Alien 3 VS Aliens Resurrection- Your Pick? - Page 2

And that's why they sent a multi-billion dollar colonization project there, right? And that's why they sent in the Marines to re-establish contact, right? Yes, that's a perfectly efficient way to take another shot at it. If they knew what was there, every action they take in Aliens is completely boneheaded, which rather cuts into their sinister rep.

They went to collect an organism they knew nothing about, and then fifty years later a colony is on LV426. Perfectly plausible dude, 50 years is a long time for a company to change, shift leaderships, time for secrets to die.

http://chud.com/forums/showthread.php?t=104723

Try again.

Why, did you get confused in the middle of the post? Sorry, I'll use smaller words next time.

The colony didn't just happen to be there. The Company put it there, at substantial cost. So either the knowledge was forgotten, and they happened to colonize that planet by complete coincidence, which is silly, or they blew all that money just to get a few alien samples, which is silly.

And fifty years isn't that long a time, unless you're a teenager. Corporations don't "forget" things. A corporation is only a person by legal definition, not biology.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_(film)

The Weyland-Yutani Corporation as a whole probably didn't know about the "Aliens" but a select few, a secret interest group within the Corporation knew about them and were manipulating things to get their hands on specimens and study this alien species.

Yeah they blew the money, what they failed to understand was how dangerous the alien creature was, they didn't really believe Ripley, except they thought she was a complete nut case for blowing up a giant ship.

Alien 3 is a flawed-but-good film. Great atmosphere, ballsy for killing off the characters from the second film, and good acting.

Alien Resurrection is just a piece of shit. Even the F/X suck! The aliens look like velociraptors rather than the biomechanical beings from the first 3 films. The newborn creature is a joke. And it's not the Whedon script that was the problem, it's the direction. Jeunet, despite having a unique visual style, was probably not the best person to direct a fast-moving sci-fi/horror/action film. His sense of whimsy overwhelms any menace the film might have had.

I actually got to read the screenplay before the film came out and it was very entertaining and probably would have worked if filmed as it was.

BE: Okay, and I’ve got one final one, and I promise this is it, but my editor’s as big a geek as I am (You wish, Pop Boy – Ed.), and he wanted to know how different was the final version of “Alien Resurrection” when compared to your script? I mean, was it really dramatic...?

JW: Uh...you know, 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.

That's vintage Whedon, though. He actually tried to say that Storm's awful line from X-Men was only awful because it was delivered wrong. Apparently, he's such a delightfully quirky crafter of dialogue that his work can be completely derailed by all these plebes who are so much less delightfully quirky than he is. His excuses drive me nuts, frankly.

Hated them both....Actually walked out of 3 the second Newt and Hicks died....Having said that....as much I as don't like 3....it's 1000 times better than the abortion that is resurrection.

You can read some of his drafts online. They are better than the movie. I'm not sure you can read the original, however. He wrote a lot of versions, I think. I read a follow-up interview where he kind of apologized for speaking out about the movie. Since he had so much critical and commercial success on TV, he expected them to roll out the red carpet for his words. But, in the film world, no one gave a shit about him. I think he's a good writer. If you read the scripts, he is obviously a fan of the other flicks. But, watching the movie, it certainly doesn't come across. And now we got the AvPs, so you'd think that would reflect kindly on Resurrection. But it's just a shitty movie. A B movie, really. So you'd think I'd like it more. Some GREAT actors in there. Given next to nothing to do. Weaver does a good job, though.

Unless the original drafts didn't follow a hybrid Ripley clone, I don't think I'd respect them either. That whole idea was monumentally bad. I understand the decision from a marketing standpoint, but it started the project on a bad footing.

The original drafts are pretty much the same.

Some lines are better than the ones that ended up on the screen (Brad Duriff explaining to Ripley that she's a clone is embarrassingly dumbed down in the shooting script) and there's some more action but the story and characters are almost exactly the same.

And Whedon's original idea for the Newborn was an albino flying vampire alien. Which makes no sense at all.

