I FINALLY got around to watching the last film in the Alien Quadrilogy. I don't even know what to think. The first half was pretty good, despite some flaws, and for awhile I was liking it more than Alien 3. But in the second half, everything just started falling apart, and the flaws became even more noticeable, ruining any chance the film had of being anything more than mediocre. I'm not really in the mood to write an essay, so I'll just list my thoughts on the film. The film is old enough and mediocre enough that I'm not going to bother spoiler tagging anything. Here we go:
1) The premise is retarded. It wouldn't work. Unless the alien DNA mixes into human DNA after the facehugger impregnates someone, they wouldn't be able to get alien genetic material from Ripley's blood. This would not be a fatal flaw if the execution were better, since it does allow for some pretty neat ideas. One of my favorite scenes was when Ripley discovers the lab full of failed clone experiments. That was one of the bright spots in the film. But generally, everything is executed so poorly that by the time I got to the end of the film, I was just Picard-facepalming at every scene.
While the alien escape scene was quite excellent, it brings up a glaring plot hole: they didn't seem to have any kind of contingency plan for the alien escape at all. Housing multiple aliens together in the same cell was just asking for trouble. If the goal was to domesticate them, why would you want to let them communicate with each other? And again, I never got the feeling that anyone had thought about what to do if the aliens escaped. It seems like the whole plan was to just abandon ship if that happened, but even that is retarded if the escape pods are located in a place that the aliens can easily reach within minutes of escaping.
2) There isn't really a likable character in the whole thing aside from Ripley and maybe Winona Ryder's character. And since Ripley spends most of the film acting crazier than Shia in Transformers 2, that pretty much leaves us with only Winona to root for, which is never a good thing. Actually, I take that back. I liked Michael Wincott's character a lot, but he dies so early on that we spend the majority of the film watching a bunch of losers and degenerates.
I know that the audience is supposed to sympathize with the handicapped guy with a speech impediment, but I just found him extremely annoying. Will Ferrell, sorry, Ron Perlman was absolutely awful. The black guy with the Travis Bickle arm holsters was pretty cool, but he doesn't really get to do much, and his death scene was completely retarded. He falls about 30 feet into a pool of water. He could have easily survived. Also, watching the cripple with the speech impediment try to claw his way up that ladder was like watching a fat kid with honey all over his legs trying to outrun a hungry tiger. You're supposed to be really invested in this character's struggle, but it just comes off as comedic more than anything else. Completely kills the tension.
I also hated the "survivor" that they found. I guess he has a redeeming moment at the end when he uses the chestburster inside of him to take out the evil general, but aside from that he was just dead weight for most of the film.
Horror films are a lot more tense if you actually care about the characters. This one completely failed at that. Compared to the casts of the first two, which were filled with great characters, this completely shits the bed. There's no one who comes close to Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, Parker or Dallas. Even Alien 3 had better characters overall. Fuck, even the dropship pilot from Aliens that they ripped off in Starcraft was a better character than anyone in this film.
3) It's very rarely frightening or suspenseful. The aliens might as well have not even existed for much of the second half of the film. We're following this group of characters trying to make their way to the ship, but once they get out of the water and up the ladder, it never feels like they're being hunted at all.
4) The human alien doesn't make for a very good climax at all. I get that it's supposed to disturb us more than anything else, but it wasn't even very good at that. The look of the creature was more comical than anything else. It would have benefited a lot from a better design.
5) The action was poor. The standout scenes are definitely the alien escape sequence and the beginning of the underwater sequence. Everything else sucked. Will Ferrel bending over backwards to fire down at the alien on the ladder sucked. Black Travis Bickle not taking more shots at the aliens when they were underwater was retarded. The characters seem to frequently forget that they're holding heavy weaponry. The aliens themselves don't really do much at all.
6) Massive logic failures. One of the key scenes in the movie makes climbing this ladder a huge ordeal, but somehow Winona Ryder is able to find an alternate route to the upper level in a few minutes after falling into the water. They're supposedly in a distant sector of space, but somehow they are able to reach Earth in 3 hours of sublight travel. It doesn't seem to matter that a huge spaceship crashes into the surface of the planet and creates a huge explosion that seems to engulf an entire continent.
7) Ripley's character makes no sense. Does she love the aliens or hate them? Does she think of them as children, or does she want to kill them? The character seems to contradict itself every few minutes.
