to believe she's right, that the Queen can control that, and that she was trying to surprise her with a facehugger. So Ripley torched the room, not as revenge, but as distraction so that she could escape. I don't like any of this stuff especially, but your complaint again comes from not having watched the movie closely enough.

Anyway, these are some little things that your reviews inspired from me. I think you go too far in calling Alien perfect, like Ash with his assessment of this nonsensical drooling lizard that doesn't need food to grow but likes eating humans anyway (good thing for him that he has no trouble processing our completely alien proteins). I think too your criticisms of Aliens derive more from a reaction to a common fan preference of the sequel to the original. You disagree with those fans (so do I; Alien is a better horror film than Aliens is an action film, though I like them both), so you find fault everywhere in Aliens, even where it doesn't exist. Many of your complaints come from not having watched the film closely enough, while others are from an unnecessary comparison with the original. I think it should come to this: if you and I were to meet Shaka Zulu alone, and unarmed, he would beat the fuck out of us. But were Shaka Zulu to meet the British Army at range, well we know what would happen, right? These things are large and strong, and they were scary to the unarmed crew of Spaceship Silver Lake in the first film. They should NOT be a similar match to a crew of well-armed marines, which is why, in order to level the field, the screenwriters gave them an unseasoned Lieutenant - there are many stories like this in real warfare - and they are pushed back to a weaker position. The screenwriters also gave the xenomorphs superior numbers, because without that, technology should always win out. I think this is enough to justify the action of the film.

I don't know what bothered you so much about the pilot of the dropship.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 18 April 2011 - 05:03 AM

[Just your average movie goer]

All righttty! You're a man after my own heart, Civilian. You spoil for the old forum debates, as do I. Okay then. Now, maybe I might just do this by the numbers.

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This is cute, and deliberately provocative, and I love that. But to say that one movie is factually, indisputably better than another film is the stuff of the legendary internerd.

You were right with the deliberately provocative part. However, I wasn't really claiming it to be fact (and you know that). I was being a smart-ass. So... yeah You say legendary internerd. I say nay. That was just me being awesome.

Now, let's get another thing out of the way. I don't know if this is a proper interpretation of the subtext of your post but it seems to me that you're under the impression that I don't like Aliens very much. Not true. I love it. It's freakin' awesome - and if I consider Alien a five star movie (and I do), Aliens is a four and a half. However, I just think it's a pity it wasn't as awesome as it could have been.

As to your point about the company colonising that planet, I know about the terraforming. It's kind of hard to miss (and on account of my own awesomeness, I don't miss things in movies - and I saw the egg opening in the Alien Queen nest scene as well, thank you very much). However, with the number of uninhabited rocks out there in space, it just screams coincidence that there should be a colony on that particular one. Now, sure. It serves the plot so it's really just a minor nitpick on my part. I'll concede that much... but only that much.

As for the conspiracy that I, in your words, invented - it was one that I suggested. And I tell you what, it'd go a long way to countering the notion of coincidence if my crazy little conspiracy theory were the real reason the company put a colony there.

Quote

In a unnecessary deleted sequence, a family is seen discovering the ship from the first film, and facehugger scene occurs. While this scene is unnecessary, it can be interpolated from information that at some point someone encountered an egg, and things got messy. Nothing wrong with the premise.

I know all this - and can I just say that at least we're in agreement on the point that that stupid scene (that ended up in James Cameron's special edition) should have been left on the cutting room floor or never filmed to begin with. I know full well how the aliens got into the colony from what we can deduce in the theatrical edition. And even if we don't deduce it, Ripley spells it out for anyone who hasn't figured it out when she tells Burke that he sent those colonists to that derelict ship. Um... I don't know why I have to defend my position on this since I didn't say anything to suggest that I was unaware of this. Damn you, Civilian... but in a jovial manner. Anyway, moving on...

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I don't understand your reaction to Newt.

She's annoying. Couldn't they have found a handful of adult colonists instead? Hey, maybe if you wanted a romantic subplot, instead of being involved with Hicks, Ripley could have found a good natured surviving terraformer. Now, I don't mind the fact that there's a kid who survives but the audience spends an awful lot of time with this kid and there's that bedtime nursery scene that's probably only a couple of minutes but really seems to drag.

Now, I'm going to come back and defend Jonesy. Sure, in real life, people probably wouldn't be allowed to bring their cats to these kinds of workplaces (since they generally can't in any other workplaces either) but he throws a bit of unpredictability into the proceedings. We always know what the humans are up to, or at least we think we do in the case of Ash. However, the cat and the alien go where they please and can inconvenience everyone at the worst possible moments (especially the alien, inconveniencing people in its particular manner). Take the scene where Ripley goes back for Jonesy. We've clean forgotten about him by this point. So has Ripley - and then suddenly, when she's got much more pressing concerns, she takes her life in her hands to go looking for him. It's not rational, but that's the beautiful part of it. Logical, methodical by-the-book Ripley is fallible. She's human. That's the meaning. When she goes back for Newt, it's part of the whole raised stakes thing - the idea being that a human life represents higher stakes than a pet cat. That's why Jones is more subtle.

As for your dismissal of the Alien Queen/Ripley maternal subtext, are you kidding me? Especially when you accuse me of not paying attention. It's right there in the nest showdown. Ripley's protecting 'her' kid and the Alien Queen is protecting hers. It's mother y mother.

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And kids do really just slide out of their jackets. I have seen it happen. Never try to pull someone to safety by their clothing. Grab the person, and try to get them to grab you as well.

Yeah, I know. What I couldn't help noticing though was that it was really obvious that this was going to happen to the audience, and our normally highly intelligent protagonist Ripley somehow didn't see it coming. She could have adjusted her grip, grabbed Newt by the shoulder... or hey, maybe Newt could have put the slightest bit of effort in herself and grabbed onto Ripley's wrist. It was lame... and I think deep down, you think so too. Come on. You can tell me.

