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Aliens, 1-4 Reviewed (briefly) |
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Alien was pretty good. I didn't see it until long after it was released, and I'm not a big fan of horror movies, but it's good. I've seen it a couple of times, and enjoy it, but it's not something I can/want to watch over and over again. A lot of it works on shock value, and once you know what's going to happen, it's not a shock next time. I don't think the characters are as detailed and realistic as the ones in Aliens either. I saw Alien on the big screen during the 20th anniversary, and enjoyed it more than I had during any other viewing. It wasn't a masterpiece, and it wasn't scary to me, but it was a pretty good movie.
Bonus observation: compare the evolution of Ripley from Alien to Aliens, and Sarah Conner from Terminator to Terminator 2. Aliens was released 5 years earlier, but James Cameron wrote much of the script and screenplay for both films, and he directed them both as well. Pretty obvious that he took a lesson from Ripley getting tougher and the movie having more battle action and applied it to Terminator 2, eh?
I saw Alien, the rereleased director's cut last week, the day it opened in theaters. Seeing it was mostly Malaya's idea. She'd seen it several times before and really liked it and wanted to see it on the big screen once in her life. And yes, she can now die happy. I liked it. I didn't find anything scary, and I pretty much knew what was going to happen by following the conventions of the genre, but it was still enjoyable. Even at 20 years old, it was far more enjoyable than most every other movie I've seen this year, mostly since it was made by talented people and took its time. Ebert's discussion of it in his series of The Great Movies articles goes on and on about the gradually building suspense, and I suppose he's got a point, but since I knew from Aliens (which is one of my top 3 action movies ever) that everyone other than Ripley would die; and I knew from every horror movie every made that every time a character wandered off alone they would die; there wasn't much suspense. The most interesting thing for me was that before the movie we'd had an hour to kill at the Emeryville mall, and since it was Malaya and me with time to kill, we of course ended up in the bookstore. There's a huge Barnes and Noble there, with the requisite Starbucks attached. Not that that matters to me since I don't drink coffee (if you can still reasonably term the absurd combo caffeine-based liquids they sell as "coffee") or pay $4 for a muffin on a whim, but I just find it amusing that seemingly every bookstore on earth now has a Starbucks grafted to it, lamprey style. I always end up checking any new books I buy for brown stains. Anyway, while in the bookstore, after walking past and laughing at the triple espresso-fueled people who occupy a cafe table with so many books (that they've not purchased) that they appear to be doing heavy research for their thesis, I wound up in the Art section. And since they had a copy of Giger's Necronomicon sitting out, I looked through it, for about the 10th time. I'd love to buy it and his other books, but I can't afford $50 for his weird but repetitive artistic visions. I love his work though, especially the background aspects of things. The aliens and such are nifty, but what I really enjoy is the busyness and texture and detail of everything, and the architecture and machinery and design. He's very monochromatic and tinted; mostly in the black/grey/silver light that the aliens so famously use, but he's done a lot of other, less-famous work where an entire image is bathed in golden or greenish or red hues. Watching Alien an hour after paging through an entire book of Giger's work was amazing, since I saw so clearly how the look of Alien was at least 95% dependent upon Giger's visions. Virtually every scene; the ship from the exterior and interior, the machine rooms, the alien ship and the scale of it, the lighting through the entire movie, and of course the alien itself are all taken directly from various of Giger's works. Many scenes in the movie (pretty much everything but the escape ship and the room where they went to talk to Mother) are practically 3d representations of individual Giger works, or else are his style of imagery, almost like painting he could have made, but hadn't yet gotten around to. And since virtually every scifi or space movie since Alien has stolen from its grungy, dingy, dark, metallic design ethos, it wouldn't be going too far out on a limb to say that the entire look of space stations and ships and planets in modern