A bunch of stray thoughts about the Alien movies, because I feel like it:
So, I’ve been showing the Alien movies to my brother. I hadn’t seen most of them in a while (probably 9th or 10th grade), and I’m happy to say the first three hold up very well.
My favorite interpretation (can’t remember where I first heard this, but it’s cool) of the Alien trilogy (we’ll get to that “fourth” film later) imagines the series as a metaphor for terminal illness. Basically, in Alien, you’re diagnosed with cancer. Aliens, you’ve fought it off for a while and you begin to feel confident. Finally, in Alien 3, the cancer suddenly takes a turn for the worse and you’re fucked.
Most people’s big problem with Alien 3 is the fact that they killed off Newt and Hicks in the first ten minutes of the movie. I’ll admit this has always bothered me (simply a waste of a couple cool characters), but it’s the main thing that makes the cancer metaphor work. Just when you think you’ve beaten one form of cancer, it might of spread somewhere else. And just when Ripley thought she had escaped from the queen and saved the lives of her new surrogate daughter and possible future love interest, their ship crashes on a prison planet, killing them both.
The Alien franchise is certainly the bleakest mainstream sci-fi series I can think of. Alien 3 strips Ripley of everything—and she had already lost a lot in the first two films. Her sacrifice at the end of that film is fucking powerful.
I’m pretty tired of defending Alien 3. If you really dismiss that movie just because Newt and Hicks died, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s a ton of great, inventive filmmaking in that film—the opening credits, Newt and Hicks’s memorial, the attempted rape, the first person crawlspace—I could keep going. It still has a lot of my favorite sequences David Fincher has ever done (Alien 3>Panic Room and Ben Button, easily; I probably like it more than Fight Club these days, too). Stop comparing it to Aliens, and I think you’ll be surprised.
Alien Resurrection, on the other hand, is probably the worst movie in any otherwise good franchise (its closest competition is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, but really, both of those movies are lightyears ahead of this one). The first three Alien films tell a complete story of Ripley’s struggles against the aliens and her eventual sacrifice. Even the idea of a Ripley clone is fucking insulting, but Alien Resurrection makes it even worse by shoehorning her into a movie which is closer to a New Horizons Aliens rip-off from 1993 than any actual Alien movie.
Most of you probably know I love Joss Whedon, but his script for this movie is fucking atrocious. In a 2005 interview, he attempted to dodge blame for this steaming pile with this weak-ass spin-
It wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.
Weak, Whedon. Most of Resurrection’s problems can be tied straight back to the ideas present in his original treatment. Though there was no Ripley (a big plus), it was still a bland retread of the first film, much moreso than Alien 3, which often gets pegged with that criticism for some reason. All the lame “futuristic” technology in Resurrection is embarrassing, like the stupid whiskey cube and the imbecilic plot device of having people use their fucking breath for entry to whatever restricted areas there are on the ship.
The script isn’t the only fatal flaw, though. How about the typically shallow and visually hideous direction from French douche Jean-Pierre Jeunet? Or all the stupid “funny” faces the actors are making constantly? Or Winona Ryder’s delivery of the line “—Since you were born without balls!”? Or the cheap-as-fuck opening credits? Or the stupid dude in the wheelchair? Or the embarrassing basketball scene? The list goes on. What a piece of shit.
I’ll get around to rewatching Alien Vs. Predator eventually, probably before Ridley Scott’s Prometheus comes out (trailer looks dope!), but I am not looking forward to it (or its sequel, which I never saw).
The Alien movies are the only series aside from Indiana Jones which I rank in perfect descending order, though the first three are pretty close and the fourth one is pretty far down in the bowels of Hades.
Check out some more organized thoughts from my boy Dabeedo here.