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Burke is unnecessary, adding a creepy level of detail to an alien chase/horror movie. This makes him comparable in fact to Ash in the first film, a suddenly-revealed piece of technology of which the others on the ship were not aware. And then just like Ash, after revealing his sinister motives, Burke dies. So both characters are unnecessary, with the difference being that Ash is interesting. Not for anything he does, or even for his silly speech about the "perfect life form" (yeah I agree that anything that can grown to full maturity in a day or two, and before it has had one meal, is amazing, but am I really listening to a robot wax poetic about life and its complexity?), but simply for his raw WTF factor. I remember when his true nature was revealed, my reaction was similar to that of the crewmembers. I was like, "well done, movie, you surprised me with that monster bursting out of John Hurt's chest, and now this too. I hope the cat talks in the final scene." No, really, I was 11 and mostly I just thought "wow, cool," but Ash is just a distraction from the fact this is a monster movie, Halloween in space. But yeah, Burke. He's there, like Ash, to pretend that this movie is more than just monsters chasing people. I can't fault the writers especially for that. They needed something. I for one would have preferred a love story.

Yeah, you could take Ash out of Alien but then you're right. It's close to Halloween in space, although I stand by my claim that it is a compelling journey into the unknown, and so even without the Ash subplot, it would still be a magnificent film. However, think of Ash as the icing on a really well baked cake. However, getting back to Burke, I just couldn't buy him as a villain, and I think he really worked as a good guy. Also, Paul Reiser just seems too genuinely soft to be a villain. Ian Holm's got the acting chops to pull off sinister, but Paul Reiser would be better suited to say, for the sake of the argument, a sitcom with Helen Hunt. I am being a smartass again here, just so you know.

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Ripley torched the room, not as revenge, but as distraction so that she could escape. I don't like any of this stuff especially, but your complaint again comes from not having watched the movie closely enough.

My complaint comes from this bizare Rambo act by Ripley that seems completely needless since the whole place was about to blow anyway. Two more points as well, while we're on the subject: First, I saw the hatching egg, and there was no way Ripley or Newt were close enough to it to be in danger. Second, with the clock ticking down, Ripley really shouldn't have been hanging around there even a second longer than necessary. Sure, she could shoot the sentinel xenomorph that tries to sneak up behind her, but the rest was James Cameron overkill. Finally (yeah, I know I said two points. I guess I lied), it just doesn't fit the Ripley we all know and love. I don't know why James Cameron felt that Ripley needed to be an action heroine. She was already a strong positive female character. She doesn't need to go blasting things left, right and centre to prove herself.

Now, I think I've responded to some of your points out of order here, but I remember you having a go at my point about Kane being a male character. The reason it's significant is because he is the one who is impregnated. The idea behind it, and you can look up Dan O'Bannon interviews if you don't believe me, was that it was to unsettle the male demographic. The idea that we could be violated in that manner is new. It's shocking. It stops us from being complacent viewers. In films where the female characters are in danger of these sorts of things, there is no genuine fear for the male viewer in terms of their their own safety... but then along comes this clever left-of-field movie that just throws all that out the window. In Alien, anyone's game and this makes it that much more unnerving. Also, consider Kane's character. For the first act of the film, he is the fearless adventurer, the one who goes into all the scary places first. The fact that he's the first to go is ominious for the rest of the crew.

Next, the aliens being turned into cannon fodder. I said it before, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to say it again, I don't mind the fact that they got taken down. I mind the fact that they got taken down so easily and so frequently. Now, logistics aside, this is just bad from a narrative point of view. It drains the movie of a lot of great potential tension. Perhaps they could have had fewer aliens, perhaps they could have contrived the scenes better so that it was more difficult for the marines to fight them. Hudson taking down dozens of the things with his F-bomb cluster attack really cheapens the movie for me. That's all. Now, I'd be happy to concede the point about the alien in the first film surviving the blast of the shuttle's engines. Perhaps, the aliens should have been toned down a bit - but they could have been more dangerous than they were in this movie. Also, don't forget - it wasn't called Colonial Marines. It was called Aliens.

I don't know if I covered everything but hopefully I got most of it. Last word, the pilot is annoying because she is just so cocky. Every line is delivered as if she thinks she's the universe's gift to the cockpit, that she's so cool, she's below absolute zero. Grrr. She just bugs me, okay?

Oh, and on that note, I don't know if what you said about the colonial marines being true to life was right or not, but if they were all a little bit more likeable, their deaths might have meant a bit more to the audience. As it was, they weren't very hard hitting. We feel the loss in Alien with each victim, because they're more genuine people. I personally feel really sorry that Brett and Parker go - but even with Lambert, I feel something. With the colonial marines in the trimming-the-fat scenes, that emotional resonance just isn't there.

Anyway, thank you for that, Civilian. I enjoyed our little spar. Incidentally, what are your thoughts on a movie unravelling all the unanswered questions in the original? Intriguing or would they all be better off left unravelled?

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 18 April 2011 - 08:07 AM

[Just your average movie goer]

Sorry - missed a couple of things the first time round.

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I like Alien a lot, but to call any horror film "perfect" is deliberately silly. You praise its use of unanswered question, like what were the eggs doing on the space jockey's ship, or the open question of what the parent company's interest was in wanting the thing, how it may have know about it, from whence it derived its ownership of the lives of the crewmembers ( to the extent that their pay is forfeit if they don't embark on a dangerous salvage mission) ... all of the shortcuts you accuse the sequel of committing, you praise this one for. This is a bias, and you are entitled to it, but you might as well say "I prefer grape soda to orange, because it is better. For a fact."

