Thirith on 2/3/2017 at 10:56
Except Prometheus was terminally schizophrenic. Did it want to tell an alien story? Did it want to tell a story that's more metaphysical? It was torn between being beholden to the Alien franchise and doing its own thing, and it ended up doing both really badly.
Vivian on 2/3/2017 at 12:10
BUT, it did try and do some different things. They all sucked, but it tried. This looks a lot better, but also a lot more straightforward space-monster stuff. Which I'm all for, the best alien films are bog-standard genre tropes polished until they're blindingly shiny.
Thirith on 3/3/2017 at 09:57
Quote Posted by Vivian
BUT, it did try and do some different things. They all sucked, but it tried. This looks a lot better, but also a lot more straightforward space-monster stuff. Which I'm all for, the best alien films are bog-standard genre tropes polished until they're blindingly shiny.
I have to admit that I'm torn. Would I rather have a good film that's basically a retread of
Alien or
Aliens, or would I prefer them to be more ambitious but risk going
Prometheus? I think I lean towards the latter, because I can always rewatch the films in the series that I like; I don't think I particularly need a "Just like
Aliens, except not quite as fresh". Then again, if I were to sit through another
Prometheus, I might curse myself for thinking this.
dj_ivocha on 3/3/2017 at 10:30
Quote:
...and the surface world was like second century AD Turkey,...
So... like the Roman Empire, then? :weird:
hopper on 3/3/2017 at 13:18
Agree on Alien 3 being underrated. I'm a bit torn on whether I like s or 3 better. The mood and the plot make 3 more original than s, which is more of a standard action flick set in space. Looking at the trilogy (and ignoring 4, which started out decently enough, but soon devolved into a horrible abomination; and Prometheus, whch I haven't seen), it's impressive how they managed to make each new installment a different kind of movie than before and still make me think it all fits together - they all preserved what made Alien "Alien", so to speak.
From the trailer, it seems it's gonna be a cabin in the woods type horror movie. Which is fine, except the setting might as well be somewhere on earth, and the monster might as well be a golem, a Slender Man, or a mutant axe murderer. Apart from the spaceships, it all seems generic and not so much "Alien" to me. Of course, I could be wrong. I guess we'll see...
icemann on 3/3/2017 at 13:47
The easy test, as with any movie is whether you'd rewatch it, and how many times.
The original Star Wars trilogy, majority of Arnies 80s-mid nineties movies, Terminator 1 & 2, Predator, Robocop, Aliens etc. Watched those movies so many times I've lost count. The great ones you watch time and time again. The good ones you might watch a few times, and the alright/ok ones you watch maybe 1-2 max.
Many of the great ones received pretty damn good video games either set in those movies or in expanded universes, which adds to it.
I'd argue that Alien 3 had better video games (which were only slightly based on the movie) which were superior to the movie, but maybe that's just me.
heywood on 3/3/2017 at 14:28
The religion in Alien 3 didn't really do much for me. If they ditched the penal colony idea entirely and just made it a monastery, that might have been better. But as it was made it seemed like a mashup of two competing concepts.
I'm not really down with the wooden planet setting though. That's drifting a little too far from sci-fi for me.
Sulphur on 4/3/2017 at 04:41
Dear god, I just read that Vincent Ward piece. Sheep-gestated alien babies with downy wool, and a 'HORRIBLE ALIEN HEAD BURSTER'? I'd have personally flown halfway across the world to maul everyone involved in the production of that thing if it had taken off as an actual sequel and not a Bosch-inflected parody. I admire the take-no-prisoners insanity of setting up a universe with monks floating in space on a ball of wood-ensconced metal after rejecting technology as sort of Amish/counter-cultural types, but taken all together it's a massive wodge of hoohoo.
Thankfully it's pretty far flung from what we ended up getting, which was more even-tempered if still tonally incompatible with both Alien and Aliens. The problem I've always had with Alien 3 is that it wrote off developments from Aliens in a fashion that belied its non-interest in them: Newt and Hicks are swiftly dispatched because there's no room for them in a penal colony, and Ripley gets to turn her motherly tendencies inward in a form of grotesque irony that makes sense for the sort of film Alien 3 was trying to be - religious/existential horror - which is hard to reconcile with the movies Alien and Aliens were. Combine that with a supporting cast that is one-note and almost never, in any way, sympathetic, and you've got a movie that's stretches of murky brown punctuated with moments of hard-edged violence, and almost zero reasons to care about anyone except Ripley. In fact, if I hadn't seen Alien and Aliens before Alien 3, I doubt I'd have much reason to care about Ripley either -- so perfunctory was the character writing in this thing.
Mr.Duck on 5/3/2017 at 06:25
Word.
Alien 3 had some interesting concepts and visuals going, but fuck it. The franchise, for me, ended after Aliens. Anything else is EU.
Same with Terminator. After the first sequel, y'all can kiss my butt.
Though I have heard some positive stuff from The Sarah Connor Chronicles...
