Rate the David Fincher movies

Movies
21

I am here to wade in and defend Alien 3.

  1. The original badness is partially, though not completely, repaired by the Special Edition (regrettably only available as part of the Alien Quartet). It’s flaws are still legion, but it now has suspense and a comprehensible geography, which are the two things that matter.

  2. Alien 3 took the wrong approach to the franchise, but if one takes it straight, it has its own dank charm. You have to be able to deal with the sudden lurch into a kind of gloomy BBC drama mentality, which is going to be a shock after the brilliance of Alien and the excellence of Aliens.

  3. Seriously, Alien Resurrection is the Ray of Light here. Before it, Alien 3 was a disaster. After it, Alien 3 is revealed as the slightly off, but still worthy conclusion to a great trilogy. It’s like there were three IGN reviews for the games in a trilogy, and the games got 9, 9, and 8. The last one, everyone says is crap. Then the fourth game comes out, and it gets a 7. Then everone realises how fantastic the third one was.

22

I remember watching a special on Alien 3 (part of the quadrilogy) and they talked about how people kept getting confused over the different bald guys. Which was pretty much true for me with the exception of the guy who played Roc.

23

They actually fix the maze stuff at the end? That might be worth seeing.

24

That happened with me. If you have a movie where a group of people gets picked off one by one, it would be nice to know who just got killed. Usually each member of the group has some distinictive feature, like in Blade 2 where you have the guy with the big hammer, the karate guy, Ron Perlman, etc. Or Predator. Predator did it perfectly.

25

To Fincher’s credit Alien 3’s script was a mish mash of epic proportions before he got there. First they were monks, then prisoners…

But after they had raised the stakes so much in the second one it just felt small, yellow, and ugly.

Also they killed Newt by cheating. That was unforgivable.

26

Seven…period

27

Newt??? They killed fucking Hicks, man!

28

Aye-firmative!

29

The annoying thing is that they not only fix it, but almost fuck it all up again be reincluding too many scenes – the ones like you get on DVD extras for other movies that were excised because they were obviously boring.

So, the new and improved Alien 3 is no longer the puke-inducing bizarre train wreck it was. But it’s very nearly an ass-numbing european arthouse flick. (But, all of Fincher’s movies lean toward that anyway.)

The overall impression is that the movie goes from “upsetting ruinous crap” to “pretty damn good,” but still not quite to the level of the first two. This is a bit of a disappointment in itself - prior to the release, fans were really expecting miracles. Nevertheless, if you are one of the Alien fans who were left with a Sartrean ache caused by the failure of Alien3 to provide an adequately watchable mythic wrapup to Alien and Aliens, you can now rest assured that the trilogy is now a unified whole. Just forget about the droning misery of Alien: Resurrection and the mindless, stupefying tripe that was AvP

One day, the mythical 4 hour cut of Dune will appear, and everyone will put out their bottom lip and nod stoutly, but not ecstatically, for that as well.

30

Fuck miracles, just don’t COMPLETELY INVALIDATE the first two fucking films, okay?

31

and a spaceship made of wood. I recall.

32
  1. Seven
  2. Fight Club
  3. Panic Room
  4. Alien 3

(haven’t seen the Game)

(omg you haven’t seen the game!!! what kind of subhuman are you??? oh yeah, well I bet you never saw Tokyo Story so the hell with ya)

33

I really think the extended cut of Alien 3 isn’t a half-bad movie. My problem with it is that the only character besides Ripley you get interested in (Charles Dance’s character, Clemens) dies like an hour into the movie.

I’m one of the few people who liked the decision to kill off Hicks and Newt. It’s a brutal thing, surely, but I think it opens up a lot of potential for Ripley to grow in interesting directions. Maybe that was their intention. I wonder if between that and the lack of any attention or identification of the peripheral characters, that they had intended to really make this a RIPLEY movie. I think they squandered that intention if it really existed at all, but I still like the movie.

34

I’d be down for that - if it had actually happened.

