Tag: alien series

Alien Resurrection

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★★★½
“Alien vs. Firefly”

It’s not often that a film series manages to recover from – or even, survive – such a disastrous mis-step. But the Alien franchise managed it, though it took five years to come to fruition, and a Really Big Cheque to Sigourney Weaver [reportedly, $11 million, as well as a producer’s credit. The results, while short of the original two movies, are an awful lot better than its predecessor, managing to progress the story, re-invent Ripley and be generally entertaining. However, from a 2012 perspective, it’s painfully obvious that writer Joss Whedon recycled large chunks of the supporting characters, and turned them into Firefly. We’ll get to that a bit later.

It is set 200 years into the future, and begins with scientists on a space-station creating a clone of Ripley, using DNA from blood samples. They also remove the alien queen embryo which she was carrying, growing that, but keep her around for further study, intrigued by her apparent mix of human and alien DNA that’s giving her unusual powers [not unlike the way Alice fuses with the T-virus in the middle Resident Evil movies]. Docking with them is the Betty, a ahip operating on the fringes, which is bringing the scientists some meat popsicles in which they can incubate more aliens. Annalee Call (Ryder) appears to recognize the threat Ripley poses, and tries to kill her – but it’s too late, as the aliens have escaped their containment facility. Ripley and the crew have to team up, to try and fight their way back through the station to the Betty, which is the only means of escape left.

That’s an improvement in terms of a storyline over 3, simply because it is one, and provides a skeleton upon which a good amount of interesting ideas and fun sequences can be built. Jeunet came to the movie from some visually-striking French films, such as The City of Lost Children, and there’s a much better sense of cinematography apparent here – it’s a striking contrast to Fincher’s approach, where it appears his main direction to the DP was “Darker. Make it darker.” Here, you can see what’s happening: particular standouts include the first confrontation between Ripley and the Betty crew, in the basketball court, where Ripley sinks a long-range shot behind her back [legitimately done by Weaver], and a lengthy underwater sequence, where you’ll probably find yourself trying – and likely, failing – to hold your breath.

But the central idea is the one of Ripley now being something more than human, and Weaver has a great deal of fun with that, playing as if she’s half a beat ahead of everyone else, and completes her transition by no longer being scared of the aliens. It’s them who need to be scared of her, and again, I’m reminded of Milla Jovovich in the RE series: more than human, and yet, less than human at the same time. There’s even a creature with the proportions the other way round – monster with a touch of human – like Nemesis from RE: Apocalypse, and it was no surprise to read that Paul W.S. Anderson was one of the many directors considered for this (Danny Boyle, Peter Jackson, Bryan Singer and David Croneberg beinh among the others). I briefly drifted off to speculate on the possibility of an Alien vs. Resident Evil cross-over; would probably have been a lot more fun than anything involving Predators.

As noted, what’s startling are the parallels between the Betty and the Serenity, from Whedon’s show Firefly, which came out in 2002. Both operate on the edge of legality, with a small crew of oddballs: Capt. Frank Elgyn (Michael Wincott) is somwhat less sympathetic than Mal Reynolds, but in both you have a captain/first-mate/pilot trio of two men and a woman, two of whom are in a relationship, plus a mechanic from an unexpected minority (there, a woman; here, disabled). If Perlman’s lumbering mercenary Johner isn’t a blatant dry run for Jayne Cobb, I don’t know what is, and there’s more than a touch of mechanic Kaylee Frye to be seen in Annalee. Writing as someone who found Firefly no more than a passable timewaster, it’s amusing to see Whedon was stealing from himself. Still, if you’re going to plagiarize, best use your own work, I suppose.

Oddly, Whedon hated this finished product almost as much as Fincher did the third, saying, “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.” It seems likely that’s why he recycled so many of his characters for Firefly.

It’s far from perfect, however. The biggest flaw is Ryder, who is completely unconvincing, and not a patch on her predecessors [if you’re thinking, “What predecessors?”, there’s a clue in the initial letter of her character’s surname…]. I wasn’t too fond of the way the film went in the final act, and the human-alien hybrid is neither convincing nor scary. It’s damn hard to believe that Whedon came up with five endings, and this was the one Jeunet picked as the best. But, really: after the dismal failure which was part three, it was a major relief to see something even semi-competent, which managed to sustain my interest (okay: consciousness) much better, and be generally entertaining.

Dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Star: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon

Alien 3

  By

★½
“Lost in space.”

