Alien - as classic as classic gets?/POO

Aliens is a grand action flick, Cameron showing again what he could do. But the first...man. Let's put it this way -- I STILL have never been able to watch the chestburster sequence.

I haven't seen Alien3 since knowing who David Fincher is, and have been tempted ever since to watch it again, even though it was an incredible disappointment at the time.

Had no idea about the director's cut -- there's a 20th or 25th (can that be right?) anniversary edition of the DVDs coming out soon, I've got em queued up in Netflix.

!!!

Okay, I'm definitely going to watch that. Maybe I won't watch the original version, I'll just wait for that.

The visuals have stuck with me (the giant hive-alien thing, the tech church), but I remember very little about the plot or dialogue.

I guess I liked the first two just fine, for different reasons. I'm not sure I could stomach sitting through the first again, though. The third one was fucking appalling.

which is kinda funny, since Doom & Quake had a helluva lotta basis in _Aliens_...

Yes. Basically she was supposed to have mini-Alien claws due to her hybrid nature, even though she looked mostly normal. (This gets traded on explicitly later in the movie when they wander into the horror room filled with failed Ripley-Alien clones and she sees the myriad horrors of existence she dodged by virtue of loking human.)

I recently saw "Resident Evil" and realized that I loved it because its tone and pacing were almost identical to "Alien Resurrection". (Also, it's more successful as a movie than the "Tomb Raider" flicks, which I also loved; why did "RE" get such bad press?)

I suspect it'll be a bit like Apocalypse Now Redux: amazing new print, story none the better, and perhaps a bit worse.

What I think will be interesting to see is how solid the visual effects will hold up on screen these days -- for its time and place, it was probably the best such effort outside of ILM's early work and in certain respects probably superior. The Nostromo really is an amazing model.

(tho it's hard to beat "game over, man! GAME OVER!!" from Chet)

The chest burster was disgusting and scary, but the scene with Harry Dean Stanton and the cat is the one that caused me to absolutely freak the first time I saw the movie.

Aliens is a damn good 90s shoot 'em up with funny tag lines, but it never got me like the first one, which outside of perhaps Blade Runner is the best scifi movie of the past 25-30 years. Ridley Scott can still make movies with smokey rooms, but they are just not like these two.

Have you checked first that Nicolars prefers The Godfather Pt I to Pt II (like some sort of freak)?

still, i like how some random project first proposed about12-13 years ago is finally coming to light.

no doubt it'll be filled with really bad CGI, tho.

Aliens spoilt by resemblances of formerly unheimlich creatures to, variously, men in (ill-fitting) suits and finger puppets, with distracting tendency to emit angry rhino noises when squished (and they're far too easily squished).

Alien 3, 2nd best, valiantly fatalist (as with the 3rd Terminator film. Is this a trend? Does American Pie 3, also, reassert the universal ascendancy of some mad demiurge's implacable design?).

Alien Resurrection spoilt by unwarranted introduction of French visual humour.

it also might be my favourite movie ever in any case

http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=1&c=2224

I'm all for the huge slew of extra features on the first two, hope these all get released individually...

And rewatching it -- yes, it's in there. My reservations about this interrupting the feeling of the final half hour remains, but I guess we'll find out when it gets released.

Normally in an American film you'd expect to see ALL those responsible suffer fates and/or condemnation DIRECTLY correlative and dramatically commensurate to the crime, but in AR that's restricted to Brad Dourif & co.

We aren't supposed to mind, or bear in mind, the involvement of the outlaws in the deal (no they won't have known exactly what Brad was going to do with their "cargo", but so what?). The film assumes it can force us to view them as morally neutral, ie. outlaws = worthy subjects for audience identification, Brad & co = fully deserving of ghastly fates.

Indifference towards cause and effect (and affect) like that might be OK (and commonplace) in bande desinee, but in a film with pretensions towards narrative cohesion it jars heavily.

I'd forgotten about the attempted rape scene in 3, which indeed aligns the inmates (Compo, Foggy, Clegg etc) with the aliens (as would-be violators of Ripley, as also with Ash's attack on her in the first film). No, not likeable AT ALL, but the film itself realises this - the attempted rape is yet another (alien-like, corporation-like) assault on her physical integrity, and it under-writes the pessimism of the whole.

In AR of course Ripley isn't "human", or vulnerable, any more, and in general the human/alien host/parasite oppositions, & consequent potential for interesting intersections, are thinned out.

i like all of them too. Ripley + the Alien may be the closest thing we have to the great genre-hopping duos of oldentimes - any major dude will tell you:

alien - inv of the body snatchers
aliens - hell is for heroes/the searchers
alien3 - riot in cell block 11
res - mommie dearest

(i remember hearing a rumor that jeunet's original design concept included weird wooden spaceships!!!)

1.) I find it hilarious that John Hurt, perpetual sufferer in film (Mel Brooks cast him as Jesus in History of the World Part 1), is the one who has the alien burst out of him.

2.) Even better, in the Mad Magazine parody, the head poking out of his stomach was Kermit the Frog.

