Apparently yesterday was "Alien Day" and I missed it. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. I've watched it at least 100 times over the years. With Covenant being released soon, this might be a good time to discuss the original and where the franchise has been and where it's headed. Maybe posit some story alternatives or alternative media stuff. Maybe a good time to rank the movies of the franchise and to play the Alien Drinking Game. In my version, you put on the DVD commentary track and take a pull every time SRS says the word "biomechanoid" or "biomechanical."
I have just bought the Alien collection which has all four of the original films on Blu-Ray. They have the director's cut and they are far more interesting. I just watched Alien 3 the other week and what a mess of a movie. It is surprising because David Fischer's ability to take complicated plots and make a coherent movie seems to be his specialties, but I have seen several videos where the studio interfered so much, that he basically gave up on the film. It doesn't help that they used a lot of CGI on the Xenomorph and it was not nearly advanced enough to do that in the early 90s. I swear you can actually see the outline of the alien where they spliced it into the film in some scenes.
Alien is an obvious all-time classic, as is Aliens. The rest of the series, not so much unfortunately.
Alien is just a superbly crafted film. A simple story that fits together almost perfectly, but it has layers of subtext and food for thought. All the elements come together to make a great movie. Maybe my favorite thing about it is just how "alien" the xenomorph is. It's incredibly rare and difficult to come up with a plausible species that isn't clearly analogous to a species on Earth- aliens are just humans with bumpy foreheads, reptilian, insectoids, etc. The alien is something that's almost incomprehensible throughout the film, and that adds a great deal to the atmosphere.
Aliens is the quintessential "space marine" movie, and I'm constantly looking for something in the Aliens vein to watch or play. Unfortunately there's not much out there that can match it in terms of pure entertainment. It isn't quite as well put together as Alien, but it is more exciting. My one problem with Aliens (and it's not a small problem) is that the alien is turned into just another hive species. Maybe it was inevitable that they couldn't keep up a truly alien creature, but I still hate to see xenomorphs be turned into such ordinary (albeit still cool) creature.
Alien is always a special movie for me. Unfortunately my first viewing was on Network television, so I didn't get the full horror of the movie. But its influence on sci fi is undeniable. For the next ten years there were several Exploitation films that were good in their own right, but most were horrible. The best thing about the first two movies were that there was more tension created by not seeing the Xenomorphs until late into the movie. Something they seemed to forget in the final two installments.
I did also love Aliens. I tend to watch them together like one long movie. I hated Alien 3 but will admit it's an interesting looking movie. I won't even go into what's wrong with Four. I'm saddened to say that I probably won't see Covenant in theaters after the profound disappointment of Prometheus.
As for making the creatures another "bug" I felt kinda the same way initially. But the alien Queen is so awesome, and the final fight with her so epic, that I think the canon must keep the idea. I still find the "egg morphing" idea utterly horrific. If you didn't already know, that's where Dallas and Brett were being slowly transformed into facehugger eggs in a deleted scene from the first movie. At the very least Brett was, Dallas could have been cocooned as a potential host for the emerging hugger. I think the two ideas are not completely incompatible. I think maybe the creature seen in the first movie was making a new queen with the egg morphing process. That's my headcanon anyway.
Yeah, that scene is chilling. It is in the director's cut, so it is very effective. I don't think they kept it in because they wanted just the creature and streamline the film (films should be only 90 minutes back in the day). I even saw a theory that Ripley was impregnated with the queen during Alien and the stasis messed with the Tumor (face huggers don't technically lay eggs, they lay a tumor that absorbs dna and material from the host, thus making it harder to cut it out of the host since it is literally part of the host). There seems to be several parts of Aliens where Ripley was mysteriously avoided by the Xenomorphs. Just a theory anyway, don't know if I believe it.
This first two movies are great. Another entry into the franchise worth mentioning is the video game Alien vs Predator 2 by Monolith. Not sure if there is any legal way to get a hold of a copy outside of Ebay but if you can its well worth checking out. It has an interconnected story split over three good campaigns and is just a great fps all around, one of the few I have played through multiple times.
In my own headcanon, the Alien franchise basically consists of the first two movies and maybe the first couple of Predator movies, without any actual AvP movies. But within the past couple of years, Alien Isolation has made its way into my headcanon too.
CareerKnight wrote:This first two movies are great. Another entry into the franchise worth mentioning is the video game Alien vs Predator 2 by Monolith. Not sure if there is any legal way to get a hold of a copy outside of Ebay but if you can its well worth checking out. It has an interconnected story split over three good campaigns and is just a great fps all around, one of the few I have played through multiple times.
One of the best parts of the game is when you get to play a chestburster and do exactly what it says on the tin.
Being a facehugger is also interesting as it's effectively a stealth section.
Aliens was the first one I saw, so as well as being an excellent film, it benefits from 'first crush' effect - even after maturing and coming to appreciate the merits of other films I initially wasn't quite so into, there's still that adolescent me that thought Aliens was the sexiest thing ever (that's maybe not quite as much a joke as it should be, I kind of get what Giger was on about - but you see Aliens in the cinema when you're ten, it makes a big impression) (no, I don't know what my parents were thinking; I guess they just saw a trailer and thought 'oh, space soldiers, that'll be like Star Wars probably'). Preferred version, extended cut - I taped it when it aired on tv and watched the hell out of it. Since I've already admitted I never shut up about it, I'll again mention the Colonial Marines Technical Manual. The movie magazine that came out at the same time as the film was also excellent, with a lot of quality behind the scenes stuff and a very thorough story form of the film, which also had a big impression, especially being that this was the days before the web and that kind of deep background being readily available anywhere.