“No one hated it more than me. To this day, no one hates it more than me.”
— David Fincher

Few films have had such a troubled path to the screen. The story of those struggles, and the various versions of the story generated by William Gibson, Eric Red, David Twohy, Vincent Ward and others, is probably worthy of an entire separate article. For now, we concentrate on what finally came out, but let’s quote writer Rex Pickett:

“I was hired by 20th Century Fox four weeks prior to the start of principal photography… First on my agenda was a complete rewrite of the second half of the Walter Hill/David Giler screenplay due to certain major character and narrative changes mandated by Walter Hill. Once that was accomplished I was to attend to the first half and write an amalgamated version which was to include scenes from their draft and new scenes that I wrote. Thus, the resultant screenplay – particularly the first half – contains scenes that I was instructed to include whether I wanted to or not.”

The end result is every bit as awful and borderline incoherent as you’d expect, given the circumstances. At the time, Fincher had no feature-film experience. He was known almost entirely for music videos, particularly for Madonna – when it was announced he would be helming the third part, I recall idly wondering if we were going to see the aliens in pointy bras. That isn’t quite the case, and it does make more sense in the light of Fincher’s subsequent work, from Seven through to the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remake. But it’s worth considering that neither Ridley Scott nor James Cameron had worked on a large-budget sci-fi flick before their entries – Cameron had made The Terminator, but it was low-budget, at barely one-third the cost of Aliens. Both seemed to deliver a more consistent vision, though I suspect neither suffered from the copious degree of studio interference apparently seen here.

Right from the get-go, the script basically junks its predecessor. An emergency on the spacecraft bringing Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop home causes it crash-land, with Ripley apparently the only survivor. It’s a near-derelict former prison planet, which was about to be decommissioned, but the inhabitants, under spiritual leader Dillon (Dutton), opted to stick around, under minimal supervision. They’re none too happy to have a woman dropped into the middle of their society, and a message is sent to request Ripley be removed as soon as possible. Needless to say the Weyland-Yutari Corporation are more than happy to oblige. However, it soon becomes clear that Ripley was not the only living thing to escape the crash, as local residents start turning up “diced.” When it’s confirmed, through Ripley re-activating Bishop, that there was indeed an alien present: destroying it is necessary, not only to survive, but also to stop it from falling into the hands of Weyland-Yutari.

You can almost take Aliens and this, using them as point-counterpoint examples, of how you should and should not handle almost every aspect of genre film-making. Aliens built logically upon what had gone before, but this throws it all out the window, apparently making the rules of engagement up as it goes along. Aliens was a near-textbook example of how to create supporting characters with a few simply brush-strokes, giving them character and motivation: this has very little beyond a bunch of unlikeable bald-headed monk/prisoner types, with absolutely no reason provided for the audience to care about anyone beyond Ripley, as they get picked off. The pacing is terrible too, with little or no sense of progression or any significant twists, beyond the one that Ripley finds out about herself. And that makes no logical sense, given what we learned about the alien’s life-cycle in the first two movie. Everyone – Ripley, the prisoners and even the marauding alien – seems to be in a holding pattern, waiting for the corporate ship to show up so something (pleasegodanythingatall) can happen.

Without wishing to give away too much about the finale, it bears more than a slight resemblance to the one used by Aliens director Cameron in Terminator 2, which came out the previous year. He later told the BBC, “I couldn’t stand Alien 3 – how they could just go in there and kill off all these great characters we introduced in Aliens, and the correlation between mother and daughter. It stunk.” So was the similarity coincidence? Or did Cameron see a script during the long, pre-production process and opt to swipe it, to thumb his nose at the makers for basically jettisoning his entire contribution to the series? I’d like to think it was the latter, but suspect it was indeed one of those Hollywood flukes.

However, it’d be no better than this massively disappointing movie deserved, with Fincher and co. literally making it up as they went along. The first time I saw it, was on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, its original theatrical release coinciding with a trip to California. I fell asleep. 20 years later, I saw it for the second time, in the comfort of my own home… I fell asleep again. As Oscar Wilde might have said, “To lose consciousness once, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose it twice looks like carelessness.”

Dir: David Fincher
Star: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover

Alien vs. Predator

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★★½
“Slime of your life.”