The unanswered questions in Alien work because the mystery is appropriate. There's no way in the scope of the film we can find out about the space jockey, not without compromising the story considerably. So you can hardly call what Alien does in leaving these questions unanswered 'shortcuts'. Also, we're dealing with the vast unknown regions of outer space. With Aliens it's more along the lines of whether the suits we see have any idea of that plan that was hatched by the suits 57 years back. However, the big difference is that while it doesn't unravel the mysteries it presents with the derelict spacecraft, Alien at least seems interested in them. Observe the almost reverent manner in which Kane and the others explore the ship, their awe in seeing what they have discovered. Whereas Aliens, when we get back to Earth knowing that someone in the company 57 years back had tried to obtain an alien for the weapons division, seems to have absolutely no interest in exploring this. You know, in Alien, the company is this hidden driving force behind the events. Then we get to Aliens and think "Ah ha. This is that powerful corporation that can make people disappear with the stroke of a pen. So what are these people like?" There's some anticipation here, but Aliens seems to just blow the company off straight away. Anyway, the long and short of it is that while both of these movies leave certain things unexplained, Alien is at least interested in the mystery and the exploration of these things. Aliens isn't.

Also, I wanted to say something on the alien's biology. The massive growth spurt with no protein input is pretty far out there. However, it works within the story because the story still lays down rules and keeps to them. It doesn't matter if the rules are far out or not. For instance, I could make a movie where all the human characters could fly. However, once I've established that this is the case, humans flying within the story are not absurd. So I don't have a problem with that. Anyway, it's meant to be out there - a creature unlike anything people have encountered before. Also, it serves the narrative nicely. The characters go hunting for it under the belief that it's a little critter a third of the size of Jonesy and that they can just throw a net over it - and then they discover that it's huge. It's got nice shock value. Besides, maybe its molecular density just changes or something like that, then it gets the rest of its weight by gorging itself on water. Who knows? Who cares? We get an awesome movie out of it. It's like something I'm sure I've said before with regards to the suspension of disbelief - which is I'm perfectly happy to suspend disbelief if the payoff is worth it. In this case, I think it is.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 18 April 2011 - 09:55 AM

[civilian_number_two]

There are a few things in there to talk about, but overall I am satisfied with your back-peddling. You went off on a tear about how ridiculous it was for settlers to be on this planet, but now you admit you knew they were terraforming. And yeah, there are lots of planets, but do you have any idea how many of them are gas giants, or outside the habitable zone? Most of them, that's how many. I don't know what the space jockey was doing with those eggs, but he brought them to a habitable planet. You say you knew this, so now all of your questions seem silly. OK then.

The pilot acts like all pilots do. They are the top of the food chain. They are way above marines. They act cocky. Top Gun is a stupid movie, but it got that right. I don't know why you have a special hate-on for this gal who has what, three lines?

I think a handful of adult colonists would have been worse than finding a little girl. How did these colonists survive? Can't the marines just do that, then? The monsters become less scary as a result, which is exactly what you're trying to avoid.

I know you're upset about the monsters being reduced in power as much as they are, but they are physical beings of a certain size. They are Uruk-Hai. Put the Uruk-Hai against the contemporary military and I would be surprised if they killed a single marine. Put them up against the Brits in WWII and I would be surprised if they killed a single soldier there. Give them acid blood, and put them in close quarters, with questionable human leadership, and you have a fair-ish fight. Your concern is with how weak the monsters appear, after the way one wreaked havoc on the Nostromo; my concern was with the number of steps necessary to make the humans fail in wiping them all out in one go (bad leadership, reduced weaponry, close quarters, deliberately allowed yourselves to get surrounded...). Again you just enjoyed the first film all out of proportion,. The things should not have been a challenge to disciplined and well-armed soldiers. Not in the numbers they represented, anyway. Thousands, maybe, but that would have compounded your complaint. In any case, the xenos in this one were dangerous because of their numbers, not because of their physiology. Given the disparity in technology, they were guaranteed to die in large numbers.

This business of Kane being "impregnated," and that being a deliberate attack on male viewers in the way you describe ... I never got any of that. He's just another victim, and the thing got him in its way. I liked that it should have been predictable, since the thing was hugging his face, but it came as a shock anyway. I liked the actors' reactions to the initial burst, the shocked silence, without which the scene would have been comical. Their dramatization of an alien experience was so human that I'd almost suspect that someone other than Ridley Scott gave it the green light. After all, this is the guy who would later give us GI Jane and Gladiator. He knows how to light a scene, but for the acting I put my faith in the casting. But getting back to Kane, the first victim is frequently male. The idea is you send a guy in to show the audience how the monster works. This is a tested formula and O'Bannon can wax on about it now that the film is a success, but to say he was making some kind of subversive comment about gender roles is nut-kick-worthy bullshit. That's along the lines of you-know-who saying he based a certain sci-fantasy series on Classical Mythology. Nut kick. As a test of that theory, let me think back on how many male viewers I have spoken with who recall that as the scariest, most unsettling thing they have seen in a horror film. Yes, none. I have never heard any male make any special comment about that scene. typically they say something like the scene in The Exorcist where Linda Blair stabs her vagina with a crucifix and shrieks "let Jesus fuck you," because, yeah, that shit's crazy. Women often mention the tree rape in The Evil Dead. In fact I know more than one woman who admits having turned the movie off at that point, who refused to watch the more humorous sequels. That's an example of a gender-based reaction to a moment in a film. I have never heard any man (before you) make any special claim, and certainly not one based on gender, about the chestburster scene in Alien.

But getting back to it, your concern with the chestburster, apart from the scene existing at all, is that the victim is female. Are you telling us all that you would have had no complaint had the victim been male? Would you not be saying that Cameron had copied the scene from the original in all its details? There is, you see, no winning here. You didn't like the scene, period. Let's not get stupid about it.

Everything you said about the alien's biology: no. Making the alien suddenly giant is the one thing most consistently (and rightly) complained about with this film. It is stupid. There is a law of conservation of matter and energy. You need to eat in order to grow. Cell division without nutrition is impossible. All they needed was a single line of dialogue about how the thing made it to the food stores, but they didn't even think of that? A running gag is that maybe he was eating parts of the ship, but that he preferred humans when he came across them.

