Last week I saw Alien, which was a pleasure. I think I only saw it once before, back in the eighties on VHS. The commentary was great too, featuring everybody including Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver.
And today I watched Alien Resurrection. I never did originally, because I had not been so impressed with Aliens and Alien3, so I figured, how good can the fourth one be?
Turns out, much better than expected. I was never bored, which is unusual for me and action movies.
And I found it funny, well acted, beautiful visually, and with fresh ideas, surprisingly.
Winona Ryder is lovely, and Sigourney was no less hot for being 47 when she made it.
The creatures looked totally real, even when they had to be CG. I liked how they finally moved away from the silly humanoid body the original alien had. Ridley Scott said in the commentary to the first one that it was humanoid because it was adaptive to the host, but it feels like a justification for the fact that it was either that or stop-motion, which would have looked even worse. (See Robocop II.) And of course there was the final creature, which looked even more different, I liked it.Sigourney wrote a fun article about shooting the film. There is a cool scene where Ripley, who is now superhuman due to having been mixed with Alien DNA, shoots a basketball into the hoop from 20 meters away, without looking, over her shoulder. It turns out this shot was real, not special effects! It didn't even touch the sides of the hoop. Amazing.
4 comments:
"Sigourney [...] shoots a basketball into the hoop from 20 meters away, without looking, over her shoulder."
Hey, if shit can happen, why not THIS, too? Stuff like that happens to me nearly all the time. (Translation : once every 5 or 10 years!)
Life doesn't always suck. :-)
I heard a true story about a U.S. Statistics teacher, giving his first class, who flipped a coin to illustrate the classic basic principle. Except, the coin landed on its side! Somebody once calculated that the odds for this were one to ten billions (I think).
I swear, had I been in this class, some "anonymous student" would be eternally remembered for having shouted : "Do it again!"
Winona and Sigourney are great actresses. Love 'em. Nuff said.
yawn................
"Anonymous":
1: that's not helpful.
2: Put your name on it.
"I liked how they finally moved away from the silly humanoid body the original alien had."
As if Earth life was lacking fine non-humanoid models! Quadruped mammals, reptiles, birds, dinosaurs, insects, crustaceans...
I've always pitied sci-fi "creatives" who blatantly displayed their LACK of imagination! At least, James White's General Sector series was a great counter-example. Extremely plausible.
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