“Why does that look like a green stamp?”
I realize these pseudo live-diaries of us watching the “Alien” movies might be getting tedious. But oh well.
My son insisted we watch Alien3 this morning. I warned him. I did. But he insisted. So we watched the thing.
The amount of crappy this movie is cannot be explained. And I have to say up front, that the guy who adapted The Hunt for Red October, Larry Ferguson, was one of the screenwriters. Face palm.
What’s great though is that we had a blast watching it because it’s so bad. My kid totally picked up on the screenwriting problems, getting increasingly frustrated in the first act as Ripley just blithely decides not to tell anyone, including the doctor dude she’s sleeping with, why she is concerned. She insists on an autopsy of clearly-not Newt, and he’s all, “Why?”
She tells him she is worried about a contagion. What the screenwriters pull out of their asses is cholera.
Cholera?
Whatever. They do this stupid dance of I-won’t-tell-you for half the movie.
-“What are we looking for?”
-“I’ll tell you later.”
-“Why were you locked up?”
-“Not now. I’ll tell you later.”
There is no reason for these put off excuses. In fact, it makes absolutely NO SENSE that Ripley doesn’t just tell them up front that she thinks there is a xenomorph on board. It is in her best interest to warn them, but the screenwriters choose that she is suddenly cagey about the alien. For reasons. As well as the doctor (Charles Dance), not telling her he’s in jail for getting drunk and prescribing the wrong pain meds to a bunch of people in a car wreck. I guess the writers thought it would be fun if we were left hanging about whether he had raped somebody or molested a child or something.
My kid went from hoping it wasn’t one of those things, to getting to the reveal and saying, essentially, “That’s the reveal? That was his crime?”
“He essentially murdered eleven people.”
“Yeah. But come on. If you’re going to hide it that long, it’s gotta be something more than a prescription mistake.”
As I said in my write up of watching Aliens with him, one of the points here is to teach him to analyze movies, as he does books at school. Before you go nuts, don’t worry, I’m not taking the fun out of it. I’m teaching him a deeper level of enjoyment of the way films are made, and what makes them work. He loves it.
Once again, we had a great time watching this movie, as bad as it is. It gets hilarious once the CG alien gets grafted into the frames. The puppet alien is fine, but the CG version is just ridiculous. My son described it as above, like a green stamp. It is literally laughable. And I use the word “literally” because we were both laughing out loud every time it showed up in frame.
It’s a terrible movie, but at least wasn’t a terrible viewing experience. Afterwards my son went to look at its review scores and was shocked.
“I’m telling you, this is one of my favorite directors. Who knows what happened.”
“This may be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen,” he replied.
Also…as we watched the credits, I saw that an old friend of mine had been the Camera Equipment Operator on the movie. So that was fun. Also, Paul McGann was in it!
-xtien
“Don’t be afraid. I’m part of the family.”