Aliens, by a margin wider than an eight-lane freeway.
Agreed. I also cringed at the insanely cheeseball way the military was portrayed…compared to the Marines in Aliens. I thought the corporate angle was forced as well. Granted that theme in Aliens wasn’t too subtle either, but it didn’t assume the audience was stupid and required it crammed down their throats.
I like them all, but Aliens is hands down my favorite. I’ve seen if far more than the others. Interesting thought on the prison planet meets alien hybrid script for A3, it would explain a lot.
The AvP’s are ok, but they’re in a different universe, mindless popcorn diversion.
Maybe a couple of face-huggers were clinging to their mother when she sneaked into the dropship, then scuttled away before she was thrown out of the airlock?
Aliens may be my favourite film ever* and it doesn’t even have Barbara Harris in it.
Alien is very good but I’ve seen it enough times now, Aliens I never get tired of.
Resurrection has some great bits - swimming aliens woo hoo! And quite a lot of crap but I still find it re-watchable. It is cartoon-ey in places, I can see how it could irritate someone expecting more in the tone of the other flicks.
3 just pisses me off for the reasons everyone has posted.
AVP was idiotic, and dull.
Saw AVP requiem for the first time just yesterday. Well… I say saw but mostly what I saw was blackness, 90% of the time I couldn’t tell which type of alien was on screen. I won’t be watching that crap again. Just what was supposed to have happened by the end?
Spoiler for anyone who gives a toss…
They nuked the whole site (not from orbit) but the implication - judging but the behaviour of the soldiers is that there are still aliens about. WTF?
- can’t say for sure I haven’t finished my life yet.
Aliens is the only one I really like. as others have remarked, Cameron is superb at getting a good SF film made, with full knowledge of the literature yet appeal to mass audiences. And he manages to avoid obvious stupidities and cliches.
I really didn’t like the original Alien. It was a film that went through too many hands, and too many ideas had been tried and rejected, only they hadn’t complete excised their ghosts. Too many of the characters act in a stupid fashion, and too much of it makes no logical sense. Dan O’Bannon may have publicly stated that he was remaking the “beachball” segment of dark star as a serious horror film, but it really looks like a ripoff of Jermoe Bixby’s 1950s classic It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but with a much better monster suit. I much prefer It! to Alien. I own a DVD copy of the former, but not the latter.
Alien[sup]3[/sup] just seemed to discard the good points of the previous movie. it never appealed to me at all.
Alien Resurrection has some good scenes (the CGI swimming aliens are gorgeous – they look as if they’re made for swimming), but is one helluva confused flick. At times it wants to be a comedy, at times horror. I found the hybrid alien thing at the end ridiculous.
The Alien vs. Predator films seem to me just pointless exercises in gross-out depictions. Time has no meaning, with face-huggers implanting Alien babies only hours before adults emerge. They want to have both gross ends of the life cycle depicted without any of the annoying delay, so it’s pretty clear their goal is to squick out the audience. I can do without either of them.
Aliens is the best movie IMHO. It’s not really a close one.
But I think Alien 3 would be better received if it had been a side story in the Alien universe rather than a sequel (i.e., no Ripley.) There are a number of fine acting performances in this movie, arguably more so than in any other installment. I really like Charles S. Dutton and Charles Dance.
I really like the setup in Alien Resurrection but things go off the rails when the aliens get loose. Jean-Pierre Jeunet was an insanely wrong choice for an action movie and I think there were major conflicts between him and the producers. Still, I liked Brad Dourif’s scenery chewing mad scientist. Lame that the vacuum of space was the final weapon for the third time in four movies.
Alien was the best, very suspenseful edge of the seat stuff.
No.2 was Aliens, a good action movie but not as impressive as the above.
The others were pretty average except for the one set in a penal colony which was dire.
‘Cept facehuggers come out of eggs, they don’t lay them. And the queen’s egg-layin’ tube thingie with all her (presumably fertilized) eggs was torn out in Aliens.
The series has been characterized by a sloppy attitude toward reproductive details. In the original Alien there was supposed to be a scene where Ripley comes upon Captain Dallas. apparently he hadn’t been killed by the Alien, but was stuck up with webbing/goo a la the victims in Aliens and injected with an alien fetus by the adult, rather than a face-hugger, much like the victims in AVP 2. The footage was even shot, although never put into the final film. Maybe part of the reason was the inconsistency, although it would’ve slowed the film down.
Cameron, as ever the SF fan, tried to bring some consistency to the life cycle, giving us an Alien Queen to lay the eggs and requiring face-huggers for implantation. But subsequent directors chucked all that out of the airlock.
My favorites, in order, are Alien, Alien[sup]3[/sup], Aliens.
Aliens is the best watch. But Alien comes in close second for its strong science fiction theme and for introducing the Aliens and Ripley. Alien 3 is the worst of the franchise, even worse than the second AVP movie, because it’s a dull prison planet story, and of course fucked with fans’ expectations in a bad way. The notion that it is a mashup of someone’s indie script about a prison planet and Aliens feels very, very right. And you gotta wonder if a certain amount of its terribleness was just Wheedon being a snarky bastard. (I notice Wheedon fans have a way of missing out on Aliens3 when they talk about their idol. heh.)
I liked AvP. It was a fine little B movie. Hardly on a level with the first two Alien movies, but holding its own as a scifi/horror B movie. AvP2 was just retarded. Too dark to see anything. Not the sewer of awfulness that is Aliens3, but a total waste of time and effort and money.
Alien: Loved the atmosphere and designs. True the crew did dumb things but, I think the reason they did was out of loyalty and friendship for one another. Note: the Loner who was at odds with everyone on the ship except the damned cat was the only one to survive.
