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Alien: Isolation

Daedalos

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:hmmm:

Very few films have been through as much of a development hell as Alien3. It went to shooting without a finished script, the script was rewritten many times during filming, studio execs intervened and overruled many decisions and the director had only directed MUSIC VIDEOS prior to this film... and he refuses to acknowledge he worked on it!

I'll admit that the 2003 Assembly Cut is an improvement over the theatrical release, but it's STILL a clusterfuck of a movie.

Yea yea, I already said the movie had problems.. so what? It doesn't matter aslong as the final product is good, and it is. At least the assembly cut is.

Assembly cut is almost an entirely different movie than the theatrical release, so theres that.

Dillon is a firebrand preacher and second-billed on the cast, so he's at least not one-dimensional. "85" isn't anything outstanding but not a bad character either. Andrews is the boss which makes him different from the prisoners. EVERYONE ELSE IS A BALD PRISONER WITH AN ENGLISH ACCENT ONLY MEANT TO PORTRAY UPCOMING MEALS FOR THE ALIEN, and of those only two manage to stand out in any way. I'll get to the doctor soon, but the ONLY REALLY interesting character in the entire film... got 90% of his material cut from the theatrical release. Golic. The mentally insane prisoner whom ended up calling the xeno "the dragon" and worshipping him as such.

When talking about alien 3, I always only refer to the assembly cut.. that's the true experience. Everybody should disregard the theatrical release. I thought this was common knowledge already since its been so long since the movie was made. Assembly cut on 1080p bluray is a fucking fantastic movie.

Please. I'll ignore Ripley as she's the main protagonist, the whole film is about her arc. Let's focus on the other three. Two of them are killed off, off-screen, and there's that. The only thing interesting about their deaths is the story about how that photo of Michael Biehn used in that obit scene turned out to be the most expensive headshot in cinema history, landing him about as much money for what he got paid for doing Aliens.

That leaves us with Bishop. The android Bishop's arc only gets one addition: "I've been reduced to a contraption less useful than a toaster, please kill me." Except then there's the "human" Bishop at the end. His mere presence presented more questions than it asked, and spawned the spectacular continuity mindfuck in the Alien mythos that is Charles Weyland's quest for immortality. (I'm not even gonna go there.)

I will argue that their deaths has a strong impact, it serves to further show how alone ripley is, and how desperate she has become.. and how bleak her world is now... she is truly at the end of her ropes.. that's the entire point of alien 3.... depression, fear, and hopelessness.. everything turns to shit.. Bishop at the end of Alien 3 makes sense for its time. I will disregard the atrociously bad Prometheus, though.

I like this far more than aliens, which is basically a pop-a-mole rpg in space with some relatively interesting characters to boot and funny one-liners and action packed scenes.


When Alien 3 was released, Charles Dance was Just Another British Drama Actor. The film is full of them, like they came at a bulk discount. Pete Postlethwaite is also in there, Paul McGann ("I" in "Withnail and I") is in there and he was probably the most well known of them at the time with the possible exception of Brian Glover.

As much as I hate to say this, because I know that Charles Dance is an excellent actor today... this is not his finest hour. He pretends to be the doctor but he's actually an inmate with a medical degree. Something even my 13-year old self spotted when I saw the film in cinemas when the film premiered. I had no clue who he was at the time, but I did recognize him again as the villain in The Last Action Hero, where his performance is much better. Trying to say that Alien 3 is "better" somehow because Charles Dance is in it... it's fanboyism. But then again, your tag. :)

Lol? Again keep using that old trope. Alien 3 IS better because of reasons like charles dance, sigourney weaver and Dillon. You might have guessed who he was right away... so what? He's performance as an actor is still top notch in the film.


The CGI is fine in the theatrical version. Unfortunately the theatrical version is a poor film. The Assembly Cut is better, but one of the downsides of that cut is the less-than-stellar CGI. Considering that neither of the prequels used CGI, this was a mistake no matter how you look at it.

How come there's an alien egg aboard the Sulaco?

How come ONE facehugger could impregnate TWO individuals? (Ripley and the quadruped)

These two unanswered questions form the ENTIRE BASIS for the plot and story of Alien 3.

:retarded:

Superfacehugger. They ran out of time to fully display that and flesh out the story more, but it WAS supposed to be there. There's pictures of it on the net.. and the assembly cut makes it even further to show this was the intention. watch the assembly cut again. I will agree that the CGI was less forgiving, as I have already said. But it's not really enough to make the film bad.. it's just something you deal with..


Right, let's ignore the elephant in the room while you paint a shadow on the wall and claim it to be reality. No. These two plot holes make the entire film impossible. They break it apart completely. "Minor suspension of disbelief"? Fuck off.

But this way we do reach an answer that falls within your self-defined criteria: Consistency. The first Alien film arrives, sets the scene, leaves alot of unanswered questions as a good horror movie should do. Then Aliens comes along, answers some of those questions in a consistent manner and sets things up consistently. Then the third film comes along and consistency is thrown out the door faster than a two-timing crack whore. People tend to notice that, and it degrades films, especially sequels.