cinema and fiction is largely derived from Giger's work. The obvious exceptions are brightly-lit comic book style fictional universes (like Star Wars), and yes, I'm biased in my views, since I love and feel quite drawn to the grungy and dirty and rusty anarchic style of scifi design, ala Alien or Alien 3 (the Alien 3 art design, not the godawful movie itself), while the clean, well-lit, colorful, Disneyland look of movies like Star Wars Episode 1 and 2 does nothing for me. As for Alien, I enjoyed it, but I don't feel any real need to watch it again. I'd heard about but never actually seen the chest-buster scene on the dining room table, and found it pretty underwhelming. The lead up to it was great, as he first starts convulsing and then the first splatter of blood hits the other crew members, leaving them shocked for a moment; but the actual alien eruption wasn't too impressive. I thought the first one seen in Aliens had more dramatic impact, with great ripping sound effects and all of the tough Marines horrified, while Ripley just suffers in silence as she watches it on the TV and relives the horror. I also found myself wondering about physical realities in Alien. How did that little weasel grow into the human-sized beast, capable of secreting a whole nest and sticking two of the captured crew members into it (in a scene that Malaya said wasn't in the original movie), in like one day, without eating anyone else, on a ship where there's no food to be found? I recall some critics bitching about the spectacularly rapid growth of the alien in Alien 3, and they had a point, sort of, but I thought the size-increase was even more blatant in Alien 1. I'd recommend the expanded DVD to anyone who likes horror or action or scifi movies. You should at least know what ever movie is ripping off today, and it's enjoyable. Malaya said that the added footage was all good and added depth to it, and the movie definitely holds up in look; the special effects (aside from the cheesy Technicolor ship explosion) are quality, and the set design and print quality and sound and everything else are as good or better than movies made in 2003. Whether you want to pay another $8 to see it in the theaters on top of buying the DVD when it's released in a few weeks is up to you.
Definitely one of my top 10 movies ever, and still my #1 action movie ever. It gets bonus points for having such memorable, individual characters, great dialogue (much of which is quoted above) and plenty of humor as well as an intelligent plot.
Aliens is the best action movie ever. IMHO. So far. There are other action films that are extremely good, and some that have better action sequences (The Matrix, for instance) but as a whole action movie, one you can watch start to finish, I have to give my vote to Aliens, for now anyway. I watched it tonight, for no particular reason, and loved it, as always. I have the DVD director's cut, mostly for the image quality and sound, since my other version of the film was a tape off of HBO about 8 years ago, and most of the movie being in dark hallways, I couldn't see a damn thing on my tape after repeat repeated viewings. Aliens, like most director's cut editions of movies, is longer, and includes basically everything they ever shot for the film that survived in focus and with reasonable sound. Whether it makes the movie better or not is irrelevant. The added footage on the DVD is about 20 minutes in total, and 75% of it I think would be better left out. Much that's added has some good elements, but I don't think that it improves the movie. Okay scenes that add substantially to the length and hurt the flow and pacing aren't necessarily a plus. In the theatrical version, the first thing you see of the colony is when the Marines land. All is deserted, destroyed after the battle, creepy and desolate. In the director's cut this is not the case. There is a 10 minute scene from it pre-Alien discovery, where they talk about sending some people out across the planet to check on some message the company sent. The scene in the colony is interesting, just to see it before it's all destroyed and water-soaked. It's full of light and people, and kids running everywhere. Some official type even yells at the kids, "We've told you to stop playing in those air ducts!" Obviously a tip off to Newt using them to hide in later, but one that I didn't think was necessary. This section also shows the people that go to check on the message they got from the company. The experienced viewer knows that this is the message Burke sent them, and I think it works better when the first time you hear anything about a message is when Ripley confronts Burke about it late