Movie Defense Force: Alien 3

[Hiroshi Mishima]

I stuck this in the Facebook comments a while back when the video went up, but I realized I should probably start sticking my comments here more often. So yeah...

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You know.. I love the Jimquisition and I'm always using it as an example of someone saying things I've been wanting to say but in a better, more intelligent way, cause you have such a way with words and it is certainly nice to see someone summing up things I want to say so easily....but I don't agree with this at all.

I -liked- the happy end for Newt, Hicks and Ripey in Aliens. Considering all the hell she'd been through I wanted to see her finally get away and move on with her life, let someone else carry the torch, as it were. Perhaps because most horror films have horrible or stupid endings, I felt Aliens was superior for not only ending on a positive note but making it look like the survivors had something to look forwards to: a new life together.

Alien 3 pisses all over that, but that isn't the only reason I didn't care for it. The alien had none of the presence or fear that the previous ones had - probably because of the crappy CGI - and when the movie came out the editing made sure that a number of scenes made absolutely no sense. No, you can't defend it by saying, "Oh, but the Director's Cut/Special Edition shows how it was supposed to be!" because by then it's too late. That's like in Star Trek: Generations where the writers explain away some of the plot holes in their commentary - it doesn't help the movie cause it wasn't IN it.

I thought the cult angle felt like a weak B Plot, tacked on to give maybe one person a little more development which ultimately came down to "I'm a murderer and rapist, and damn proud of how things work around here, so don't rock the boat, *****." It probably didn't help that it was playing onto stereotypes by having it be the only black man with a significant role.

As for the guy pouring his backstory out to Ripley? Kinda felt like padding, especially since he's up and killed off making me wonder why we bothered getting to know him, anyways. I know that's probably pretty shallow and I admit that until he is killed you don't have any reason to think he's not important. I think it might've been better if he'd died in a different way besides, "Whelp, told you about myself, time to die and set up another scare scene."

I do want to say that I loved the Alien figures and how they had different animal types and the Flying Alien Queen and so forth. It's just a shame that all those things never made it into an actual movie where they might've been awesome to see on screen - not that they would've done it without CGI, making the whole effect look crap, sadly. Really, the scene at the end where Ripley accepts her "fate" and casts herself into the fire felt a lot like Alien as a franchise casting itself into the abyss. Probably why it took so damned long for us to get another film; they had to wait until the bad memory faded from enough peoples minds and the series got popular again.

As an aside, I'd really like to see your Freddy vs Jason review. Although I thought the movie was ridiculously laughable and impossible to take seriously, I didn't actually think it was bad.. just that it failed at being scary and more than once I found myself shouting at the characters for being utterly stupid.

 

[Indecipherable]

I'd love to see Jim defend something a little less, well, defensible. Frankly I quite liked Alien 3 from all those years ago that I watched it.

 

[JudgeGame]

Alien 3 may not be the best of the series, but its certainly not a bad movie by any means.

also wtf is podtoid.

It's just the best podcast ever. Currently hosted by Jim Sterling with Jonathan Holmes and Conrad Zimmerman.

adding it to my list of now total 2 podcasts to listen to then. how can i deny the effect of this b are blank avatar stare.....

Other good videogame podcasts are Jonathan Holmes's "Sup' Holmes", the Insert Credit Podcast and the Oh No Videogames! Podcast. They all contain interesting opinions, personality and humour.

 

[Strazdas]

Alien 3 may not be the best of the series, but its certainly not a bad movie by any means.

also wtf is podtoid.

It's just the best podcast ever. Currently hosted by Jim Sterling with Jonathan Holmes and Conrad Zimmerman.

adding it to my list of now total 2 podcasts to listen to then. how can i deny the effect of this b are blank avatar stare.....

Other good videogame podcasts are Jonathan Holmes's "Sup' Holmes", the Insert Credit Podcast and the Oh No Videogames! Podcast. They all contain interesting opinions, personality and humour.

i never liekd podcasts as a concept, for me it was video or text. but then i discovered i can run escapist podcast while im playing strategy games. miracles happen.

 

[JoJo]

My suggestion for future episodes...

Let MovieBob do it.

The end.

Let's not. Bob's videos can be interesting but he has some very specific and unusual movie tastes as shown by his recent best and worst of 2012 videos which wouldn't fit this sort of series.

OT: Good points, though I still have a couple of issues with Alien 3 which a number of people have already brought up, that:

1) There's little reason to care about a lot of violent criminals who look similar, reducing the tension

2) Newts and Hicks death was very quickly and cheaply done without any build-up.

 

[JudgeGame]

Alien 3 may not be the best of the series, but its certainly not a bad movie by any means.

also wtf is podtoid.

It's just the best podcast ever. Currently hosted by Jim Sterling with Jonathan Holmes and Conrad Zimmerman.

adding it to my list of now total 2 podcasts to listen to then. how can i deny the effect of this b are blank avatar stare.....

Other good videogame podcasts are Jonathan Holmes's "Sup' Holmes", the Insert Credit Podcast and the Oh No Videogames! Podcast. They all contain interesting opinions, personality and humour.

i never liekd podcasts as a concept, for me it was video or text. but then i discovered i can run escapist podcast while im playing strategy games. miracles happen.

