SubJeff on 2/8/2009 at 07:31
Its a relief to see that most of TTLG gets how truly despicable A:R is. It had 1 or 2 redeeming features,
1 of which is having Winona (so cute)
in it. But everything else is just crud. I don't buy the black comedy thing and even if it were real it just didn't work.
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
Hi
So you call me out on something and I tell you you are wrong and you just
have to find something else to make a "ha ha" about? You didn't use any punctuation in your last post, imbecile. Now eat it up and get lost you pedantic dullard.
PS. Why thank you kindly SD. However, swine flu has not affected me at work at all. Global Gathering, now
that was a crappy weekend.
june gloom on 2/8/2009 at 08:24
God where do I fucking start with this fucking shitty movie?
Oh, I know. I'll start with the fucking dickbag who wrote it.
Joss Whedon, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, needs to stop fucking writing everything like a comic book. It is not good writing. It is not funny. It is not witty. He is a hack who should never have been allowed near the Alien franchise. The man can't write dialogue to save his life. It's evident in his other work too- his Buffy universe is high school tripe and anyone who thinks that Firefly or Serenity are in any way clever in the way that it blends several different genres is utterly tasteless because Joss Whedon has managed to make about 3 or 4 different genres boring all at once. His script for Alien Resurrection is like a bad fanfiction. It does have a few good parts (underwater scene for example), but it escalates way, way too quickly. The first three movies have always had this slow buildup of tension and suspense. Even Aliens, far more actiony than its prequel or sequel, built tension to an almost unbearable point. Alien Resurrection is basically the movie equivalent of premature ejaculation, and you're left feeling unsatisfied and disappointed and possibly sobbing yourself to sleep. But again, one of the biggest problems is the dialogue. It's horrible. There are too many characters and they all end up sounding the same, which is basically true of nearly anything Whedon creates because of his fetish for ensemble casts. Whedon once said he likes to cast actors who can do comedy because he believes comedy to be harder than drama, and so if they can do comedy... Anyway he's wrong and he should feel bad. What makes Alien Resurrection particularly irritating is that with one notable exception (Gary Dourdan as Christie, awesome character) the only characters even worth remembering are the ones who make it all the way to the end. Least worthy of all was the military guy who would not shut up about weapons and whatnot. He gets so feverish about it you half expect him to sink to his knees and start masturbating at the sight of a gun. Shut the fuck up and go shoot things like you're supposed to you meathead. But the biggest crime is the Newborn.
Oh my fucking god the Newborn.
Whose brilliant idea was that? It's horrible. The concept itself is kind of retarded but could've gone over better if it didn't feel so tacked on, not appearing or even being hinted at until the last third of the movie. Sometimes a sudden appearance can work (such as the Queen in Aliens), but in this case it didn't, it failed horribly. The scene where they introduce it is singularly awful- possibly one of the worst scenes in the whole movie. Especially the scientist, who's glued to the wall, going on and on about how the queen took on a secondary reproduction sequence. If he hadn't taken on the ridiculous "THIS IS RIPLEY'S GIFT TO HER" horseshit and just kept on mumbling scientifically I would have liked that scene a lot more. But no, he actually fucking says, "you are a beautiful beautiful butterfly." I puked in my mouth a little.
Joss Whedon ruined one of my favourite film franchises long before Paul WS Anderson even thought of skimming the Dark Horse comic books for plot ideas. So you know what? Fuck Joss Whedon. He can go fucking die in a fucking fire at an apiary.
But as bad as the plot and writing is, the directing most certainly does not help. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's directing is flatout fucking terrible. Now, I've heard a lot of praise for two of his earlier films, Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, both loosely dystopian films, but this isn't about those movies. It's about Alien Resurrection and frankly Jeunet's directing only compounds the horrible script. The tone he brings to the film is all over the place: wait here it's serious, wait now it's a surreal comedy, now it's serious again, no wait it's a bad 80s action flick, wait now it's a comedy again. Wait, this film is just shit. One thing in particular he did that irritated me to the point where I gritted my teeth every time he did it was when he zoomed in on people's faces at odd angles during what were supposed to be emotional moments. All it really did was show how overacted the scenes were and resemble a college student film thesis that barely scored a C.
I'll be honest, I did like the setting somewhat. It was kind of a cross between the interior of the Nostromo from Alien with the grittiness of the colony buildings in Aliens. But I wasn't happy with the alien hive at all. The hive in Aliens was smooth and almost skeletal. In Alien Resurrection it reminded me of those horrible tentacle rape .gifs you used to see on the internet back in the day. Ripley disappearing into it only makes it worse.
As for the aliens themselves... why do they all have to fucking breathe steam? They never did before, why now? Also, the sequence where this one alien uses his inner jaw to pound on a button that releases liquid nitro to freeze a guard is mindnumbingly stupid.
Things I did like: I liked the one part where Ripley wakes up in her cell- very creepy "birth" motif there. There's a bit that's not actually in the theatrical version, where they show her pictures and she cries at the one of a little girl. Why this was cut from the theatrical version is fucking beyond my comprehension, as it adds a depth to the character that is largely absent. The Ripley we see in the movie is basically the original Ripley's attitude, a little bit of "look how creepy I am!" and that's about it.
Oh, Ron Perlman rules too. But that's because he's Ron Perlman. The director's cut ending was quite nice too.
This movie could've been so much better if it had a different script, a different director, a different plot, a different and smaller cast, and was basically not this movie.
And no fucking Newborn.
End rant. Time for Tylenol.
nicked on 2/8/2009 at 13:43
dethtoll: So blinded with rage he writes the same paragraph twice.
rachel on 2/8/2009 at 14:25
Firefly versus Alien Resurrection. God dammit, dethtoll. How dare you even have the two in the same post? Ain't no fuckin' ballpark, it's not even the same sport.:tsktsk:
Vasquez on 2/8/2009 at 17:24
To the original topic: Fucking great :D if it's done Right, of course. My opinion of Right would be going back to the style of the original movie, with a very good story (hard to do after everything that's happened so far, of course, but I don't think it's un-doable).
Resurrection was not great, but entertaining enough about 2/3 along the way, then it suddenly turns into such a load of horseshit that you really couldn't care less how it ends. Completely inverse build-up of suspense.
I love AvP movies, but I don't even count them in the same bunch with Alien movies. If you watch them with any kind of serious mind, I don't wonder if you hate them :p
thefonz on 2/8/2009 at 17:39
In this current generation with their pacman and danceathon twister games and Doctor Who - does anyone really find the Aliens in these movies scary anymore?
I say; bring them back in a much more fucked up psychological thriller with a group of people on a space ship woken up from deep sleep and slowly picked off by a lone Alien scuttling through the pi....oh wait, ITS BEEN DONE ALREADY.
nicked on 2/8/2009 at 18:25
I say bring back the metaphor-for-rape thing. That was always the most disturbing aspect of Alien.
Renault on 2/8/2009 at 18:33
Quote Posted by nicked
dethtoll: So blinded with rage he writes the same paragraph twice.
Too much editing in Word ahead of time, I think.
