1/6 1/6 Hot Toys: Ellen Ripley - Alien - Collectible Figure

abake said:

I think the difference between Alien and Aliens is that the former is a thriller/horror movie set in space, while the latter is an action/thriller set in space. That difference already sets the tone for each film, and that in itself doesn't make either better or worse than the other.
I will say this however, Alien has aged better than Aliens IMHO.
Cameron is a master of crowd-pleasing cinema. Aliens is a perfect example of (good) 80's movies: the one-liners, the obvious Vietnam angle, the in-your-face "message", the over the top characters... it's all there, it's what Cameron does. He makes great popcorn cinema. And that's not necessarily a bad thing (except when it gets to nauseous levels like Avatar, but that's another story).
Alien on the other hand has no one-liners, it has no over the top characterisations, it has no in-your-face "message" to deliver. You can relate to the characters in Alien, because they are written and portrayed like regular human beings. I can't really relate to anybody in Aliens, because they're pretty cartoony.
As for the mystery of the creature in Alien vs. the explained life-cycle in Aliens, well, I do like the mystery better.
In Alien you're never really sure of how intelligent the creature is, its motives are inexplicable. Is it just a monster on a rampage? Does it kill or eat its victims? Remember that first viewing experience: a guy gets face raped and then dies giving birth. You never really understand how that happened or where this thing came from, but it's scary as hell. The same is true for the creature itself. You don't really understand what it looks like at first, but it's big and scary as hell! You don't know its motives or how clever it is, and then Ash calls it "Kane's son". And you start thinking, "wait a minute, is that thing actually half human? does it have some of Kane in it?". You never know if it just ended up in the Narcissus out of sheer luck or because it knew the ship. You don't know why it undressed Lambert. Or what it actually wanted to do to Ripley. Why did it show Ripley its tongue sliding in and out?

Cut to Aliens.
The sexual tension is gone.
The mystery around the intelligence of the creature is gone (the queen clearly communicates with her children and she clearly sets an ambush for Ripley. She also clearly goes after her for revenge, something no animal does just like that).
The ambivalence about the creature's motives is gone (they are just like any other creature, killing and eating for survival).
It's just a morality play about how the brass let down the grunts who pay for the mistakes of their superiors, and how there's nothing stronger than a mother's love for her children. With lots of one-liners and cartoony characters.
And I'm not saying it's a bad movie at all, I enjoy it immensely. I don't think Cameron had too many other options to make a sequel. It's just that he did kill a lot of the mystery.

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Khev said:

You know both life cycles can co-exist. It is an "alien" after all. For all we know the default reproductive cycle of the creatures is egg by queen but in the event that no queen exists (Nostromo) certain warriors can turn their victims into eggs (which then could potentially give birth to a queen.) Or maybe that isn't the default because the creatures don't like following orders and prefer there to NOT be a queen but when there are too many potential threats in the area (an entire colony of people) they arrange for one to be created in order to beef up their numbers quickly. A "shake and bake" colony of aliens, if you will.

The Queen might just be the alien counterpart to human terraforming.

Think of it like District 9. I'm sure the prawns reproduced the old fashioned way but they clearly had means through their technological goo to produce more of their kind by turning humans into them. Why? We have no idea. And that's part of the fun.

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Khev said:

Thank you. Remember that in the theatrical cut the word "queen" is never actually mentioned. Just "so who's laying these eggs." "We don't know, it must be something we haven't seen yet." As opposed to Hudson foreshadowing the look of the queen by indicating that she's merely a "badass" ant, "I mean big." In the theatrical cut you are just braced for something you haven't seen, then they do that awesome slow reveal of the egg sack, then that giant spindly monstrosity and THEN the queen's mouth descends and you finally see that she has features somewhat like those of her offspring. It was very well done.

I think people also forget that ALIENS predated Platoon by a couple months and was THE first movie to show true documentary style war combat. It isn't some dated 80's action movie, it's Black Hawk Down but with monsters and spaceships. I guess Cameron could have tried to match the artistic style of ALIEN but who wants "The Thin Red Line" in space? No thanks.

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Khev said:

I think people also forget that ALIENS predated Platoon by a couple months and was THE first movie to show true documentary style war combat.

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Khev said:

You know both life cycles can co-exist.

