As some folks might be aware, I've been going through a bit of a renaissance in terms of getting back in touch with my sci-fi roots. For several weeks it had been an excellent experience watching some movies that I haven't seen in at least 5 years, in some cases even longer. Last week I ended up getting sick badly enough that watching TV was the extent of the activity I could participate in so I decided to break out my "Alien Quadrilogy" DVD set. Watching "Alien" and "Aliens" was just an absolute blast.
Those two films are over 20 years old, Alien is almost 30, and those films still holdup as two of the strongest genre movies aver made. But you know that already, no need to gush about that right now.
Next up was "Alien 3". The last time I saw this was maybe when it was first released on video and that had to be at least 15 years ago. My memories of the movie were not kind, but I wanted to try and watch it with new eyes. After all, my super-duper 9 disc dvd set included an all new expanded version, maybe this would help make the film better, strengthen the story or add new and interesting plot points...
My brother said it best - "how do you make a bad movie worse? You make it longer."
With an added 20 minutes this is pure torture!
Do you know what the worst part is? Really?
I can't get past the opening of the film without my bullshit alarms going off in my brain. The whole "Gee how did we not notice that egg next to our cyrotube" plot makes my brain hurt. Then you needlessly kill Hicks and Newt & Bishop (yeah, he's droid, so what?). It's pointless and unnecessary. I can think of about ten thousand other ways to make an Alien film without using these characters that doesn't call for a lame death.
But if that's the low point for me then it should be nothing but up from here on out right? WRONG!
The movie is boring! Zero characters are interesting, Ripley is very un-Ripley like and I really didn't care if the Alien was to kill them all.
Oh and then there is the 'new' Alien.
Supposedly Aliens take on some of their host features, hence the reason why in 1 & 2 they move in a very human like way. In the original cut of 3 the alien is birthed from a dog so it makes sense that it moves on all fours and is very quick. This expanded cut however, the Alien is birthed from some sort of large cow-like animal. It makes no sense no at all!
Also, this movie came out a year or so after 'Jurassic Park' and I think studio exes wanted a creature who could mimic the ultra cool Raptors from that mega-hit. What they got was a very badly computer animated Alien that looked super fake in most of it's shots on the screen.
In this viewing it's evident that studio heads at 20th Century Fox wanted to make some quick cash buy trading on a known brand and just threw something together with no real plan or idea of how to execute it. I now understand why David Fincher has disowned this movie. That man has far too much talent as a director to have his hands dirtied with this turd of a film.
When next watching this series do yourself a favor and skip over it. Alien:Resurrection is tons better (even if that film sort of falls apart in the last 20 minutes or so) at least Ripley gets to play off of the always great Ron Pearlman and strong (but not his best) script by the uber-cool Joss Whedon.
Or just watch 1 & 2 over and over until you forget.
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