Anyway, I like both films quite a bit, but they're both fairly stupid. Aliens is stupid for being just another big dumb 80s action film, though I disagree about the characters of the marines. I think many of them are quite likable, and yeah, we don't cry when they die, but how many war movie death scenes really move you the way the filmmakers hoped? Did you care when Tom Hanks died at the end of Saving Private Ryan? I know I didn't (Tom Sizemore, a little bit). Alien is stupid, partly because I had seen it a year before, when it was called Halloween, and I saw it again a year later, when it was call Friday the Thirteenth. Faceless villains chasing down wisecracking young people and killing them one at a time, and then a girl survives it all but can't tell anyone because there's no evidence. It's a formula, only Alien also has a talking robot. It has great cinematography as well, so there's that, but I can't invest too much care into the artistry of a slasher horror film.

As for the comment about it being interesting that they're going into the "unknown," that's not all that interesting either. Its origin is the fear of the dark, and the answer is never complicated nor interesting. What's in the woods? Something that wants to eat us. What's in the mountains? Something that wants to eat us. What's under the ground? Something that wants to eat us. What's in the ocean? Something that wants to eat us. What's in the future? Something that wants to eat us. What's in the closet? Something that wants to eat us. What's under the bed? Something that wants to eat us. So yeah, what's in space? ... Something that wants to eat us .... yawn. That movie was kinda cool, let's go get a burger.

Prequel? I don't want it. I'll probably watch it, but it won't be any good. I am, however, looking forward to The Hobbit.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 18 April 2011 - 09:46 PM

[Just your average movie goer]

All right. I'll give you the point on the chestburster scene. I would have hated it regardless of the gender of the victim simply based on the whole convenient timing thing.

Regarding survivors, I wasn't saying that I'd prefer any type of survivors. Really, the marines could find that the entire colony has been wiped out and it would make little difference to the story - since the story really is a matter of them not being able to do anything but cut their own losses.

I'm still going to argue that Kane being male is somewhat significant. You've got a man giving birth. Now, I wasn't saying that Dan O'Bannon's intention to unsettle male viewers worked, but I'm just saying that I can see what he was up to - and unlike a certain director who goes on about Joseph Campbell and The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I find that his story fits. He may have made it up later for all I know, but it fits. Anyway, the chestburster scene in Aliens is lame - and if you took it out, no one would even notice it was gone.

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You went off on a tear about how ridiculous it was for settlers to be on this planet, but now you admit you knew they were terraforming. And yeah, there are lots of planets, but do you have any idea how many of them are gas giants, or outside the habitable zone?

Seriously, there'd be a tonne of lifeless rocks out there for people to terraform. It's coincidence. However, I'm sure I mentioned that that's fine as it serves the story. It just seems a little weird. There were any number of ways to get people back to that planet. You could have had the company make another attempt at getting alien eggs, but this time with an expedition just for that purpose - and the marines could come in there after it goes sour... but whatever, I can't be bothered arguing this point any more. I think it's a whopping coincidence but there you have it. Anyway, you can have that point if you want. I'm feeling generous today.

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Everything you said about the alien's biology: no. Making the alien suddenly giant is the one thing most consistently (and rightly) complained about with this film. It is stupid. There is a law of conservation of matter and energy. You need to eat in order to grow. Cell division without nutrition is impossible. All they needed was a single line of dialogue about how the thing made it to the food stores, but they didn't even think of that? A running gag is that maybe he was eating parts of the ship, but that he preferred humans when he came across them.

All well and good, but you'd have a rather short movie if it didn't grow up, wouldn't you? Remember what I said about suspension of disbelief and pay-off? As for him attacking the crew members, maybe he just didn't instinctively didn't like people unless they were acting as hosts for more of his kind. Maybe the fan theory about them being engineered as bio-weapons is right and that it was just doing what it's been bred to do. Who knows? Suspension of disbelief... ... pay -off.

Oh, also, this doesn't really fit here - but I just remembered it. You said something about the Alien Queen controlling the opening of eggs earlier. However, we've seen how this works. Basically, they open if somebody stands in front of them for too long. Remember in the first movie? Kane stands among thousands of eggs, but he's particularly close to one of them. That one hatches but the rest of them don't. Anyway, moving on.

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In any case, the xenos in this one were dangerous because of their numbers, not because of their physiology. Given the disparity in technology, they were guaranteed to die in large numbers.

Not necessarily. Have them duck out of air vents and snatch soldiers from above - kind of like the first attack in the movie. Actually, if you want to know something that was very well done in the movie, the opening few moments of the first strike were good. If the movie had maintained that approach, it would have had a lot more tension. I get what you mean about the technological disparity but with tight spaces, acidic blood and what have you, that could be dealt with. Having thousands more xenomorphs however would only make matters worse. You're right there at any rate.

Now, before I get to the last point, that pilot... well, let's just agree to disagree on that. I find her annoying. You don't. There's not a whole lot of point in battling that out.

As for your points about Alien being stupid because it's just a horror slasher flick, I have to disagree. The reason is because the movie transcends this. You see, I actually don't usually watch horror slasher flicks. I hate them as a general rule. Yet Alien is my favourite movie. Why? I think it's just because it's got more class than these other films and it's bloody well made. You've got that terrific cast, and yes I'm sure they add more nuance than what was originally there in the script. You've got the atmosphere of the film. You've got the terrific sets. Visually, it's a stunning film. You've got the human drama. You've got the haunting score by Goldsmith... and all in all, the ingredients add up to something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I've already said that the original screenplay by Dan O'Bannon wasn't great. This movie was a collaborative effort. However, everything fell into place perfectly. It was made in the right place at the right time, with the right people and it's just one of those things where movie magic happens. In all likelihood, it's an accident that it's anywhere near as good as it is... but there you go. Great art is sometimes like that.

Now, as for my claims about its perfection, I'd like to explain that in a slightly roundabout way, but here it is:

There is a quote I often see in movie reviews. This quote is used by many people and it often ends up being stamped on the covers of various DVDs... and I hate it. The quote goes like this "One of the year's best films" and variations include "One of the best movies of the year."

Why do I hate it? Because it's weak. It's tentative. It's non-committal. It tells me that the reviewer really liked the film but is too afraid of disagreement or putting readers off-side to say it loud and clear.