Want more? How come Alien 3 has throwaway characters? The first Alien film had 7 characters, we get to know them and learn their names before they start dying off one by one. (Brett is a personal favourite of mine despite him being just a stereotypical trucker... but IN SPACE!) Aliens has 16 characters IIRC, we get to know many of them a little before they start getting killed off, but halfway through the film we're left with a core group of characters that are distinguishable and memorable. Alien 3 has around two dozen characters of which a vast majority looks and sounds the same and we get virtually NO time to get to know more than half of them before they're Alien Chow. Alien 3 could have been shot with 10 characters total, with each at least given a chance to make their "stage entrance" before being skullfucked by the xeno without any real loss in quality. Hell, we might even have grown to like some of them.

Alien 3 still has a lot going for it. It didn't scare me in the slightest when I saw it first as a teenager, but very few films have had such a gloomy background, an apocalyptic undertheme and all-round despair. The film still haunts me in some ways even today. Seeing things from the xeno's perspective was a brilliant idea, and the soundtrack is underestimated. But it is NOT, and NEVER will be, better than its prequels.

Actually, the suflaco egg plothole etc. doesn't entirely break the story in half. It has some problems sure, but this has been debated alot in the past. There were supposed to be a superfacehugger, capable of laying two eggs, and also the queen at the end of aliens, made it to the escape pod to plant the egg for the super facehugger to manifast out of... it's abit wonky.. but that was the original intention.. there's even a picture of the superfacehugger in the assembly cut.. so that actually makes sense.

Generally, the assembly cut of Alien 3 is really really good, and that is the one I'm talking about, of course. How is consistency thrown away in alien 3? Some characters die, ripley lives on, is now alone with a new set of characters.. just like the start of aliens... she survived the encounters from aliens and now she is alone on the prison planet... dont' see problems with consistency there.

And yes the first Alien IS better than Alien 3: assembly cut, like I said, but I still think most of the characters from alien 3 are quite memeroable, at least they were to me and alot of others. The point of alien 3 is exactly bleakness and darkness and depression. We don't GET to know most of the characters, because that's the intention. We do get to know quite a few of the main characters, which serves well.. also the endgame of the movie.

It's worse than Alien, but better than Aliens in my opinion. But whatever. I love all of the 3 films, even the 4th for being a guilty pleasure.
 

Daedalos

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I know it's a cop-out, but try reading this article on the assembly cut of alien 3.

It outlines perfectly for me at least, why Alien 3 is a truly underrated and fantastis movie, and why I personally rate it higher than Aliens but not Alien.

http://whatculture.com/film/10-reasons-alien-3-is-a-misunderstood-masterpiece.php


also, Alien and Alien 3 has far more to do with Alien: Isolation than Aliens ever will.

The action-paced themes of Aliens could best compared to the game like colonial marines, which was all kinds of fuckuppery
 

Old Hans

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Creative Assembly are good at making nice trailers and videos. Not so much with the actual game. Their pre release Rome 2 videos talking up the amazing AI and showing off the jaw dropping battles were particularly convincing
 

Lyric Suite

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Alien 3 was a retarded mess of a film. Anyone who thinks it is a better film than Aliens is just trying to be edgy.

Here's how rate the Alien series:

Alien > Aliens
 
Last edited:

zerotol

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You can't compare the 2 films.

A thriller vs an action movie. They are vastly different yet both very good.

Also no Morgoth Day one purchase? Wow, game must be really looking bad.
 

Bitcher1

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My rating:

Alien
vs. Predator
:troll:

Seriously, though, to dismiss entire movie because its opening doesn't gel well with the previous one you've gotta be kind of an anal-retentive sperg, imo.
 

Wirdschowerdn

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http://www.destructoid.com/is-elate...ions-approached-my-wildest-hopes-276527.phtml

I love that Isolation has thoughtful, idiosyncratic mechanics. The tracker is one. While you're holding it up (R1) and focusing on it, you lose depth of field. If you tap L2, the background will come back into focus. If you're hiding in a locker or box and the alien is looking for you, you can hold L2 to hold your breath and use the left stick to lean away from the front of the door. Sometimes he'll still find you.

The alien is on point. It cuts an impressive figure. It moves fast. It kills quickly. The tone is right. You are constantly under extreme pressure. The sound design is excellent. Alien: Isolation has the potential to be the second best piece of media in the series. Ten minutes after my heroic 1:57 run, after 30 minutes of intense failure, terrified "oh f**ks," my hands were still a little shaky. My adrenaline was pumping.

Everybody in the popamole press likes A:I. I am not sure what to make of it.

Priority One. Better prepare to be dissapointed. All other priorities rescinded. Just to be sure.

More screenshots: http://www.alienisolation.com/en_us/media/screenshots

Gnnn...
 

Deleted member 7219

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Alien > Aliens > Alien 3

Alien 3 was a great, great film. But Alien and Aliens were better.

I have spoken.
 

chestburster

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Newt had GLORIOUS Plot Armor, +2 Resistance to Alien Killers from Outer Space.

