A L I E N

Alien 3 is a pretty movie, visually
If i’m going to consume either Alien 3 or Aliens I’d rather watch the one without the attempted rape scene

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prometheus was good for establishing that humanity approaches space exploration and alien contact like a laurel and hardy routine so it’s not so jarring in covenant. I thought the shootout on the outside of ship was cool, for a modern day cgi action scene thing. made me kind of wish I’d seen it in a theater.

how a engineer ship with an engineer inside ends up crashed on a planet somewhere with a cargo bay full of alien eggs that only fassbender invented after killing all the engineers makes no sense, but the alien connections were already rendered nonsensical by prometheus anyway

none of these sequels are a hair on the ass of the original anyway. we’ve seen the alien, what more is there. the horror is known now. it’s like a silent hill game, you can get maybe two good ones out of it and that’s it.

Alien and The Terminator are both excellent movies that ended up getting solid, clever sequels that unfortunately turned them into franchises that were never going to be sustainable because the ideas within don’t lend themselves to them.

Basically, James Cameron has a lot to answer for. At least Isolation was good.

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I rank them:

Alien (incredible cosmic horror in a cruel and mysterious universe)
Alien Isolation (competent and atmospheric horror game)
Alien 4 (legitimately funny, cool designs, some kind of weird 90’s vibe I enjoy)
Alien 3 (a miserable slog, but nothing too objectionable)
Alien Covenant (incredibly stupid writing that thinks it’s brilliant and intellectual, but some good action setpieces)
Prometheus (also pretty stupid writing, and committed the cardinal sin of explaining one of the coolest mysteries of Alien, revealing that the enormous creepy husk of a dead alien was actually a suit for a giant bald muscular white man)
Aliens (militaristic fascist propaganda made even more objectionable by its shallowly competent execution)

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imo!

alien
alien³
aliens
alien: covenant
avp
alien: resurrection
prometheus

isolation would be somewhere in the top few, certainly above aliens

covenant might climb higher with time

i don’t hate any of these

aliens haters, plz read my friend’s review https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/aliens/

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Yeah it’s weird to read Aliens as fascistic when the whole franchise is a critique of corporate Reaganism. Cameron himself is too juvenile to be ideological but the anti-corporate stance in Avatar is so blatant and explicitly textual as to be cartoonish.

I’ll give these analyses a whirl once I’ve rewatched the series, but I hope that (based on knee-jerk reactions) the feminist framework won’t be lazy as fuck.

Also makes me realize how tired I am of all the analytical content moving to video format, since I prefer reading over watching.

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i have fonder memories of prometheus than i do of most movies just as a weird mass of sequences i have trouble reconciling with each other (or with anything else), like, the alien mythos thing at the start, the zombie attack(?!???), i guess idris elba was there for some of it? i remember the daughter of the ceo being kind of cool by the end? the relationship arguments and the peter o’toole android feeling like totally different performances from totally different films that had just been spliced on top of each other without actually interacting. they kept trekking back and forth from the ship to the ruins and the trek was portrayed alternatingly as this brutal gauntlet (the storm or whatever) and just a totally routine piece of plot navigation. characters just wandering around. effective sequences like the snake and the medical booth which just happen and are dropped. lotsa playing with crucifixes. i think most films are mildly engaging as they happen and become boring in memory so i prefer the reverse situation of like mostly nondescript genre pieces that have a longer mental afterlife than you’d expect them to just from the effort of trying to figure out what something actually was. value for money etc. i also liked that there was more than one monster and that the cosmology of the film was less that space travel was some kind of sheer existential threat than that it was just endlessly complicated and endlessly unpleasant. your eyes get fucked up from accidental gene mutations but it doesn’t matter because you’ll either get poisoned by a robot or left to die by a corporation or will accidentally step on a space snake or meet a huge, angry dude who will attack you for unrelated reasons. nethack 2.0.

haven’t watched the new one but i did see terminator 2 on tv the other day and honestly despite thinking that both that one and aliens are kind of more tonally bloated and boring than anyone seems to remember them being (i guess they both feel like they keep whiplashing between action sequences and sentimental “base camp” scenes with no real tension or sense of momentum until the final 20mins kicks back in???) i do always get into them both for those final 20mins and the weird bagginess of pacing until then can work as a container for other, less connected sequences that stick with me more (like the nuclear attack in t2 and i guess the lab in aliens).

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i think if the first alien movie was like prometheus then once they stepped off the nostromo the one guy would still get the facehugger but then another guy would get some kind of totally unrelated alien cold which made him slowly turn into a slug and a third guy would just wander into the caves and be lost for the remainder of the film and a fourth guy would fall off the ramp of the spaceship when they were first leaving and be instantly killed.

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Prometheus is one long series of fuckups about how corporatism is managed by grown toddlers who fail upwards into their positions. It’s great.

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Fassbender’s weird fetish hospital jumper is almost striking enough to distract from just how terrible the dialog in the opening of C O V E N A N T is.

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It’s important to consider the first three films as attempts to deny Ripley a satisfying sexual experience while cooped up in space.

Sure hope he still plans on doing Alien³.

He did!

https://tw.news.yahoo.com/雅虎科技新聞-來自翡翠星系的異形系列玉璽-090739264.html

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But most importantly…

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These were not terribly good!

I mean except the kids’ play.

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I remember him musing about this, kind of wild it’s happening.

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