3.) The Alien comic by (I think?) Walt Simonson was AWESOME.

4.) In my memory, Alien was the last sci-fi movie that obsessed me in that Star Wars/Close Encounters/2001 kind of way.

plus, it pays off the joke of Barf ordering the special, and then them watching the thing dance.

That was the first thing I thought of when I said "John Hurt, perpetual sufferer."

http://skeletonart.com/images/Art/334-Strange01-400.jpg

I'm quite curious to see the Director's Cut. Is it radically different?
-- Alex in NYC (vassife...), October 26th, 2003.

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Couldn't say, since I didn't see the first version. I assume the big dance number with Madeline Kahn and Burt Reynolds was in the original?
-- Skottie (n...), October 26th, 2003.

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No, it was pulled because RS was worried it'd be too scary for family audiences.
-- s1utsky

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That made my night.

Nine discs. Three billion hours of bonus material, including featurettes, screen tests, production artwork, interviews, and way more. All in a tidy little case. It's beauuuuutiful.

DVDS ARE A SCAM

Region 1 - 2 December.
Region 2 (UK) - 8 December.
Region 4 (Australia) - 10 December.

All the sets are identical.

I picked up both, but used and some time back. So I'm content to rebuy in this case.

(Also, how glad am I that the theatrical Aliens will FINALLY be on DVD? I like some of the extra footage but the whole feel of the movie is undercut by showing the happy terraforming station before the aliens come along -- the Marines arriving and finding nothing = far more effective.)

Along with Ned, I'm happy that the theatrical version of Aliens is getting released. It's really the only one of the four that I would want on DVD.

Alien: too scary for me! I had to watch the intense parts virtually on mute.

Aliens: I love video games dressed up as movies. If they limited the dialogue to practically nothing, this would be the best movie ever. (which also holds true for first Matrix)

Alien^3: terrible. Brits in movies must be classy and well-groomed, otherwise they are just Australians. CGI was wretched, obv.

Alien: Resurrection: surprisingly good, I'd actually watched it once before and I think I was lukewarm to it, not to mentioned confused b/c I had not seen the others yet. However, I have a feeling that Ripley/Sigourney hurt the film; since the film was mostly about gloss, having a familiar character and the attempts to provide enough characterization really conflicted with the mood of the band of outcasts, who are all neat poses and smarmy one liners.

Which to watch first? I just saw Alien in the theatre, so Aliens is the logical choice - but I've never seen ^3 and Resurrection has Winona...

Revive.

I can't believe this, but I've never seen any of these in their entirety. Just watched the first one (director's cut, so I don't know what extra stuff I shouldn't have seen) and it was great, about to watch the second.

The question is, should I bother with the last two?

god that scene in the air ducts with Dallas running around with the flamethrower, and that panicky woman yelling in his earpiece where the alien is. One of the greatest horror moments in movie history.

I said in my original post that the last two films were tripe. Actually the third was is worth a watch just for the dog alien, be prepared for some dodgy cgi though.

I may have to watch the fourth one again myself, can't remember much about it.

http://www.sayagain.co.uk/b3tapix/images/alienminer.gif

bloomerbait

A+, btw

Just watched the first one again, do we know if and when it's coming out on bluray?

Now to watch Warriors, movies from the fucking 70's are the tits !

warriors vs aliens

http://rictone.tumblr.com/photo/1280/625849601/1/tumblr_l2w0epkJsG1qzu6nx

Needs the Alien standing behind them being all, "Hey, guys, what are we looking at?"

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lurx40MS0i1qbo6leo1_500.jpg

SFX-guy Gavin Rothery is posting lots of behind the scenes photos from the first Alien movie. They are all AWESOME.

http://i.imgur.com/avA7JBR.png

What's this?

that's the guy in the Alien suit IIRC

Wow:

https://news.avclub.com/this-high-school-drama-club-put-on-a-stage-production-o-1833515613

"you need a WHATomorph suit by tomorrow morning?"

max fischer would be proud

I thought "Memory: Origins of Alien" was a really good doc. A bit of making-of/background (some of which was new to me), but it's mostly a lot of smart What It All Means discussion.

Memory: Origins of Alien on channel 4 now, I'm half way through. Seems to have a fair bit of interview footage from previous docs, still I'm always there for the story of the meeting of minds of o'bannon & giger & scott, especially the victory snatched from the jaws of defeat of giger being let go, then rehired by scott. Didn't know the comic book forebears of the script. I'm finding the 'what it all means' guy a wee bit much maybe I'm not against all that.

... but I'm not against all that.

A bit weird in the end, a mix of "making of" and "meaning of" but after they go all in on the chestburster scene it just ends, so nothing about the actual full size creature; I think there was one single mention of cobb, none of foss or moebius, excepting a brief shot of a moebius comic in o'bannon's archive.

I just saw the 4K edition of "Alien," and boy was the transfer beautiful. I don't I've ever seen it look this good, and none of the goofy AI upscaling shit that hampers so many 4K editions.

(think)