Thing is, I read the screenplay in 1997, shortly before the film came out (my friend bought a bootleg at a comic convention and let me borrow it), so my positive memory of it is most likely colored by that. I went to see the movie and was massively disappointed, angered even. The tone felt all wrong for an Alien film...it felt like Batman and Robin in its smirky contempt for the audience.

I remember scratching my head, thinking "well it seemed to work on paper, why didn't it work on the big screen?" Maybe that just proves the mind's eye is a better director than any real-life auteur.

But still, I sympathize with those remarks of Whedon's, even though I'm not a fan of his in general (I fucking hate Buffy and I've never seen an episode of Firefly). There were a lot of little cool touches that would've worked fine if they hadn't been either dumbed down or cut out completely. The newborn sequence in the screenplay*, for example, was way creepier than the awkwardly edited sequence in the final film, which plays as almost comical. In science fiction films the look of an effect is important, and I think that the muppet-like design of the newborn completely ruins any menace the scene might have originally had.

So basically that's why to me Alien:Resurrection is easily the worst in the series (unless you count Alien vs Predator, which is sort of a different beast altogether, pardon the pun). Alien 3 might've been a mess, but it was an honest mess. Fincher did the best he probably could have in the almost impossible situation he was put in. Resurrection, on the other hand, just feels lazy.

*I don't recall the draft saying the Newborn could fly, but I agree that as I remember it described it would've been an awkward design (IIRC it had red gills or something plus Siguorney Weaver's face!). Which is something the creature f/x guys at ADI or whatever could've improved on, but they opted for the "Slimy Muppet" approach.

You are correct, sir:

"You're all gonna die. The only question is how you check out. Do you want it on your feet? Or on your fuckin' knees... begging? I ain't much for begging! Nobody ever gave me nothing! So I say *fuck* that thing! Let's fight it!"

Awesome. I really like Alien3, though I can see it has faults that are not entirely fixed by the director's cut, and could never be without an extensive re-shoot and effects budget.

I can't not watch Resurrection when its on TV, but while there are things to like, the tone is all wrong and as soon as Ripley gets sucked through an alien vaginal wall and the cross-breed is birthed (is there a poorer creature design in the history of mainstream cinema? Not for me, there ain't) it goes completely off the skids and is only worth watching for a bit of creative gore.

Finally chewed through this thread, a few thoughts:

-- Saying Alien 3 is the same story as Alien is kind of disingenuous, because Alien is basically the same story as It! Terror from Beyond Space. The idea of a small group trapped in a confined space with some kind of threat running loose wasn't invented in 1979 by Ridley Scott and company. It's in the execution, and I think Alien 3 brings a decidedly different angle to the idea.

-- Re: the colony on LV-426. The Company deliberately diverts the Nostromo to the planet because they know the xenomorphs are there. The Nostromo never returns and Ripley floats in space for 57 years. So the Company sets up a colony there, knowing that the hive is there and hoping the colonists just "stumble" onto the derelict ship. They have plausible deniability, since, as far as they know, no one survived from the Nostromo to spill the beans. And there were undoubtedly Company people in that colony keeping an eye on things -- thus the facehuggers stored in the containers. The alien overrun and the loss of the colony are unforseen circumstances.

But now Ripley turns up alive and well and shouting about this horrible alien she encountered, and now the game is up. So they send her on a rescue mission with the Marines, one which I fully believe they never intended Ripley to return from. Hell, maybe they never intended ANYONE but Burke to come back -- sending in the Marines may have been done to test the aliens in an actual combat situation to determine their actual value as weapons, with the crashed drop ship taking away Burke's ticket out.

-- Alien: Resurrection had some interesting ideas -- Ripley's duality, the inner conflict between her alien and human natures, what it means to be "alien", in both the "from outer space" and the "outsider" sense -- which it decides to ignore to instead act as a dry-run for Firefly. Please, look at Ron Perlman in ths and tell me he's not a rough draft for Jane. Go ahead, I'll wait.

