Alien (franchise)

"You better just start dealing with it, Hudson! Listen to me! Hudson, just deal with it, because we need you and I'm sick of your bullshit."

"You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."

"[to the Alien Queen who is about to kill Newt] Get away from her, you BITCH!"

"Close your eyes, baby!"

"All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? It's another glorious day in the Corps. A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm: Every meal's a banquet. Every paycheck's a fortune! Every formation's a parade! I love the Corps!"

"I'm ready, man. Check it out! I am the ultimate badass! State of the badass art! You do not want to fuck with me. Check it out! Hey, Ripley, don't worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you! Check it out. Independently targeting particle-beam phalanx. WHAP! Fry half a city with this puppy. We got tactical smart missiles, phase plasma pulse rifles, RPGs. We got sonic, electronic ball-breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks..."

"Yo! Stop your grinnin', and drop your linen! Found 'em!"

"We're on the express elevator to hell, going down!"

"They're coming outta the walls! They're coming outta the goddamn walls! Let's book!"

"What do you mean "they cut the power"? How could they cut the power, man?! They're animals!"

"That's it, man. Game over, man. Game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?"

"This time it's war."

"There are some places in the universe you don't go alone."

"[W]here "Alien" focused on the creature itself, "Aliens" centers on Ripley, whom a "deep-salvage" team finds floating in space after a 56-year "hypersleep." The anonymous Company, as represented by Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), is pretty steamed that Ripley destroyed the mother ship (with the alien in it). But when the radio silence of one of the Company's colonies points toward another alien outbreak, Burke enlists Ripley in a search mission. So she's thrown together with a company of Marines, including Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), a burly, tough-talking woman machine-gunner; quiet Hicks (Michael Biehn) and noisy Hudson (Bill Paxton); a gravel-voiced, enigmatic android named Bishop (Lance Henriksen); Sgt. Apone (Al Matthews), a cigar-chomping top kick; and Lt. Gorman (William Hope), the group's callow and effete commanding officer. As a screenwriter, Cameron has an uncanny ear for the way these trench rats talk, their banter and swaggering bravado. He has the same instincts as George Lucas did in "Star Wars" -- make the future seem real, and lived in -- but he pushes it further. The surroundings are different, the weapons are fancier, but as the soldiers razz Lt. Gorman or ready themselves for battle, it might as well be Vietnam. The humor is a way to get us to like these characters, so that when they're thrown into danger it's not just a cheap thrill. And it's a way to draw you into the early going, without squandering any of the cliffhangers -- it allows Cameron to pace his movie along a perfectly accelerating curve, to pack the excitement into the last 45 minutes (which is almost all climaxes) without losing the audience at the beginning."

"At its heart, "Aliens" involves a myth deep in everyone's psychology, a war between a good mother and a wicked stepmother (the "Alien Queen"), and it ends with a tableau of the family triumphant, although this might be the weirdest family anyone's ever seen -- a gun-toting mom, a wild child and an android who's been sawed in half. But in that single image is the whole of Cameron's strategy -- to take what's familiar and permanent in ordinary life, and twist it, and twist it again. "Aliens," in other words, might be about a young girl who hates her stepmother and loves her mom -- it just wouldn't be nearly as much fun. Aliens, opening today at area theaters, is rated R, and contains violence and profanity."

"[W]ritten and directed by James Cameron, the Canadian boy from Chippawa, Ont., Aliens is smartly conceived and executed, and it does contain its share of thrills and scares. But it is very much a sequel, and the element of surprise, the most invaluable of commodities in enterprises such as this, has been lost."

"In “Aliens,” Biehn plays Weaver’s comrade-in-arms, and while she seems to be the only human on this Marine mission with any smarts, he at least shares her humanity. It’s a quality in short supply this time. There’s no attempt to let us know or care for this new crew as we did for the old one, for Harry Dean Stanton or Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt or Veronica Cartwright. Losing them was a wrench. These awesomely muscled men and women are sewer-mouthed, burr-headed young grunts, there to wrestle the weaponry about and to be picked off."

"“If the sequel doesn’t equal Alien in cardiac-arrest value, it’s only because stainless-steel teeth, repulsiveness and slime have gone about as far as they could go (with John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing), then gone on to be a laughing matter in Ghostbusters.”"