So if you think something is fantastic, regardless of whether anyone agrees with you or not, just come out and say it. I may be completely alone in my high regard for Alien but it doesn't matter. I think it's a fantastic piece of cinema and I'd give it five stars without a second's hesitation.

There, tentative reviewers everywhere. That is how it is done.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 18 April 2011 - 08:28 PM

[civilian_number_two]

Air ducts? How long would that have been interesting? "This group of marines, they had fantastic weaponry, superior organization, and even access to a map of the station, but they kept standing by these air ducts, so they all got eaten." That's just idiotic. The monsters had the drop for the first assault, but after that they should have been sitting ducks. In order to lengthen out the story, the writers allowed an alien to get on board the dropship, even though that made no sense. It was well outside the living area of the aliens, so they had no reason to investigate there; they were all hibernating when it landed; also, it should have been sealed and secured with motion sensor alarms. Finally, we are told in no uncertain terms that the shortest distance to it from where the aliens are is through the marines, yet the aliens get there anyway (and then apparently doubled back so they wouldn't be behind the marines. It was screenwriting convenience, another desperate attempt to even the odds for the poor overwhelmed xenomorphs. This is the extent to which the screenwriters of Aliens had to go to make a credible threat out of creatures whose weaponry extended no further than their hands. You figure the solution was to allow them magically to appear from the ceiling and the floorboards whenever they wanted. Like it or not, the writers tried that too.

Kane did not "give birth" to the xenomorph. It gestated inside his stomach and ate its way out of his chest. It's a parasitic infestation, not procreation. I saw and still see no connection between the way that happened and the notion of birth. The makers of Alien3 did, however, so I suppose you're in good company: Ripley was conscious and not in shock as the creature burst from her chest (through her heart, presumably, yet she was awake enough), and she cradled it like an infant. You want to ally yourself with that horseshit, go ahead. I repeat that I have never heard any man claim that he felt particularly unsettled by that movie. The slugs that crawled up people's asses in Night of the Creeps, however, I have heard many men say that bothered them. So it's not like men don't have gender-based reactions to events in horror films. They just didn't have one to Alien.

You may not agree on the subject of terraforming, but get this: space is big, and there are not very many planets that we know of that are eligible for terraforming. In our system there are two: Earth and Mars. The nearest 50 stars are between 2 and 16 light years away, and in total we know of 8 planets among the lot. The planet encountered in Alien is terraformable, and apparently close to Earth; that it might be the subject of a terraforming community is not amazing. The coincidence is that Ripley is alive to see it, but that's the thing of wanting the actor from the first film to be in the sequel. It would have made more sense for everything to have gone on as normal but for Ripley to have been long dead. Of course that's true, but that's not how sequels are written. So for me the concession is not that someone else went to that planet; that was inevitable IMO. The concession was that Ripley went back.

The baby monster growing: here's an idea: everyone freaks out and runs out of the room, locking the monster inside. It eats Kane. It grows quickly. It gets out, through one of your magic air ducts, or simply by bashing the door open. It is now Kane-sized, whichj is enough for some mischief. That, off the top of my head. You mention this notion of "suspension of disbelief," and you misuse it in exactly the same way that everyone does. This is a pet peeve of mine. I am going to teach you a little lesson about that phrase, and it will change the way you use it. In fact I guarantee before the year is up you will turn it on someone in exactly the way I am about to turn it on you now.

Here is the exp​ression as it first appeared in Coleridge's Biographia Lieraria, 1817:

"It was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

You see, the onus is on the writer to imbue his story with enough of the real so as to allow the reader to suspend his disbelief. The suspension, you see, is not on the air but on a scaffolding built by the writer. The way the exp​ression is used today, and indeed by you here, is that the onus is on the reader, that any time a reader makes a complaint that something is ridiculous, a writer can insist that he "suspend his disbelief." Well ok, I say, give me something to suspend it on. Leave the monster in the room with Kane, or give the monster something else to eat, like the food stores, or Jones. You can't attack Aliens for leaps in credibility, which are legion, and then say Alien is good enough, and any gaps ought to be filled by the reader, on account of you like it so much, and, you know, suspension of disbelief, and so forth. You can't just wave your hands at something as ridiculous as a baby turning into a grownup overnight (this is dumber than Benjamin Button).

And yeah, it's fine and I can go with it if the movie is ultimately about something else, but this movie is not about anything else. This movie is about nothing more than a monster running around the ship eating people, and the writers couldn't even be bothered to explain the most simple detail, like how did it accomplish that? So in the end we have a creature like Jason or Michael Voorhees, who despite all precautions taken by the humans can appear behind them whenever it wants, or magically jump at them from just out of frame, never betraying its 300-pound presence. It's no more than a monster movie, but with pretty photography.

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You see, I actually don't usually watch horror slasher flicks. I hate them as a general rule. Yet Alien is my favourite movie. Why?

Because you are inconsistent.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 18 April 2011 - 09:50 PM

[azerty]

If you are going to make an Alien sequel you need: an Alien (or Aliens), Sigourney Weaver, and a way to get them together.

How do you get Ripley back? Space Salvage. The other alternative is have her simply arrive on earth, as per the original plan. The salvage (however mathematically impossible) allows for the reasonably interesting throwaway scene that opens the film. I explain the maths in that she was already inside Mars orbit on her way home, asteroid belt miners, and luck.

The 57 Years in the future gives you: A freak out factor, a way to explain technological advances, a dead daughter, a way to explain everybody's lack of interest in xenomorphs, and people colonizing the rock. As to why would you colonize the rock? Why would you live in Pittsburgh? Hell, I don't know, because I wouldn't.

I shall digress here - I prefer the semi lengthened version of Aliens, the one they showed on American TV with the dead daughter, the roving guns, and the other 10 minutes or so (including the Dwayne and Ellen part at the end, which I don't think was in the theatrical version), but not the colonist stuff.

