"Aliens" : Some nice effects, but actually kind've a crap film.

I would say Dark Star is good working class sci-fi. Plus it's great.

I should specify that I'm talking about space opera, or thereabouts, I guess. The deliberate juxtaposition of the highest and most optimistic dreams of post-war spaceflight contrasted with the far more-realistic earthbound workaday concerns of actual people doing actual unglamorous schlub work in those environments of hardshelled tubs floating about in low-grav.

In film, this never would have been possible to portray were it not for the changes in the Hollywood studio system of the late 60s/early 70s.

This kinda stuff has been in fiction since before the war, but I don't think it ever elevated to multimillion dollar 35mm until like 35-40 years ago. Flicks like 2001 made spaceflight far more realistic, stuff like Silent Running and Dark Star brought it to the enlisted level, if you will.

yeah and red dwarf and mst3k too but now that everything in sci fi is super gritty and unglamorous i wouldn't mind seeing a new look

i would rather see john carter on mars than another gritty 00s sci fi movie

i would rather see a thoughtful depiction of actual working lives in a visionary far-future context than either "grit" or idealized fantasy

like "wall-e"

lol, yeah, sure

Pluto Nash

"moon"

weird to use minority report as an example of a shiny future as one thing that movie really got right was interleaving the futuristic buildings/tech with older houses, neighbourhoods etc, it def felt way more lived in than most scifi these days

"Moon" was dead-on; we are shown the day-to-day dreariness of a workaday stiff doing wage drudgery.

I separate this from, say, Sunshine, which was a scientific crew

there were tonal problems with the future in minority report -- the whole thing would have been much better as a backdrop to back to the future 2 where the incessant product placement and concept car futurism would have worked for rather than against the movie.

serenity is working class sci fi but i did not like that film at all; haven't seen the TV series.

moon is awesome and a perfect example of this.

serenity is dire

moon was tedious and predictable, occasionally beautiful

district 9 showed the weariness of a workaday stiff

war of the worlds had a deadbeat dad

the road dude was just a doctor

late great you can show yerself to the door at any time

Huh, when did Tombot leave, I didn't know he was still around in 2009.

tombot is still around now isn't he?

Well, holy fuck.

moon wasnt that great imho

On film 4 right now. I guess it's the director's cut, there's stuff I've never seen before - Newt's family discovering the derelict!

Might switch over to hot tub time machine in half an hour though.

Gorman sticking a cigar in his mouth the moment he wakes up might be the best shot in this.

I mean Apone. Sorry Apone.

http://i.imgur.com/0Mh6G.jpg

:D

wow.

kind of suverts the film's politics of motherhood though, don't it?

return of the repressed IIRC.

one of the great things about this film is the palpable sense of actual dread at the fate that will befall the characters if they don't escape, and how cameron keeps you with them 100% of the time. barely any wide cutaways or swooping cameras, just claustrophobic terror. even in most horror films the actual fate of everyone isn't something to get worked up over in a queasy manner but even after characters get shuffled offscreen in this one we're still given reminders of the unfathomable tortures they're going through and you're like 'you guys holy shit get the hell out of there you guys'

i feel like that is a pretty rare tone to set for a film, even horror flicks. 'no country for old men' and 'silence of the lambs' had some of the same unsettling grim atmosphere but esp in the case of the latter it never feels so helpless. love the lack of a slow turnaround, the marines go from cocky kill mode to shitting themselves for the rest of the film in two minutes flat.

^^^ i dig all this - maybe accounts for why I've had more bad dreams about this movie than any other probably - the dread is thick even when the pulse-pounding stuff is going on, which is sort of the exact head-space that nightmares hit.

I dunno. The dread seemed more unpredictable and unsettling in the first one, which had the extra fun suggestions of ugh sexual violations.

love the lack of a slow turnaround, the marines go from cocky kill mode to shitting themselves for the rest of the film in two minutes flat.

p sure i've said this somewhere else but i really like this movie's depiction of Total System Failure -- the way you're introduced to these very prepared and well-armed marines (in contrast to the hapless truckers of the first one) and then a single weakness, the deactivation of the weapons in the reactor room, like a hairline crack, spiders outward so rapidly and totally shatters the upper hand they've got. this is also (some of) why i like jurassic park and the decent parts of 28 weeks later.

the dread might be less predictable in the first one but its predictability in this one is part of what makes it so dreadful. the nightmare just goes on and on and on and they're in constant terrifying danger for like two straight hours. like the tagline says, it's a war movie where the first one was a horror movie.

