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

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

hahahahaha

aces

love it so much

Amazing.

great

Meh

some nice effects but kind of a crap gif

Every time it reappears this thread title shits me

http://38.media.tumblr.com/17747f28c917e6668884864cae2b2e26/tumblr_nd26s6bzwn1toxnu4o1_400.gif

Brilliant!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4QY5Z8LBEo

loooool

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/50/b9/39/50b939a13f86fa5043e3f2a8d23083de.jpg

And then an alien pops out of the cake and

Awwwww, tho. :(

cool that all three of those blokes were in Terminator as well

Trying to gauge your level of surprise at that or not

Actors Lance Henriksen (Prince of the City), Michael Biehn (Tombstone), and Bill Paxton (Traveler) help schoolteacher Carrie Henn celebrate her birthday.

xp not surprised, more a general aww feeling

Traveller. Ha!

Hadn't thought of that movie in years.

http://i.imgur.com/DTw8EMF.jpg

Pleased to discover Newt did not become a child star tragedy (Aliens is her only film credit), and is now a 4th grade teacher.

She mostly teaches math. Mostly.

:D

ok how cool would it be to see ALIENS in high school or whatever and then learning that Newt was your fourth-grade teacher? that is amazing.

also, from Wired:

“I wasn’t nervous about being on set, because I knew everybody, and they were very friendly,” Henn said during a recent stop at the WIRED Cafe during Comic-Con International, where the film is celebrating its 30th anniversary. “The aliens were all my friends, wearing suits. I was actually most nervous about going to the cafeteria for lunch, because I had to go in-character as Newt, and I thought everybody would be staring at me. I didn’t have any concept that everybody else was going to be dressed up, too. My tutor actually gave me a big pair of sunglasses to wear when I went in. But it turned out not to be such a big thing.”

Henn had gotten the part after a meeting with Weaver, who’d flown on the Concorde to London to test out their on-screen chemistry. “I was excited, because I was like, “She was in Ghostbusters! How cool is this?”, Henn remembered. (...) According to Henn, who still keeps in touch with Weaver, the two actress’ bond was evident from the get-go. “Immediately, we hit it off,” she said. “She took me under her wings when we were filming, because I was so inexperienced. I can’t describe my relationship with her, because she’s more than just a friend—what you see on screen is genuinely how we feel about each other.”

Even though Henn was only 10 when Aliens was released, she has a vivid recall of her days on the set. Her favorite scene to shoot? The one in which Newt, stuck chest-high in water, is snatched up by a towering alien—a terrifying sequence, and one that gave most other 10-year-olds nightmares for years to come. But for Henn, it was mostly a chance to goof around. “The first assistant director had actually had someone stay there overnight, to make sure the water stayed warm,” she said. “But it was actually too warm for me, so I would sit up on bars on the side, and the alien and I would stay up there, kicking our feet in the water.”

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

So genius.

Do we have a thread for actors with a one-and-done film career? Meaning they had their big/notable role and then that was it -- they didn't die, it didn't turn tragic, they were just all 'that's good' and went on and enjoyed life?

this one? Actors who only appeared in one movie

Actors Lance Henriksen (Prince of the City), Michael Biehn (Tombstone), and Bill Paxton (Traveler) help schoolteacher Carrie Henn celebrate her birthday.

― nomar, Tuesday, February 28, 2017 6:51 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's apparently Carrie's stunt-double, Louise Head.

Officially an action figure. Never been prouder.#aliens #blessthevest pic.twitter.com/xRDRGYAU1D

— Paul Reiser (@PaulReiser) June 29, 2017

I've always been curious, how did Reiser ever land that role?

they needed a smarmy shitweasel for the part and he was perfect for it

^^^