I'm going to re-watch the first four Alien movies

That’s a difficult decision since Alien and Aliens are both great films! I guess if you put a gun to my head, I’d have to pick Aliens.

So the North Bergen High School play linked above made our national tv news last night.

They are, and they are very different films, which is probably why both are classics. The sequel is confidently its own thing, rather than trying to ape the original.

Best Horror movie in the Alien franchise: Alien
Best Action movie in the Alien franchise: Aliens
Best Comedy in the Alien franchise: Alien: Resurrection
Another movie in the Alien Franchise: Alien3

Like.

I’ve give Best Comedy in the Alien franchise to Aliens. I think it’s funnier than Alien: Resurrection by a longshot.

Who would win Best Performance, though?

Best Music?

Hudson: Hey Vasquez have you ever been mistaken for a man?

Vasquez: No. Have you?

I’m glad the Director’s Cut is around for those of you who enjoy, it, but I can’t stand it. The pacing plummets, and I found the backstory about Ripley’s daughter to be utterly unnecessary and maudlin. Also didn’t need the earlier foray w/ Big Wheel kid at the colony. The tone is vastly improved leaving background events to mystery. The Special Edition scenes belong in the Alien Film Universe of Prometheus & Covenant, not Alien & Aliens.

image

I like the scene in which Ripley finds out about her kid, and the additional turret sequence, but the early colony stuff takes away from the gut-punch reveal that they put a colony on the planet.

Mind blown.
Thanks for that write-up, @JoshL.
I saw Alien: Resurrection in the theater when it was first released, and hated it beyond words at the time, but until just now, reading this thread, and specifically your post with examples, I had absolutely no idea that it was supposed to be a comedy. I sat in that theater, and to my best recollection, neither I nor my date nor anyone else was laughing one bit. I distinctly remember wanting to walk out.

But those scenes you describe do sound quite funny.
It’s amazing how my expectations totally ruined it for me. I never gave it a chance.

My god. Do you know what this means? I own the Alien Quadrilogy on DVD, and have owned it for years, but have only watched the first two films (both versions of each) again. I’ve to this day only seen 3 and 4 in the theater (I think).

I now must dig it out to watch Resurrection again.
Which of course means that I must first watch 1, 2 and 3.

My tongue is a little bit in my cheek. I take no responsibility if you still hate it :)

Heh, yeah, I watched Resurrection as a comedy a few years after I hated it in the theater, and it didn’t help, since I didn’t find it funny. :-)

I did however watch Alien 3 again a few years after hating it in the theater, and I did enjoy that one a lot more on second watch, without the weight and expectations setup from the previous movie.

This is an excellent point, @JoshL, and I only realized it upon reading your post (thank you for linking it). Because when we watched the other two movies, my son was constantly asking about character names. “Wait, who is that?” “Which one is that?” “There’s really a guy named Spunkmeyer?”

He identified each one with a trait and attached their name, and thus when they died, it impacted him. “Wait. I thought you said she lived.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I thought you did,” he said, sadly.

Point is your point is well put. Each character meant something to him in those two first movies, which I think makes the movies scarier and compelling. Here…there’s that bald guy and that one and that one and that one and…oh…two Charleses. FWIW, he liked the two Charleses.

I found that pretty annoying. As much as the second movie is a retread of the first in a lot of ways, I find it forgivable. In the third movie I just can’t.

I also love this point because it makes me think, You know what? She hates the company. She knows the alien will decimate everyone. Why doesn’t she just say, “Fuck it!” and let them have the alien? It would take the anti-corporate message to another level. I like that you made me think this.

That’s a shame. The CG is so bad when this happens that it was one of our biggest laugh moments.

Yup. My son demands that tonight. I’ve had to explain to my son that two of my favorite directors worked on two of the worst movies in this franchise.

-xtien

“Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”

/eyeroll

You just have to include the AvP movies and Prometheus and Convenant, and then the originals are the top 4 instead.

Seriously … I’ve never watched beyond Aliens (well I did see Prometheus)-- are the Aliens movies past what would be generally accepted to be “classic” any good? (I guess that means Aliens 3 and 4)

My vote would be Alien, then Aliens.

Aliens 3, directed by David Fincher, is not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. It’s basically guilty of being Alien 2, instead of Aliens 2: it feels anticlimactic if you expect the series to ratchet up, not drop into a lower key.

Resurrection is unwatchable. The first AvP movie is fun, though totally inessential, but I never saw the others.

Prometheus I hated at the time, but there are ways in which it has aged gracefully in my mind: it helps if you view it as a remix of Alien’s more intense themes and images, and not the prequel it is billed to be. Alien: Covenant tries to tie Prometheus in more closely with the Alien mythos, and by doing so, essentially ruins the mythos.

The best praise I can give it is this: it gave us Kelly Wand’s “Promethiopsis”. Which I now have an urge to listen to again.

Alien 3 is pretty decent (in the extended cut version) though obviously not problem free. I’d stop there.