Initially inspired by a throwaway joke in Predator 2 – an alien skull in the Predator’s trophy cabinet – this has been some time in the making. Seven years have passed since the last entry in the Alien franchise, and fourteen since P2. Comics and video games have beaten the movie to the screen, and if truth be told, this film bears more resemblance to them than anything else. This is no surprise, given director Anderson helmed both Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil. Interestingly, it takes place pre-Alien, in the present day. A pyramid is discovered deep under the ice on an island near Antarctica; industrialist Charles Weyland (Henriksen) puts together a team to investigate, led by Alexa (Lathan), the kind of lady who free-climbs ice-walls for kicks. They soon find that the pyramid is a training compound where, every 100 years, the Predators come to hunt aliens, with humans hosts for the acid-blooded critters

It’s a totally ludicrous concept. The Alien life-cycle, from hatching, through infection and chest-bursting, to full-sized monsterhood, is now ridiculously fast. In an idea lifted from Cube, the pyramid floor-plan changes configuration precisely every ten minutes – even though the “minute” wasn’t invented (by the Babylonians, fact fans) when this supposedly “first pyramid” was built. And expending such effort on a stadium used a couple of hours per century is wildly implausible.

There’s never any doubt who the stars are here, and it’s not the humans, who engage in such cliched behavious as showing photos of their kids – which, as we all know, is a death sentence in this kind of film. In addition, they persist in using hand-held flares when they possess perfectly good flashlights, for no reason other than to create spooky shadows. Alexa’s bilingual sidekick Sebastian (Bova) is intensely irritating in both English and Italian, but fortunately the heroine herself makes a decent impression, improving as the film goes on in much the same way as Ripley did in the original. Of course, Lathan is not Sigourney Weaver – but neither was Weaver when she started. [Er, if you see what I mean…]

The film steps up towards the end, finally delivering what we all came to see: full-on, three-way carnage, climaxing in Alexa + Predator vs. the Alien Queen. I’d be lying if I didn’t say this was cool, and the thought crossed my mind: with two of the three combatants being female, is the Predator perhaps one too? If so, this would probably be the ultimate in brawlin’ broads. However, the best moment is actually a flashback to an earlier cycle, with the Predators atop a pyramid, up which thousands of Aliens are swarming. It makes you wish they’d dropped us altogether and just let the titular twosome go at it, head-on.

There are a couple of nice nods to the inspirations, such as Lance Henriksen’s presence in the cast, albeit not playing an android this time. Alexa at one point almost echoes Arnie’s line, “You’re one ugly motherfucker!”, though doesn’t get to complete it, thanks to the film’s PG-13 rating. It’s hard to deny the toning-down this requires hampers the production, limiting the amount of violence that can be done (to the humans, at least – on both Alien and Predator planets, this would likely still be rated R). The effects are mostly adequate to well-done, though Anderson’s style is to cut fast rather than linger so we could give them any scrutiny.

The end result is a disappointment that works better as a high concept than on the screen. Part of the problem is that we’re never given any reason to root for anyone, from anywhere in the universe. The Aliens are the villains, who must be contained at any cost – fair enough. However, the Predators are equally opaque, and most of the human characters are a far cry from, say, Aliens‘ marine corps. Sure, they were sterotypes, but they proved you could quickly create endearing and memorable characters with well-chosen dialogue. In contrast, there are few memorable lines to be found here. Indeed, few moments will stick in your mind at all – and when they do, you may find yourself wishing they had slid right on past, such as the moment where a facehugger suddenly enters The Matrix. Hey, now there’s an idea for a crossover: Neo and Trinity take on the extra-terrestrials. Quick, where’s my typewriter?

Dir: Paul W.S. Anderson
Star: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewan Bremner

Aliens

  By

★★★★★
“Queen of outer space”

Few sequels are as good as the original, never mind surpass it. The Godfather II. Evil Dead 2. Mad Max II. But perhaps the finest of them all is Aliens, which did something obvious with the premise, yet executed it with breathtaking audacity to make what remains, even almost two decades later, one of the finest          films of all-time.

Yep, a blank, which you can fill in a number of ways. Science-fiction, certainly; horror, too. But I personally rate Aliens as one of the finest action movies of all time – whether it beats Die Hard depends almost entirely on which one I’ve seen more recently – and if you were to argue that it’s a classic war movie too, you wouldn’t hear loud complaints from me.

For in many ways, this is a Vietnam allegory. A technologically superior, arrogant military force lands in foreign territory…and gets its butt kicked by a ferocious enemy with no moral qualms, while the non-combatants are happy to plot their demise in pursuit of some other cause. It is likely also significant that Cameron worked on First Blood, Part II, which is perhaps why some reviewers e.g. the Philadelphia Daily News, referred to Aliens as “Rambo in space”.

