Alien 'Quadrilogy'

Prometheus also had a dope trailer, and well...

I haven't seen one of these movies since that one. Won't get fooled again!

you need to rethink your inner modality

The Prometheus trailer flew too close to the S(dammit, that was Icarus, wasn't it)

time to give this guy a go

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2f/11/6d/2f116d78389da705a9460250575fa501.jpg

sadly laurent de brunhoff died in march

this one might be good, Alvarez does atmosphere and suspense well, he doesn't just give things the right look.

it does seem plotwise like Don't Breathe, but the blind guy is aliens.

Can definitely see the Evil Dead remake lineage - make it sort of like the original but wall to wall hi-def CGI and dumber

mind boggling that Zack Snyder is the only director to successfully pull off a modern remake of a VHS classic horror

uh what about alexandre aja's the hills have eyes

i know i'm more forgiving of '00s remake horror than most, like i love platinum dunes and marcus nispel soooo much, but i thought the evil dead remake offered a lot in its portrait of addiction and intervention and also in the massive amounts of blood rain

Alien: Romulus panel…everyone in Hall H, all 6500 of them, just received facehugger masks. pic.twitter.com/GjJ3UdltXQ

— Borys Kit (@Borys_Kit) July 27, 2024

Poor Ian Holm, holy shit

he got over it and played Bilbo Baggins later on

guess I'll catch Romulus later

colour me intrigued?

dead actor resurrection should be banned

oh ew i didn't know that's what the revive was about, thought maybe Mares was just seeing og Alien for first time!

There's an article in the NY Times about the lead actress from Romulus (who I did not know also played Priscilla in that movie) and in one of the photo captions (and later in the text) they describe her as the "final girl" — hello! Spoiler alert, maybe?

Thanks for sharing

I feel like my thoughts about this are too spolierish for now, but damn.

Is there any good reason to watch alien 3 or resurrection? Going into this on the weekend and debating whether I try squeeze the two I missed (intentionally) in beforehand

never finished Resurrection. was told the Assembly cut of 3 is good. I watched it and was bored out of my fucking mind.

Alien 3 rules. Second best of the original 4.

I like Alien 3 a lot, its got some great sequences and its fun to watch all those character actors go off. The big climactic alien-trapping chase sequence is super exciting, worth it for that alone imho. Assembly Cut is def for completists only.

Alien 3 is a fascinating failure. Resurrection is boilerplate Joss Wheedon bullshit given a classier look than it deserves by the director.

All right, just got out of seeing the new one and I’m just copy/pasting my FB post on it here because it doesn’t deserve a separate writeup:

Uhhhhhhhh boy. So pretty much I’m a fan of the first two movies and give _Prometheus_ a heavily conditional “at least you tried” award so a film theoretically drawing on those three should be okay enough for me. But no. First half is best; once a certain hidden extended cameo part (which I was accidentally tipped off to earlier) kicks in then things start moving from “Yup it’s an _Alien_ movie” to “This is a lot of _Alien_ movies in a pureé” and it gets messier and often stupider and more obvious from there. (At this point I have long since given up trying to make any sense of xenomorph life cycles.) Right from the opening credits it’s all “Boy you’re not hiding anything here” though at least O’Bannon and Shusett will always get a nod (plus a prominent H.R. nod at the end but honestly they should have done the same for Jerry Goldsmith, Michael Seymour, Roger Christian etc given the end result). Much like Michael Fassbender, David Jonsson easily walks off with this by providing his own distinct spin on the Inevitable Android Role, and there are a couple of good set pieces and one amusingly creepy body horror element at the end. But by that time so many beats long since familiar and self-conscious will have ground you into a fine powder. (At least there wasn’t a Jonesy knockoff. And was Alvarez simultaneously trying to pay tribute to _Blade Runner_ in the opening segment?)

Hmmm okay, I’ll give Alien 3 a go, at least to see the “alien drooling near woman’s face as she cries” shot in its context

Alien 3 is a fascinating failure. Resurrection is boilerplate Joss Wheedon bullshit given a classier look than it deserves by the director.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Thursday, August 15, 2024 6:49 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think many of the ideas in Resurrection are good and the actors do a good job with it, but it's best evaluated while considering that it's got Whedon on the script and Jeunet in the director's seat, so you have Whedon humor (goofy) and French humor (goofy, but in a different way) at odds with each other. I think Whedon scripts, disregarding the fact that guy should not be allowed near a script or direction again, can be decent if tempered by decent rewrites and direction. Like some sort of Aaron Sorkin where he's snorting pure nerdisms ("If I repeat a line enough, my fans will love it and repeat it, no matter how clunky it is!") instead of cocaine.

Jeunet understood none of these nerdisms, which is an asset. But you can spot a half dozen of them in the finished production, but half of them are delivered with the wrong, non-nerd inflection, so the characters sound like they're from an alien (heh) culture.

There are some bits that feel very Jeunet in casting and wouldn't be out of place in a Moebius comic.

At this point the only thing that makes me happy about a new Alien movie is that one of our greatest directors gets a check every time they make one. Walter Hill's been a producer on all of them, including the Alien vs Predator movies.