There were also countless problems with the execution of the film that I can't even get into: poor musical cues, bad editing, , bad design, etc.
It wasn't offensively bad, but it wasn't good either, which sucks, because there was a lot of potential there.
1) The premise is retarded. It wouldn't work. Unless the alien DNA mixes into human DNA after the facehugger impregnates someone, they wouldn't be able to get alien genetic material from Ripley's blood. This would not be a fatal flaw if the execution were better, since it does allow for some pretty neat ideas. One of my favorite scenes was when Ripley discovers the lab full of failed clone experiments. That was one of the bright spots in the film. But generally, everything is executed so poorly that by the time I got to the end of the film, I was just Picard-facepalming at every scene.
While the alien escape scene was quite excellent, it brings up a glaring plot hole: they didn't seem to have any kind of contingency plan for the alien escape at all. Housing multiple aliens together in the same cell was just asking for trouble. If the goal was to domesticate them, why would you want to let them communicate with each other? And again, I never got the feeling that anyone had thought about what to do if the aliens escaped. It seems like the whole plan was to just abandon ship if that happened, but even that is retarded if the escape pods are located in a place that the aliens can easily reach within minutes of escaping.
2) There isn't really a likable character in the whole thing aside from Ripley and maybe Winona Ryder's character. And since Ripley spends most of the film acting crazier than Shia in Transformers 2, that pretty much leaves us with only Winona to root for, which is never a good thing. Actually, I take that back. I liked Michael Wincott's character a lot, but he dies so early on that we spend the majority of the film watching a bunch of losers and degenerates.
I know that the audience is supposed to sympathize with the handicapped guy with a speech impediment, but I just found him extremely annoying. Will Ferrell, sorry, Ron Perlman was absolutely awful. The black guy with the Travis Bickle arm holsters was pretty cool, but he doesn't really get to do much, and his death scene was completely retarded. He falls about 30 feet into a pool of water. He could have easily survived. Also, watching the cripple with the speech impediment try to claw his way up that ladder was like watching a fat kid with honey all over his legs trying to outrun a hungry tiger. You're supposed to be really invested in this character's struggle, but it just comes off as comedic more than anything else. Completely kills the tension.
I also hated the "survivor" that they found. I guess he has a redeeming moment at the end when he uses the chestburster inside of him to take out the evil general, but aside from that he was just dead weight for most of the film.
Horror films are a lot more tense if you actually care about the characters. This one completely failed at that. Compared to the casts of the first two, which were filled with great characters, this completely shits the bed. There's no one who comes close to Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, Parker or Dallas. Even Alien 3 had better characters overall. Fuck, even the dropship pilot from Aliens that they ripped off in Starcraft was a better character than anyone in this film.
3) It's very rarely frightening or suspenseful. The aliens might as well have not even existed for much of the second half of the film. We're following this group of characters trying to make their way to the ship, but once they get out of the water and up the ladder, it never feels like they're being hunted at all.
4) The human alien doesn't make for a very good climax at all. I get that it's supposed to disturb us more than anything else, but it wasn't even very good at that. The look of the creature was more comical than anything else. It would have benefited a lot from a better design.
5) The action was poor. The standout scenes are definitely the alien escape sequence and the beginning of the underwater sequence. Everything else sucked. Will Ferrel bending over backwards to fire down at the alien on the ladder sucked. Black Travis Bickle not taking more shots at the aliens when they were underwater was retarded. The characters seem to frequently forget that they're holding heavy weaponry. The aliens themselves don't really do much at all.
6) Massive logic failures. One of the key scenes in the movie makes climbing this ladder a huge ordeal, but somehow Winona Ryder is able to find an alternate route to the upper level in a few minutes after falling into the water. They're supposedly in a distant sector of space, but somehow they are able to reach Earth in 3 hours of sublight travel. It doesn't seem to matter that a huge spaceship crashes into the surface of the planet and creates a huge explosion that seems to engulf an entire continent.
7) Ripley's character makes no sense. Does she love the aliens or hate them? Does she think of them as children, or does she want to kill them? The character seems to contradict itself every few minutes.
There were also countless problems with the execution of the film that I can't even get into: poor musical cues, bad editing, , bad design, etc.
It wasn't offensively bad, but it wasn't good either, which sucks, because there was a lot of potential there.
