Maybe at the time he realized more than you think, considering the entire subplot of Ripley's daughter was cut from the film...revisionist recuts after the fact notwithstanding.
Alien 5: An Open Message About Newt, Hicks, and Bishop
- Thread starter JWPlatt
- Start date
Depending on how one spins it, you may have just re-iterated my point back to me. Their deaths were done because *the plot needed them to be dead* from the outset. It wasn't an organic continuation of the themes and character arcs of the last film.
It was a literal hack job to connect the prison-monk story they wanted to tell to where the previous one left off. Literally everything that happened prior to Ripley waking up again was a lazy contrivance: -
The egg that *somehow* got onboard the Sulaco without anyone noticing. The tiny electrical fire that the ship's automated systems couldn't deal with (hint: you're in a vacuum and all the passengers are in sealed tubes with life-support.) The evacuation pod that's lethal to 66% of it's occupants. The fact that a ship that's on an interstellar journey would just *happen* to pass by some random inhabited world in low orbit (at nothing close to the relativistic speeds they should ave been going at) just when all this happened.
It's all rather unsatisfying because it's lazy writing, some very fuzzy logic and a seemingly complete lack of understanding of how space travel works. Not "wooden planetoid-space station" bad, but still, pretty ignorant.
Like I said though, I do *like* the body of the film (mostly thanks to a lot of strong character performances, great work by the set builders, cinematographer and Fincher thanklessly directing his arse off), but I have to acknowledge that the way they it began the movie was clumsy to say the least and I totally understand why some people can't get past that.
They didn't have any character arcs TO continue in the first place. And what "themes"?
It was a Superfacehugger, so odds are the Queen had it in her when she was brought onboard.
The fire was electrical, so it damaged the systems running the pods. They couldn't put it out with sprinklers because you can't do that with electrical fires, and they couldn't blow the air out without the people in the pods suffocating because they were waking up (because of the damaged circuitry!).
The EEV isn't meant for planet-fall, it's a lifeboat for floating in space. But the fire raging out of control meant those systems were damaged too and the EEV ejection misfired.
The EEV then homed in on the Weyland-Yutani Beacon the Comm systems the Prison had. It wasn't random luck it went there.
Mostly because the audience Aliens attracted don't have the stomach for things like kids dying.
Making up a new type of creature that "was there the whole time but nobody saw it" is about as contrived as you can get.
Also contrived.
You know, I should just put up the dictionary definition of "contrived" here, because at this point you're basically making my argument for me.
People who like movies about swarms of vicious monsters that killed 60-70 families, including children don't like films where children get killed? You logic is not like our Earth logic.
A few months ago they release e-book versions of all four Alien novelizations. Are they worth reading?
I've been thinking about rewatching the first two, watching the second two for the first times, and maybe checking out some of the comics, and I was wondering if I should add the novelizations to that plan?
I've been thinking about rewatching the first two, watching the second two for the first times, and maybe checking out some of the comics, and I was wondering if I should add the novelizations to that plan?
Well stated.
People just don't like contrivances which, I'll say redundantly, don't make sense. I've called it 'rationalization' on behalf of the apologists, but 'contrivance' is a great term because it's less personal and aims squarely at the film's poor writing and planning instead of the audience. Not that studio interference was the director's fault. The production problems testify to the issues in the film and it shows. And I know that all the credit given to the writers with Anwar's rationalizations is really a magical assignment of intelligence where none was planned or present.
Here's a quote from David Fincher about the kind of intelligent thought Fox expected from the production:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=11236507David Fincher said:
Reverend's posts here are impressive to me because s/he can still make fair criticisms despite liking the overall film. That's probably more than I've done and why I trust Reverend's posts on this topic far more than anyone who denies the faults.
Last edited:
Seriously. These movies were never that deep, guys.
It's no more contrived than the Queen Alien.
How, exactly? Damage to the cryo-chambers probably would wake people up, meaning you couldn't just blow air out without killing them.
Is it so hard to believe that a damaged EEV would home in on the nearest recognizable beacon? Sounds pretty reasonable. More reasonable than no one finding the Derelict in all those years even though the planetoid was only 1200KM in diameter.
Those deaths were mainly off-screen, and we saw no kids dying on-screen. That makes all the difference to moviegoers.
That's why everyone cheered for Ripley to go back into the Hive to get Newt when before no one cared that she abandoned the Marines earlier. Because a kid dying on-screen is a no-no compared to adults getting killed or abandoned.
OK, I may actually have to put up the definition of "contrived" after all since you don't seem to know what it means.
A contrivance is when something is made up purely to serve the plot and not a natural outgrowth of the story, characters and situations already established. To give an example: just about everything that happens in 'Star Trek Nemesis' is pure contrivance. Randomly detecting B-4 on some distant world from Earth orbit? Using a buggy to go pick the bits up? Getting into a fight with nameless goons for no good reason? All of these are plot contrivances because they have nothing to do with anything that's going on other than where the writer wants the plot to go.
