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Lame ending - Aliens 3

Saw it once. It wasn't a bad film, but neither did it feel particularly special. Which is kind of a bad thing in itself, considering it's an Alien film.
 
I thought the downbeat ending was one of the better things about an otherwise disappointing movie. As a huge fan of Alien and Aliens I felt hugely let down when this came out. Since then I've come round to it a little more. It will always be more of an interesting failure than an underappreciated masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.

I like the first 30 minutes, but then the movie becomes an inferior re-run of Alien, with characters who are mostly indistinguishable and who I don't care about. A lot of shouting and running round corridors and the creature effects suck. Aliens expanded on the world of Alien and it didn't make sense to scale everything back again. I agree that the alternative cut is an improvement, but not much. The best thing about the film is Elliot Goldenthal's score.

There is an excellent documentary on the blu-ray release called Wreckage and Rage, which details everything that went wrong during production and why the movie is so compromised. It's the least gushing Makin-Of you'll ever see, with everybody at each others throats. It documents everything wrong with the approach of having a release date before having a working screenplay.
 
The initial pre-production visual stuff with monks in a mostly wooden environment was interesting, hard to say if it would have been better though.

One of the main (and yet silly) issues I have with the film is that everyone has the same buzzcut look, making the characters seem interchangeable (especially as they're not particularly distinctive in any other ways), leading to a slightly confusing final 3rd with randoms getting picked off without much investment.

My favourite bit is just after Brian Glover's been dragged up into an airvent and Aliened, the random mopper nervously looking up while he cleans the blood off the floor.
 
Love Alien 3. Would recommend the special edition with extra/different scenes in it, gives the film a new perspective.

This, the assembly cut is almost a totally different film, and Golic, whose hardly in the original release plays a huge part in this. I'd go as far as saying on iMDB that the assembly cut should have it it's own entry away from the theatrical release. It's still a shame David Fincher dis owns this film, and to this day still refuses to talk about it or take part in documentaries about the series. It's still better than Resurrection.

For those that are not interested in watching the assembly cut, but want to know the differences, first just scroll through this page to see just how much is different (spoiler, it's a lot) then either read it, or actually give it a watch.

Alien 3 Special Edition
 
I thought Newt was one of the less annoying movie kids. It’s not even like she said much, she was a traumatised little girl.
 
She was incredibly poorly acted to be fair.

The writing didn't help, but some of those line reads took me right out of the film. Devoid of any real emotion.
 
This, the assembly cut is almost a totally different film, and Golic, whose hardly in the original release plays a huge part in this. I'd go as far as saying on iMDB that the assembly cut should have it it's own entry away from the theatrical release. It's still a shame David Fincher dis owns this film, and to this day still refuses to talk about it or take part in documentaries about the series. It's still better than Resurrection.

For those that are not interested in watching the assembly cut, but want to know the differences, first just scroll through this page to see just how much is different (spoiler, it's a lot) then either read it, or actually give it a watch.

Alien 3 Special Edition

Just inspired me to buy the blu ray, got the dvd ages ago and lent it to a mate, so looking forward to watching the full extended cut in hd on the big telly. :thumbs:
 
Just inspired me to buy the blu ray, got the dvd ages ago and lent it to a mate, so looking forward to watching the full extended cut in hd on the big telly. :thumbs:

Most of the actors came back to re do their lines for the Blu-ray as well, so the audio quality is much better for those scenes, although it did introduce a new blooper, depending on if you read the whole of the link above or not, see if you spot it!

Massive fan of the franchise and just upgraded my TV purely for the 4K release of Alien in April.Alien 40th Anniversary 4K Ultra HD (Includes Blu-Ray)
 
She was incredibly poorly acted to be fair.

The writing didn't help, but some of those line reads took me right out of the film. Devoid of any real emotion.
She wasn’t the most accomplished of child actors but I’ve seen worse. I think it would have been more annoying had she been too emotional. I can rationalise her flat line readings because she is traumatised and she doesn’t have that many lines anyway. She’s cute enough. I love the movie and for me it only works if I care for Newt to get rescued by Ripley and Sigourney Weaver sells me on that with her performance.

Then again, I cared more for Jones in Alien, but then I generally prefer cats to children.
 
I like Alien 3. It's another jump in style and tone, just like there was between the first two. Works well as the end of a trilogy, doesn't really work as one of an endless chain of increasingly meaningless movies.

I seem to remember not liking the creature effects much, but I didn't really care about that because the alien is there more as an elemental threat.
 
I read that wooden planet/monks stuff was based on a william gibson script, and thats been made into a comic now:
William Gibson's Alien 3 #1 - Comics by comiXology: Web UK
The William Gibson treatment was a different one, nicknamed “commies in space” because it was a Cold War allegory. The wooden planet one was the Vincent Ward treatment. There were at least four different treatments and the Vincent Ward one made it the furthest and ultimately served as the basis for Alien 3. They changed it from a wooden planet with monks to a prison planet with felons. That’s why there still is all of this odd religious stuff in Alien 3.
 
I thought Newt was one of the less annoying movie kids. It’s not even like she said much, she was a traumatised little girl.

It was mostly the screaming and the pitch of it I think.

I understand that yes, kids attacked by large aliens will scream and scream and scream but it just never really stopped.
 
It was mostly the screaming and the pitch of it I think.

I understand that yes, kids attacked by large aliens will scream and scream and scream but it just never really stopped.
Considering the circumstances, she screams very little. It’s certainly not true that “it never stops”, the few times she does scream is when she sees a chestburster coming for her.
 
I meant the facehuggers. They freak her out because in the longer cut she saw one attached to her dad’s head and that was her first encounter with the aliens. She doesn’t scream when they encounter alien drones, because she managed to be the only colony survivor by keeping quiet. So actually, she screams very little in the movie.
 
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The film makes a point of Newt and Ripley staying calm in situations when the soldiers freak out, because unlike them, they’ve seen it all before. The big scaredy cat of the movie is Bill Paxton’s Private Hudson, who screams way more than Newt does.
 
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