I've decided: it's not canon.
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Alien³
Drooch — 9 years ago(October 17, 2016 05:36 PM)
After much deliberation, and as much as I really like Alien 3, I don't consider it a legitimate instalment of the Alien story (all those made after Alien 3 are, obviously, not canon either, because they're sht). I can't get past the decision to wipe out all of the characters we loved from Aliens, in whose futures we had invested. It wasn't an artistic decision, it was born of studio madness and star egomania.
The series ended with Ripley and her new family - Hubby Hicks, Newt Kid and crazy Uncle Bishop hyper-sleeping in the Sulaco, and Alien 3 is a weird nightmare, to be broken only by another legitimate Alien film (possibly Blomkamp's proposed Aliens sequel..?) -
bluersun — 9 years ago(October 19, 2016 11:40 AM)
Ah man, just as I've decided it is canon as well and do in fact consider it a legitimate installment of the Alien
Honestly though, I felt it made for a fresh start and would balk at the idea of a neat little (wierd) family are Newt, Ripley, Hicks and Bishop to remain alive forever throughout any and all sequels?? Eventually at least one of them would have to be offed or there'd be no tension No point.
And by the time someone had the rocks to off a much beloved character, there would really be a lot of tears as by then so much more time would be invested in them
And I really hope this Blomkamp thing never gets wings -
Drooch — 9 years ago(October 19, 2016 05:57 PM)
It would be absolutely fine, and in fact very effective, to kill off any of the Aliens survivors as part of the narrative of a sequel - there are legitimate creative reasons to do so, but slaughtering Hicks, Newt, and having Ripley's fate sealed from before Alien 3 even starts is unforgiveable.
It wasn't the decision of a competent storyteller making a bold creative choice, it was Fox being cheap, Giler and Hill being obnoxious, and Sigourney being an egomaniac. She has since realised the error of her ways and wants to make a true Aliens sequel that honours its predecessor. -
Drooch — 9 years ago(October 20, 2016 05:54 PM)
It's non-canonical, it's not part of the official Alien saga, it's closer to fan-fiction. A bit like anything after Terminator 2 or Die Hard With A Vengeance - the films that came afterwards are junk that are nothing to do with the great stories of John Connor or John McClane respectively, even though they claim to be for financial reasons.
Alien 3 is a very interesting case because it's a good film in many ways and deserves recognition, but the fck-stupid decision to kill off everyone we care about from Aliens is unforgiveable. If, say, the actors had died or something similarly tragic one could understand, but the deaths of Hicks, Newt, Bishop and eventually even Ripley was the product of obnoxious writers who had no respect for Cameron's masterpiece, an egomaniacal star, and a petrified studio who bullied the young Fincher.
Alien 3 shows a disdain for the creative genius' that brought it into being (ironically much like a chestbursting alien), it's a miracle that it's a good as it is, but its shortcomings are too deep for it to be accepted as an Alien film. -
Picnic10 — 9 years ago(October 21, 2016 03:09 AM)
The only unfortunate thing about the assembly cut is that the ox scene, whilst more extensive, isn't as gory as the dog scene. It's scarier to see a live animal, one often kept as a pet, being killed than to see an already dead one often used for meat giving life to the alien. Also, a dog makes more sense for the movement of the alien in other scenes, quickly moving on all fours.
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Drooch — 9 years ago(October 21, 2016 06:21 PM)
That, and the way the extended cut removes the shot of the queen bursting from Ripley's chest as she descends into the molten lead. That shot was powerful, especially the way Ripley almost embraced it before they melted, and it cut away from the godawful 'effect' of her falling, which we have to endure in full in the extended. A baffling and terrible decision.
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HPSaucecraft — 9 years ago(October 26, 2016 01:00 AM)
The shot of the 'burster leaving Ripley as she fell was cheese on toast.Glad it was cut from assembly.Melodramtically perfect timing from the alien.Horrible.
Everybody's cute,everybody's cuteI'm cute too,but in purple..I'm STUNNING!! -
TalesfromTheCryptfan — 9 years ago(October 20, 2016 04:58 PM)
So in layman's terms, you say this and Alien resurrection and AVP all killed the franchise as much as Ghostbusters remake, Robocop 3/remake, Die Hard 4 etc. did and sometimes it's better to kill something than let it sufer as some franchises can end up being like a wounded suffering half-dead animal in a way?
