Spoil "Alien Resurrection" for me - unboxed spoilers

Cafe Society
1

Now, I dearly loved the first two Alien movies, rather liked the third one, but had been told that the fourth one bites. So when it was on last week, I just intermittently watched it, and as a result only have a sketchy idea of what went on.

I get the main plot, not that it’s much different from the previous movies. But why did Ripley have acid blood? And where was this spaceship they were on? Why was there a semi-human alien springing from the queen’s abdomen?

By the way - grotty ending. I got a bit queasy. This is one reason why I don’t think I’ll watch it again, so I don’t mind the spoilers.

2

Alien Resurrection sucked balls the size of Mount Everest, so you’re not missing much.

Ripley: She was cloned from old DNA they acquired, probably a sample from the prison colony from Alien3. But there was a screwup, and the xenomorph DNA got mixed with her blood (uh… what?) and she acquired some alien traits (like the acid for blood) and the xenos got some human traits, which resulted in the most ridiculous movie monster in the universe.

There’s one scene in the movie that shows previous Ripley clones, some that were more “alien” than human. One of them was a deformed, freakish mass of overgrown flesh, a disgusting amalgamation of human and xeno, and in a fit of acting to show that she IS better than the piece of shit movie that she was in, Ripley kills her previous clones. If it had been done well, it might’ve been a powerful scene. Instead, it just made me want to hit my head against the wall.

ANYWAY… fast forward through inanity, boredom, and the only cool scene in the movie (the underwater sequence), we ultimately find out that the local queen on the ship had developed a human reproductive system (we learn this due to some crazy guy hanging on the wall in the queen’s chamber… no, I’m not kidding). The alien/human hybrid created from this looks like a xeno with a human skull plastered on the front of its face - in other words, it looks fucking stupid.

Anyway, the thing thinks that Ripley is its mother (again, we know this 'cuz the crazy guy hanging on the wall said so… no, I’m not kidding). So it follows mommy back to the ship, they shoot it out through a tiny hole in the wall, and then that’s that.

But the movie sucked. Go watch the first three (hey, the third wasn’t NEARLY as bad as the fourth) and you’ll essentially see Alien Resurrection, as it simply was just a copy and paste of scenes from the trilogy with other actors heads super-imposed.

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And as for the ship, it was supposed to be Yet Another Human Research Ship For The Purpose Of Trying To Use The Xenomorphs As A Biological Weapon, The Exact Same Plot As The First Three Movies (YAHRSFTPOTTUTXAABW,TESPATFTM). For some reason, this super-spiffy YAHRSFTPOTTUTXAABW,TESPATFTM was dilapidated, rusted, falling apart, dirty, and many kilometers long with only four people onboard the entire thing. Talk about yer waste of space.

Did I mention that Alien Resurrection blew chunks? 'Cuz it did. BIG chunks. Chunks the size of bowling balls. It blew them. It blew those chunks a long, long way. Chunks. Blew.

4

I still say it’s not too late to salvage the franchise. Just take a page from Dallas and say the last two movies were Ripley’s cryo-stasis dreams. Then, film William Gibson’s script for the third movie.

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Errr - aside from SPOOFE’s comments, the reason the hybrid xeno popped out of the queen was due to the GE experiments. They wanted to shortcut the whole xenomorph breeding cycle (facehugger, host, larve, xeno) by giving the Queen a human reproductive system. They did give a nice speech explaining all of this when Ripley meets the Queen with the scientist coccooned.

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Excellent plan.

7

I liked the 3rd film but hated the fourth. That said, I’d still love to see a film adaptation of Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens: Earth War. THAT would kick ass.

8

Soo…the movie sucked because there is a guy hanging on a wall, because you think the Newborn looks stupid, and because, horror of horrors, they embellished upon the concept of cloning.

Yeah. Go get 'em, champ.

9

The fourth film was very lame…but it was Oscar material compared to the third.

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Ripley clone number two: “Kkkkiiiiiiilllll mmmmmeeeee!”
Viewer: “Mmmmeeee first!”

I laughed when I saw this scene. It was just sooooo bad, cliched and contrived.

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You’re not actually going to try and defend it, are you?

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Each movie was a different type of movie built around the Aliens.
The first was a haunted house movie. The second was a shoot’em-up. The third was a religious allegory. The problem with the fourth was that it didn’t know what it wanted to be. The one semi-daring idea they did have was that the main characters (the smugglers) were portrayed as amoral scumbags. In the sci-fi franchise world, it isn’t often that the makers have the courage to have “heroes” who aren’t very heroic. In any case, the fourth movie wasn’t the worst sci-fi flick I’ve ever seen. That would have been “Metal Storm 3D: The Destruction of Jared Syn.” It is to my eternal shame that I actually went to a theater and paid money to see that one.