That over-simplifies thing enormously; the script here works on a far more efficient level, both emotionally and logically. The tricky question of how to get Ripley out to face the aliens once more is dealt with smoothly – she wants to go, in order to exorcise the ghosts of her first encounter. Physically, she may have won that battle, but mentally, she has to fight it again every time she goes to sleep, and it’s killing her, one nightmare at a time. The audience might not do the same thing, but they understand why she does it.

The story also gives Ripley another reason to fight, in the persona of Newt, a young girl found in the airducts of the otherwise inhospitable base – her survival for several weeks there surely has enough material for a movie by itself. This resonates with particular force in the director’s cut, which includes a scene where Ripley learns of her daughter’s death, turning Newt into a surrogate child. This makes the final face-off between Ripley and the alien queen into a conflict of mothers, both intent on defending their offspring at any cost, even their own lives. It’s a terrific concept, almost unique in the genre up to that point, and still rare even today.

The other issue was how to make the monster as terrifying as it was originally. This wasn’t the first time Cameron had been brought in to direct a genre sequel, though I suspect he might not thank me for mentioning Piranha II: Flying Killers in this context. But here, as there, he re-invented the basic concept, albeit in this case with a good deal more logic and coherence. If one alien is terrifying, how about a hundred?

alien4In addition, he imbued them with movement, something almost lacking first time round, where the monster lurked, came out, grabbed you, then vanished into the shadows again. Here, they’re in your face – or if not, are coming towards it at high speed. With cinematic smoke and mirrors, Cameron created the illusion of dozens of creatures, but in reality only had six actual suits – if you watch the film, you’ll never see more than this number of aliens in any shot.

It does take its own sweet time getting there, with the first adult alien not being seen until over 70 minutes into the extended version of the movie. You can certainly see why some cuts were made for the theatrical version, such as the discovery of the aliens by the colonists [though someone could do an Alien 1.5, covering the gap between that discovery and the arrival of the Marines here]. But the subsidiary characters are such great fun to be around, that this delay isn’t a chore. Hudson, Hicks, Vasquez (left – Jenette Goldstein is perhaps the best supporting action heroine in cinema history), Apone, and the rest of the marines are fabulous, entire personalities being generated in just a few words, and what could come off as unjustified arrogance is actually endearing.

Add in Paul Reiser’s corporate slime, Carter Burke, and Bishop the android (Henriksen), who confounds Ripley’s expectations of how an “artificial person” should act, and all of these help make Aliens one of the most eminently-quotable films of recent years. Let’s pause for a moment and enjoy, once again, some of those classic lines…

The Ten Best Aliens quotes

  • 10. Hudson: We’re on an express elevator to hell – going down!
  • 9. Ripley: These people are here to protect you. They’re soldiers.
    Newt: It won’t make any difference.
  • 8. Vasquez: Look, man! I only need to know one thing – where…they…are.
  • 7. Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. That’s the only way to be sure.
  • 6. Frost: What the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?
  • 5. Hudson: Hey, Vasquez – have you ever been mistaken for a man?
    Vasquez: No. Have you?
  • 4. Hudson: Is this going to be a standup fight, sir, or another bug-hunt?
  • 3. Newt: My mommy always said there were no monsters – no real ones – but there are.
  • 2. Hudson: That’s it, man – game over, man! Game over!
  • 1. Ripley: Get away from her, you bitch!

You can see why the Aliens patch for the computer-game, Doom, became an essential item. The two were made for each other, and I spent many hours, blasting away at face-huggers, warriors and queens with my pulse rifle, while samples such as the ones above, or accompanying this page, blared semi-randomly. Ah, happy days… Er, where was I?

On the action level, Aliens is almost flawless (I admit that a couple of effects shots during the descent haven’t stood the test of time). The first encounter between marines and the aliens in the film should be required viewing for every director interested in staging a scene more energetic than two people talking, shot in close-up. And from that point on, there’s hardly a slack second, as things go from bad to worse to this-place-is-going-to-explode-real-soon.

Ripley is more pro-active in this film than Alien, where she became the heroine almost by default, being the only person left. In the sequel, she is the first to realise that the search for the colonists has gone horribly wrong, and effectively hijacks the APC on a rescue mission. After that, she is no longer an outsider, whose opinion is an irrelevance to the professionals. She is the instigator, the innovator and also the anchor, who keeps despair from becoming as deadly an enemy as the aliens. And who can doubt her bravery when, with escape in her grasp, she turns and voluntarily goes back into the ticking nuclear-bomb of the base, in order to rescue a child she met only a few hours previously.