-- I liked Alien 3 from the get-go. I thought it was a film about choices, not only in how Ripley finally chooses to take control of her life back from the aliens, but how the convicts choose to spend their incarceration. Their imprisonment mirrors Ripley's, except instead of being in jail, Ripley is imprisoned by the aliens and the Company and the way they've ruled her life since the Nostromo landed on LV-426. And seeing how the prisoners chose to face their captivity -- by trying to overcome it and become stronger -- Ripley finds a strength to literally free herself. While some find the ending depressing, I find it uplifting. Ripley is finally free.

For me, Alien 3 never happened.

Any movie that has callous disregard for characters like Newt and Hicks and their epic survival from the first sequel has already lost me before the first ten minuts are up.

It's sort of like taking Han Solo after ANH and putting a few rounds through his head in the first reel of ESB, or killing Marion in the new Indy Film before we get a chance to see her again.

That's exactly how I was....Walked out of the theater within the first 10 minutes and it was probably 2 years before I finally watched it.

And for what it's worth....I hardly walk out of a movie....The only other one was Highlander 2.....As soon as Connery showed up and announced that the immortals were aliens.

Once I watched alien 3 I can say that while I still don't like it....It is a good story that is miles above the stupidity of the fourth movie.

I hated Alien 3 when I first saw it for killing off the characters we loved in Aliens. Maybe it was a ballsy thing to do, but it felt like they were pissing all over a more superior film, retroactively making me enjoy Aliens less when I realized what the ultimate fate of our heroes was.

Over the years, however, I managed to compartmentalize the two films. I began to see Alien 3 for what it was, while still enjoying Aliens, treating them as two completely separate films. I began to appreciate the dark moodiness of Alien 3, the powerful bleakness that was not exactly fun to watch but was the mark of a good director, good actors, and - I have to admit it - a good script.

The updated version in the Quadrilogy was the last step in elevating Alien 3 to royalty. It improved the film so much that I now think of the Alien series as three great films and one mediocre one, rather than only two great films.

Resurrection still sucks. It had a lot of potential but none of it was realized. I am a huge Whedon fan but think the script was all wrong, and Jeunet didn't bring much to the table either. The cast was okay but the characters were unsympathetic and uninteresting.

I can't believe that there are still sadsacks out there whining about the killing of Hicks and Newt. They're fictional characters, you fat babies. Get over it. You sound like the browncoats who cried for a week because Serenity killed off whatsisface the pilot.
While this is a workable explanation, it still seems like a ridiculously expensive and unwieldly solution to a fairly simple problem. Diverting another mining ship seems like a much easier way to get their sample than spending billions of dollars on a terraforming/colonization project which, if they get their way, they know will end up abandoned. It's like buying out the entire QFC chain because you want to get some milk. That alien would have to be awfully fucking profitable to justify the expense.

I think it's far more plausible that the Company destroyed all files on the Nostromo, in fear of facing charges for the death of seven people and the destruction of an expensive ship and a huge amount of cargo. A scandal is a scandal, even in the year 2525.

Hell, they could even have done that in order to collect the insurance on the ship and cargo.

I always loved the fact that the two of them didn't make it past the credits. It was like Fincher was saying "Oh, you thought this was going to be a re-hash of Aliens? Too fucking bad."

Well, I think if you really, really dig Aliens, it's a dumb turn of events. It's an easy way out. Instead of a grown-up Newt and a disfigured Hicks, and instead of imagining what that trio would look like years later, those two characters are just dead. So, where Cameron kind of blew-up the Alien universe, this movie shrinks it. Sounds like the writing process on Alien 3 was completely fucked up. I read some article where the shooting script was just a mashed up version of a bunch of earlier scripts (which is what happens all the time), but maybe they just never had a good script. A prison planet. OK. But Fincher & Co pulled a not bad flick out of it, somehow. They still managed to give old Ripley some interesting facets. Plus, it's an overt pro-choice flick, which is interesting. Still haven't seen the version on the Quadrilogy. Anyway, I think they kind of missed the boat on this flick. And then, of course, it led to the worst one.

