My friend’s dad use to say that government employees would rise to the level of their proficiency, and then get promoted one more time, right smack into incompetence.
The same can be said for this movie series.
Gone too far. Pushed their luck. Cashed in. Jumped the shark.
If someone comes to you, asking you to write a movie sequel, and in the last movie the hero was killed off, just say no. Walk away.
Joss Whedon is on the books as having written this screenplay. The original concept was to have a hybrid with Newt, but Weaver signed on and they rewrote it with Ripley.
They needn’t have bothered.
In watching the Star Wars series, I was reminded that a series needs two things: a consistent story, and a consistent story teller. Lucas had come up with the framework for the original storyline, even if he didn’t write them until it was time to make each one. And he stuck around to tell those stories.
This series didn’t have that. It would have benefited from it, I suspect. Alien and Aliens were close enough together that the stories were well integrated, though not entirely nested together. What made the first two movies work was the talent of Ridley Scott and James Cameron, the story tellers.
The irony here is what the story for Alien Resurrection was written by the same two guys who wrote the original movie. But that wasn’t enough. They brought it Joss Whedon to write the screenplay, and it was all downhill from there.
Whedon was not the guy for this movie franchise. What exactly does the alien have in common with Buffy the vampire slayer? Toy Story? Not much.
What you will see in this movie is a set up for the Firefly TV series, with a renegade outlaw making their way through some sort of space western. Whedon just doesn’t get it. He wrote a movie; it’s just not an Alien movie.
He killed the series.
Now, I understand that this movie was received better by the critics than Alien3, and that it made more money. I do not see this as a better movie. No professor at film school is ever going to make his / her students watch this. Joss Whedon fans are not going to seek this thing out. Hopefully, though, folks watching Alien and Aliens will make the time to see Alien3.
The nail in the coffin was selecting Jean-Pierre Jeunet to direct. He was just the wrong guy. He had the wrong background, and if you look to see what he did afterward, it’s pretty apparent that he’s a different kind of movie maker.
Skip this movie. If you do watch it, there are a few little nuggets in it. Like Ding. Well, the actor who plays Ding, he’s the soldier who makes it almost to the end. Ditto for Hellboy – Ron Perlman.
And there’s the scene when the doctor watches the aliens turn on one of their own, and escape. He turns sideways, and offers this look that is just priceless.
Yes, there’s still the whole maternal thing going on. Yes, Ripley completes her mother duties in the ending for Alien3, when she holds the new queen in her arms as she dives into the molten steel. But in this one, it gets all kinds of complicated — a new queen comes from her, the new queen has more kids, and the new queen has a new kind of kid, who sees Ripley as its true mom. And there’s the whole Ripley / Call relationship that is, at best, big sister like and at worse, very maternal. Anakin and the dad get the Star Wars movie, the ladies get aliens. Not sure the ladies really appreciate that.
And for the record, I wanted to like this movie. I wanted it to be good. I’m a fan of Heathers, so I as bummed that this is just not that good of a movie.
With this last movie, I have to ask a couple of questions, for which there are no apparent answers. They all have to do with the alien itself.
There’s a good if not long article about the alien, over at Wikipedia. If you’ve made it all the way through these our posts about the movies, you might find it to be a worthwhile read.
But it doesn’t explain the rapid growth of the aliens after they pop out of the chest. Growth takes energy, and it takes mass. You can’t make more out of nothing — you need something, food maybe. And in a couple of these movies, there just isn’t enough.
Like this movie. There are 12 eggs that are used on the twelve sleep pods that are brought aboard in the early part of the film. Yet rapidly, within a couple of days, the aliens are full size. Ditto for Momma — she is surgically extracted, and poof, she is full size. A girl’s gotta eat, man.
Do they breath? If you punt them out of a space lock, as happened in Alien, they die. But Momma hid aboard the space craft in Aliens — did they have air to breathe then? If air is necessary, is it oxygen? In Alien Resurrection, we see them underwater, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Hmm. What gives?