35

Fine. But don’t cheat. There was no fucking way the alien queen put an egg on that ship in the context that Cameron had set up in the film.

If you want to to go back and show something that happened when we weren’t looking then go ahead and do it. Do the effin work and maybe I’ll follow along with you. But flashing lights and blood don’t work for me. It was lazy, and it puts a taint on the rest of the movie, because now I can’t trust them as storytellers right from the beginning of the film.

The good news was that lack of trust was not misplaced.

36

You know, I’d forgotten how pissed off I was when Newt died, and Hicks, though I wasn’t that bothered about Hicks. Watching Aliens and Alien3 back to back: how depressing can you get?

They should have gone with a completely different scenario, once set much later, maybe an older Ripley, on Earth, having to rescue teh whole planet! And Hicks could be killed in the first scene when the Alien eggs land, thus giving Ripley a better call to adventure than “However, unbeknownst to our heroes, the Alien Queen laid an egg while in the middle of a life-or-death battle with a forklift truck!”. Newt, she could just be off at college on Titan or something.

But, as the powers that be decided to set the movie on the way back to earth just a little while after the end of Aliens, and the relevant actors were not suitable anymore (I understand the little girl was all grown up and Hicks was unavailable.) the extended cut is OK.

Was there anything apart from that? I remember being vaguely annoyed when Bishop turned up as a human as well.

37

It could have been Hicks impregnated but still alive, instead of Ripley, and he could do some macho thing before it busts out of his chest. He could run around with Bishop’s upper half strapped to his back. Newt could be played by some other young actress, who gives a flip.

They should have gone with a completely different scenario, once set much later, maybe an older Ripley, on Earth, having to rescue teh whole planet! And Hicks could be killed in the first scene when the Alien eggs land, thus giving Ripley a better call to adventure than “However, unbeknownst to our heroes, the Alien Queen laid an egg while in the middle of a life-or-death battle with a forklift truck!”. Newt, she could just be off at college on Titan or something.

“And you, you little shit: you’re staying here.”

But, as the powers that be decided to set the movie on the way back to earth just a little while after the end of Aliens, and the relevant actors were not suitable anymore (I understand the little girl was all grown up and Hicks was unavailable.) the extended cut is OK.

Each Alien film has more or less reflected the time period it was made in. The first was true 70’s horror style. Indeed, the Cane scene was the A#1 spoiler scene in film to that point, and the whole thing was the usual pick-em-off-one-by-one, The second was as much action as horror, with James Cameron hitting full stride. The third is a grim, angsty, dreary vision, your Silence of the Lambs era. And the fourth, the fourth is a dumb, cheap, tired retread that has some entertainment value if you just sit there and take it for what it is.

Was there anything apart from that? I remember being vaguely annoyed when Bishop turned up as a human as well.

You mean in AvP? I thought that was sort of neat, since it was the same company from the earlier films that made the androids.

38

I’ve heard you float that concept of the movies before, and it definitely made them much more interesting to watch over when I picked up the whole set and watched them straight through. What would you say the keystone films are for the other eras as Silence could be for III?

39

Probably the best sociological contexting for the movies I’ve read.

You mean in AvP? I thought that was sort of neat, since it was the same company from the earlier films that made the androids.

At the end of Alien3, I meant: Bishop turning up, as the engineer who made Bishop, to make Ripley “feel better,” was like a final kick in the balls. The mutability and futility of human relationships, kicking me again in the balls. Everyone she loves had died, and not only that, been replaced: Newt with the alien growing in her, Hicks with Clemens, and finally, nice Bishop with nasty Bishop the meaningless engineer.

40

I’d have to say the first was something along the lines of any “classic” slasher film, Friday the 13th or Halloween or the like. You have a group of unsuspecting protagonists running into a superhuman killer that keeps coming back and kills off everyone one by one except the plucky heroine (and her pet). In the second, we’re talking the post-Terminator era, where Hollywood discovered that “horror” films were more fun with lots of guns and explosions. The fourth is easy - Jerry Bruckheimer dumb action flick, (post-Don Simpson), take your pick.