I liked Alien, but when I was young and watching the theatrical cut on my teensy little CRT tv, it was just 'pretty good' - the combination of maturing, the quadrilogy director's cut, and a nice big screen, really raised Alien in my mind to near-equal with its sequel. If the sequence of Ripley finding Dallas and Brett didn't contradict later canon (and maybe was somehow smoothed a little more into the overall pacing of escaping the ship, so it wasn't so much a stop-start of 'run like hell' 'stare at alien stuff like you've got all day' 'run like hell again') I'd have a really tough time making a call between the two films.
I didn't think much of Alien3 on release, and I still have a massive issue with how it shoves the victory of Aliens - Ripley rebuilding a 'family' in Newt and Hicks to regain the chance at a happy life that encountering the original alien stole from her - under a bus just to manoeuvre Ripley into the position the film wants her to be in for the sake of its own plot. That to me is the definition of 'bad sequel' - if you can't think of a way to honour what's already there on at least a basic level, don't stick your oar in. That said, despite its technical issues (the sound, again) the assembly cut is a huge improvement, and eventually I have come to find a lot of merit in Alien 3 as a standalone film, with a notably terrific cast - honestly, I think if Ripley hadn't been in it, just the prisoners and staff (it's flimsy, but off the top of my head, say instead of the Sulaco escape pod we see a different but recognisably Space Jockey ship drift into Fiorina's orbit and come down off the shore, some wreckage washes up, ox gets hugged, and off we go), that's a solid movie. I kind of waver on whether to include 3 in my personal canon now - in a horrible kind of way, Newt's autopsy actually lessened the degree to which her writing out annoyed me on a story level, since instead of just brushing the Aliens cast aside without a backward glance, now at least it's really thrown right in your face how important Newt was, just from seeing on Ripley's face how awful what's happening is. That's a decision I haven't entirely made yet.
Resurrection is a film I don't hate - there's a lot in it that's good, and I enjoy watching it overall. Sigourney Weaver really makes the most of the chance to be off-the-wall weird in her delivery, the Betty crew's antics are pretty amusing, Dominique Pinon is great, Ron Perlman's always entertaining, Hillard's bottom is very nice and (switching gears completely) the whole sequence of her death, with her being completely out of her element in water, is really effective on a gut level, the alien learning to use the gas button was cute, and you've got Brad Dourif putting in his usual display of Brad Douriffing which is never unwelcome. Occupying the middle ground of not-awful-not-good I feel like a lot of what I appreciate in Resurrection works in spite of it being an Alien sequel rather than because of it - if it hadn't had the thematic baggage of the earlier movies to try to live up to, and had just been able to chart it own path as an oddball sci-fi scary action thing, that would have made a better film. And on the wholly negative side, sweeping aside the genuinely effective presence of the Company in the franchise in favour of those Keystone Kops military guys was a terrible idea, the bit of them climbing up the ladder was self-sabotaging due to poor pacing and layout, even if we accept the reasonable assumption that Elgyn was ignorant of the level of threat he was up against and still thought he was badass enough to survive whatever the emergency threw at him, his death scene is filmed and paced in a way that just makes him seem like the dumbest slasher film victim ever, I get what they were going for with the civilian guy and Leland Orser almost makes it work, but not enough, and who the fuck thought the Newborn was anything but an embarrassment to both species? I can watch Resurrection, but put it in a ring with a real Alien film and I'll happily cheer as it's KOed in the first round.
AvP... again, I kind of like it - it is what it is, and I think for what they set out to do, they did an okay job. Everything's toned down to abide by the rating, there's no getting around that, but I feel like within those constraints they still basically 'got' both species - the Predators behave like I think Predators should, the aliens behave like I think aliens should (primarily, that in keeping with the thematic futility of the Company's later efforts to do the same, they can't be controlled or 'used' - even though you have to ignore that that had happened for a long time with earlier generations of Predators, and the queen just happened to bust out this time). Lance Henriksen is never unwelcome (and I liked how his death scene played out), the Antarctica setting was neat, and I liked Alexa as our hero. It was a dumb cartoony version of aliens and Predators, but it was them, for me.
Requiem, ugh - even the few things that should have been fun, like seeing a proper mature badass Predator cut loose, I just can't enjoy because the whole thing was so contrived and joyless. I didn't particularly care about any of the human characters and especially not all the tedious 'character development' scenes I had to sit through to get to the actual plot, the setting was as generic as it could possibly have been, and the Predalien deserved to be taken out back and shot.
The best thing I can say about Prometheus is that I quite liked the Alien: Engineers script that's floating around the internet. I was sick of Shaw's crap from practically the moment she appeared on screen, and she actually weakened David for me, who'd otherwise be a character I could say I thought was decent (as it is, I tolerate him for the sake of Michael Fassbender doing great work with what he's got). If the ship had squished Shaw instead, as well as being mildly amused, I'd be somewhat interested in following Vickers; as it is, I can only hope Shaw doesn't have much impact on Covenant's story.
