Alien: Covenant was a profound disappointment, just like every Alien film since Alien 3. But it turns out that fans of the Alien film franchise have been looking in the wrong place for worthy sequels. Since the release of Aliens in 1986, there have been numerous comic book and video game entries in the series. None of it is canon, but it’s all fiction anyway so that doesn’t really matter. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Alien: Isolation”
Some of Those Responsible: Sigourney Weaver
October Horrorshow: Alien 3
This is the film that started the long decline of the Alien franchise, but much of the bad feeling this film generates is misplaced, I think. There’s a lot of love out there for the first two films in the series, so any continuation of the story is going to face both closer scrutiny and higher expectations. I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with that, so long as opinions aren’t magnified beyond a reasonable consideration of a film’s quality. Luckily for the filmmakers of Alien 3, it was made in a simpler time — the 1990s — when a franchise flick wasn’t judged with any sort of finality before it was even released.
Alien 3 hails from 1992, and was director David Fincher’s first feature film. He worked from a screenplay cobbled together by David Giler, Walter Hill, and Larry Ferguson, after the project had been bouncing around in development since shortly after Aliens hit it big at the box office. At one point, sci-fi legend William Gibson was hired to write a script by Giler and Hill (who also served as producers on the film). Gibson’s script was wildly different from what was eventually filmed, so much so that he received no writing credit. For the curious, Gibson’s screenplay can be found online. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Alien 3″
October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Aliens
Alien is an artful film. It is frightening and suspenseful, but it also has operatic grace and gritty realism, despite being set mostly aboard a spaceship. It’s hard to imagine Alien spawning a sequel so tonally different yet still so successful, but Aliens does just that. The two films are poles apart, sharing with each other only the alien creatures and Sigourney Weaver, who reprises her role from the first film as Ripley.
Many sequels born of successful films are flawed from the start, attempting to recreate the magic of the first film by simply imitating it. For example, Jaws 2 tried its damnedest to cash in on its progenitor’s success, but it was little more than a rehash of the same story with a less robust script, a less talented director, and a lame attempt at topping the original’s explosive climax. More examples abound, including Rocky and Rocky 2, King Kong and Son of Kong, along with many others.
Aliens director and screenwriter James Cameron was surely aware of film history and the perils of trying to recreate a successful formula when he conceived the project. His solution appears to have come about by asking some simple questions about Alien. Why didn’t the protagonists just shoot the alien? What would happen if there were more than one alien? Cameron apparently decided that a successful sequel could be made while adhering to conceptual precedent by arming the humans in his film with machine guns, flamethrowers, and grenade launchers. Since heroes bristling with such weaponry would make quick work of one alien, Cameron supplies dozens. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Aliens”
October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Alien
Always beware when a series of films has been labeled a franchise. Often it can mean that any effort to bring quality to the screen has been abandoned to embrace the industry’s insulting perceptions of mass taste. Such has been the fate of the Alien series of movies. The last entry that remained within the original continuity, Alien: Resurrection, was so awful it effectively killed the series. Since then, it has truly embraced the franchise label, making reality longstanding plans to team up with the Predator franchise, following a trail the comic book wings of the two brands began blazing in the 1980’s. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Alien”