in the film. It's a shock to hear it then, but if you'd only seen the DVD version, it wouldn't be surprising at all. Maybe that it was Burke who sent the message, but that's just half a surprise. The people that go look are Newt's family, her and her little brother and her mom and dad. Mom and dad go into some crashed space ship while Newt and brother wait in their quasi-futuristic Range Rover, and we get to hear Newt's legendarily-piercing scream for the first time when the parents stagger back to the car, daddy with a face hugger on him while mommy calls for help. My impression is that they drove for days to get to the crash site. So what good is calling for help going to do? Maybe the colony has a flyer to come and pick them up in a hurry, but the whole point with face huggers is that they implant the Alien and then fall off, leaving the host not much the worse for wear. So by the time any rescue arrived it would have died and detached, and he'd think he was fine. The other problem with this is that if they are so far from the colony, how do more eggs get over? I guess in theory the face hugger that got Newt's dad was a queen implant, and she founded the whole nest by herself, but that seems unlikely. I assumed it was just a normal alien, since they outnumber the queens about 1000 to 1, and after all, the one they got in Alien was a normal one from one of those ship face huggers. My vision was that the colonists found the ship and brought back a bunch of eggs, or it wasn't so far away that once one Alien was hatched and found a food source (humans) it traveled back to the ship and brought over more face hugger eggs, including the one with the queen in it. The other problem is that if the ship is so far away, it would probably be out of range of the thermonuclear explosion that destroys the colony in the end, so would still be waiting there for someone else to encounter. Anyway, that's just one example, of the largest bit they added on the DVD. There is also a hearing at the beginning where the company people all think Ripley's story is bullshit. I thought it was better with them just referring to it later on, as they do in the theatrical version. They also act like since there is a colony on the planet, her story of a ship full of eggs can't be true, since the colonists would have found it. As if the people on the planet have explored every square foot of the place. That ship could be on the earth and never have been found yet, if it were really deep in some forest or under a sand dune in a trackless desert. This is one thing that pops up in virtually every sci fi movie, and that I always think is dumb. As you've probably noticed, planets are rather large. Yet if there's a movie and some ship lands, you can be sure it will end up, totally at random, within spitting distance of the one thing on the entire planet they came to find. I just threw a ball bearing at you. It went into outer space and came down within 100 miles of you, where it landed quietly and vanished into some grass, or perhaps carpet, or maybe dirt. Go look for it. If you find it in five minutes in virtually the first place you look, you too can write SciFi scripts for Hollywood. One thing added piece I did approve of was added near the end. It's a short extra to a scene, where they've just landed on the platform, and Ripley is going off to try and find Newt. She stops to talk to Hicks for a moment, says, "Hicks." and he says, "Kyle." She looks at him, and says, "Ellen." He says, "Don't be gone long." and her lip does this gorgeous quivering movement as the emotion hits her. Great bit of character development and acting on both their parts. Pity they cut it. One of the best things about Aliens was the dialogue. It's not some Tarentino style screen play where long scenes exist only for the characters to practice their witty repartee. But it does have a lot of very memorable lines. Quotable stuff, even aside from the contest. Here are a few I typed from memory earlier, while the movie was playing. If you've seen the movie (a lot, like me) these will be instantly-familiar. If not they won't do that much for you, since you don't know the context or tone of voice they are delivered in. Wait, if you haven't seen the movie, what the hell are you doing here? Go watch it. I forbid you to read another word of my blog until you have seen Aliens at least once. There are a lot of other great lines, but these are ones you don't have to know the movie by heart to appreciate. In theory, anyway. These are roughly in chronological order.
Reading those now makes me want to watch it again, actually. The greatest tragedy of Aliens was what came after.
Then came Alien3.