Yes Fincher came along way before The Game, Se7en, Fight Club and more and he did disowned the film.
"Unicorn, mermaid, vampire,sorceress! No name you'd give her would surprise me i love whom i love" -
schlockhorror — 9 years ago(October 25, 2016 04:17 AM)
Agree. The major offences were:
1/ as you've said,
the decision to wipe out all of the characters we loved from Aliens, in whose futures we had invested. It wasn't an artistic decision, it was born of studio madness and star egomania.
2/ the character and continuity nonsenses this relied on - Ripley (
Ripley?!
) really wouldn't have checked the ship for contamination? The ship couldn't do so itself? The ship would not have noticed unauthorised movement? The ship can fly between stars but can't put a small fire out?
3/ the reliance on farcical coincidence to move the plot forward (there just happened to be a planet handy for the pod to crash on. Yeah, right).
4/ unexplained nonsense on screen. Nothing would have survived the escape pod's crash, for example.
5/ supporting characters completely indistinguishable from one another. To this day I cannot name anyone and I can only remember Brian Glover, Charles Dance and Charles Dutton's characters. The others were just
Star Trek
red shirts, cast to be killed, wholly uninteresting.
6/ premise fundamentally uninteresting. Why do I care about a lot of God-bashing convicts? If an alien has to get loose I can think of nowhere better.
7/ self-conscious filminess. The funeral scene was desperately poor and obvious.
8/ yet another evil android.
To be fair it did also have some good ideas in it:
a/ it showed that the alien copies aspects of its host, something not seen before and that retrospectively makes the humanoid shape more credible.
b/ the alien POV was different and interesting.
c/ the idea of there being no weapons was a good one. -
Drooch — 9 years ago(October 25, 2016 06:11 AM)
See, I actually like the fact that it takes place in a dank, forgotten corner of the universe filled with mad criminal scum, it's like something out of the '70s - unsympathetic, cold, cynical, unwelcoming, altogether unpleasant - it's quite similar to the nastiness of Alien in that way, where humans are warm little creatures in a cruel universe. Ridley and Fincher find strange beauty in this nihilistic worldview, and I commend them for getting such films made when we know mainstream audiences want more comforting fodder.
BUT, Cameron has more heart and made a very human story about
Ripley
, and how this traumatised woman has to push through her fears, discovers the warrior/mother within and starts afresh with a new 'family'. Yes it's arguably feelgood fluff but it's
earned
in Cameron's expertly crafted film. He created something great and audiences fell in love with it.
If Alien 3 could have respected that, while still heading back to the cold horror of Alien, people would be much more forgiving. Sigourney seems to realise her error now, but back then she went nuts with success and insisted on killing off her greatest character (she was also anti-gun and wanted no guns in Alien 3, this works well for the film, but she needs to keep her politics out of her films). -
Picnic10 — 9 years ago(October 25, 2016 01:29 PM)
Alien 3 has such rich metaphorical possibility that a longer film could have more explicitly investigated but, ironically, that might have turned off some intellectuals who like to make connections / imagine themselves. eg the alien as an attack of conscience, a self defeating beast in the imagination of paranoid, abandoned, scared prisoners, a symbol of insurmountable odds due to upbringing, other people's treatment of them. Scared mostly of never being loved. Most probably had terrible childhoods. Few comforting bedtime stories for them. They hope to be the knight to slay the dragon. But it's not a gentlemanly dragon. It's an insectoid mammal type hybrid and it doesn't care or know of romantic tales. It's not there to provide them with a meaning of life. If it had the wit to think of it, not that it needs one, it'd be there to deliberately suck every last bit of meaning out of their life, to deliberately fill their last breath with terror, fear, a sense of stupefying dehumanising smallness against, in essence, a big insect, and no peaceful enlightenment. It's every bully, every mind game psycho (whether they're intellectually clever or not), every sadist, every nihilist philosopher's icon of the Godless vacuum in human or nonhuman hearts.
The alien's birth from the dog/ox at the time that Newt's funeral is being held tells you, in glaring sickening irony, that hope of new life, new optimism, to replace deceased ones is wishful thinking. Evil persists and it tends to destroy many people before it is contained. And those it destroys cannot be physically or emotionally brought back to what they were. Reproduction is not necessarily an intrinsic good, either by becoming evil or being born in to an evil world. Newt was spared the psychopathic strain of solitary alien seen in the first and third films.
