Ser Scot A Ellison Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Yeah, I never actually watched past the opening of Alien 3 because it pissed me off too much. Just so disrespectful to the entire emotional journey that Aliens built.That's exactly what I mean. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davos Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Yeah, I never actually watched past the opening of Alien 3 because it pissed me off too much. Just so disrespectful to the entire emotional journey that Aliens built.Exactly. I've watched it through and in retrospect the majority of the film is decent, if a bit uneven. I could not enjoy it and am inclined to never watch it again due its callous disposal of significant characters from Aliens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theda Baratheon Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 You're missing out on an actual interesting film that was, sadly, plagued by some serious production woes. But that aside, Alien 3 is an ambitious film that ultimately didn't quite succeed at what it wanted to do, and hating on it because of Hicks/Newt's fate is a shame. Alien 3 is pretty decent stand alone movie; it's got an interesting aesthetic and concept and the christ like shot of ripley falling is a great one. But here's the problem, though, Alien 3 ISN'T a standalone film; it's a sequel. And as a sequel it fucking SUCKS. The off screen deaths of Newt and Hicks are essentially a kick in the teeth to Aliens. And even as a standalone movie it has plenty of faults; not many interesting, likeable characters - we're rooting for Ripley because we love her BECAUSE of the last two movies. The alien itself looks no where near as scary or creepy as it did in the first two movies and there isn't some underlying need for survival like you feel in the first two movies. I just don't think it's very good at all.EDIT: So, essentially; I don't feel like I am missing out on anything at all. I watched Alien 3 and the few good thins going for it are just not enough to make up for all of its faults and the huge shit it takes all over Aliens. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 MC,But why throw away interesting characters like Newt and Hicks in a way that didn't make any sense given the events of the prior film? It is off putting from the opening moments of the movie. The plan was to return to the original Alien paradigm of Ripley vs. xeno in a constrained environment, and having Hicks and Newt along would interfere with that. They also may have had issues with Newt not having supposed to have aged in the meantime (thanks to hypersleep), with the film set to come out years later they would have had to have recast and hoped to have lucked out with a reasonably decent child actress a second time around. I do sometimes wonder if Dark Horse may have inadvertently screwed things up a bit. The plot of their graphic novel trilogy beginning in 1988 (Outbreak, Nightmare Asylum and Earth War) was actually perfect for a third film. In this story, set 10-15 years after Aliens, the characters are split up by Ripley going off on some mission/crusade off-screen to wipe out the xenos by finding their homeworld. Newt is - understandably - a PTSD-suffering woman whose character is a bit Sarah Connor-in-the-asylum-in-T2-esque. Hicks is still in the military, but has become cynical and rebellious after seeing his whole team get wiped out on LV-426. Long story short, the Company fucks up by experimenting with an alien queen in a lab on Earth and of course she escapes, resulting in the entire planet being overrun. Hicks and Newt go on a mission to another planet infested with xenos, eventually Ripley shows up in a Big Goddamn Hero moment and they set about bringing the Alien Queen Mother (a queen of queens) to Earth because she can attract all the xenos on the planet to her and a conveniently nukable location, which of course doesn't work out too well at all. Even the Engineers show up at one point, with the hint that they are going to sterilise the universe of humanity if it can't keep the xeno threat under control. Refine it down a bit and you have the seeds for a story which is bigger and more epic than the first two whilst also staying focused on character as well as having some big action set-pieces. There's even a moral dimension, with the Company cranking out an army of synthetics to fight the xenos because they can't be impregnated and add to the xeno numbers, with moral issues on if this is right or not. I do wonder if Fox had problems with doing "xenos on Earth" without it becoming too similar to the Earth War arc, resulting in copyright issues, and decided to do something smaller in scale (and cheaper). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theda Baratheon Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Wow that comic sounds amazing i gotta read it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MerenthaClone Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 MC,But why throw away interesting characters like Newt and Hicks in a way that didn't make any sense given the events of the prior film? It is off putting from the opening moments of the movie.Alien is essentially about a traumatic event. Aliens is about confronting that traumatic event head-on and facing your fears, etc.. Alien 3 is about dealing with the psychological aftereffects of that event even after its been confronted and ostensibly dealt with. Its the nightmares for years afterwards. Its still about Ripley; its always been about Ripley. To an extent, I think Fincher really wanted to make a sequel to Alien, not Aliens, and it did impact his work in a way I don't like (that, and the development hell that Alien 3 went through didn't help). Hicks and Newt were interesting characters, sure, but I never felt like they were integral to Aliens except as they interact with and change Ripley. Alien 3 only works without the support structure provided by Newt and Hicks. People die utterly senselessly all the time. In the same way that people on this board repeatedly have said that they first perked up during AGoT either when Bran got window-chucked or Ned lost his head, Newt and Hicks dying right off is shocking. Its supposed to be. It preps you for Alien 3 going dark. I think Fincher could have handled the portrayal of their deaths differently, to a greater effect, but I don't think killing them was necessarily the wrong move. I like a movie series about trauma that doesn't pretend it always wraps up neatly. Its a really bold movie and I appreciate that. e: Alien and Aliens do make a more pleasing duology, I'll grant that. Hell, Aliens is one of my favorite movies ever. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theda Baratheon Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 It wasn't bold or shocking to just kill them off screen and have them dead for the entire movie though. It was just stupid.EDIT: OK. It was shocking...but only because it was so stupid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Wow that comic sounds amazing i gotta read it. You can still get them, and the novels based on them (Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum and The Female War). However, in the post-Alien 3 editions Dark Horse did an emergency retcon on them and turned Hicks and Newt into very similar-but-slightly-different characters who were also survivors of a xeno attack on a remote colony. And when Ripley shows up, she's now an android replicant of the original created by the Company for literally no reason that makes sense at all. If you can find the original versions, they make a lot more sense. The Aliens expanded universe was also terrific fun in complete WTF-turned-to-11 kind of way. There's the weird thing where it turns out the Aliens universe is the same as the Terminator one, and characters reference Earth almost being destroyed, controlled by machines and liberated by John Connor in the 2030s. This was simply because "Hyperdyne" sounded like "Cyberdyne", which was taking a James Cameron in-joke a step too far. They backed away from that later on, thankfully. Then you had various time-travelling crossovers with Superman and RoboCop. Some crazy shit right there. Some people have been trying to get around the idea that Hicks is going to be in the film but it's not going to erase Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. One idea that could work uses the Colonial Marines notion that the Sulaco was boarded on its way back to Earth and Hicks was woken up. He had to escape the ship without Ripley (or Newt) and someone else ended up in the cryo-tube to get killed when the cryo-tubes were ejected and crashed. How Ripley would show up in the new film is unknown. Hicks ends up being frozen for 200-odd years because he knows too much and is then rescued by a post-Resurrection Ripley clone? It's at this point that you realise simply erasing 3 and Resurrection, although cheesy, may simply be the better idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RumHam Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I'm normally a big fan of continuity, but they already decided to ignore Alien v. Predator when they made Prometheus. So fuck it, bring back Newt and Hicks! Superman Returns did something similar in ignoring Superman III and IV. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theda Baratheon Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 I don't really have a problem with just ignoring 3 and 4 and pretending they never happened, lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MerenthaClone Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 It wasn't bold or shocking to just kill them off screen and have them dead for the entire movie though. It was just stupid.EDIT: OK. It was shocking...but only because it was so stupid.If you had watched Newt drown in her cryopod, would that have been better for you? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theda Baratheon Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 If you had watched Newt drown in her cryopod, would that have been better for you? Nope; because that death would still have been stupid and meaningless and a kick in the teeth to Aliens. Look, I'm sorry, but I just really don't like the third Alien movie and don't think its few merits come anywhere near matching all its blatant flaws. :dunno: Which is a shame because it's not all terrible but there is just no way to spin the death of Newt and Hicks offscreen and as pointless a death as it was, in a good light. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polishgenius Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 They should do what once happened in comics and officially introduce the Xenos to the DC Universe.Okay, maybe they shouldn't. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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