How would you guys make Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection different from the films made IOTL?
AHC: Improve Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection
- Thread starter OldNavy1988
- Start date
Alien 3 was so Narmtastically nihilistic that there was very little to root for. I blame David Fincher for the general tone of dreary hopelessness of a desperate, doomed struggle of humanity's outcasts against a heartless, unfeeling universe and Enemy Within.
Alien Resurrection was a lot of neat ideas thrown at the wall to see if they stuck. It had the guts to go for s/t besides a feel-good kick-ass actioner, a little too much squick for the general movie-going audience, and really didn't give the audience much chance to really see humanity as redeemable.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet had his philosophe hat on exploring the ways humans and Xenomorphs would interact and affect each other, as well as what happens when artificial persons have free will and can exercise their conscience, as well as the eternal bastardy of the Weyland-Yutani corporation willing to keep tempting fate trafficking with the Elder Gods even 200 years later.
Just seeing the trailer for his immedaitely previous movie, The City of Lost Children tells you the guy's more interested in the appearance and sense of violation of innocence than telling a standard Hollywood hero's journey.
So for the tl;dr crowd-- By the time Jeunet came to bat, the Alien franchise was tired and really ISO a purpose. It explored what happened on a freighter when they brought a xeno aboard, a doomed colony terraforming where the xenos took over the Engineers' ship, and a prison colony fighting the Enemy Within as well as the Terror from Beyond Space.
Jeunet said WTF, let's play with this scenario of humanity out among the stars but not morally evolving as fast as our tech extended our reach.
For Alien3 to be better, well some reason to be hopeful, say Hicks and Newt also surviving might be a start.
Different script, different director, therefore totally different story.
As to Alien Resurrection being "better", YMMDV. What do you want?
More action? Clearer ending? Less WTF?
Alien Resurrection was a lot of neat ideas thrown at the wall to see if they stuck. It had the guts to go for s/t besides a feel-good kick-ass actioner, a little too much squick for the general movie-going audience, and really didn't give the audience much chance to really see humanity as redeemable.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet had his philosophe hat on exploring the ways humans and Xenomorphs would interact and affect each other, as well as what happens when artificial persons have free will and can exercise their conscience, as well as the eternal bastardy of the Weyland-Yutani corporation willing to keep tempting fate trafficking with the Elder Gods even 200 years later.
Just seeing the trailer for his immedaitely previous movie, The City of Lost Children tells you the guy's more interested in the appearance and sense of violation of innocence than telling a standard Hollywood hero's journey.
So for the tl;dr crowd-- By the time Jeunet came to bat, the Alien franchise was tired and really ISO a purpose. It explored what happened on a freighter when they brought a xeno aboard, a doomed colony terraforming where the xenos took over the Engineers' ship, and a prison colony fighting the Enemy Within as well as the Terror from Beyond Space.
Jeunet said WTF, let's play with this scenario of humanity out among the stars but not morally evolving as fast as our tech extended our reach.
For Alien3 to be better, well some reason to be hopeful, say Hicks and Newt also surviving might be a start.
Different script, different director, therefore totally different story.
As to Alien Resurrection being "better", YMMDV. What do you want?
More action? Clearer ending? Less WTF?
With Resurrection, I wanted less Winona Ryder. Maybe another upgraded Bishop android.
Dan Reilly The Great
Banned
Alien and Aliens were successful for a number of reasons. First among those was the fact that James Cameron and Ridley Scott took familiar elements and put them into fantastical settings (for Alien it was truckers in a haunted house in space, and for Aliens it was the Vietnam War in space with a few horror elements thrown in for good measure). Combine that with the fact that each of them were effectively one basic concept from the beginning until principal photography, which allowed the art direction to really make the whole thing feel like a real world.
