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

I bet a lot of fucked up parents brought their kids to both films. Don't be that parent, Alex!
― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, August 20, 2004 6:48 AM (4 years ago)

Hah, my mother took me to see "Alien" in the movie theater when I was 8 years old. My first R movie. Loved it then, and still do. Sure, it was scary, but I knew it was make-believe. Being scared by choice when you can't really get hurt = fun.

my dad took me to alien 3 when i was 9, and nothing came of it.

...or did it

Airlock scene at the climax is still a towering stack of crap, though.

My new favorite part of this movie is when Burke is like "Hold on hold on, you're talking about nuking a very expensive installation here!" and Ripley goes "They can BILL me!" Somehow sums up the attitude of the whole thing perfectly. Much prefer pissed-off, working-class human Ripley to creepy, detached pseudo-alien Ripley of the latter two films.

What about the officious, middle-class Ripley of the first film?

Like.

These are all on sale at my local used book/DVD place. Despite them all being run on TV continually, I'm tempted to shell out and watch them again properly without commercial breaks/"formatted for your TV screen"/etc. etc.

"I'm tempted to shell out and watch them again properly without commercial breaks/"formatted for your TV screen"

I've been enjoying re-watching all of my favorite films widescreen with a projector. It's insane when you think that you've only seen 2/3 of most of your favorite movies.

If you can find the Alien Quadrilogy box set cheap it's worth investing, it has lots of goodness including alternative
cuts of the movies, including the original cut of Alien3.

I quite like Alien 3, does anyone else?

It's flawed but I like it a lot!

god the premise of this thread is rongness at its rongest

One of the rejected scripts for Alien 3 sounds very cool:

The story by Vincent Ward[8] and the screenplay with co-writer John Fasano had Ripley's escape pod crash landing on a monastery-like satellite, which had parts of its interior, both wooden and archaic in design. The Alien³ special features disc set, Alien Quadrilogy[9] explains how Ward came about creating the story for this partially wooden satellite also as a place of refuge for Luddite-like monks. The story begins with a monk who sees a "star in the East” (Ripley's escape pod)[10] and at first believes this to be a good sign. Upon arrival of Ripley, and with increasing suggestions of the Alien presence, the monk inhabitants believe it to be some sort of religious trial for their misdemeanors, punishable by the creature that haunts them. By having a woman in their monastery, they wonder if their trial is partially caused by sexual temptation, as Ripley is the only woman to be amongst an all male community in ten years. To avoid this and (hopefully) the much grimmer reality of what she has brought with her, the Monks of the "wooden satellite" lock Ripley into a dungeon-like sewer and ignore her advice on the true nature of the beast.[11] The monks believe that the Alien is in fact the Devil[12]. Primarily though, this story was about Ripley's own soul searching complicated by the seeding of the Alien within her and further hampered her largely solo attempts to defeat it. The Alien Quadrilogy DVD set features scenes and illustrations that show this ‘Wooden Planet’. Aspects of the monastery and monks of these drafts were later utilised in the final production of the film by having the male inmates participating in an apocalyptic religion that forbid sexual relations. Primarily it was the plot of Alien 3 that was borrowed from this story but little of this world remained in the film. Despite his credit [13], Ward noted that the things he liked best about the story and those that he believed would have made it work were not used. The screenplay featured scenes set in different locations on the one-mile wide wooden planetoid, ranging from wheat fields, through a grisly but darkly comic scene in the monks’ communal toilets, to furnaces and a glass works (also used in the finished film). Empire Magazine described Ward’s ‘Wooden Planet’ concept as ‘undeniably attractive – it would have been visually arresting and at the very least, could have made for some astonishing action sequences. In the same article, Norman Reynolds - Production Designer originally hired by Ward, remembers an early design idea for “a wooden library shaft. You looked at the books on this wooden platform that went up and down”. ‘Imagine the kind of vertical jeopardy sequence that could have been staged here – the Alien clambering up these impossibly high bookshelves as desperate monks work the platform’[14]. Sigourney Weaver described Ward’s overall concept as “very original and arresting.”[15]

Search out the Lebbeus Woods sketches for the monk habitations.