Plus, if you assume the film is going to end with Ripley dying (which, from what I remember, was a demand from Weaver, who didn't really want to make any more of the films at that point), it makes perfect sense to remove any glimmer of hope or positivity in her life.

So instead he serves up a rehash of ALIEN, only with none of the mystery and nowhere near the amount of characters to give a shit about. Bravo.

That's assuming that whatever film followed Aliens would take place far enough along for Newt to grow up. I don't think that was a given, even without the amount of time that passed between the release of the two films. I don't even think it was a given that Newt and Hicks would appear in the third film anyway -- there was never really a romantic relationship between Hicks and Ripley that would demand he still be around, and really, the Newt/Ripley arc ended the second she called Ripley "Mommy". The lost daughter finds the lost mother. What do you do after that? Show them braiding Newt's hair or talking about boys? The Aliens films, no matter what form they took, were always about metamorphosis in some way, and to keep things unchanged from film to film seems to go against that.

That's if you think Alien 3 has to be about the alien. It's more about Ripley than about a rampaging alien in a space prison.

I always see it as a film about characters with zero depth being picked off here and there until we are ultimately left with a somewhat interesting final 10 minutes of film.

Sure, it's not a given, but it's a more satisfying way to go, I think, then what they came up with. Especially, since those characters were so well-drawn and you gave a shit about them. What we got instead was a "what's the easiest way to pull this off" rather than a rebellious fuck you, as you suggested earlier. To me, the first two flicks are pretty much perfect. Number three is fine, but a film full of ideas could have ended the series on a really high note. Instead, we got a weak sequel shot by a great director. I certainly like watching parts of it, but O' what could have been.

Guess I'm one of those sad sacks.

I cared about Danny Webb enough to do a search on the webb to see if he was the same cock who stole Pee wee's bike on Francis Buxton's dime.

Both films are sub par alien movies
but 3 is way better than 4
i was 11 years old when it came out and i remember liking it a lot. Not LOVING it like Aliens or being completely terrified like Alien, but liking it.

Alien Resurrection loses track after the aliens get loose.
I can watch ron pearlman all day long in that movie, but the rest sucked.
the underwater scene and the death of the csi guy was cool though.

so yeah, alien 3 wins.

I think doing another film with Newt and Hicks would have been a much easier way out than killing them, but, different strokes, I guess.

Explain then.

Having a third Alien film with Newt and Hicks alive just feels like it would have been a by-the-numbers retread. There's too many obvious avenues to go down. You have Hicks as an obvious romantic interest for Ripley. If you move time ahead a few years, you have a rebellious teenage Newt butting heads with Ripley. Or you have Newt taking over the Ripley role, saving Ripley this time out. Plenty of things we've seen before. Now I realize that the basic story of Alien 3 was essentially that of Alien, but as I said before, the execution was different, and for me, a large part of that was the feeling that anyone was fair game I got from Newt and Hicks being killed. It underlines the idea that Ripley's universe isn't one of victory and peace, but of endless, hopeless death and fear, with the seeming respite of Aliens only an illusion torn away by the forces that have controlled her life since the first film. And I think taking Ripley in that fatalistic direction and having her make the choice to die not out of despair but out of finally regaining control of her own existence is a much stronger overall arc for the character than building on the victory of the second film.

I don't see a problem with killing off Hicks and/or Newt at some point in ALIEN 3. It's the way they pulled off that rimjob that bugs me. That movie did not have a plethora of engaging characters to spare.

Dickson and Matchstick win the thread.