The Nostromo felt like it was really a cargo ship sent on long hauls through space with the current trip being merely the latest of many just like it, and the crew felt like they were right at home driving it wherever their employers told them to go. Hadley's Hope felt like it had been a fully inhabited place before shit got nasty when the aliens showed up, the Marines felt like real people with real reactions, we all had at least one which we could identify with or which we could see as realistic people.
Likewise, the character dynamics worked. We were given a stretch where the crew of the Nostromo interacted with each other much like many of us would react with our own co-workers and we all would gripe about the assholes up the corporate chain of command making our jobs harder, etc. The Marines were very much like the characters out of a war film, being rowdy and rough around the edges. It was clear that they had been on many deployments, and the dynamic between Ripley and Newt felt touching and genuine. You really wanted to root for these characters, because they felt real and deep down we liked them.
Additionally, there was enough continuity between the two films to make them feel like they really went together. James Cameron said himself that he wanted to make the film his own, but he also wanted to establish some visual continuity between Ridley Scott's film and his so as to keep a connection between the two.
Unfortunately, all of that went out of the window for Alien 3 and Resurrection. The executive meddling is well known, but I think Fincher deserves at least some blame for the failure. Rather than even bothering with any kind of visual continuity, he decided to just "Fincherise" the shit out of the whole damn thing. I mean it looked so much like Se7en that it was ridiculous. The audience was expecting to see something that felt like it went with the other two films(not without some justification) and from the very first frame they were forcefully disposed of such notions. It didn't feel like an Alien movie, it felt like something else entirely that just happened to have a xenomorph in it. This is effectively like dumping icewater down the viewer's shirt, it's jarring and uncomfortable.
And then just before the audience even has a chance to get over that jarring effect, they are kicked in the collective gut when it is shown that both Hicks and Newt have been killed, off screen, rather unceremoniously.
Now, this can be made up for later on, but by this point the film has lost so much ground that it would have to be a hell of an awesome film to do so.
It wasn't.
By the time the audience has been able to process the jarring change in tone, and the gut punch of killing off beloved characters, they may have noticed that the setting does not feel as complete as the previous installments. The fact that the concept changed drastically during script writing is the main culprit, effectively turning it into some kind of patchwork of different settings. The "monastery in space" theme is very apparent in both the setting and the characterizations. Which likewise fails to make any of the characters but Ripley feel as identifiable as any of the other characters so far in the entire franchise. This was a real shame because Alien 3 probably had the single most talented roster out of the entire series.
Worse; while Alien and Aliens were grim, they still felt "comfortable" in a way. You could put yourself in this setting and have it not seem that different from our world. Alien 3 on the other hand was just nihilistic and depressing. You kind of felt uncomfortable just watching it, and the ending only made this worse. There was a certain fun to the first two films that just wasn't there for the third one. You could pop either one or both of them into your DVD player as part of a fun horror and sci-fi marathon with some friends on a rainy saturday, knocking back drinks and reciting the memorable lines all day long. Alien 3 just doesn't fit that role.
By the time you got to Alien: Resurrection things were a real mess. The fact that Ripley freaking died at the end of the last film certainly left the fans scratching their heads as to how they were going to keep going. The fact that Joss Whedon wrote it didn't help. The Alien franchise was never the kind of IP to really mesh with his style of writing, and it showed. Wise-cracking badasses and countless attempts to subvert half the horror tropes out there were even more jarring changes than the ones introduced in the third film. It wasn't helped by the fact that they were obviously trying to rip off the visual look and feel of the(until then) least successful installment rather than one of the two more successful ones.
Also, I have no idea why anyone would have picked Jeunet. Almost as if the producers decided that picking an artsy avant-garde style film maker for a blockbuster action film worked so well for Dune why not try it here
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Again, the setting is bleak and depressing, possibly even more oppressive than before, and is made even more uncomfortable by throwing far more blood and guts at the camera than in all of the preceding films combined, even though gore was never one of the major draws of the franchise and gross-out horror had fallen out of popularity in the early nineties. None of the characters are identifiable now, and even Ripley has been turned into a psychotic asshole. Winona Ryder's Call was nice enough, but really wasn't strong enough to hold up the film and she starts the movie off by trying to kill the franchise protagonist.
It was like the producers of Resurrection took all of the lessons that should have been learned from Alien 3 and drew the exact opposite conclusions that common sense would dictate. Almost as if they were freaking trying to make a worse film than the third one. This was made even more perplexing with AVP:R which effectively made the same exact mystakes that Resurrection did, only worse, and likewise failed to learn any lessons from the first AVP film.
In short: the third and fourth films failed because the directors and studios decided that the only reason why people bothered to watch Alien movies was because of the xenomorphs, and not because of the well developed setting, relatable characters, good dialogue/interactions, and interesting visual styles.
What you need is for the people making those films to realize that much like the zombies in Romero's films, the xenomorphs weren't just monsters, they were almost a force of nature that drove the plot and motivated the character interactions.
I think the best course of action would have been to get a single concept for the third film that is stuck to the whole way and allows it to be properly fleshed out. Have the William Gibson version of the script be the one that is greenlit, but keep the already established facts of the xenomorph life cycle. The cold war analogy would work in the late eighties, and the idea of having the "USSR" analogue join forces with the capitalist earth for the fourth film would have been perfectly timed with the fall of the Soviet Union. Either have Ridley Scott find a way to direct it as was originally intended, or get somebody who knows what they are doing(John Carpenter would be a great choice IMO).
The Nostromo felt like it was really a cargo ship sent on long hauls through space with the current trip being merely the latest of many just like it, and the crew felt like they were right at home driving it wherever their employers told them to go. Hadley's Hope felt like it had been a fully inhabited place before shit got nasty when the aliens showed up, the Marines felt like real people with real reactions, we all had at least one which we could identify with or which we could see as realistic people.
Likewise, the character dynamics worked. We were given a stretch where the crew of the Nostromo interacted with each other much like many of us would react with our own co-workers and we all would gripe about the assholes up the corporate chain of command making our jobs harder, etc. The Marines were very much like the characters out of a war film, being rowdy and rough around the edges. It was clear that they had been on many deployments, and the dynamic between Ripley and Newt felt touching and genuine. You really wanted to root for these characters, because they felt real and deep down we liked them.
Additionally, there was enough continuity between the two films to make them feel like they really went together. James Cameron said himself that he wanted to make the film his own, but he also wanted to establish some visual continuity between Ridley Scott's film and his so as to keep a connection between the two.
Unfortunately, all of that went out of the window for Alien 3 and Resurrection. The executive meddling is well known, but I think Fincher deserves at least some blame for the failure. Rather than even bothering with any kind of visual continuity, he decided to just "Fincherise" the shit out of the whole damn thing. I mean it looked so much like Se7en that it was ridiculous. The audience was expecting to see something that felt like it went with the other two films(not without some justification) and from the very first frame they were forcefully disposed of such notions. It didn't feel like an Alien movie, it felt like something else entirely that just happened to have a xenomorph in it. This is effectively like dumping icewater down the viewer's shirt, it's jarring and uncomfortable.
And then just before the audience even has a chance to get over that jarring effect, they are kicked in the collective gut when it is shown that both Hicks and Newt have been killed, off screen, rather unceremoniously.
Now, this can be made up for later on, but by this point the film has lost so much ground that it would have to be a hell of an awesome film to do so.
It wasn't.
By the time the audience has been able to process the jarring change in tone, and the gut punch of killing off beloved characters, they may have noticed that the setting does not feel as complete as the previous installments. The fact that the concept changed drastically during script writing is the main culprit, effectively turning it into some kind of patchwork of different settings. The "monastery in space" theme is very apparent in both the setting and the characterizations. Which likewise fails to make any of the characters but Ripley feel as identifiable as any of the other characters so far in the entire franchise. This was a real shame because Alien 3 probably had the single most talented roster out of the entire series.
Worse; while Alien and Aliens were grim, they still felt "comfortable" in a way. You could put yourself in this setting and have it not seem that different from our world. Alien 3 on the other hand was just nihilistic and depressing. You kind of felt uncomfortable just watching it, and the ending only made this worse. There was a certain fun to the first two films that just wasn't there for the third one. You could pop either one or both of them into your DVD player as part of a fun horror and sci-fi marathon with some friends on a rainy saturday, knocking back drinks and reciting the memorable lines all day long. Alien 3 just doesn't fit that role.
By the time you got to Alien: Resurrection things were a real mess. The fact that Ripley freaking died at the end of the last film certainly left the fans scratching their heads as to how they were going to keep going. The fact that Joss Whedon wrote it didn't help. The Alien franchise was never the kind of IP to really mesh with his style of writing, and it showed. Wise-cracking badasses and countless attempts to subvert half the horror tropes out there were even more jarring changes than the ones introduced in the third film. It wasn't helped by the fact that they were obviously trying to rip off the visual look and feel of the(until then) least successful installment rather than one of the two more successful ones.
Also, I have no idea why anyone would have picked Jeunet. Almost as if the producers decided that picking an artsy avant-garde style film maker for a blockbuster action film worked so well for Dune why not try it here
.Again, the setting is bleak and depressing, possibly even more oppressive than before, and is made even more uncomfortable by throwing far more blood and guts at the camera than in all of the preceding films combined, even though gore was never one of the major draws of the franchise and gross-out horror had fallen out of popularity in the early nineties. None of the characters are identifiable now, and even Ripley has been turned into a psychotic asshole. Winona Ryder's Call was nice enough, but really wasn't strong enough to hold up the film and she starts the movie off by trying to kill the franchise protagonist.
It was like the producers of Resurrection took all of the lessons that should have been learned from Alien 3 and drew the exact opposite conclusions that common sense would dictate. Almost as if they were freaking trying to make a worse film than the third one. This was made even more perplexing with AVP:R which effectively made the same exact mystakes that Resurrection did, only worse, and likewise failed to learn any lessons from the first AVP film.
In short: the third and fourth films failed because the directors and studios decided that the only reason why people bothered to watch Alien movies was because of the xenomorphs, and not because of the well developed setting, relatable characters, good dialogue/interactions, and interesting visual styles.
What you need is for the people making those films to realize that much like the zombies in Romero's films, the xenomorphs weren't just monsters, they were almost a force of nature that drove the plot and motivated the character interactions.
I think the best course of action would have been to get a single concept for the third film that is stuck to the whole way and allows it to be properly fleshed out. Have the William Gibson version of the script be the one that is greenlit, but keep the already established facts of the xenomorph life cycle. The cold war analogy would work in the late eighties, and the idea of having the "USSR" analogue join forces with the capitalist earth for the fourth film would have been perfectly timed with the fall of the Soviet Union. Either have Ridley Scott find a way to direct it as was originally intended, or get somebody who knows what they are doing(John Carpenter would be a great choice IMO).
Fincher came to Alien 3 very late in production and had little input on the final story that was used, beyond re-staging a few scenes to take place in sets that had already been constructed. Fox refused permission to shoot certain scenes that he wanted, and didn't even allow him in the editing room during post.
There were, if I recall, four or five previous distinct versions of the story - William Gibson wrote a draft that had Hicks and Bishop but no Ripley, as Sigourney Weaver did not plan to come back. By the time Fincher came to the project the Weaver had changed her mind, and the studio had settled on a script that was a mishmash of previous elements, and which excluded Hicks, Newt, and Bishop.
Alien 3 is one of the most legendarily fucked productions in Hollywood history - it's hard to blame one guy for everything that went wrong, least of all a director who was thrown into the driver's seat after the car was already speeding out of control.