After the brilliant ending of Aliens, with the best three characters still around (Hicks, Ripley, Newt) and Bishop becoming more interesting, Alien3 begins shortly afterwards, with some face huggers running around their ship, destroying things. How they got there isn't explained; apparently the queen dropped them off, but being as she was only in the hangar shortly while Ripley was off getting into the construction suit, and Newt and Bishop were both there watching her, how did she find time to drop eggs? And drop them where Ripley and the others didn't see them afterwards? And where they weren't sucked out the airlock? Anyway, overlooking that, the first thing Alien3 does is kill off Newt and Hicks, actually killing them in the damn opening credits! I was pissed right from the start. Then Ripley lands on some barren boring prison planet with a bunch of boring prisoners, most of them mental. The only one who is at all interesting in conversation is the warden, since he's insane. There is a doctor who is sort of interesting, mostly since he's not just a nutty kook in ill-fitting clothing, like all of the other prisoners. The warden is of course killed off almost immediately, and the doctor never does anything interesting or unpredictable other than talk with good elocution. There's only one Alien, and it's sort of cool that it's from a dog, therefore sleeker and faster, but at the same time that sucks, since it's not a semi-human menacing creature. It's like a cyber-wolf, faster and nastier, but with no cunning or guile to speak of. It just runs around and kills people, and not very efficiently at that. The only scene that I remember finding at all clever in Alien3 was when it drops into the hospital and leans up to Ripley, then leaves her. It was awesome to see them so close, her horrified face. Nice acting there. Other than that, the movie was a mess. The company becomes totally evil and corrupt and crazy, rather then just having one madly greedy employee (Burke). The guy who invented the androids and made them look like himself shows up, for no particular reason. Tons of soldiers appear, no one has any sense about the dangers of Aliens other than Ripley and the convicts, the ending is predictable and stupid. The whole point in Alien and Aliens was that they were people against monsters, with a grand finale/conclusion battle one on one. Even that Alien3 can't get right, unless you count Ripley against her small intestine. Anyway, to recap Alien3. Characters: Boring, best ones killed before the movie starts. Think how much better the movie would have been with the injured Hicks and Ripley working together, or her trying to protect Newt while in this weird prison, and with the Alien running around. Plot: 90% recycled from Alien, full of stupid stuff and implausible events. Alien: One, looks like a dog, doesn't do anything clever other than not sit still to be engulfed in slow-moving molten metal. Whoever wrote that movie should be kicked out of the screen writers guild, IMHO. The director was David Fincher, fresh from making a bunch of music videos, making his first real film. He was good at lighting and art direction but unsurprisingly, had no clue about working with actual actors or a plot. He improved greatly, making Se7en and Fight Club among others, but ruined Aliens3. You'll note that I saw it once in the theaters, opening day, and never since. I just remember it well since it was such a great disappointment.
Alien: Resurrection was a wreck also. Extremely implausible opening, far too much of boring sub characters and not enough of Ripley or Aliens, the stupidest soldiers in the history of film (gee, let's search the pirates by looking at them, rather than oh say, checking up their sleeves), Winona Rider looking impossibly out of her depth, and an ending so comically stupid as to bring loud laughter to the theatre I saw it in. I won't go into any more detail than this, since I hardly remember it, even though I saw it a lot more recently than Alien3. It was probably a worse movie, but at least it had some action, and after Alien3 being so dumb, expectations were a lot lower for the 4th film.
The worst of the four movies, with really nothing to recommend it. Ripley looks old and weird, the pirate ship people are uniformly boring, Winona is profoundly miscast and irrelevant, the bad guys are clichιs, and everything that happens with the aliens is utterly predictable. It's even visually unappealing, with ugly people and a dark, ugly ship that nevertheless fails to induce any of the claustrophobia of Alien, or even of the lesser imitation that was Alien 3. There's not even any good action, and what there is makes no sense with Ripley magically unaffected by acid splatters, super fast and strong when the script requires her to be, not hunted by aliens when the script requires it, and somehow able to get pregnant and give birth to an alien, or else able to impregnate an alien queen by her mere presence; the movie never makes it clear, and in either case the gestation of about 30 seconds is utterly absurd. We're not even going into the painfully awful baby alien thing, which would certainly win the award for single worst model in the entire Aliens series, even though it did have a pretty cool death sequence.