Jurassic Park is an interesting example - pretty sure it was the explicit theme of the book, as in Crichton had just discovered chaos stuff and was really interested in the idea of the minor thing that snowballs in lightning speed to become the total catastrophe. Thus the "you can't play God!" stuff was more "it's just not conceivable to control nature because there are too many variables you will overlook and SOMETHING will go off the rails." Neither the book nor the movie is half as bleak as Aliens though, in the sense of "Jesus, these people are just fucked."

Love the sense the movie gives of temperature/humidity too. The whole "it's a dry heat!" gag - you're aware of the setting throughout as being close, bad air, just muggy and sweaty and icky which also feels very much like a nightmare....

Aliens: Colonial Marines, which is designed to be a direct sequel for this, gets released next week.

It's done by the Borderlands guys.

xp yeah, it's the crichton half of the movie. leavened (+ improved) by the spielberg half, which is all "they do move in herds" and sam neill splayed in joy across a triceratops and laura dern not noticing the brontosaurus because the ferns are mindblowing enough. that's the half that weighs more, the awe-of-discovery half; it's like one of the james mason jules verne movies. the tone even when the raptors are barking is basically joy. aliens meanwhile is like the pacific theatre. good date movie though; you hold on to each other the whole time.

Spielburg does give the movie some scare though - the big T-Rex scene and the raptors-in-the-kitchen bit have more to do with Jaws than they do with Crichton I think. Or there's some overlap there. But yeah - Aliens is a meat-grinder. My new lady acquaintance hasn't seen any of the series and is interested in trying them out; I'm sure she'd be into it but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to go through them again. Something exhausting about the prospect, much as I do love the series. Maybe it's all the fault of Prometheus...

er...Spielberg. Clearly I was thinking of Quest For Glory.

oh yeah the raptors are def jaws descendants -- even the way everybody talks about them for two hours but you don't see them. but even that strain of the movie gets resolved by the t-rex taking them out while we cheer and a huge WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH banner flutters down from the rafters.

aliens is one of the most exhausting movies ever made i think. i like the ebert review, which is 3.5 stars out of 4 ("because it does the job it says it will do") but not exactly a rave:

I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it's like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.

I don't know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure "Aliens" is what we mean by entertainment.

so yeah, absolutely something exhausting about the prospect.

If you think the film is full of dread, you should have tried the Amstrad CPC 464 computer game version

haha that is a great review

I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it's like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.

I don't know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure "Aliens" is what we mean by entertainment.

this passage from the Ebert review almost perfectly describes my feelings about the two Dark Knight films. I don't think Aliens achieves that same queasy intensity, but then, I didn't see it in theaters at the original release; dated effects+home viewing bring goofiness to the forefront while softening some of the dread.

Well, first of all, "Aliens" has some prolonged quiet moments where they're just waiting around. To die, maybe, which is more dread, but at least they give you a break. But second, the action at the end of "Aliens" is a huge release. Even the fight scenes in Batman are full of portent. "Aliens" may be the rare exception where wall to wall machine gun fire is satisfying in and of itself.

ya that's true--my thinking w/r/t the parallax in Ebert's review is that maybe "wall to wall machine gun fire" reads as more 'dreadful' and less 'satisfying' in 1986 than it does in 20xx.

Isn't the auto machine guns only in the Directors cut? If you mean the firefights in the plant or towards the end, I remember them being deeply steeped in "Ofuckofuckofuck"

There's definitely a sense of release when they finally get to open up the guns against the aliens at the end, but they're so clearly outnumbered and doomed that the dread doesn't dissipate one bit. Plus: red light! Stressful noise! Burke is locking the door behind him! Etc.

http://i.imgur.com/C7VqGiJ.gif

omg