Ideally, podcasts are best for things like long, boring drives and monotonous work. It's for when you have your eyes busy but the rest of your brain is pretty idle.

 

[Strazdas]

Alien 3 may not be the best of the series, but its certainly not a bad movie by any means.

also wtf is podtoid.

It's just the best podcast ever. Currently hosted by Jim Sterling with Jonathan Holmes and Conrad Zimmerman.

adding it to my list of now total 2 podcasts to listen to then. how can i deny the effect of this b are blank avatar stare.....

Other good videogame podcasts are Jonathan Holmes's "Sup' Holmes", the Insert Credit Podcast and the Oh No Videogames! Podcast. They all contain interesting opinions, personality and humour.

i never liekd podcasts as a concept, for me it was video or text. but then i discovered i can run escapist podcast while im playing strategy games. miracles happen.

Ideally, podcasts are best for things like long, boring drives and monotonous work. It's for when you have your eyes busy but the rest of your brain is pretty idle.

Thats what audiobooks are for. I love audiobooks. Then again, i guess, podcast isnt that far from an audiobook. ill try checking the ones you suggested btu no promises
also while on the talk of podcasts, i been listening to escapist podcast, but being obsessive i started from the start (yes the very start) and the first one had yathzee in it but later its just escapist staff. i was wondering dies yathzee come back in the later podcasts?

 

[abort_user]

cant agree more. ive always said this was the best Alien movie.

 

[MrBaskerville]

I think the extended version is pretty damn god, albeit incredibly flawed. The addition of Golics character arc seemed pretty damned important to the themes of the movie, where he sees the alien as a godlike creature and finally releases it from it´s captivity.

Just a shame that it couldn´t have been completed properly, even the extended cut is filled with bad CG, poor editing and faulty sound design (some of the audio is obviously from the set, with background static and everything).

 

[Fwee]

I saw Alien 3 in the theater when it premiered and enjoyed it thoroughly. I actually wasn't much of a fan of the series before that time, and this one pulled me in. Sure there were the space marines from the previous entry, but that was the biggest attraction of the second movie. Take them out of it and you have Scared People For Two Hours. All of a sudden I turn around and everyone's blasting Alien 3? What about Resurrection? I think everyone's thinking of Alien Resurrection and Alien 3 as the same movie and then saying Alien 3 is the worst in the series.
That, and everyone's looking at it from the "Got it for $3 on DVD at CostCo" perspective and calling it out for bad special effects. LOOK at the movies that came out around the same time and tell me how many were far superior with their CG.
Alien VS Predator series doesn't enter into it, because that's just fan-service films for fun. Like Abbott and Costello Milk the Wolfman.

 

[Jeyl]

And I'm back to talk about the opening of the film. You know, the part which the creative team retconned every single piece of detail in order to justify how we go from point a to point b. But before I get into that, I want to talk about how ALIENS treated the opening.

Aliens started out pretty much where we left off, with Ripley in her shuttle. If you pay close attention, the amount of detail into recreating the shuttle's interior is spot on. Even when the salvage team is cutting through the door, you can see the harpoon gun still jammed in the airlock. This is why I like James Cameron. He has a great attention to detail, and he likes to honor previous details that have come before it.

Alien3's opening does the exact opposite.

1. Cryo Tubes. Remember how the Sulaco's cryo tubes had a vertical shape to them that set it apart from the Nostromo's cryo tubes? For some reason the cryo tubes now look exactly like they did on the Nostromo, complete with a warm color to it. Where did this warm color come from? Aliens depicted the Sulaco's interior as having a blue metallic color. Why couldn't they get the color right?

2. The egg. Where did this egg come from? Why is it on the ceiling? Why is it in an area that the Queen was clearly not in? Did the Queen literally take two seconds out of her time chasing Newt to find some corner of the ship, stand on her head, and lay an egg on the corner of the ceiling.... WITHOUT AN EGG SACK? And why did the egg open? Doesn't an egg need to react to something in close proximity in order for the facehugger to catch it's prey? How did this egg know when to let the face hugger out when everyone on board the Sulaco is frozen? If the egg knew there were crew members onboard, why didn't the eggs in the first movie open up when Dallas, Kane and Lambert entered the Derelict? Even if an egg was somehow laid in the Sulaco, it should have been dormant until it detected a host. That's not what it did here.

3. The Facehugger. How did the facehugger know where to find our characters even though they were in cryo? Doesn't the cryo tubes seal the individual up and freeze them like we saw in ALIENS before the crew woke up? How come it can successfully crack it's way into a cryo tube that's supposed to be freezing and implant an embryo into a frozen person? At least in the first alien movie, the Facehugger reacted to whatever was looking into the egg and in ALIENS when Ripley and Newt tried to escape the nest.