You need colonists (and a dead daughter, possibly) to get Ripley to the planet. As I said, as as the movie says, Ripley absolutely does not want to go back to that planet. I wonder that she really doesn't want to go into space at all. I shall digress again. I was at the San Diego zoo once in the auditorium when they brought out their "ambassador cheetah" to meet the peasants. The African fellow I was with got up and left the goddam room, and I thought Holy shit, what must that guy have seen to refuse to be in an auditorium with an ostensibly tame cheetah? I mean there's a reality, and there's disneyland, and to imagine you're in one when really you're in the other is a major mistake.

So we get Ripley's nightmare's (a throwaway scene, but amusing the first time around), Ripley's shit job, shit apartment, and her recent concern for families, and her belief that the marines are going to wipe out all the aliens. So she signs up for the mission. In the words of Martin Sheen, what else was she going to do?

I do not find Burke to be unbelievale or a waste of time. He is the both the catalyst, and the unforseen factor to the whole plot. Reiser is to me totally believable in his very charming bland lawyer living in disneyland kind of way. Who could have predicted his whole deal? You don't see the aliens screwing each other over for a percentage, as they say.

The marines are all believable too, except maybe for Spunkmeyer the fuck up. They are competant and lazy, until they are in trouble, and then the survivors begin to inspire some confidence. I'm with Civilian Number 2 on this one. Hope it doesn't piss him off.

We need Newt because the film is partially about procreation of competing species. It gives Ripley a focal point. Otherwise you just have starship troopers. Which is pretty much what we do have, anyway. I'm almost glad they didn't go all Ender Wiggins on us and have Ripley save the last egg and go all weepy. I prefer the run from the car to the house through the swarms of mosquitos and trying to unlock the door and get in while slapping the little bastards to death and hoping you don't bring even one inside alive with you. You always know it will get you later on...

So how else are you going to make a sensible film? Get Ripley, get aliens, get them together, and don't do the first film again because if you wanted to see that, you'd just go and watch the first one again. That's the problem with the third one - it's a shit remake of the first one.

Aliens DOES have tension, right from the opening, through the nightmare, through the search for the colonists, through Burke's traitorous play, through the barricade and the sensors showing the aliens coming closer until they are inside the goddam room - and then your own barricade is a trap, through meeting the Queen, through Ripley pissing her off (I personally belive that the egg opened by itself because it sensed an available host and knew it was time to hatch. The Queen was willing to let the truce be a truce, and Ripley did not. I like to believe that she would have wasted all of them on the way out irregardless of that egg), right through to the site about to go nuclear, and Newt getting lost at an inconvenient moment.
The more I think about it, the more I am deciding that I like it.

Right - I am part way into the original presently. It's pretty damn slow, and the characters are not as likeable as the sequel characters, and so far they sound like actors ad libbing in that irritating ad lib way that actors ad lib stupid lines in workshops when rather than shut up they are required to show their ad lib skills.

But I am going to continue watching now, with hopefully a semi open mind.....

[Just your average movie goer]

What have I created with this thread?

Civilian, I don't remember you being anywhere near this stubborn or literal minded.

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Kane did not "give birth" to the xenomorph. It gestated inside his stomach and ate its way out of his chest. It's a parasitic infestation, not procreation

Yeah, I get this. Everyone who sees the movie gets this. However, it's a metaphorical birth. Remember how Ash called the alien "Kane's son"? Everyone else who watches the movie does.

As for the suspension of disbelief, I know what you're saying but to accept that an alien creature with a completely unknown physiology can do freaky things that lifeforms we know about can't isn't the same thing as accepting outlandish things like a character coming back from the dead. So you can take your stance on suspension of disbelief and shove it on someone else. It doesn't sway me. Besides, I gave a feasible possibility with the molecular density thing. Maybe the infant alien and the full grown alien weigh the same. Anyway, the whole point of everything I said regarding the properties of the alien is a matter of internal consistency within a story. If the alien is given a set of properties and those properties don't change throughout the story, then no matter what those properties are, the rules of internal consistency have been met. However, as much as I love Aliens and I do (which is something you seem to keep forgetting), with regards to the aliens, it breaks these rules.

Now, let's get something straight on the terraforming colony. In Alien the crew of the Nostromo are nowhere near Earth. Dialogue regarding their position includes the following snippets:

"That's not our system."
"We haven't even reached the outer rim yet."
"What the hell are we doing out here?"

So this planet, wherever it is, is quite literally in the middle of nowhere. Then we get this little exchange in Aliens:

"Why don't you check out LV-426?"
"Because I don't have to. There have been people there for twenty years and they never complained about any hostile organisms."
"What do you mean? What people?"
"Terraformers. Planet engineers. They go in and set up these big atmospheric processors to make the air breathable. It takes decades. It's what we call a shake'n'back colony."

Well, how about that, hey? What are the odds? And what are these terraformers doing? Setting up the planet for human habitation. Why? Who wants to live quite literally in the middle of nowhere? It'd be like opening a shopping mall on Easter Island.

Also, that dialogue is exposition-heavy. ... Segue notice... You don't get that in Alien. Dialogue is natural. Azerty, what you call actors ad libbing is characters behaving like real people. The crew in Alien are tired, they're grumpy, they want to go home. They therefore behave like tired, grumpy, people who want to go home. You don't have to like them all. Dallas is an unprofessional captain, Lambert is negative all the time. Our heroine Ripley, although she's generally right about things, is sometimes a bit stuck up and you can see how her by-the-book attitude rubs Parker and Brett the wrong way.

As for Alien being slow, I've heard people say this, although I have no idea where they're coming from. It doesn't muck around. It gets right into things. They pick up that signal and they land. They're in and out of that derelict spacecraft, back on board and the alien makes its appearance by the hour mark. That's not exactly a dawdling pace. If Peter Jackson had been directing it for instance, they'd be just landing on the planet at the hour mark. So, slow? Well, I'd say it's a matter of personal taste. However, if you don't like it, don't watch it. I've never said Alien is for everyone. Still though, at least you're approaching it with an open mind.

