Alien5: It's a Bug Hunt (pre-release thread)

[Marsden]

Well despite a few extra wrinkles Weaver still looks pretty darn good, I think, and seems to be back to her thinner self again. So it shouldn't be that hard to pretend this somehow takes place between Aliens and Alien 3, if that's how they decide to do it.

And then at the end at the end of this new movie her, Hicks and Newt can go back to sleep in special, magically rejuvenating cryo-tubes so she wakes up looking young again for Alien 3.

Hey, that's a good way to go, actually because being impregnated with a queen chestburster might be releasing some kind of rejuvinating chemical. I'm sure the things wouldn't want the host dying before the queen is matured enough to come out, so I could buy that. It's more logical than a lot of the poor explanations we get with many situations.

 

[Relayer1]

That still leaves Hicks and Newt thrown away in a pointless manner in 3. What we need is a retcon explaining why that wasn't Hicks and Newt (and Ripley ?) in Alien 3.

Something explaining that it was all a set up / experiment and that's how the eggs and facehuggers got there would be good.

 

[Marsden]

That still leaves Hicks and Newt thrown away in a pointless manner in 3. What we need is a retcon explaining why that wasn't Hicks and Newt (and Ripley ?) in Alien 3.

Something explaining that it was all a set up / experiment and that's how the eggs and facehuggers got there would be good.

Agreed.

I think that Alien 3 taken completely on it's own isn't really that bad, but with the double let down of Hicks and Newt's immediate off screen deaths and the promise that the next Alien movie would have been them getting on Earth somehow really hurts it. And I don't mean the AvP version of them on Earth, a good one continuing on the end of Aliens.

 

[RoJoHen]

Maybe I just didn't have that big of a connection to Newt and Hicks, but I've really never understood the problem people have with their deaths. I rather like how dismal and bleak it is when Ripley wakes up and learns that they've died.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

It's not so much a connection as a fondness for 80s action star Michael Biehn helping to take out a whole colony of xenomorphs only to die in his sleep in the least exciting way possible. It's very similar to the disappointment as to how lackluster Captain Kirk's death was in Generations.

Everyone else (Captain Dallas, Frost, Apone, Hudson, Vasquez, Gorman) go out in a blaze of glory or gets a comeuppance (Burke) or goes out whimpering (Lambert). Hicks doesn't even get a GOOD death scene.

 

[Marsden]

Maybe I just didn't have that big of a connection to Newt and Hicks, but I've really never understood the problem people have with their deaths. I rather like how dismal and bleak it is when Ripley wakes up and learns that they've died.

I understand what you're saying and it's a good point.

I think I would have been ok with it if it somehow happened at the end of Aliens, though. Making it happen off screen at the begining of the next movie is the problem for me, it's like a cheat of the last movie. If the makers of Aliens always intended that result, then that would be the result. But what we have is some other people coming in and radically changing the results of the previous movie. That's the problem.

It's not necessarily the bleakness of life or futility of trying to save them and having it taken away, it's the cheat of some other guys coming in after the fact and doing it, off screen.

Analogies to explain myself.

Instead of Generations, the seventh Star Trek movie starts with a brief note that right after Kirk says "Second star to the right, ...and straight on 'til morning." and then the warp core exploded and the ship was destroyed because of the damage with the battle with Chang's ship and Sulu is narrating this in his log. That wouldn't have bothered anyone. Ton of sarcasm on that last sentence.

Empire Strikes Back starts on Hoth with Chewie trying desperately to fix the Millenium Falcon himself because Han was out on patrol and a Wampa ate him, as explained in the last line of the opening crawl.

It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy.
Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of freedom fighters led by Luke Skywalker have established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Hoth.
The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of space....
And Han Solo was just eaten by a snow monster....

 

[davejames]

That still leaves Hicks and Newt thrown away in a pointless manner in 3. What we need is a retcon explaining why that wasn't Hicks and Newt (and Ripley ?) in Alien 3.

Something explaining that it was all a set up / experiment and that's how the eggs and facehuggers got there would be good.

Either that or.... we could just avoid ever watching Alien 3 again and pretend this new movie is the final one.

 

[Relayer1]

That still leaves Hicks and Newt thrown away in a pointless manner in 3. What we need is a retcon explaining why that wasn't Hicks and Newt (and Ripley ?) in Alien 3.

Something explaining that it was all a set up / experiment and that's how the eggs and facehuggers got there would be good.

Either that or.... we could just avoid ever watching Alien 3 again and pretend this new movie is the final one.

Not good enough. I'd need to not have seen Alien 3 at all, and I've been trying to unsee it for 23 f***ing years...

 

[Marsden]

That still leaves Hicks and Newt thrown away in a pointless manner in 3. What we need is a retcon explaining why that wasn't Hicks and Newt (and Ripley ?) in Alien 3.

Something explaining that it was all a set up / experiment and that's how the eggs and facehuggers got there would be good.

Either that or.... we could just avoid ever watching Alien 3 again and pretend this new movie is the final one.

Not good enough. I'd need to not have seen Alien 3 at all, and I've been trying to unsee it for 23 f***ing years...