It’s moments like that which elevate Aliens to a special place in my heart, and the hearts of many – voters at the Internet Movie Database rank it in the top 100 films of all time. Regardless of any debate over the genre to which it belongs, this is a classic, make no mistake about it.

Dir: James Cameron
Star: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton

alien5

Alien

  By

★★★★
“Feeling Alien-ated”

alien1The lack of a seal of approval here is less a comment on the quality of the film, than the fact that it only starts to qualify as an action heroine flick in the final twenty minutes. [Though for sheer influence, omitting it entirely here would be unthinkable] For most of the film, Ripley (Weaver) has been just another one of the crew; if you found someone unaware of the series, and showed them the first two-thirds, they’d probably have Dallas (Skerritt) down both as the hero, and the character most likely to survive.

But it is one of the central rules of horror movies – or, at least, good horror movies – that anyone can die at any time. This is a rule to which Alien adheres, and makes it as much an entry in the haunted house genre as a science-fiction film. True, it’s set in space, with the main threat an extra-terrestrial creature, but outside of these elements, and in both tone and structure, possesses little in common with contemporaries like Star Trek and The Empire Strikes Back.

Indeed, perhaps the closest relation this film has, is Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. Like Ripley, Bruce Campbell’s Ash (oddly, a name shared with the Nostromo crewman played by Holm) only assumes a heroic posture late in proceedings, forced by adversity to tap unexpected reserves of courage and strength. The movies also share characters trapped in a location from which they can’t escape, by a creature whose presence is in part self-inflicted, and at the same time wildly beyond their understanding. Their enemy is also pissed.

A plot synopsis hardly seems necessary, but here goes. [A spoiler warning is also in effect, albeit one probably relevant only for any Bantu tribesmen who happen to be surfing this site] The spaceship Nostromo, on its way home, picks up an unexplained signal from a planet and goes to investigate. On landing, they find an alien craft, and a lot of eggs, from one of which a creature leaps, attaching itself to crew member Kane (John Hurt). It later falls off, but not, as it turns out, until he has been implanted with a larva which bursts out of him during a meal, and scurries off into the ship. From there, it picks off the crew one by one, growing bigger and badder all the time.

Scott barely lets us see the monster for most of the film, probably a wise move given the budget, which at $11m was below average for the time, especially for a film with so many effects. While the designs, by Swiss weirdo H.R.Giger, are fabulous, their realization sometimes leaves a little to be desired. The scene of the critter scurrying away from Kane’s body is more likely to provoke sniggers these days, as are some of the model shots.

 It helps enormously having a great cast: Ian Holm and John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and of course, Sigourney Weaver, in her feature debut. They are a million light-years away from clean and shiny SF characters, and the film owes more to Dark Star than 2001. It does start off at a very leisurely pace, perhaps too leisurely for an informed viewer, who knows that almost all these lovingly-detailed characters are going to bite the big one before long.

alien2Once Kane gets infected, and especially after the alien gets loose, the pace picks up significantly, with tension being ratcheted to the max. The final sequences rank among the most memorable of all time, when Ripley realises all her crewmates are dead – it’s just her and the monster. And just when you think the film is over, with Ripley blowing up the Nostromo [in space, it appears, no-one can hear you scream, but you can hear a ship explode] and escaping by shuttle, clad in the smallest pair of knickers imaginable…it isn’t.

alien3The film’s most important contribution to the girls-with-guns genre was in creating a plausible heroine, capable of surviving through her own skills, rather than being saved by the macho hero. This was a cliche particularly relevant in SF films, where women were usually passive, and though Alien‘s place in that genre is questionable, as discussed earlier, it opened a lot of eyes to the possibilities. Without Ripley, there quite probably would be no Sarah Connor, Lara Croft or Sidney Bristow.

The director’s cut, released 25 years after the film’s initial release, isn’t as much an alteration as some – as with Blade Runner, Scott opted to trim as well as insert, leaving the new version almost the same length as the original. The main addition is a sequence where Ripley discovers the remains of two of her colleagues, cocooned in preparation for the next step of the alien’s life-cycle. Otherwise, it is simply a joy to experience this film in the darkness of a theatre, where its understated creepiness is undeniably at its most effective.

Its critical and popular acclaim – adjusted for inflation, it’s the best-grossing girls-with-guns film ever at the box-office – inevitably meant that a sequel would follow. While Scott would return to similarly empowering themes more than once, first in Thelma and Louise, and then, less successfully in G.I. Jane, the reins were handed over to another director, James Cameron. He took the franchise in a radically different direction, arguably to even greater success. But that’s another story…

Dir: Ridley Scott
Star: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton