QUICKIES: "ALIEN" Marathon

It's a cold, rainy day here and what better way to spend a lazy Sunday than to have a movie marathon of one of the most successful Hollywood franchises ever made? Eight hours & twenty minutes of space ships, aliens, chestbursters, humanoids, alien face-hugging, aliens being sucked into space.... oh and yeah, Sigourney Weaver. Almost 9 hours of sitting/lying/squatting/gymnastics in the couch drained me yes, but seeing Weaver kick alien ass, oh it was so worth it. Three things that kept me watching: Ripley, the humanoids, & the aliens.

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"Sometimes the scariest things come from within"

ALIEN (1979)

Director:  Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator)
Screenplay:  Dan O'Bannon
Running Time:  117 mins.
Starring:  Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Bolaji Badejo (Alien)

"After investigating an S.O.S. signal on a near-by world, the crew of an industrial spacecraft must fight for survival when a highly aggressive bioform is born in the ship and begins hunting them one by one." - IMDb


Words to describe the movie:  subtle terror, claustrophobic, timeless.

Kick-ass Scenes: 

• Ripley questioning the bodiless, milky humanoid head
• The Chest-burster scene. I remember this when I was a kid, and it's still one of the most memorable scenes for me. I loved Veronica Cartwright's genuine expression LOL.

Favorite Characters:  Ripley, Kane (John Hurt), & Jones the Cat.

Weaver Hotness Meter: 3.5/5 - fresh

Alien Hotness Meter:  4.5/5 - kick-ass phallic sliminess. I love the mystery and the physical effects.

My Rating:  4.5/5 - this is now included in my list of sci-fi favorites. The musical score, the set, the cast, the direction - all good.

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"The bitch is back."

ALIENS (1986)

Director:  James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar)

Screenplay:  James Cameron

Running Time:  137 mins.

Starring:  Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton

"The planet from Alien has been colonized, but contact is lost. This time, the rescue team has impressive firepower, but will it be enough?" -IMDb


Words to describe the movie:  action-packed, fast-paced, firepower, testosterone.

Memorable Scenes:  

• Bishop & Hudson's knife-hand scene 
• the ancestor of the "nolan-batmobile"
• the forklift/robot scene with Ripley.
• the scene with Ripley & Newt under the bed..

Favorite Characters:  Ripley, Hudson (Paxton), Bishop (Henriksen)
Weaver Hotness Meter:  2.5/5 - she looks old here
Alien Hotness Meter:  4/5 - more mobile aliens, more exposure.

My Rating:  4/5 -  I liked the finesse of Scott's Alien, but i also enjoyed the roughness & thrill of Cameron's Aliens. 

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"3 times the suspense. 3 times the danger. 3 times the terror"

ALIEN 3 (1992)

Director:  David Fincher

Screenplay:  David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson

Running Time:  114 mins

Starring:  Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Paul McGann, Charles Dance 

"Ripley continues to be stalked by a savage alien, after her escape pod crashes on a prison planet." IMDb

Words to describe the movie:  weird, dark, David Fincher, shaved heads.

Memorable Scenes:  the dog scene :(  .. nothing else.

Favorite Characters:  Ripley
Weaver Hotness Meter:  3.5/5 - Weaver without the weave! And I thought G.I. Jane was cool. Ripley kicks ass.
Alien Hotness Meter:  2.5/5 - too slick & fast, sometimes they look so CGI, i hate it.

My Rating:  3/5 -  I liked the first half, it has the Fincher flavor. I like the eerie atmosphere that makes you feel you're in a totally different world. But then it began to spiral down. It's a big hot mess. Seriously, where are the guns? lol. 

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"Hell gives birth."

ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997)

Director:  Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, A Very Long Engagement)

Screenplay:  Joss Whedon

Running Time:  109 mins

Starring: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dan Hedaya, Ron Perlman, Gary Dourdan

Words to describe the movie:  irrelevant, unnecessary, ambitious, fail.

Memorable scenes:  

• the underwater scene
• Ron Perlman's reaction to the spider (that was really funny)
• the climax scene with Ripley & the alien (I can't believe how much that made me sad... like seeing a dog suffering *sob*)
• the scene with the queen/Ripley/baby alien
• the scene with the scientist taming with the aliens on the other side of the mirror. 

Favorite Characters:  Ripley, the guy in the wheelchair
Weaver Hotness Meter:  4.5/5 - like wine, she ages so well. An extra .5 for that basketball scene. Watch it here HERE, the shot & the cast/crew's reactions.
Alien Hotness Meter:  4/5 - the queen.
My Rating:  2-2.5/5 - The movie & Ripley ended with the third film and it should have stayed that way. Instead, they chose to cheapen it by resurrecting both. This is just a prime example of Hollywood trying to cash in on something good and then ruining it on their way to the bank. It could have been a good film I guess, but the characters looked like caricatures, Winona was so bland she could have been locked in the bathroom and it wouldn't make any difference (or the movie would have been better), and the idea of a Clone-Ripley being the mother to the aliens is just so WTF. Like a line uttered by Winona's character, "This is not right!" and someone answered back, "I've been saying that the whole time". And I so agree. 

This says it all:

Screenwriter Joss Whedon was unhappy with the final product. When asked in 2005 how the film differed from the script he had written, Whedon responded:

"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."

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All in all, I've enjoyed this franchise.

What's your favorite Alien movie & why?

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