"The supporting actors here are inventions like the PulseGun or the SmartGun, which red-bandannaed Private Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) stalks about with regally, like a flamenco dancer. (“Aliens” is going to be big on the survivalist circuit. It’s about this point that you remember Cameron also co-wrote “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”). The film may be as empty as it is fast and noisy, but Cameron still has a droll touch with his villains--watch who steps off “Aliens’ ” elevator in pursuit of Weaver--and with amazing mechanical inventions: Here it’s a forklift suit with monstrous lobster claws. (The film’s R rating is for its language and gruesome effects; it’s definitely not for impressionable children in spite of its 9-year-old heroine.)"

"Two of the actors, ex-comic Paul Reiser and Lance Henriksen (“The Right Stuff’s” Wally Schirra) as the ship’s exceptional android, are particularly fine, as is James Horner’s ruminative, intelligent music and Emma Porteous’ eye for costuming. But of all the film’s choices, the best was Weaver. She’s its white-hot core, given fine, irascible dialogue to come blazing out of that patrician mouth, and the chance to look, for a moment, like a space-dusted Sleeping Beauty in her hyper-sleep casket."

"Perhaps the best single word to describe James Cameron's Aliens is relentless. Tautly paced and expertly directed, this roller coaster ride of a motion picture offers a little bit of everything, all wrapped up in a tidy science fiction/action package. From the point when the opening half-hour of exposition ends and the real movie begins, Cameron barely gives viewers a chance to catch their breaths or ease their grips on their armrests as he plunges his characters from one dire situation to the next. This is one of those rare motion pictures that involves the audience so completely in the story that we're as worn out at the end as our on-screen counterparts."

"When it comes to the logical marriage of action, adventure, and science fiction, few films are as effective or accomplished as Aliens, and there's nothing on the market (either in theaters or on video store shelves) that will leave you as thoroughly exhausted."

"If you take the special edition of James Cameron’s astounding sequel to the classic Alien, it’s a film where you don’t see – save for a face-hugger right at the start – a single alien creature until almost an hour has been clocked up. One full hour. How incredible is that, particularly contextualized against modern-day flicks that never seem to introduce the cat to the bag, let alone let it out? But there’s more to it than that, because Cameron then spends that hour superbly well, managing to ratchet up the tension to quite unbearable levels in the build-up to the inevitable first encounter. In fact, there’s a convincing argument, and this writer would certainly subscribe to it, that the scariest thing in the whole of Aliens is a flashing dot on a screen, accompanied by a beeping noise."

"I was as much doing an homage to what Ridley [Scott] had created as I was making my own movie, but I did set out to do both in a balance. I didn’t think I could outdo Alien for pure shock. … So I had to come up with an end run around that would be equally entertaining for an audience but in a different way."

"I was sitting with the three producers, and we were in the office of the then-head of 20th Century Fox. And I said, ‘Guys, I got an idea for the title. And it goes like this.’ And I wrote, ‘Alien’ in large block letters. And I put an S on the end. I showed it to them. I said, ‘I want to call it Aliens, because we're not dealing with one. Now we're dealing with an army, and that's the big distinction. And it's very simple and very graphic.’ And I said, ‘But here's what it's going to translate to.’ And then I drew the two lines through it to make it a dollar sign. And that was my pitch. And apparently it worked! Because they went with the title. They never questioned it."

"Though it's perhaps the most iconic single prop in the entire Alien franchise, the power loader Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) uses to fend off the xenomorph queen in Aliens (1986) was a real pain to make. A new featurette, premiering today on The Creators Project, reveals that, while Rome wasn't built in a day, the very first model for this "far future forklift," actually was. "The practical effects guys in England, they just thought I was nuts," Cameron says in the clip, referring to the time he essentially locked his team in a room with a bunch of pipes and foam core. But by the end of the day they had a recognizable prototype of the first robot exoskeleton to hit the silver screen. When they tested out their experiment, Cameron says, "All the effects guys were starting to think, 'Oh my god this actually sort of works just enough that he's going to make us do this.' And I did, I made them do it.""

"Sigourney Weaver set the bar high when she reprised her role of Ellen Ripley in 1986 sci-fi classic Aliens. As a female lead who was unsentimental but not unfeeling, she gave us a hero that has since been copied but never equaled."