I stated this in the other thread, but again, for posterity: What puts most people off Alien 3 tends to be the fact that it's not a horror or action movie in the strictest sense, but a drama. And it's true: it's not a logical step for a series like this, but among the reasons why it works is the fact that it keeps Ripley from becoming the cliche she spawned. Agreed, the prisoners needed more room to really give a shit about them (again, the SE helps), but the one relationship that matters (Ripley and Charles Dance) is all the film needs: one last chance for Ripley to feel like she belongs somewhere, and for that to get snatched away too, and then leaving her with a choice...THE choice, really. In terms of a series about aliens with acid for blood, it's a WTF approach. In terms of cinema, it's a far more interesting approach to make Ripley a martyr instead of a heroine, and the film's all the more special because of it, even in the cobbled together form it's in now.

I'm completely with Dickson here. Killing off Hicks and Newt right off the bat was supposed to upset everybody, precisely because it is so off-handed and random. The script's only shortcoming in that regard is that it underestimated the rampaging fanboyism of the fans of the previous film. Obviously, the deaths had exactly the effect that the film intended. Unfortunately, people decided to be upset at the movie.

Keeping Hicks and Newt around would have been the comfortable move. These movies are not about making you comfortable. That's why they bring in different teams every time. In fact, Hill has said that he actively encourages each new team to forget about the other films, and do their own thing. He doesn't give a shit about continuity. If the series were concerned with the comfortable, familiar approach, Aliens wouldn't have been patterned after Starship Troopers, it would have been another monster-hunting-trapped-people horror film.

Personally, the idea of watching Ripley, Hicks and Newt turn into a family of kickass alien fighters sounds painful. And I have to wonder how much of the venom for their deaths is based on the existence of the Dark Horse comic that the movie thankfully retconned out of existence. I actually like to think that Fincher knew about that series, and killed them just out of spite. I know I'd have been tempted.

Alien 3. No question. Alien: Resurrection is fairly shitty, despite Sigourney Weaver's solid performance and the underwater sequence. The trailer is better than the entire film.

And that automatically makes it good?

Like I stated previously, you guys are confusing vaccuuos Nihilism for it's own sake with something that's dramatic. If they were killed and their deaths actually contributed to the film's plot, people wouldn't have had such a hard time with it. If Newt and Hicks had died on Furiona while fighting the Alien it would have been more effective/believable and heightened the bleakness of the story: especially if Ripley had to watch helplessly while it happened.

But now it's just the filmmaker's trying to do something shocking because they know they have a shitty story they need to disguise. (See Kirk's death in ST:GENERATIONS for a similar example of this). It also calls attention to the plotholes regarding the facehugger, egg and all that.

You guys can throw all the praise at it you want but the fact is it's simply just lazy storytelling. Even David Giler (one of the producers on the flick) admits that in the DVD interview.

BYW, killing off Newt and Hicks wasn't Fincher's idea. It's left over from the earlier draft Vincent Ward wrote about the monks on the wooden planet. They simply slapped in onto the front of ALIEN 3 for shock value and Fincher went along with it because he thought it was "kewl".

No, what puts most people off Alien 3 tends to be the fact that it used lazy storytelling as a device, and unlike it's predecessors, never gave us anything new in regards to story or characters. As far as the Xenomorph itself, the film not only sloppily ignored it's two predecessors, it actually gave us a lesser version of the creature. To fail on all three fronts like that is just plain lazy. At least Ressurection tried.

And if by "drama" you mean that there're a bunch of bald British thespians running around in the dark on low tech sets, well then you've go a strange definition of the word.

The first two films could be classified as dramas as well, especially Aliens. The fact that the Academy nominated Sigourney Weaver for Best Actress that year in a sci fi flick over more serious "dramas" tells you all you need to know. For all the whining going on in this thread about the gunplay in Aliens, people seem to forget how long it was before any action took place in the movie and how much character interaction there was between the 3 main set pieces. Cameron takes his time to set up Ripley's character and her dilemma. That's drama.

Alien 3, on the other hand, gives to ryhme or reason to most of the creature's attacks. It just goes around randomly picking the guys off one by one. Something that we'd already seen done in the first film -- and done more creatively and better. Darker/nihilistic doesn't necessarily equate to a good film.