Alien3 (The “director assembly cut”) When I saw the theatrical version I was non plussed. Not because of the Newt/ Hicks thing (later on that) but because it really didn’t seem to say anything new or different. When I got the DVD legacy series I decided to give it another try but chose to watch the director cut. It was actually a much better film. The characters were more fleshed out and some of their strange behaviors suddenly made sense.
The Prison setting was in fact, shoehorned in by the producers. Several times directors and writers wanted to go elsewhere but the producers would say, “Yeah this is good, but what if we set it on a prison ship”
The sets and design on the film was wonderful and Fincher’s direction given the fact he was forced to re write as they were filming was outstanding. I’d say this version is worth another look, despite its flaws I think the reedit done for theatrical release did the real damage to the film. There are some amazing performances in that film. Watch the funeral scene and pay attention to both Weaver and Dutton. The Doctor’s, quiet mercurial mannerisms, make him a very interesting person.
Aliens: I still don’t get the love for this film. If people think cramming a prison movie into a sci fi film is silly why does the Lost patrol in space work for them? The dialogue was ham fisted and the Marines and EEEEvil corporation folk were all one dimensional.
Bishop was an interesting character in only the fact that the actor playing him was able to make him ambiguous enough that you had to wonder when he might side up against everyone.
Newt… she did her part mostly well… mostly. But taking an anti social character like Ripley and forcer her to take a mommy role to maker her more human didn’t work for me. It’s schlocky and weak.
Compare this to the then contemporary film The Road Warrior. Max too was the anti social character beaten and brutalized by the previous film. Yes, there is a child shown to remind him of what he lost (Like Ripley’s daughter) but he was not used as the damsel in distress that is constantly dragging Max into danger like Newt was. Max regained a bit of his humanity when he decided that his death would be more meaningful if it was a sacrifice for others rather than the near meaningless death he just escaped.
Ripley on the other hand gets to be a tough female who is secretly a nurturing mommy type. It never felt right for that character. It seems forced.
Hick’s could have been a more interesting character if he had more trouble adapting to his sudden promotion to leader. Nope he is just a natural leader and tough as nails (He does have a good line of dialog used many times here on the Dope)
The action is frenetic and well shot but in the end it is loud and meaningless. Cameron just tries to up the volume to 11 with each scene piling more on more till not only we get a fight with the Mommy Alien and a big nuclear explosion after the mandatory countdown and last minute rescue but we have to have the false ending and another battle with the Mommy.
It is a fun movie, I won’t argue that. But as far as the franchise goes it isn’t as strong as people place it.
Alien 3 (Theatrical version): A confusing muddle where many prisoners who seem to the the same guy do things for no reason until we have the alien killed with a couple of survivors standing around to witness the inevitable return of the EEEEvil company. At least Ripley finally can hug a child of her own. The film doesn’t add anything new to the series but has a great look and some great performances. But it is a hodgepodge of scenes that make no sense.
I never found the Death of Hicks and Newt a down point in fact I was glad Ripley could cut the baggage. She is a tragic character whose sole purpose is to suffer and survive film after film.
Resurection: Whew! Awful. A pointless remake that stretches the franchise well passed the breaking point and just gets silly. I’m just surprised they didn’t have Ripley, much like the film, actually lay an egg.
I haven’t seen the AVP films so perhaps they may rate higher… (Doubt it though)
That’s just my take.
Not quite. He wasn’t impregnated, he was transmorphing into a new alien egg.
The original lifecycle was egg -> facehugger -> alien ->-> goo-ified prey -> egg.
Hm, I don’t know about that, I think it made her three dimensional, plus the whole maternal slant was the entire theme of the Alien movies. It was all about mother protecting her young and the fight for survival.
Whence comes this information? AFAIK it’s not explained in the movie. And how does someone change into an egg?
If it’s from the novelization, I wouldn’t take it as gospel. With a few rare exception (The Abyss, 2001) the writers of the novelization have nothing to do with the production or its logic, and are trying to work out what’s going on as best they can from the script.
From an interview/documentary I saw some years back. Never read the novelization.
As for your second question…well, that’s probably why it got dumped, isn’t it?
Alien was a slasher movie at its heart. Scary thing jumps out and guts ya.
Aliens was a war movie, more than an action movie. It had many of the classic cliches: avenging fallen buddies, fetishism of weaponry (“We got tactical smart-missiles, phased-plasma pulse-rifles, RPG’s. We got sonic electronic ballbreakers, we got nukes, we got knives…sharp sticks…”), the “officers are unfit, we have to reply on the noncoms” cliche, and so on. But these cliches were handled well and seemed novel in the sci-fi setting.
Alien 3 was secretly a women’s prison movie. I know the penal colony had only men on it, but the emphasis was on Ripley sweating in her dirty T-shirt, always afraid for her physical safety in a brutal environment, straight out of that sleazy subgenre of women behind bars.
I am probably pretty alone in the world in liking Alien3 the best, followed by Alien, Aliens, and Resurrection. (I haven’t seen them past Resurrection).
The part I loved about Alien3 was the horror of having fought against this THING for so long, and of realizing that you were going to transform into it…being trapped by the dog-Alien, preparing yourself to die, to finally get relief from the constant battle, to join at last your children (biological and adopted), but not getting that release because it recognizes itself inside you… that was really horrific to me.
And Alien was just an awesome horror movie.
I didn’t like Aliens, I think, because I’m just meh on Action films. Saying that it was a great Action movie is like saying it’s a great pumpkin pie - awesome for those that like pumpkin pie, but do you have any pecan?
Gotta be Aliens for me.