wildcat

Does it make me a bad person that I like the second film? It's an action film to be sure. It's the first the series that I watched. I accidentally rented the 1st with the intention of watching the second a second time not realising there had been a first. I got caught by the production values and decided that the second was better at the time.

The third was nice looking. I was utterly apauled by the idea that they had killed off Newt. I felt it had entirely ruined the point of the second movie.

I like a good action movie. It's fun. I like suspense wrapped up with good production values. I like shiney objects.

Two interesting points about #4.

1) Brad Dourif is an actor with a talent for very creepy characters and he was really the only really good thing about Star Trek Voyager.

2) Atmosphere venting through a hole the size of a quarter is only 1 atmosphere of pressure. Your skin is sufficient to withstand the pressure of 1 atmosphere. you could plug a hole with your hand. A bit uncomfortable being exposed to space but far from being able to be sucked through.

Well, as Phil Dick once said, the problem with sci-fi writers is they usually don't know anything about science.

One of the overriding elements of the movies is that at the beginning of each one, they basically reset the status quo, usually in favour of isolating Ripley in some way - often emotionally. So you have to look at #3 as doing that when she arrives on the prison planet and Newt's dead. It sort of sucks, but it's partly thematic, Ripley -has- to be alone against the monsters, the only one who actually understands what they are when she isn't completely alone.

However Alien is very grounded. There's a reason we don't see laser beams and fantastical weapontry. There was effort spent to avoid making it space opera.

The Aliens series is unique in that each film represents the work of a new much-lauded "young" director. But that formula is also responsible for the spliced, repetitive unevenness of the whole thing. Coherency over the arc of the undertaking is left single-handedly to Weaver and she triumphs amid the train-wreck of competing ideas that toss her rather carelessly from one film to the next.

Aside from the high concept logline that links Scott's film with the Cameron followup, I find there to be little if any shared spirit between the two projects. Aliens is mostly pomp and bombast, the celluloid equivalent of Cameron puffing out and beating his chest to the rhythm of a concept that he mostly spoils through over extension of the inital sparse recipe.

I'm inclined to say the Fincher agreed with me, as Alien3 wisely dropped the plural in favour of a return to a single organism menace scenario. Aside from its ending--which I feel contributed significantly to the mythos of the series, only to be undercut but the fourth film's cloning contrivances--Fincher's work is largely caught up in issues of sequel derivation on the Scott front and reactionary backtraking on the Cameron front. Its highpoint is it amber colour palette. Such is the music video director's way; Fincher is the weakest artist of the four, the only non-auteur of the bunch I'd say.

God Bless Jeunet--Europe's greatest sci-fi visualist--but Alien Ressurection was a misguided cash grab. I thought that dehumanizing Ripley dehumanized the entire undertaking, leaving us at the mercy of stylized sets and monsters that we'd already seen too many times to really be scared of anymore. Rent Delicatessen or City of Lost Children instead.

I certainly applaud the franchise for delving deeper and deeper into its own nilhism, in many ways getting much darker (but not scarier) as it went along. On that level Ressurection was a compelling and risky gambit, but none of the three followup films can bear anywhere near the dramatic weight and audio/visual quality of the inital work.

I would suggest that on an several levels the original Alien can be seen in much clearer and more compelling light when better paired with Ridley Scott's immediately proceeding work, Blade Runner as opposed to the series of subsequent films that it spawned.

Those two works represent a seminal creative suite of visual ideas, evolved from the mind of a single artist, that has had major impacts on the science fiction genre. The rest is all mouths within mouths within popcorned stuffed mouths.

"Coherency over the arc of the undertaking is left single-handedly to Weaver and she triumphs amid the train-wreck of competing ideas that toss her rather carelessly from one film to the next."

I like that idea, as it highlights Weaver's strong acting ability. She seems to make it work no matter what, even when she's on all fours, spitting up acid and failing to be entirely human.

The Ridley Scott thing ... makes sense that Blade Runner was right before Alien, when you look at the replicant and android parallel he sets up.