Alien 3 (Assembly Cut)
Head above the parapet… It’s my favourite Alien movie. I can accept that it’s not the best, and that the first two have more artistic merit. But I really like it. The themes it plays with; the reformed oddness of the prisoners, trying to kill a terror with no weapons, the vastness of the location and the smallness of the battlefield. A woman taking lead in a space that has a full absence of women. Charles Dance is brilliant in it too. It’s also utterly gorgeous, incredibly well lit and framed.
8/10
Glad we have another believe in the house. I already like the original cut of the film, but I LOVE the assembly cut.
Is there a version out there now that is remastered in any way? When I watched the assembly cut, there were some audio issues with some of the scenes, specifically those that were inserted in. I've only ever seen this in the Alien Quadrilogy DVD boxset.
I originally saw Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 together in the same week when I was in my early teens. They were showing them on tv, so I taped them like the pirate I was (Yarrgghh!) and watched them over the course of that week. To me, the whole plot line of Ripley losing Newt and Hicks at the start of the film felt natural at the time. It seemed like Ripley was just destined to suffer from rotten luck and to spend so much time in isolation and amongst unfamiliar company. It's a film that has its own identify and style, which I appreciate. I love the simplicity of the film and the inevitability of the ending. It's bleak, it's depressing, it's grimy, it's pessimistic at times...but I fecking love it. It feels like a natural follow on from the first film in terms of what that set out to do.
I also watched
Alien Resurrection again recently. It's such a strange film in many ways. Growing up, I was not a fan of this. I don't want to say that I'm warming to it now as I am still very mixed, but I can appreciate that it also has its own style and uniqueness to it. The underwater chase scene is fantastic and a real highlight of the film. I like certain scenes like that, and the scene where Ripley torches the failed clone projects. That's got some emotional weight to it, so I can appreciate that. But, I dislike the look of the aliens in this film. They're too slimy and seem to look quite cheap compared to the original. At this point, they seem to have gone too far down the route of them being 'space bugs' rather than the threatening species that they were in the original. I dislike the dialogue in lots of places as it's too corny and seems to have a bit too much cheap humour thrown around to get a quick laugh. I actually like some of the crew that we are introduced to, but just wish we had a better/more mature script to go with it.
The action scenes really fluctuate, too. You've got the lovely build-up in that underwater scene, and then there's that other scene where the Auriga's crew gets slaughtered in seconds, complete with that extremely dumb scene with the death of Dan Hedaya's character. I always hated that scene. There's no finesse to it. Compare that to the Lambert and Parker scene in the original and it's completely cheap in comparison.
I'm not a fan of the final 20 minutes or so with that hybrid. Found that whole scene to be ugly, which I know is what the director and writers were going for. But, I just didn't like it. We've got a Queen there that we maybe see for 2 scenes in the entire film. Felt unnecessary to sideline what could potentially have been an interesting battle to give us what we got. I will admit that the newborn's death scene was...interesting. Again, corny in places, especially that final shot of its head getting sucked into space.
It's one of those films that I imagine could have been made into an interesting comic instead. I don't like Joss Whedon's writing, so maybe a different writer could have made this work. Scratch that newborn bit/the final 20 minutes, get rid of the whole need for Ripley at all, give us a better script, and slow down some of the action scenes to add more tension and this could have been better. I don't hate it as much as I used to, but I still dislike it.
my wife did the same.