And Civilian...

Quote

And yeah, it's fine and I can go with it if the movie is ultimately about something else, but this movie is not about anything else.

You're insane. This movie's about plenty of things. You've got the message about profit-driven corporations crossing ethical boundaries and the fact that the rights of individuals matter nothing to the people in charge. There's something of a warning there about where present day corporations are heading. You've already got multinational corporations that, in order to maximise profits, manufacture their products in countries with non-existant labour laws so they can literally destroy people's lives with intolerable working conditions and almost non-existant wages. You've also got this idea that if ordinary people were ever to travel through space, hauling ore would probably be what most of them would be doing. You've also got Ripley's struggle in a workplace dominated by men who never listen to her and undermine her at every opportunity, even when she's completely in the right.

Finally, you suggest that I am in any way like the makers of Alien3? I'm not even going to respond to that. That's a pathetic underhanded attempt at baiting me. Besides, if you read my very first post, you would have seen my opinion on Alien3 already. Anyway, I think the thin ice you've been stomping all over has given in at this point.

I think I'm wasting my time posting a thread like this in these forums. I would've thought a classic like Alien would get a bit more love than it's getting here.
Well, I can't say any of this was exactly fun, but I suppose I knew what I was getting into. Anyway, good to see you again, guys. Later.

[Jordan]

This is a great discussion. It's been a long time since civillian went overboard on another persons film critique, and even longer since JM made a film critique!

Good to hear from you JM, I miss your long ranting posts, welcome back!

Air Ducts

Air Ducts being easy access is something I've seen before in film. And I hate it, primarily because I've spend time in designing HVAC systems for industrial, commercial, institutional, and residential buildings. In general, most air ducts are not large enough to fit anything more than a cat or small dog. The larger main ducts are usually located in areas like bottom floors or top floors or near mechanical rooms and reduce in size with every branch take off, just like a water main. So a large comfortable duct will get smaller and smaller to the point you can’t tunnel any further.

Getting inside the ducts would be very hard and very noisy. In most cases you'd have to cut through insulation and sheet metal; sometimes a hard pvc jacket with various insulations are used. It’s roughly a few inches of shit to cut through. If you managed to cut a large enough entrance hole, your next issue is noise as you wiggle your way through the duct. If you're lucky, it has acoustic insulation, but often times only thermal. But the noise you cause inside the duct is only half the noise, the other half is created by the weight of your body in the duct pushing down on the duct hangers which support the duct from the floor above. If you’re lucky, you may get 50 feet in a duct without hitting a balancing damper or fire damper or smoke damper. These are basically valves which constrict air flow or shut it off all together. These would be next to impossible to sneak through.
Once you get into the duct, getting out of it would prove just as difficult, if not more so, since the duct branches which go to those large return air grilles, those things you see people jump out of from the ceiling, are typically 10 inches in diameter, so you'd have to bore an exit hole in the duct prior to the grille.

But while you're in the lightless duct, how can you tell which way you are going?, and where to stop and cut an exit hole? You can have plan drawings and a flash light if you’re prepared, but As-built drawings are never 'as-built' they are always wrong. No engineer, architect, or contractor goes 100% by what building plans say, because often times the contractor on site will deviate from the design to save money, or in some cases, has a better understanding of the system than the engineer and will 'redesign' a minor change during construction, this is seen as kosher in the industry when it comes to duct routing. And 9 times out of ten, the contractor will not spend the time to mark up the drawings to show the deviation. Or if he does, they stay on his copy of the plans and rarely get back to the owner. So no human could really make use of air ducts, and no alien could either for that matter. And if they managed to get in and out and navigate, they'd make a shit ton of noise. Noise in a tunnel will travel, no different in a duct.

Strength in NUMBERS

This is something both of you failed to realize. In the beginning, the marines would have the advantage. Range, communication, discipline, strategy, and survalence would all give them the edge. But as time passes and ammo is spend, and aliens kamikazi there way into cameras, trip wires, and sensors, the marines would slowly spend there precsious weaponry and equipment until they'd only have a knife and some dirty underwear. Aliens would win the war of attrition since they behave like ants, they run on a hive mind and will keep pressing until the job is done. The humans will also break down due to fear and stress. So time is not on there side and it is the race against time. Like the story of babyaga. The guy could only hide every night in the cathedral and invent new ways to keep babyaga from eating him before dawn broke and she'd retire. Every alien comic I've read more or less stresses this. I recall one issue where a planet was literally over run by aliens. Red and blue and the two fought one another, for whatever reason. The marines landed on the planet, a chalk of them (12), in large space armor suits with massive guns. They mowed down 1000's of aliens, but every once and awhile, one of the guys would get pulled into the swarm and disappear. Alien is a pussy on his own and totally useless, just like any insect in nature, he needs the colony.

This post has been edited by Jordan: 19 April 2011 - 03:49 AM

[civilian_number_two]

MG, again you take these things too seriously. Ash called the monster Kane's son, so therefore the way the monster gestated must naturally and universally have affected men more than it affected women? I don't know any man apart from you who would make this case. What the filmmaker may have wanted is questionable; what he got was a monster movie set in space. It was marketed as a monster movie. It is remembered as a monster movie, and many think a very good one (many more think its sequel was better, but I disagree with them).

All that stuff about what the movie was "about:" yes, things get mentioned in movies. Most horror movies have comments here and there about politics, about gender equality, about race, economic diversity, frequently about the role of authority. This is stuff that gets tossed around in the dialogue and the conflicts. Even that deplorable Blair Witch Project had a moment or two about the loss of wild space in America. But you can't say these things are what Alien was about. It's about a monster gradually eating people, and one of them not getting eaten. If I want to watch a movie about a woman's role in a male-dominated workplace, Alien does not come to mind.