Also at the library I checked out the Alien Quadrilogy on DVD. They only had disks 7 and 8 in the package, but since I wondered if Alien 4 was really as bad as I remembered, I checked it out anyway. Hey, it was free. And I'm happy to report that yes, yes it was just as bad as I remembered. In fact it might have been worse, since even with fast forward on the DVD, I was bored by the best 20 minutes of the film. On top of the completely implausible plot and characters that I discuss on the current review page, I really noticed how awful the directing and editing was. For one thing, every death (or apparent death) of a main character takes place in a completely clichιd, slow motion shot, with wailing opera music cutting into the default faux-military thumping. While sitting through about the 5th of these, when Winona Ryder's character falls (slowly, oh so slowly) towards the convenient flooded level below the pointless ladder climbing area that was filled with alien eggs until every single one of them was destroyed by two grenades, I called forth memories of the masterpiece that was Aliens 2, and imagined what it would have been like if every death there was treated in the same fashion. Hicks dragged through the floor in slow motion with emotional opera vocals in the background? Slow motion lamenting as the woman dropship pilot was smeared into goo by the alien? Slow motion sobbing as Vasquez and the Lieutenant waited for the grenade to blow and the aliens closed in on them? A long, lingering pull back as Burke whirls around and sees the alien waiting for him in the elevator? Seriously, wouldn't that ruin the movie? And yet virtually every death in Aliens 4 is done in that fashion, even when it's the death of a stupid character none of us give a single shit about. It's possible to wring more emotion from a scene than the audience is prepared to give, but not when it's done in such a ham-handed fashion, and why bother trying in an action movie anyway? The pain of death in such movies is usually conveyed by how casually people die, and how meaningless their lives become in a blink of bad luck. Overdoing it and rubbing our faces in it works in sob story films and doomed romances, but in an action movie it's just annoying. Alien 4 was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who has gone on to direct international hit Amelie and very well reviewed A Very Long Engagement. So it's not that he's some Uwe Boll-esque hack, he's got talent as a director... he's just not cut out for action movies, and while he did the best he could with Alien 4, trying to infuse human elements into the humans and even the aliens, he had no idea how to go about that process, and made the worst film of the series in the process.
Future Projects? The Alien franchise seems destined for failure from now on. Ripley being in any more of them seems unlikely, given that they couldn't come up with a tolerable plot for 3, and for 4 they had to clone her and have her be part alien herself, and set it 200 years later. What's next, Ripley's spirit reincarnated into an Alien-fighting robot? That would be Hamlet compared to their actual plans, I.E. Alien vs. Predator, the movie. Really. I think they need to jettison Ripley, and get someone with some damn talent and ideas to come up with a totally new setting and story. There are 500 Star Trek TV shows and movies and novels, set in very different times, with different characters and enemies, etc. Yet no one can come up with one decent movie involving the Aliens? The whole world and look is pretty well worked out in advance, the grungy sci fi future, the corrupt corporation, the disbelief followed by acceptance and a struggle for survival, etc. Make up a crew of interesting characters (not quite as screwy and unbelievable as the ones in Alien 4), have them encounter an Alien; chaos ensues. I mean how hard is that? Or be more clever and have opposing forces, a future space war, with Aliens appearing in the middle of it. Or being used by one side as a weapon, and then running amok. Anything, it seems like it would be so easy to come up with the ideas. Studios keep churning out sci fi garbage like Pitch Black and Ghosts of Mars and Pluto Nash; why are they wasting time with that junk when a potential blockbuster series of Aliens films is waiting? Bah.
Alien vs. Predator? The concept of an Aliens vs. Predator movie seemed absurd to me; a sort of overheated comic book/video game dream. Of course since those have proven to be among the easiest and most reliable sources of movie inspiration over the last few years, that made AvP inevitable. I saw it, of course, despite my better judgment. It wasn't any good, but at least it was better than Alien 3 and 4, and on par with Predator 2. Click her to read it. |
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