Just watched the original the other night with the 13-year-old, he loved it. Warned him about the chestburster scene without spoiling it, just in case, but he was transfixed. The part that tripped him out the most was the scene with Dallas in the vent. The money bit comes at you several beats before you think it might and works all the better for it.

Wow, quite the bold start to Alien 3

Resurrection just tries *so* *hard* to be quirky and edgy and falls on its face repeatedly. Plus the hybrid elements are initially disgusting (good) and end up unintentionally funny in an unbearably cringe way. Very little to redeem it apart from the swimming bit.

Just watched the original the other night with the 13-year-old, he loved it. Warned him about the chestburster scene without spoiling it, just in case, but he was transfixed. The part that tripped him out the most was the scene with Dallas in the vent. The money bit comes at you several beats before you think it might and works all the better for it.

― omar little, Thursday, August 15, 2024 10:45 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i saw that at the exact same age and will completely agree that the Dallas scene was what got me more. Even worse, at the time I was living in the basement of our house so all I ever heard were the noises of the heating and ac vents going and I was essentially terrified of going to sleep for hours on end.

I enjoyed Romulus, a solid B.

Too indebted to familiar beats and too many set pieces in the half hour, and really no fuckin reason to drag the likeness of Ian Holm into this.

Still, I had fun so that works

the other problem is the big reveal. not only was it easy to predict what it would be, but the payoff of introducing a new hybrid creature when you're creating an in-betweenquel is that because this creature very clearly doesn't exist in the rest of the series, you know it's going to be destroyed along with the compound, so it's really just an amusement. but...like I said, the atmosphere I found fun, I enjoyed Cailee Spaeny and David Jonnson, and the pregnant character is a great screamer.

he was on the radio yesterday saying that he had to please both the people who knew the originals and the younger people that didn't. and that he'd also used a couple of giger's ideas that were removed from the original (possibly self censorship by giger)

Need Alien 3 update from H.P. pleeeese

Lol! It sucked!

haha

Nahhhh look..... the early 90s cgi.... I guess you can forgive things for being of the time? The religious/patriachy/capitalist ideas kinda great in theory but not spelled out enough/given enough depth? Like they really could have gone somewhere focussing more on resurrection (the burning of the body's at the start, greater beings coming back after death) but... they didn't. The chase scene kinda great in a looney tunes whackey way. The Ridley crying next to smelling alien shot is so utterly classic. Killing of the Aliens characters not done seriously enough. One or two mourning scenes, and then we move onto aliens 3! Lame. I did really like the prison colony setting and the power plays inside of it. Movie did well to make me feel bad for a warden; poor 85 getting dunked on the whole film. But honestly that cgi..... just thr worst.

All that ^^ is small beans. The most damning indictment I can give it is that it just simply was not scary, primarily because it was not serious. First two set such high bars, and this one did not come close to meeting them

Off to Romulus now! Convinced my fraidy-cat wife to see her first "horror" film at the cinemas. Thoughts and prayers it's not her last

Also unperson wtf was that opinion above? Justify yourself. Calling aliens 3 better than alien/aliens is a baffling take

Oddly, a lot of what looks like CGI with the alien in 3 is actually a puppet, not CGI at all. only shadows in a couple of shots were beefed up digitally to add mass.

Thoughts

1. Bloody hell, can every institution on planet earth stop trying to get me to care about AI in 2024? Movie is dud for this point alone

2. Oh so that's why they called it romulus

3. bold to leave the singular new idea in this film to thr last 15 minutes. And that's being generous.... new alien reveal in the fakeout ending already done with aliens

This is getting like the Terminator, endless middling or bad relaunches

wait lol, the alien franchise motored past terminator (also bad and boring now) in that regard a v long time ago

alien3 is good tho, ppl who dislike it don't understand cinema
— jean-luc godard

Also unperson wtf was that opinion above? Justify yourself. Calling aliens 3 better than alien/aliens is a baffling take

― H.P, Friday, August 16, 2024 5:00 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'd still put Alien 3 as third-best Alien movie, but I will admit that until Zodiac came out probably the spiciest take in my arsenal was that A3 was the best Fincher movie.

if you've watched any behind the scenes doc about alien 3 you will be astonished at how coherent and atmospheric the final film is

my dream alien 3 would be a combination theatrical/assembly cut... iirc in the theatrical the alien bursts out of a dog, which is much cooler than what happens in the assembly cut, and also the ending of the theatrical is more emotionally complete. but everything else about the assembly is superior

Also unperson wtf was that opinion above? Justify yourself. Calling aliens 3 better than alien/aliens is a baffling take

I didn't say it was better than Alien. I said it was the second-best of the original four. I am a longtime and confirmed Aliens hater. Taking one of the darkest, scariest SF/horror movies ever and turning out a sequel that's a pure none-more-80s action movie gets you a spot on my fuck-off list forever. (Cameron has two good movies to his name: The Terminator and The Abyss.)

Alien 3, due to the setting, has the most uniformly drab costuming and character appearances but leans into it by having the most interesting looking dudes fill out the cast. I'd imagine people with face blindness might have had issues, but the fact that nearly every character has a distinct facial expression and voice is a feat in itself