So some things could have been developed. But it's canon to me. -
McQueen1980 — 9 years ago(October 26, 2016 04:40 PM)
What a post!! and a superb read
There was also talk back in the early 90s that it was a metaphor for AIDS and its consequences
Of course having a lone wolf alien on a prison planet was very effective and made for some disturbing scenes
I'm gonna read your mesmerizing post again to come up with some other thoughts!wow -
Picnic10 — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 03:37 AM)
Thanks McQueen. Yes, I go along with what people say as AIDS as possible metaphor. A great thing about the Alien series, Alien 3 in particular, is that different potentially metaphors coexist, they don't ruin the mystery by having too much explicit exposition or philosophy, and you can choose to concentrate on one above the others on each viewing. The Alien films end up, I think, of having this undertone of late 1970s and beyond brutish nihilism brushing up against the working or middle class. And, aloof from it all, an upper class not of kings and queens but of a money and war making corporation. Again, the series brilliantly barely shows the corporation. Just like many a passively aloof employer, they show up only when the threat's been contained. You can almost imagine that their biggest bore would be to have to answer what they'd see as merely bureaucratical questions from the people left alone with the alien. To the corporation, it'd be a mere question for Human Resources. On one hand, the alien is inevitable slowly creeping death itself, on another the arbritary nature of dumb reproduction, on another it sums up class hostility/competition which was accelerated in some places by the capitalism of the 1980s, on another hand it's a solitary psychopath, on another it's the cold hand of modern interaction but it's often implicit - the mystery's there for us to unwrap ourselves if we want or people can just admire the packaging. So the series never became too 'scifi'. It remains essentially gothic in its horrifying awe.And on a prison planet where the inhabitants were, in some fiery Hell-like Garden of Eden, trying to avoid urges through finding God and doing heavy industry, not only does a woman enter but, cruelly to them, she's fairly cold and aloof, becomes sexless when shorn of her hair. The final indignity the prisoners have, as if Eve herself has brought the serpent to tempt them, is that they achieve no female close companionship but, instead, a phallic monster destroys them. A metaphor for their own self loving masturbatory madness in the absence of anyone else loving them.
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VVolfySnackrib — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 07:26 AM)
Oh right. You've decided. Well guess what, I have decided, as I always have, that Alien 3 is legitimate, and it is part of the canon. And it should remain part of the canon. I'm so sick of all the whiners whose only concern is they can't bear the thought of a child character dying. Hell, Newt's death is one of the reasons I love Alien 3.
Alien 3, while it's not at all as good as the first two, it certainly is an entertaining little flick of its own and there's lots of movie lovers that have tons of fun sitting it through.
It was pretty damned bold to bring in such a dark tone for the third movie, and don't tell me it doesn't suit the franchise. It was dark from the beginning. If anything, the happy little ending for Aliens was out of place. If nothing else, a good quality that Alien 3 brought in was making the franchise the right shade of dark that it ought to be. Sure, it's a bit of a mess because of its problematic movie making, but they managed to put together a decent enough movie with qualities enough of their own for it to be memorable and different.
Alien: Resurrection would probably be the most easy movie to reject as non-canon. It's almost entirely disconnected from major events in the franchise. It's like a self contained chain of events where they have a ship, they clone Ripley and aliens on the ship, and things go south. However they manage to contain the situation. So the stakes in the movie were invented by the movie, unlike the other movies, where it follows a specific narrative. There's LV-426, there's aliens there, Ripley's the main character, and that's pretty much it. In Aliens they blow up all the aliens, kill the queen, but they save an egg on the ship for the third movie.
Anyone who thinks it's BS that an egg could have been laid on the ship for numerous reasons, think about the fact that it's BS that the queen got on the ship in the first place, as fast as she did, off screen and everything. But I bet you're not upset to have the awesome final fight with the Queen in the movie, are you?
Just enjoy the movies you got. Although Resurrection is by far the worst, I can bring myself to enjoy even that movie a lot. It's quirky as hell. It's weird to think we went from Alien to Resurrection, when you compare the two, but hey it's a fun watch so what the hell.
And it's up to everyone to decide for themselves what they consider canon.
If Alien 5 come along and skip over the third movie and says it's not canon, I will personally skip over Alien 5 and consider that one not canon.
I think most of us will agree though that Prometheus is not canon.