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Nahhhh – the first one was a ripoff of Jermoe Bixby’s It! The Terror from Betond Space with a bigger budget and a better monster suit, with a bit of Mario Bava’s Planet of Vampires thrown in for style.

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I prefer to think of it as the equivalent of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes movie, only done right.

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Okay, personally, I think the third one was great. The more I watch it, the better it gets. And I’ve read a bunch of the scripts that weren’t used, and if Gibson’s is the one that focused on Hicks, and you thought that was better than what was put out there, then you really need to re-read that script, because it sucked 1,000,000 times worse than the monk script, which was essentially what they made, only worse. At least that one had some interesting ideas…the Gibson one was utter, utter shit. but we’ll get into that later.

Alien: Ressurrection was also shit, and really did suck, but it is kinda fun at some points. I liked the crew of the Betty, especially Ron Pearlman’s character. It did have a good look to it at points, and the escape scene was awesome, but the whole hybrid thing blew. The theory was that the blood sample they had was from the prison planet from three, and that Riply’s being host to the thing tainted her blood enough that there was some incombant alien DNA in it (kinda like how you can tell a woman’s pregnant by a blood test, I guess; the embryo takes on some genetic traits of the host, and seemingly changes the host a bit, maybe to help others of the species know a host is a host and not dinner). Anyway, there were problems separating the two, hence Ripleys 1-7, Ripley 8’s little quirks (blood, finger claws, animal instincts, strength, reflexes, etc), and a few other character traits in the aliens themselves which were never really touched on aside from the “human reproductive system” piece of shit.

I know a lot of people that like this movie because it’s a return to the whole “dark mother” psychology of the first two. I liked three because it got more to the horror of the creature itself. As much as I love Aliens, it gets boring the more I watch it, whereas the first and third ones just get better with each viewing. I prefer the horror over the action…means the characters have to be more inventive.

My biggest little pet peeve with Ressurrection is that it takes place on a military space station, and at the first sign that the twelve little critters on board get loose, all the heavily armed military personel evacuate. Wha???

I did like the bit where the infected guy beat the crap out of evil heartless scientist guy, and held him up just right so that when the chest burster blew out of his chest, it went straight threw the other guy’s head. That was a rather cool sequence.

But yeah, an adaptation of Aliens: Bood One, Two and Earth Wars would have been much cooler. I just wish they’d finally put Ripley to rest and do something more original with the storyline.

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That last statement should read “Aliens: BOOK One….”

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all they needed to do for the hybrid xeno (which, as mentioned before is the shittiest looking thing ever) was check the failed ripley clones and use the one with the xeno head and more or less human body (no4?).
wont Giger have anything to do with them anymore? i know it says based on his original design in the credits. how hard is it to make a decent looking hybrid creature…?

i know this has been mentioned before in other Alien threads, but surely the Earth would have, in the far future, some kind of orbital defences. even if the Auriga is one of their own, youre telling me nobody would realize a 4km ship was about to crash the earth, causing untold ecological damage? (i think its Africa it crashes into if i remember right) but 2 minutes later, no harm done as ripley and winona stare wistfully in to the sunset above the clouds, leaving it open ended for another lameoid sequel.

its bollocks, but worth seeing the once to pick it apart.

Ron Perlman rules though. the underwater/ladder sequence is the films one redeeming feature.

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What I also disliked was the way the hijackers were able to wander through security with what, four guns?, and the way they had magical abilities compared to the soldiers (shooting a pistol bullet straight up so it ricochets back down through a helmet. Gah.
It was too cartoony for me to treat it as horror, everyone was evil for the sake of it, and so on.

19

Eh, the gun in the thermos, and the piecemeal gun in the wheelchair I can understand, but it was pretty ludicrous the way the guy with the guns under his long coat didn’t get a good padding. I always thought they were just waived threw for the most part because the big man in charge knew who they were and that was pretty much all the authorization they needed.

I do like how they can bounce bullets around so well, but Perlman’s character couldn’t shoot straight when it came time to save his buddy’s life.

You gotta admit, though, the lesbian tension was rather enjoyable.

20

“They killed me.” is a pretty funny line, in the context, but the fact that the spacecraft didn’t even have adequete hallway lighting annoyed me, as implausibly low lighting always has.

The physics of the mpovie didn’t make any sense, let alone the biology. Even if a human had a baseball-sized vacuum stuck to his back, I doubt it would suck him inside out, let alone the presumably tougher alien hybrid. and how does going faster mean you get to Earth faster? Wouldn’t the more likely result be missing the orbital rendez-vous entirely?

Sigourney Weaver did establish herself as the cold, calculating action star, though. Had she played the vampire queen instead of Aaliyah… well… I’m sure something positive might have resulted.