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

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

^^^

haha

Watched it again last night. Still better than Alien.

IDK, I guess you could argue its more fun, but the mood, production design, and general aesthetics of Alien always made me rank it as the superior film.

Yep the production design is better in the first, but Aliens is just way more entertaining, and the characters and plotting are stronger. Depends what you look for in a film I suppose.

Rewatched Alien fairly recently as well, and the scene I found most compelling was Ash's reveal/destruction.

imho the characters are wayyyy stronger in the first but agreed that they scratch different itches and I am very very happy to spend time with the bolder and cartoonier characters in the second.

i think that's legit the scariest scene in the film tbh - giger's glistening biosextech aesthetic is a bit overfamiliar now but ash's breakdown and assault on ripley is genuinely unsettling

xp to chap obv

I don't really compare the two. Alien is my favorite horror movie and Aliens is one of my favorite action/war movies.

(and of course ash's assault foregrounds the queasy sexual undertones of the movie in an alarmingly literal fountain of robojizz)

Now we just need a Helen Hunt action figure.

greg evigan or gtfo imo

Don't forget Ash literally tries to ram a girlie magazine down Ripley's throat!

well, yeah

the utter lack of subtlety is part of what makes it so unsettling, i think

I remember as a teenager I had a poster on my wall which featured the speech that Ash gives when he's just a jizz covered head on the table. Love that scene.

I don't really compare the two. Alien is my favorite horror movie and Aliens is one of my favorite action/war movies.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, July 3, 2017 9:15 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The differentiation between Alien and Aliens is usually rightly chalked up to the fact they're different subgenres within action science fiction. The other main factor that changes is the role of the Corporation as an entity. In Alien you think there's a person who is acting without regard for human life, that they have a direct representative on the ship that's to blame, but it's revealed they're still completely anonymous and offscreen. Ash is mechanical and has no emotional stake in his actions. The line between the characters we know and the shadowy entity is kept intact. Maybe it's malevolent, maybe it's just a computer on the other end doing the risk/reward calculation of losing a crew in order to capture a new lifeform.

The further into the franchise you get, the more the role of the other end is expanded. That's probably the main failure of Alien 3, all things considered: the role is dialed back, and when the human face is revealed, it's in the very last act and not that threatening.

Alien: Resurrection turns the formula on its end, and every corporate or military character has some ridiculous set of craven motivations. It's malevolence as farce, played against a still-threatening xenomorph. So there are three parallel tracks that play out: alien versus protagonists (Ripley and Call, with the mercenaries being relatively disposable), alien versus corp/military which is farcical, and protagonists versus corp/military which becomes more mechanical in the end when you realize that the real triumph of their research wasn't the weaponized alien, but Ripley as post-human who walks off at the end

good post

yeah that's a cool reading!

fwiw this isn't my full or really a well thought-out take, I just love spitballing on ilx. pretty obvious when you see how badly I need to copy edit. need a blog, I guess.

do it!

actually watching Aliens again now, and I'm remembering how Cameron does his ensemble films well, but in a way that always kind of irritates me. it's by-the-numbers, but in a way where the stock characters are just a little too punchy

"The further into the franchise you get, the more the role of the other end is expanded"

What I like about Burke as the face of corporate evil is that even if he's kind of an 80s yuppie archetype he feels utterly contemporary. The news has never been more full of Burkes.

for sure, half of the time Rippey says something and he's like "oh shit you're right!"
dude has no due diligence skills, he's just such a puppet

watching Aliens now and he's literally explaining to Ripley about how they need to get a specimen through quarantine because of the profit potential
and justifying his bad call for letting the colonists just investigate the planet after he'd already talked to Ripley

the best part is Bishop becomes the good guy because he has one directive that has higher priority than following the company's orders: protecting human life. Burke's only rebuttal is "yeah, but..."

"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid"

Great performance from Hendriksen.

it's such a simple reversal of the first movie that the android turns out to be an invaluable ally but it's so effective. what a great character, and what a fantastic performance

i wish we could somehow see the version of the terminator that cameron originally envisaged, with henriksen as the everyman-infiltrator terminator

i love that guy's face, it's one of cinema's great ugly/handsome visages. you know he was illiterate until he was 30? he needs to write an autobiography, i'd be first in line for a copy

oh wait, he has written a memoir! brb gonna get a copy - what an oversight on my part

£87 for a copy on amazon, fuck

Henriksen did a "Random Roles" interview on The AV Club last week and apparently once got out of a speeding ticket when the trooper walked up to his car, looked through the window and said "Bishop!"

it's such a simple reversal of the first movie that the android turns out to be an invaluable ally but it's so effective. what a great character, and what a fantastic performance

It is. One of the many ways the further sequels bungle things is with the androids. Like, what do they have to offer, besides sometimes going nuts? Especially in the most recent movies, when the humans just stupidly land on planets and take off their helmets anyway. It's similar to the Terminator twist: first Arnie is a bad guy, then suddenly he's a good guy, which is a cool twist. But in all the other movies the Terminator is just another killer robot from the future.

i'd argue that fassbot and winona ryder as android were the stronger parts of their respective movies

i should probably rewatch resurrection before saying that but oh well

They were, without a doubt, but that's partly because unlike Alien and Aliens the humans are without a doubt the worst, most cartoonishly poorly written and conceived characters in those films.

it's been a long time since i've seen resurrection but i remember thinking winona was awful in it

maybe i should rescreen

i should probably rewatch resurrection

maybe i should rescreen

guys please don't do this to yourselves

funnily enough the making-of doc on the resurrection blu-ray is the best of the ones on the (ahem) 'quadrilogy' box-set iirc, maybe i should just watch that again

the underwater sequence in resurrection is pretty good, maybe i'll just watch it on youtube

Resurrection is so tonally different from the others that people hate it, and it has some narrative problems, but I enjoy it. You lose the somber tone of the previous films and get two competing styles: a goofy French science fiction bit that, more than anything, reminds me of some of the near-slapstick of The Fifth Element (which came out the same year, so they're drawing from some common base and not each other) and the Ripley/Call end-run of idiots trying to manipulate and monetize the alien creatures with genetic experimentation. The mother/daughter theme returns and it's somehow put into the same characters as the human/android theme (wtf), and there's the almost meta-commentary angle of whether we can really have Ripley without the alien, and vice versa. Because Ripley and the alien are the same.

thread title should read "Alien" (singular) or "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

mh otm about resurrection

thread title should read 'kind of' tbrr