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Wor-Gar said:

I know we're on the same side on this issue, but I got to call this -- I doubt anyone would call ALIENS the first true documentary style combat film. Unless your life began in 1986.

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Khev said:

I said it was the first film to feature realistic documentary style combat, not that the whole movie was a like a documentary film. But maybe that clarification wasn't necessary. What movie had realistic war action prior to ALIENS? Platoon often gets the credit for that (which as I mentioned actually came after ALIENS), but if you think there was another film prior to 1986 I'm definitely curious to hear what it was.

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Khev said:

Not Rambo, not Apocalypse Now, not The Deer Hunter, Missing in Action, or Uncommon Valor. Remember the end of the Viet Nam war was just a little more than 10 years old when ALIENS came out. Prior to the 70's a lot of war films used real stock footage which doesn't count. Then everything changed in 1986.

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DiFabio said:

I'm really surprised in you Wor-Gar. You used to be someone I could trust. Now you're one of them!

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DiFabio said:

I think we can all agree that the most severe changes in a sequel is when something completely undermines or changes what came before it, aka the Star Wars prequels changing the very DNA of the Original Trilogy with clones, midichlorians, etc.

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VintijDroidGutzz said:

Also, I've offered some pretty good points too. I'm a little disappointed that the only direct response I've gotten in the last two pages, is Khev thanking me because I liked part of his post - & he normally never responds to my posts.

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VintijDroidGutzz said:

Also, I've offered some pretty good points too. I'm a little disappointed that the only direct response I've gotten in the last two pages, is Khev thanking me because I liked part of his post - & he normally never responds to my posts. o__o

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DiFabio said:

Yeah, I know. You know I'm messing with you.

When I watch Alien, it still retains it's mystery because all I have to do is think back to the first time I saw it and let nostalgia kick in. Still, I don't think Aliens is shedding too much light on their species or taking away what the Alien is or was. Just because we see more of the life cycle doesn't mean that it strips away the nature of the Alien. After all, the first one still dabbled with things like parasitic organisms and life stages, so it's not like the Queen or warriors is somehow a huge leap to take, or pulling back the curtains on one of the greatest cinematic monsters.

I also think the difference has a lot to do with the key players involved. Look at it this way, had the crew from the first film been replaced with the Marines, the first film would have been very different, no matter what the Alien was. Same deal if we reversed it with the Alien crew. Had the Alien succeeded with Ripley, Parker, Dallas, etc. we would have gotten something similar to what was depicted in Aliens. I could see if the original film had ONE egg that Kane came across, but it didn't.



I think we can all agree that the most severe changes in a sequel is when something completely undermines or changes what came before it, aka the Star Wars prequels changing the very DNA of the Original Trilogy with clones, midichlorians, etc.

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Wor-Gar said:

But Platoon is not a "documentary" style film by any stretch. Neither is Aliens. I'm not sure what your definition is of "documentary" style, but it seems pretty broad. If it is broad, then a movie like "In Harms Way" (1965) would seem very gritty and realistic to you and would certainly count as a predecessor -- but that film is black-and-white so you likely haven't seen it. There were a lot of films in the 70's that showed a much more gritty and real WWII post Viet-Nam style. Perhaps "Deer Hunter"'s combat scenes would count, or "Apocalypse Now".

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VintijDroidGutzz said:

Also, I've offered some pretty good points too. I'm a little disappointed that the only direct response I've gotten in the last two pages, is Khev thanking me because I liked part of his post - & he normally never responds to my posts. o__o

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abake said:

As I said in my post, the "problem" with Aliens is that the mystery surrounding the creature is gone.
You're no longer left wondering what its motivation is. You're no longer wondering if and how intelligent it is. You're no longer wondering whether it retains some of the characteristics of its host. The creature is no longer some terrifying bastardisation of the human form. It suddenly is a regular monster.
There's something very different from "Kane's son" to the Queen. It's no longer some kind of terrible parasite that takes over a host for unknown reasons and then proceeds to do unspeakable things to every living thing around it. It just became a monster that comes out at night (another heavy-handed "message" from Cameron) to take people away. There is no fear of the unknown anymore. You know it just wants to use you for reproduction. The original was much more terrifying.

Again, I'm not sure Cameron could have done something terribly different from what he did without ending up being derivative of the first, so kudos to him.

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