So no, the Queen wasn't a contrivance, it was a natural outgrowth of the Beast's concept from the first movie, answering the obvious question: "where did all those eggs come from?"
Just saying "it's because it's a superfacehugger" isn't a satisfactory answer in 'Alien 3' because 1) no such distinction is established in any cut of the movie I've seen. 2) we are meant to simply accept that an egg got onboard *somehow* without explanation despite the face queen clearly wasn't shown to be carrying one while chasing Ripley and having severed itself from the ovipositor, which is rather essential to egg laying by sheer definition.
There's an egg there *because the plot needs one to be there* and no other reason. That makes it contrived and it's amateurish, lazy writing to boot.
As for the derelict: the only way the Nostromo crew found it at all was because of it's beacon, which in the intervening decades ceased to function. Remember even Newt's family who had an exact set of co-ordinates to go by didn't see the thing until they were right on top of it. Granted, the state of the beacon is not directly addressed in the second movie, but in the special edition it's clear the ship has been damaged by nearby lava flows, so it's consistent. As is the company's incredulity at Ripley's story because of course, they have people on the planet already who would have detected the beacon on day one. We know Ripley was telling the truth, therefore the beacon must have stopped transmitting before the colonists arrived. QED.
Newt was also killed off-screen, so your logic simply doesn't track.
Honestly I'm not sure why you're reaching so much to defend this movie's script. It's well documented just how much of a confused mess the development process was and the manuscript itself was a rushed mish-mash of several *radically* different concepts pulled from previous drafts, none of which were particularly good to begin with. The whole thing was stitched together on the fly by a couple of the producers in a desperate attempt to get *something* out the door. Trust me, plot contrivances are the least of it's problems and I don't think the FOUR people credited with writing the thing would put up as much effort in it's defence.
Last edited:
The question was answered in the deleted scene from the first film. Cameron ignored that to do his own thing (he knew about the deleted scene).
And the Superfacehugger answers the further question of "Well, where does the Queen come from?"
You think it needed that eggsac to make eggs? It didn't. The actual egg creation is within it's ARMORED and PROTECTED body while the sac is some easily detachable thing that just makes the process easier. If the sac was so important it wouldn't have been so easy to destroy and so easy to rip off.
Just like there's a colony on LV-426 because the plot needed there to be plenty of hosts to infest the place byt he time Ripley got back?
So it broadcasts non-stop for millions of years and just happens to stop in the mere 50 years between Alien and Aliens? Pretty convenient.
Oh, how convenient that just had to happen in the mere 50 years between films but not in the millions of years it was broadcasting before.
We see her dead body, for one thing.
And Jabba the Hutt was an over weight human in a Star Wars deleted scene. Its a deleted scene they don't really mean that much or else they would have been in the film.
Honestly seeing as that term was nowhere in the film it sounds like some bullshit someone made up.
All four are excellent, though Alan Dean Foster was working from the shooting script on 1 (hence quite a bit different from the finished film, esp. dialogue) and 2. His novelization of 3 is essentially the Assembly Cut, and he didn't even bother trying to plug that film's gaping plot holes. Ann Crispin (RIP) did a spectacular salvage job on 4.
Believe it or not, there's a novelization of Prometheus out there too - but only in Japan (and only in Japanese).
The deleted scene from the first film did explain a few important unanswered questions (just what happened to Brett and Dallas) and told us enough about the alien lifecycle to make it that much more terrifying (the eggs come from their victims).
So just because no one thinks to ask "Wait a minute, if the Queen makes the eggs then where does the Queen itself come from?" that somehow means the Queen can't be given something origin related?
If Bishop never asked "Where do the eggs come from?" would you think the Queen was bullshit someone made up?
The point again is that none of it was in the films as released in theaters and initially seen by audiences and critics, only on home media after the fact. People can hardly be expected to have understood something that the filmmakers didn't show them.
And yet it was cut from the film. Or at least the turning into a egg part was. Which means Cameron was under no obligation to give a flying fuck about it.
It's kind of how deleted scenes work. Otherwise Brett couldn't possibly be an egg after the Alien crushed his skull.
He'll Alien Isolation was practically a love letter to the damned film and they pretty much ignored the whole turned into eggs things when they actually bothered to design a corpse for Brett.
It was cut from the theatrical cut aka the one that most people are likely to have seen. Hell until I bothered to look it up online I thought it was some bullshit some fan made up.
That means making it the defacto explaination comes into similar territory of making someone have to read a tie-in novel because that's where importan plan information was discussed and the film assumes you know this.
I'm firmly with Reverend.
Except I loathe the movie. I went with friends who were equally big fans and we adjourned to the pub immediately afterwards. After picking apart its many flaws and shortcomings, we basically sat there with our heads in our hands muttering 'How could they...'
Except I loathe the movie. I went with friends who were equally big fans and we adjourned to the pub immediately afterwards. After picking apart its many flaws and shortcomings, we basically sat there with our heads in our hands muttering 'How could they...'