But more importantly, Cameron added his own touches while still respecting Ridley Scott's vision. That's one of the reasons the film was so popular. Alien 3, does just the opposite. It takes away familiar elements of the first two films (or completely ignores them) but adds nothing to the world beyond a few simple aesthetics that don't enhance the film. It's almost like whomever made the flick hadn't even seen the first two and thought they they were reinventing the wheel by making it dark and gothic.

Again, I like a lot of aspects of Alien 3. But it does nothing it's first two predecessors (and in some instances, Resurrection) hadn't already done better. I mean in plot, action, and (most importantly) character.

And if you guys are going to completely overlook the facehugger/egg lack of consistency/logic in Alien 3, then you can't go off complaining about AVP's 3 minute chestbursters. Both films are guilty of ignoring the rules set down by their predecessors.

I think we get plenty of new stuff with Ripley in Alien 3. We've never seen her brought so low before. Even in the darkest moments of the first two films, you never saw her so defeated as she is in this film, and how she chooses to deal with it is absolutely vital to the character. Again, this film isn't about the alien, it's about Ripley.

And the death of Newt and Hicks DO contribute to the plot. Their deaths demonstrate the chaotic randomness the aliens have brought to Ripley's life, and how easily victory turns to defeat, hope to despair. I think people saw the happy ending of Aliens and imagined all sorts of rosy timelines for the three of them. But the world doesn't work like that. How many soldiers lived through D-Day only to get killed in some minor skirmish a few days later? Life isn't nearly as tidy as "and they lived happily ever after".

So is Aliens. Pay attention. None of the films logically follow the previous one. I cannot repeat this enough. Anybody who thinks that there are no logic flaws from the first film to the second is wearing rose-colored glasses. There is no continuity. Stop pretending that Alien 3 was the first violation.

Agreed. While I certainly enjoy Aliens, and I understand that offing Newt and Hicks right off the bat in Alien 3 felt careless and cheap to the people who really loved those characters, I was never particularly attached to either one of them and felt it was a fitting start to a very depressing film.

Anyway, of the two... Alien 3 by miles. Ripley decking one of her potential rapists after being saved by Charles S. Dutton ranks as one of my favorite punches in film history.

Sigourney Weaver does a great job playing Ripley in 3, not as good as in 2, but she gets more to do than back in part 1. Even after surviving all of this, after losing her only friends, after realizing that everyone she ever knew on earth is dead, after nearly being raped by a bunch of prison inmates and after noticing that her greatest enemy grows inside of her, Ripley still stays strong without ever appearing unrealistic. Sigourney's great and one of the major points why Alien 3 works.

Inspired by this thread, I Netflix'd Alien 3 (which I'd never seen) and watched it today. And I gotta agree with the majority: it's no contest. Alien Resurrection is embarassingly bad no matter how you look at it, whereas Alien 3 may be a failure -- but it is, at least, a noble failure. Alien 3 wins.

As for the rest of the debates in this thread:

- Continuity? Get the fuck over it
- Death of Hicks and Newt? Get the fuck over it

Sure, Alien 3 has its major flaws, but let's not forget how completely fucked the production of it was. Overall, I think Fincher did the best he could in an unwinnable situation. I can see why people don't like it (hell, I'm not sure I liked it), but I do respect it.

Alien 3 is a gem of film making history, so it's fun to be fascinated by it, even if it was sub par, the story behind the scenes is interesting enough to engage.

For the whole egg on the ship thing, AVP may have given us the hint that the queen can just using her tail she can drop an egg (since the predator never had a facehugger attached to him at anypoint in the film, but did get impaled by the tail only to have the predalien hatch.

Yeah I even started a thread about how great Alien 3: Assembly cut is.

I just wish we got the original documentaries on the 'Quadrilogy' discs as opposed to the 'watered-down, Fox-friendly' version we received...I wonder if 'The Hellboy' still has versions of these.

I'd pay good money to own them.

I'd say you need to watch AVP again and pay closer attention this time, but then I wouldn't recommend watching AVP to my worst enemy.