Yeah, I was never clear on exactly what happened in the title sequence either. I get that the aliens’ acid for blood are into some critical parts of the ship, causing it to eject Ripley and co, but where did the acid come from? Was the facehugger injured to cause it to bleed? They don’t just naturally “sweat” acid, I don’t think.
For me, I was 12 or so and loved monster movies. I was begging my parents to let me see it but they refused.
Then one night my irresponsible uncle and his wife came over and let me watch it. Was fantastic and it made him my favorite uncle, though as I grew up I knew to keep the irresponsibility in the back of my head ;). Still one of my favorite memories of him.
Ripley is all about survival? Not once during Alien 3 did I ever feel that Ripley’s priority was self-preservation. This is a woman so full of sorrow that she doesn’t just ask to be killed, but she actually ends up killing herself [spoiler alert]. In what way does she care more about “survival” than making sure WY doesn’t get control of this alien? That is literally the entire point of the film’s climax—to sacrifice herself so that the company doesn’t get the alien!
This is a really good point, but I don’t think it is dispositive based on what Ripley has shown us as a character in the first two movies. Her decision to destroy the alien doesn’t necessarily relate to her not trying to survive. She is full of sorrow in the second movie as she’s just found out her daughter is dead [spoiler alert]. And yet she finds motivation to help her survive, which also deals with maternity on a couple of levels.
Nevertheless, the fact of her suicide does not negate my point. She’s not committing suicide out of despair. She is destroying her ultimate enemy. That is the purpose of her silly dive into the molten bowl of moltenness. Not because she’s so sad. But because she wants to eradicate this queen creature. It’s more of a sacrifice than a suicide. Which is why you get all of the outstretched-arms Christ imagery.
You wouldn’t call Christ on the cross a suicide, would you?
-xtien
I would call her jumping into the molten lead a sacrifice (which I did). You can kill yourself and sacrifice yourself at the same time. Those are not mutually exclusive.
And while Ripley may have been full of sorrow in the second movie (depending on which version you watch!), she did indeed find motivation. That motivation was, if you’ll recall…
Ripley:
Just tell me one thing, Burke. You’re going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study. Not to bring back. But to wipe them out.
Burke:
That’s the plan. You have my word on that.
Ripley:
All right, I’m in.
So no, her daughter is not her motivation, nor is Newt, or Hicks for that matter. She was haunted by the creatures, and her motivation was to destroy them. And again, you’ll see that self-preservation even in the second movie isn’t a priority for her. If she was simply interested in survival, she never would have agreed to leave Gateway Station.
Her purpose was indeed to destroy her “ultimate enemy”, and to that end she was primarily motivated to keep it out of the hands of those who wished to preserve it. And since she had already been burned twice by Wayland Yutani (by way of Ash and Burke), I could certainly understand her wanting to keep it low-key, at least until she was certain it had indeed been destroyed and hadn’t stowed away on board the life boat.
And it’s not like you could call that “paranoid delusions”, since as soon as word had gotten out that Ripley was on Fury 161, Wayland Yutani immediately sent their forces to intercept her and the queen she carried.
Wasn’t the trigger for her self-scan that revealed to Ripley (and the audience) that she carried a queen, and the device was online and transmitted that info back to W-Y? Not that that matters really, I just liked that sequence.
Next one
I’m enjoying these. Good to see there’s still some life in those old bones.
Here’s a simple breakdown from the end of this side of the “Alien” franchise:
Prometheus is better than I first thought.
Alien: Covenant is worse.
So that balances it out, right?
Negative, Ghost Rider. Prometheus is better by a hair. I’m talking microfiber. Alien: Covenant is worse by a light year.
It was interesting to see my son respond to Prometheus. The scientists act like dopes with accelerating consistency. My objections from the podcast stand. The movie strives to answer questions we did not need the answers to. And having Guy Pearce in it is just silly. Just have a decent old dude play the part instead of making us try to see beyond crappy makeup. The rolling donut never fails to inspire a laugh. And did I mention that the scientists all act like dopes? I love it when one of them just reaches out to an alien life form blithely hoping for the best and saying how beautiful it is, when it looks like a weird slimy thing to me that is reminiscent of a space cobra. Also all the Lawrence of Arabia stuff. It’s so dumb.
But it’s not terrible. The acting is okay. The CG is okay. My son was okay with it. I had lowered the bar considerably, so maybe that helped.
It didn’t help with the next movie.
Alien: Covenant is beyond horrible. Which…in a sort of Alien3 way makes it better. Because it’s fun to watch a bad movie with your kid sometimes.
“She’s really dumb.”
This is about Faris–I admit I couldn’t stop thinking “Bueller’s Day Off” every time Danny McBride says her name–who runs all over the drop ship (which they call something else, a “landing ship” or some such) screaming and running into things and not doing proper quarantine and then after actually locking in her fellow crew member with the other infected crew member, refusing to let her out because it could contaminate the ship, runs in once they are both dead and slips on a ton of blood. Then blows up her own ship.
My son was not wrong. I tried to explain these were standard horror tropes. People acting illogically. Splitting up. The couple having sex later getting executed. As if I really knew those kind of things. But he wasn’t having it.
He did say this at the end of the sex/death scene though…
“Nipple!”
So. Dad of the Year award again goes to me.
I would rate this “R” for “Laughter Throughout” because we were laughing a lot during this movie. I left the room once to get my son a second helping of pasta and he started laughing. “Dad! Come back. I need to show you this!” It was Demian Bichir’s character saying, “And I know wheat.” Which I have to say, is pretty funny.
Do not get me started on the flute/recorder/whatever-that-instrument-is scene is. We were giggling through the whole thing, because it was just an entirely unaware exercise in double entendre. My son constantly says, “That’s what she says.” I have no idea where he got that. And this scene was just shot through with opportunities for that. So much so that we didn’t need to bother to respond.
“Whistle, and I’ll come.”
“Hold it like so. Nice and easy.”
“Blow into the hole gently. Like so.”
“Watch me. I’ll do the fingering.”
“Now put your fingers where mine are.”
And that scene is all that. It’s a weirdly written scene for what it is trying to convey about the story and the characters. It’s oddly structured, and what’s more, doesn’t really pay off, even in the twist. But it gave us a ton of laughs.
It is very strange to watch a movie with your son and have him constantly ask, loudly and with increasing frustration, “Dad! What is going on?”
And have to answer, “I’m telling you yet again…I don’t know!”
When David and Walter kiss themselves, which ends with his synthetic goo snotting out of his nostrils, my son said, “This may be the worst scene I have ever seen. Why is this happening?” He then allowed that the Ripley scene with the gross weird alien hybrid yuck monster might have been worse.
At any rate, it is a horrid movie. None of us can understand the online scores. But we had fun watching it together.
-xtien
“When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony, David.”
One of these days I really need to see Covenant.
No. You really don’t.
-xtien
You know that never works.
I am well aware.
-xtien
“No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.”
Congratulations, now I want to see Prometheus and Covenant. Despite all the warnings to stay away, which had worked until your post Dingus.
I think I might have had the exact same reaction when I watched it :-)
Callie Hernandez is really, really pretty.
I will say this about Prometheus: not as bad as advertised. Which is not to say that it’s good, exactly, but it is interesting. And it helps if you don’t think of it as an Alien movie, more an interesting science fiction movie about first contact gone wrong. Which now that I think about it, I guess is true of the Alien movies too.
Here’s a new one -
And, uh, another new one -