Sounds like another case for Shock Treatment

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Maybe I just didn't have that big of a connection to Newt and Hicks, but I've really never understood the problem people have with their deaths. I rather like how dismal and bleak it is when Ripley wakes up and learns that they've died.

I understand what you're saying and it's a good point.

I think I would have been ok with it if it somehow happened at the end of Aliens, though. Making it happen off screen at the beginning of the next movie is the problem for me, it's like a cheat of the last movie. If the makers of Aliens always intended that result, then that would be the result. But what we have is some other people coming in and radically changing the results of the previous movie. That's the problem.

It's not necessarily the bleakness of life or futility of trying to save them and having it taken away, it's the cheat of some other guys coming in after the fact and doing it, off screen.

Aliens & Alien 3 were telling vastly different stories. Killing Hicks & Newt at the end of Aliens would make no sense because that wasn't the story that Aliens was trying to tell. While it wasn't the intentions of the filmmakers that made Aliens, it does fit in with the intentions & themes of the filmmakers that made Alien 3. And if James Cameron doesn't like it, he should have made the movie himself. (I'm sure 20th Century Fox would have let him if he'd wanted to. And I'm sure I would have liked it a lot more than the ultimate end result we got with David Fincher at the helm. Although I suppose it would have been tough to fit it into Cameron's schedule considering how busy he was at the time with The Abyss & Terminator 2.)

I also don't see it as a cheat. It doesn't entirely happen off screen. We see flashes of the escape pod crashing during the opening credits. True, it's not the hero's death that I'm sure Hicks would have preferred. But as a deck clearing measure to isolate Ripley from everyone else that she loved, it's no less legitimate than Ripley's daughter dying of cancer off-screen during the 57 year gap between Alien & Aliens.

(And, slightly OT, at least the deaths of Hicks & Newt were more involved & emotionally engaging than the deaths of nearly half of the cast of X-Men: First Class-- offhandedly tortured, experimented on, & killed during the 11 year gap before X-Men: Days of Future Past.)

 

[MacLeod]

If they didn't want Hicks and Newt in Alien 3, there was an easy way around it other than killing them. Have them ejected in a different lifeboat, it would add another reason for Ripley to want to get off the prison planet.

 

[Beagleman]

But the point is, there is no point to their death. We are talking about a completely bleak nihilistic universe here. There are no real hero-deaths, you normaly don't go out in a blaze of glory, all you can do is try to survive and pehrhaps manage it for a time, then you get up one morning and slip in the shower (or get hit by a bus, or your cryo-stasis malfunctions).

 

[martok2112]

But the point is, there is no point to their death. We are talking about a completely bleak nihilistic universe here. There are no real hero-deaths, you normaly don't go out in a blaze of glory, all you can do is try to survive and pehrhaps manage it for a time, then you get up one morning and slip in the shower (or get hit by a bus, or your cryo-stasis malfunctions).

^THIS!


I personally applauded Alien 3's less than blaze of glory deaths for Newt and Hicks, because where is it written that heroes and good guys/gals cannot die ignominious deaths?

However, Hicks, at least, is still alive, according to the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines, which is considered by Fox to be official canon. His "return from the dead" is explained in an add on campaign for the game.

Newt's death was clearly brought on by a lack of desire by Carrie Henn to return to movie acting.

Another death I applauded, simply because it took balls to write it the way it played out, was in the movie Serenity. (spoilers avoided for those who have not seen it, even after all these years).

 

[Reverend]

I don't mind saying I've always had a soft spot for Alien 3. Yeah, they off-hand way Hicks and Newt were killed off was cheap and lazy. The reality of it is that it was simply an artefact of the film's *very* troubled development and production. The root cause of which (IMO) was poor leadership on the part of the producers.

They never had a clear idea of what Alien 3 should be and so wasted time and money on re-write after re-write until they cobbled together the resultant half-baked ideas into the frankensteinian beast we ended up with. Full credit should go to the cast, crew and Fincher from steering what by rights should have been disastrous train wreck and steering it towards being a legitimately compelling movie.

It's far from perfect, but it could have been sooooo much worse.

 

[Set Harth]

It's very similar to the disappointment as to how lackluster Captain Kirk's death was in Generations.

It's worse! Kirk at least died on screen and in the process helped save the lives of 230 million sentients.

 

[RoJoHen]

Kirk: a character we had come to know and love through 40 years of TV and movies.

Hicks/Newt: Throwaway characters from one movie.

Yep, that's so much worse.

 

[Relayer1]

Either that or.... we could just avoid ever watching Alien 3 again and pretend this new movie is the final one.

Not good enough. I'd need to not have seen Alien 3 at all, and I've been trying to unsee it for 23 f***ing years...

Sounds like another case for Shock Treatment

I've seen The Ramones.

Didn't work...

 

[Doctorwhovian]

Chappie is getting bad reviews (and it already wasn't a good sign because of the review embargo anyway) so I wonder how this will affect Blomkamp's Alien5.

 

[MacLeod]

Not every film a director does gets rave review.

 

[Doctorwhovian]

Yet it could hurt his reputation. Spielberg still gets flack for Lost World, and TPM hurt the reputation of its better sequels