Cinematically that scene is really cool too, it goes out of its way to be one of the more elaborate twinning scenes in movies with the way the camera dollies around them with lots of parallax to ‘prove’ it’s not just a split-screen, they pass a prop back and forth to each other and even hold it at the same time, their movements with the flute have to quite literally be in concert with each other, etc. etc. Whether it’s Dead Ringers or Multiplicity or whatever I can’t think of anything else that gets quite that subtle.
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This reading never occurred to me and it actually kind of gets me to like Resurrection lol. Certainly Jeunet wasn’t taking anything too seriously and if he’d mocked the material a little more it could have been really fun. Speaking of queer undertones I like that he fully leaned in to playing scenes between Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder for sexual tension
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rewatching all the movies last year, is it a coincidence that the two movies I enjoyed most after the first both feature basketball prodigies?
who would win one-on-one?
- Ripley 8
- David
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voters
haven’t seen Romulus yet but it has Robert Bobroczkyi right? I want to believe…
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I love the fact that Sigourney Weaver actually made that shot IRL
She can do no wrong even in a terrible movie
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I still think 3 is probably the worst one overall
even though it might also be the most underrated and everyone is always trying to redeem it, and resurrection and covenant are both deeply mediocre, 3 just looks like shit the whole way through which is hard to get past
Alien >>>> Aliens > Prometheus >>> Covenant > Resurrection >> 3
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I’m kind of in the same position after my last rewatch of the franchise. Resurrection’s biggest flaw is Joss Whedon. The script is horrible. Jeunet did everything he could to make something watchable but there’s no getting past that writing. The costumes, set design, direction, etc are all decent.
3’s only good moment was when they killed that annoying kid from Aliens over the opening credits but the movie does indeed look like shit. I’m still upset we never got Vincent Ward’s insane idea for a wooden monastery ship and were stuck with David Fincher instead.
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i agree with this
but i am pretty sure the underwater sequence is one of the most evil things a director has ever made actors do (still only about like… idk 1/3 as bad as what cameron put the abyss cast through) but it looks great
3 is one of those things where i’ll never understand people saying it is some horrible piece of crap, but i also don’t really get the revisionist adulation of it. it’s fine, about on the same level as aliens for me at this point? idk though i also think heaven’s gate is fine so i might just be immune to catastrophic legendary tales of hollywood?
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Aside from the first movie being a durable classic, this series is maybe the most difficult to pin down of all the canonical Nerd IPs, in that I am constantly revising my opinions on all the movies. Are they all pale imitations of the first and unworthy of it? Yes. Are they all good movies and worth watching? Yes. Which one is best, which one is worst? It is impossible to say, I mentally rearrange them weekly it seems like. I think right now I think Covenant is worst? Is that possible? It’s like, you know, a solid movie, decent… isn’t it? I can’t tell…
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3 is handsome and also good
it is better than 2
I would rewatch it before 1
I will not be taking questions
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Playing through Isolation for the first time and accidentally cheesed the first real challenge when my immediate impulse upon being faced with the four scavengers was to bait them to a door and whack each of them on the head with the wrench as they marched through it one by one
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jeez o pete we have the same alien opinion
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Aliens is kind of overrated as “the only good Alien sequel” in some people’s eyes but I personally quite dislike James Cameron and yet I think it’s my favorite of his movies so I do rate it fairly highly
3 is conceptually neat and Charles Dance is good in everything but by the second half of the movie it has pretty much squandered its premise
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Aliens is the ALIEN FRANCHISE movie I have least nice things to say about because I’m basically allergic to Cameron’s nerdy obsession with guns and killing and squandering the mythic potential of the xenomorph by turning it into an overgrown bug.
Alien 3’s opening credits are good but it quickly goes down hill as it plods through the motions of the most generic monster movie plot, rendered in that irritating david fincher style. Charles Dance is good, even if the script he’s working with is almost as bad as that of Resurrection
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Resurrection is very nearly the worst one except that Ron Perlman, Winona Ryder, and Jeunet are all very likeable and appealing relative to how grim and dull 3 is. 3 certainly was more ambitious but for what
Prometheus has equal amounts of shit that works and shit that doesn’t work and it’s fun and surprising enough and the heights are actually very high and it’s better made than most of them
Aliens is like, spiritually the poorest but I think people are if anything too invested in taking it down a peg on that basis. It and Prometheus are very nearly even for second tier but for opposite reasons
Covenant is fine. The most average one. And it’s not really missing a trick even. Just hard to love.
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gratuitous polling here* but I am curious because…the series is interesting for a few reasons and one of them for me is that it’s spanned multiple decades in such telling and damning (and interesting) ways and yes Cameron’s was my initiation and the action figures and the games and the theme park ride but then I became a relative reactionary rewatching it in my late 20s thinking, this is kinda boring and regressive for the most part, and I for sure must have tuned out for a lot of it as a kid when it wasn’t straight up being a video game, and I maybe over corrected my opinion, or maybe not BUT, anyway
what was your first Alien?
- Alien
- Aliens
- Alien³
- Alien: Resurrection
- Prometheus
- Alien: Covenant
- Alien: Romulus
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voters
what was your $econd Alien?
- Alien
- Aliens
- Alien³
- Alien: Resurrection
- Prometheus
- Alien: Covenant
- Alien: Romulus
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voters
what was your ³rd Alien?
- Alien
- Aliens
- Alien³
- Alien: Resurrection
- Prometheus
- Alien: Covenant
- Alien: Romulus
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voters
*also I just wanted to figure out how to do multiple polls in a single post
edit: seeing Resurrection before Alien is for me part of my own personal 90s idiocy but it did make seeing the original after that quite the revelation
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I watched em all in order in one sitting in the early 2000s on that Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set. I don’t even care that Quadrilogy isn’t actually a real word.
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I haven’t rewatched Aliens since I did a series rewatch, like, 10 years ago.
However, I think I fucked up by watching the special edition/director’s cut. My memories are vague, but I recall it starting with a long chunk showing Newt before she’s a beast child and the colonists on the planet and stuff. That alone kind of ruined the movie for me. Then I remember the alien shooting scenes being long and pointless, and I see now that the special edition also includes an additional scene of them shooting the aliens with automatic turrets, which I’m sure contributed to that feeling.
We all know the take that Alien is the artistic masterpiece and Aliens is the 80’s schlock sequel, but now I really wonder if Aliens Theatrical is, like, 10x better than Special Edition. Like, I straight up didn’t enjoy that Aliens watch. I was shocked by just how outright bad and cheesey it all was. Maybe it’s just like that, but… I dunno. I might try a rewatch, but I who knows when. I watch movies at home pretty rarely these days.
Yeah, the extended cut of Alien$ makes a bad movie worse
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