Activate: Be a child. Nobody kills a child. You can squirm and scream your way out of everything. Surrounding adults will die in your stead.


It made perfect sense in the movie.

Suppose you're the alien queen. You've ordered your warriors to abduct one hundred colonists to be hosts. Would you then find a yellow book of the colonists and check their names and then go "Gee, we got all of them except this little girl. How did you guys miss her?! Now go back there and find her! Don't come back until you find her!"
 

Deleted member 7219

Guest
Newt had GLORIOUS Plot Armor, +2 Resistance to Alien Killers from Outer Space.

Activate: Be a child. Nobody kills a child. You can squirm and scream your way out of everything. Surrounding adults will die in your stead.


It made perfect sense in the movie.

Suppose you're the alien queen. You've ordered your warriors to abduct one hundred colonists to be hosts. Would you then find a yellow book of the colonists and check their names and then go "Gee, we got all of them except this little girl. How did you guys miss her?! Now go back there and find her! Don't come back until you find her!"

It was pretty obvious in the film that the xenomorphs wanted all the humans to be hosts. Lots of the guys who seemed to die in the first assault (when Ripley had to order the tank to be driven in to the factory complex) weren't killed, but were taken to be made incubators.
 

Correct_Carlo

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I think Alien 3 is underrated. It's just a completely different film from the first two, which kind of throws you off. Alien is a super tense thriller, Aliens is a straight up action film, and then Alien 3 is a dour, depressing film about religious fundamentalism in a prison camp. Which is like genre whiplash. It's definitely the least of the 3 and it completely shits on the hard earned happy ending of Aliens, but I give it points for doing something so radically different. It is flawed, though. I'm not sure if FIncher was ever right for the film. It seemed like he never really wanted to make an Alien film in the first place, so he kind of just tried to do his own thing. Then the studio freaked out and tried to salvage it into something more conventional and the result is a film that shows occasional flashes of brilliance, but ultimately is way less cohesive than it might have been. I'm not going to blame the studio entirely, though, as I've never been a huge Fincher fanboy and, like I said, I don't know that he was ever right for the franchise.
 

Lyric Suite

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Newt had GLORIOUS Plot Armor, +2 Resistance to Alien Killers from Outer Space.

Activate: Be a child. Nobody kills a child. You can squirm and scream your way out of everything. Surrounding adults will die in your stead.


It made perfect sense in the movie.

Suppose you're the alien queen. You've ordered your warriors to abduct one hundred colonists to be hosts. Would you then find a yellow book of the colonists and check their names and then go "Gee, we got all of them except this little girl. How did you guys miss her?! Now go back there and find her! Don't come back until you find her!"

Cameron was just ripping off Them here and was going for effect and not consistency. Still, it is possible to rationalize it to some extend, because both the ants and xenomorphs were portrayed as a mere natural phenomenon, they didn't just kill for the sake of killing. It is possible to imagine that the aliens ignored Newt because she posed no threat and they didn't need her for impregnation. As long as she kept out of sight she wasn't bothered. Much like it was possible for the little girl in Them to escape the giant ants because the latter were attacking to steal food for their colony, not because they wanted to kill humans specifically.

Ultimately, it is not things like this that bother me about Aliens, it is just some of the derp and the complete disregard of many of the things that were established in the first film, though unlike Alien 3, it does manage to keep the tone of the original, so that it is easier to think of it as an actual sequel where as Alien 3 just feels like a completely different film that just happens to have an alien in it. Either way, it is great as far as action films go, and it is relatively well written compared to most other Cameron films. I mean, the characters are actually cool, the one liners are funny, and the action is actually exciting. The battle between the queen and the forklift exoskeleton was awesome, even though it is completely ridiculous when looked at from the perspective of the first film.

One way to put this is that while its true that Aliens rapes the original, it is just too good of a film in its own right to simply write it off as shit, more so than, say, Terminator 2, which rapes the original in a similar way but also manages to fuck up things on it own, by having bad characters and sub-par writing in comparison with Aliens.
 

Jaesun

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Had they used the original script of Alien 3 before the studio execs freaked out because of all the religious stuff in it, and had it all cut out, it would have been possibly better than Aliens.

Alien will always and forever stand as the best film. Period.
 

Unkillable Cat

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Suppose you're the alien queen. You've ordered your warriors to abduct one hundred colonists to be hosts. Would you then find a yellow book of the colonists and check their names and then go "Gee, we got all of them except this little girl. How did you guys miss her?! Now go back there and find her! Don't come back until you find her!"

Now I'm seeing the Queen as some sort of Office Space-esque boss:

"Hi Peter. We have a bit of a problem here, you didn't put the new facehuggers on all the colonists. You see, we're putting the new facehuggers on ALL the colonists before they hatch. Did you see the memo about this?"
 

shihonage

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The alien is on point. It cuts an impressive figure. It moves fast. It kills quickly. The tone is right. You are constantly under extreme pressure. The sound design is excellent. Alien: Isolation has the potential to be the second best piece of media in the series

The first one being Colonial Marines of course.
 

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