Your suspension of disbelief comment and the notion that the alien had greater density: no, it cannot be of greater molecular density, because that would affect its weight, you see. So it weighed 300 pounds while in Kane's stomach? How did he walk around, then? If it were of greater molecular density like you say, then Kane's neck would have snapped when the facehugger latched on to him (since its egg would have had the full density of a fully-grown monster, by your theory). Again, you will before the year is out use the correct meaning of "suspension of disbelief" as a retort against someone you meet, probably on the internet. I guarantee it. The onus is on the writer, not on the reader. The only way the thing got bigger was by taking on organic matter that it not embody at its birth. This is how all life forms grow. It is a gap in the writing, and yeah blah blah, who cares. I only mention it, and you know this, because you make such a big deal out of the gaps in Aliens but are willing to invent new physical laws for the universe in order to accommodate Alien.

It's already been established that these are different movies, one being horror and the other being adventure, but I don't see that rules were broken or forgotten from one movie to the next. We don't know whether guns could kill the creature in the first film because nobody had one. But according to the laws of physics, yeah guns should be able to penetrate its organic carapace. Unless we're to learn these things are made of steel, and of course they're not, because the facehugger was not (they cut into it with a scalpel), and all of the material that made the alien came (or should have come, apart from an error in writing) from eating people. Unless it has a miniature fusion reactor in its belly, it's not making steel out of amino acids and sugars. So yeah, guns can kill them.

As for the whole business of how a planet out on the edge can be terraformed now, it's supposed to be a comment on the progress of civilizations over time. "57 years ago, the Oregon territory was a backwater, but now, after Lewis and Clark charted the course of the Columbia river, Portland is a bustling metropolis, with plenty of fine whorehouses and drinking establishments ... " I think the time frame ma be too quick, but it was deliberate. That was part of the reason for Ripley's extended stay in suspended animation. The writers could just as easily have had the events take place on another planet, and Ripley could have been involved because people remembered her story. Sure, yeah, but while we're imagining creatures with great molecular densities that don't affect their weight, I think we can throw the writers a bone here. They gave us enough see, the passage of time, the lip service to social progress and technological advances, enough of a scaffolding upon which to willingly suspend our disbelief. If Easter Island were planet-sized, and ripe with mineral resources, and could with terraforming support billions of people, yeah I can imagine a shopping mall or two.

I don't question that you like Aliens. I question why you praise Alien all out of proportion to its actual entertainment value. I like both fine, and could watch them again every year or two. But they are not filled with the memorable dialogue, story, characters or even photography of the films that really move you. There are movies you could watch every day, and Alien is not one of them.

Jordan: hilarious post on air ducts. Ok, agreed then. Not only are air duct a lame narrative trick, they are also unfeasible. They would be noisy, cramped, movement eventually would be impossible, and so on. The monsters in Aliens traveled at one point through a suspended ceiling, which we all thought at the time was stupid enough. So ok, air ducts are out.

As for what you say about numbers, yeah that's what I'm saying, and the film does go into this. The marines are ok when they have their back to a wall, but their supplies are low and they do need to get out. They know that they are smarter and stronger, but that their strength is running out and they face numbers. That's the challenge. MG is complaining that the monsters shouldn't be so easy to kill. It's really a fine line. If guns can't kill a thing of roughly human size, then you're dealing with magic of some kind. I like the creatures to be physical and not magic. So even though the dialogue in most of Aliens is silly and 80s, I liked the conflict well enough.

Anyway good to see you again Jordan. I don't think I went "overboard" on MG, but I did respond in the manner he asked for. People on the internet speak to one another the way that great nations do, by firing off huge guns at one another. It's the way it was meant to be.

This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 19 April 2011 - 12:41 PM

[Just your average movie goer]

I don't know, guys. When I started this thread, I did so under the assumption that we all think Alien is awesome, because I thought most movie goers do. So I didn't expect a huge backlash over it. I guess then on this site that we can only make that assumption with Star Wars. Ah well. However, I'd suggest you contemplate why this movie is still well-known thirty + years after it came out in cinemas - but I'm not going to keep shoving my opinion at you all.

The molecular density thing I keep throwing out there is just a suggestion, nothing more. Who knows? Maybe the adult is really light. That could explain why the Alien Queen didn't look heavy enough for her size in the sequel (however, before you say it, yes I know that was down to special effects limitations). I still think that it was a crime to make the xenomorphs something that is only to be feared in numbers. What a waste of a great movie monster - and it really is a beautiful creation. {i]Alien[/i] deserved the right to swipe that noun/adjective for its use. I just think that if you don't think the monster is anything special then there's really no point in having it. If you just want to have them as cannon fodder, then you could have an army of three foot soldier ants instead.

Also, you'll never win with me on the alien's physiology point. The alien does the things it does because that's what the story is about. It's kind of like Superman. If you're not going to get behind the concept that a guy can fly and do the rest of it, then you may as well skip the movie... because that's what it's about.

Furthermore, I've already said I've got no problem with the aliens getting taken down. It's just that Aliens has them taken down en masse and it's not good simply from a story telling point of view. "Then they were swarmed by dozens of the things. Fortunately, they could blow them away effortlessly, otherwise they would have been in real trouble." We have Hudson - Hudson, I tell you - taking down the things left, right and centre. That also stinks of being disrespectful to the first movie - but save your breath arguing that one, because you're not going to persuade me otherwise. Yeah, I know, you'll say something really witty like "That's silly" or "No" anyway.

As for what the original's about, I know what you're trying to say, but Alien is layered. There's a lot more going on than the average viewer sees the first time round - and it's layered well. I think it rewards repeat viewing or I wouldn't have said that earlier (I'm pretty sure I said that earlier, by this is such a long thread, it's hard to tell).

And again with the Kane thing, I've told you a dozen times that all I meant was that that was what the filmmakers intended to mean, and most viewers understand that regardless of whether or not it works for them. It doesn't work on me in that way either, but I could see full well what the intention was and to say I couldn't would be daft.


Anyway, hey there, Jordan! I enjoyed the post as well. I agree with everything you said, except one thing - since when have movies ever cared about what air ducts are really like? I always thought there was a mutual agreement among everyone making and watching movies regarding the things.

Well, that's all for now. Later.