4. Fire. Why does the Sulaco eject the sleeping crew from the Sulaco? It already puts them into a different area away from the fire and seals them inside. Why not just wake the crew up so they can do what they can inside the EEV to put out the fire, or use the EEV while awake incase all attempts fail and the Sulaco is compromised? How come the Sulaco itself doesn't do something to stop the fire like creating a vacuum to deplete all the air, aor ctivate the ship's onboard foam/sprinkler system. Why does one fire in one place on a huge ship mean that all personnel have to be evacuated and jettisoned without their knowledge? The Sulaco is a marine ship that carries a whole arsenal of weapons, vehicles, nukes and other classified information. Does it really make sense to just outright abandon it because of a fire? Why does the Sulaco jettison the EEV onto a planet that's clearly designated as a prison? Why is the Sulaco's name in white when it was black in Aliens?

5. EEV. How exactly is the EEV an effective escape vehicle for marines when it doesn't contain any weapons, medical supplies, communication devices, or food? Why does the EEV have no practical method of safely landing on a planet? Were parachutes too expensive? Even when landing in the ocean, NASA's spaceships had to have parachutes. What would have happened if the EEV crashed on land? It was barely a mile away from shore.

Even when seeing this movie as a seven year old, I knew that this movie violated too much just to justify the alien's presence.

 

[thergonomic]

Why no Movie Defence Force today?

 

[wolf thing]

good points well made jim, i re watch alien 3 when the blu rays came out and i liked it alot more then i rememberd. i agree with alot of your point but i feel writting hicks and neut out was lazy and did not move the plot forward, i felt it regressed it. it brought riply back to were she was in the beginning of aliens, neuts death is never brought back up (as far as i can remember) after the cutting open scene and she is put back to square one. it seemed they did it not because it was risky but because they wonted to use the same formula as aliens, women alone with ruffnecks.

 

[keserak]

I wanted to come back in and mention the horrible plot holes and technical wrongs that destroy immersion in Alien 3 -- and I find that Jeyl already mentioned many of them. It simply doesn't work as a sequel to Aliens. The more you remember about Aliens, the worse Alien 3 runs, until you have an urge to stop the movie and make sure you saw what you just saw. I don't know what you call the opposite of immersion, but that's it.

There's still meat on the bone, though, when it comes to plot hole. Let's not forget that Alien 3 is the first movie of the franchise to committ the Great Sin of Xenomorph Portrayal, one repeated in all video games and subsequent films to come:

Xenomorphs that pointlessly kill.

Instead of capture and impregnation/conversion -- the point of the "rape monster" motif -- Alien 3 and its worthless spawn present xenomorphs that just bite you for no good reason. The entire point is missed. Contrary to Jim's claim that Alien 3 expanded the biological depth of the xenomorphs, the movie instead narrowed it, unmooring the creature from its base concept and making it an utterly generic boogeyman, a tedious, screeching pit bull with a penchant for crawling. This is one of the reasons the Aliens video games have been so terrible (only one of the reasons. . .). The Jaguar version of AvP is the only one that presents the ability to convert victims to xenomorphs (a properly-executed melee combo turns the victim into an egg which is then used as an extra life for the PC: not terribly elegant, but it gets the theme across). Even the superior, original AvP for the PC doesn't feature this concept. AvP 2 gave us "lifecycle" mode, where xenomorph players start as eggs, move around as nymphs (facehuggers) and have to find a victim to infect. . . during a deathmatch. It's gimmicky and cumbersome and unbalnced, as you might expect. There's no concept in any of these games of the xenomorphs working together to reproduce.

And we have Alien 3 in part to thank for that.

 

[Zenn3k]

While Alien 3 was a good movie, it simply was not what anyone really wanted at the time. Coming off Aliens, we wanted more of the same really, instead we got something completely out of left field. Personally, I think it would have been better to just have made it a space prison, instead of crashing on some prison planet (mostly since it never matters in the plot), that would have at least allowed for a "out the airlock" kill scene, as is iconic to the series

However, Alien 3 is NOT the best movie in the series. Thats a crazy stretch. Its solid for all the reasons you mentioned Jim, but the BEST?! No. Aliens is the best, Aliens will always BE the best (the new series is already bad, not much hope for it) and your personal preference for 3, doesn't make 2 a worse film.

 

[Draxz]

Alien 3

Jim Sterling takes famously "awful" films and sees the good in them.

Watch Video

Just the once or..?

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

Alien 3

Jim Sterling takes famously "awful" films and sees the good in them.

Watch Video

Just the once or..?

Every two weeks.

 

[Rabidkitten]

Alien 3 is actually pretty ok. But Alien 4 and everything after are all unrepentant turds. Taking the time to defend Alien 3 is only setting yourself up to have to defend its incredibly awful younger brother. Good luck, cause I got a brick of text to tell you why every nice thing you have to say about 4 is wrong.

 

[Caffeine_Bombed]

Alien 3

Jim Sterling takes famously "awful" films and sees the good in them.

Watch Video

Just the once or..?

Every two weeks.

That's ok then, I was starting to wonder myself. Rather enjoyed this!

 

[Cyfu]

Really liked the show. Haven't seen aliens 3 in a really long time so I have to watch it again.
anyways, liked the show, want more!