It's flawed but I like it a lot!

― fel (latebloomer), Sunday, November 15, 2009 10:05 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ditto!

The wooden planet idea was ludicrous and was never going to work.

http://talentedapps.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/kijinnmaru-inconceivable.jpg

i don't know why i love this so much:

cliches? the end where the mother alien *gasp* isn't dead but is holding onto the ship zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....
― dog latin (dog latin), Friday, 20 August 2004 08:46 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah what a boring scene
― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 20 August 2004 08:48 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wooden planet could have been cool though - certainly something more distinctive than the flames-and-steam-factory planet we actually got.

yer man ebert's review gets mentioned a bunch upthread from years back. he's talking about here = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMtv1WfgJFA

slocki is such a fuckin' hero in this thread

http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/arvo/Legodreams/Alien/alien_01.jpg

slocki is such a fuckin' hero in this every ILX film thread

i wonder if they had a wooden spacecraft, that 'wooden' go !

alien3 improves as it ages and slopes out from under the towering shadow of Aliens, imho.

lol @ the alien resurrection defenders itt

Alien Resurrection suffers from being not quite distinctive and necessary enough to justify being made, but not nearly faceless and boring enough to be the kind of dull, bean-counting franchise junk that AvP was. Basically all credit to Jeunet and the cast - the story is just not there and neither are the scares.

AvP2 totally redeems the franchise, tho.

resurrection was admittedly on to an interesting idea but it got buried in actual boring action movie cliches and some of the worst dialogue i've ever heard.

not to mention the turd

http://photos.bravenet.com/272/478/925/3/5CBF206132.jpg

Can't remember the Geiger quote but he says something like "they made [the alien] shit, literally into a piece of shit", lol

lol @

Alien 3 i sthe best film Fincher will ever direct and I suspect, if ever we see the 40 or so minutes cut, the best of the lot.
-- i, grey, Friday, April 13, 2007 7:31 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Link

A++ contrarianism, would be shocked to the core again

― That one guy that hit it and quit it, Monday, July 16, 2007 3:16 PM

(Just for the record, though, I would never turn off Alien Resurrection if I came across it on TV. The over-the-top acting and saturated colors and the underwater scene collectively kind of make it work for me.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcLTaMpRl2o

Surely it's some dude from Goldie Lookin Chain behind that? If not, he sounds exactly like him. Whatever, good stuff and it makes me want to watch Aliens right now, rather than be in work.

Some nice lines in there.

Gotta give them an A for effort on the kind of dorky project I would talk about but never actually do. I also like how thoroughly it covers all the minor twists and suspense-jacking moments, and then Alien 3 is done in like fifteen seconds.

Watched this again last night and it was as wonderful as ever. One of my top 5 movies of all time.

Bay twelve - please!

lol @ the thread premise

that kenan-alex debate is one for the ages

(kenan otm btw)

Roffle.

There's something endearing about that level of SF nerdiness in a director, that he's constructed such a detailed backstory for everything under the sun.

You can't go from Aliens to thinking about buying some packaged cookies, than back to Aliens.

kenan otm seven years ago. in a ghost story control over mood and pace is U&K.

I just watched Alien again last night. As fantastic as the sequel is I just don't see how you can improve on Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton futzing around with the ship like a couple of shade-tree mechanics trying to bash an old Ford into shape.

Also pretty much everything that happens in Aliens is just a slight re-do of what happened in Alien. Newt = the cat; "you bitch" = "you bitch"; etc

Speaking of Jonesy, that cat is a DAMN GOOD ACTOR.

the cat from alien vs. the dog from the thing

The cat makes an appearance in the 8-bit video game of Alien too, you have to bag it before you escape.

you have to WHAT

oh

i feel like aliens is very different in story and tone from alien.

ya i mean it's almost a cliche that they're two totally different kinds of movies