"Thirty-five years on, Weaver’s performance remains the high watermark for strong female leads in action movies. It’s a character description that may sound redundant and regressive in this day and age, but in 1986 Weaver embodied it to a degree that left many other great performances by great actors that came afterwards suffering by comparison."

"Parents need to know that the relentless, ravenous clawed monsters in Aliens, the sequel to Alien, are likely to give small kids (and others) nightmares. It's even more violent than the original. Besides the rerun of the grisly moment when embryonic aliens burst out of people (in reality and in dream scenes), we also see quick cuts of victims seared with acid, getting set on fire, and blowing themselves up with a grenade. Gunfire, bombs, and flamethrowers are directed at the aliens. Most disturbing of all -- or, at least, the most nakedly manipulative -- is the perpetual threat of ghastly violence/death/contamination directed at a frightened, screaming little girl. There's also a plethora of swearing and lots of adoring fondling of guns and high-powered weapons."

"Families can talk about the military metaphor in Aliens; it's said James Cameron had Vietnam on his mind when he depicted a group of gung-ho Marines charging into tunnels only to get shredded to pieces by hordes of an enemy that keeps on coming. What could the characters have done differently?"

"`Aliens,` said Cameron, resplendent on a recent June afternoon in a black, open-neck shirt crawling with virulently purple orchids, is the movie I would have died to see when I was 14."

"An action-thriller that women will cheer for."

"A sequel to director Ridley Scott's "Alien" was inevitable, of course. This traditional horror movie set in outer space simply made too darn much money for the studio to simply let it stand alone. Surprisingly, when director James Cameron took over, he was determined to make a different movie rather than merely rehash the first. Thus, "Aliens" was adventurous, taking the story in new and exciting directions as an action-adventure yarn instead of another horror movie. Indeed, several critics feel "Aliens" is better than "Alien.""

"The ads for "Aliens" claim that this movie will frighten you as few movies have, and, for once, the ads don't lie. The movie is so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy? It has been a week since I saw it, so the emotions have faded a little, leaving with me an appreciation of the movie's technical qualities. But when I walked out of the theater, there were knots in my stomach from the film's roller-coaster ride of violence. This is not the kind of movie where it means anything to say you "enjoyed" it."

"The director, James Cameron, has been assigned to make an intense and horrifying thriller, and he has delivered it. Weaver comes through with a very strong, sympathetic performance. The supporting players are sharply drawn. The visual effects are professional. I’m giving the movie a high rating for its skill and professionalism and because it does the job it says it will do. I am also advising you not to eat before you go to see it.”"

"It's here that my nerves started to fail. "Aliens" is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie's less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it's like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops. I don't know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure "Aliens" is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft."

"Skip ... if you’re not a fan of war movies. Even though “Aliens” belongs to a number of genres, it is basically just a scarier, louder, gorier version of a classic combat flick. Add in the profanity, the high body count and the endless waves of monsters coming out of the darkness, and you’ve got something that’s a far cry from the typical sci-fi or horror film."

"James Horner's score contains elements of Goldsmithian militaristic marches and borrowings from his Star Trek III score, as well as a touch of "The Gayne Ballet," as used in 2001, making it seem more of a rehash than an original from this talented composer. Stan Winston has done an excellent job of making H.R. Giger's original Alien design quicker moving and more mobile, adding a hitherto unseen form of the Alien for the climax. Aliens ends up as a wild and woolly roller-coaster ride of a movie which should attract anxious crowds of thrill fans as it cuts a swath through theaters from here to Alpha Centauri."

"“Aliens is about nothing at all beyond squeezing yet another buck from what seven years ago was an original, arresting — and profitable — science-fiction-horror [film]. Alien was so good because it said all that needed to be said on its subject. [S]equels are superfluous, dictated by pure greed as opposed to any driving artistic compulsion.”"

"Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production. For sure, there’s only so many times you can tell the same story and rewrite the same set pieces: Because the film’s human melodramas play second fiddle to the kick-ass action sequences, it’s obvious that 20th Century Fox wanted to bank on the success of the original film. Sometime after its release, Alien began to develop a following among feminists, confirmed when one of my film school professors would frequently reference the set design’s phallic and vaginal imagery. But it’s Ripley’s battle to be heard by the film’s alpha males and mother ship that truly resonates today. This mostly subtextual war of the sexes is on whorish display throughout Aliens: the mother alien is referred to as a “badass” by Bill Paxton’s insufferable Hudson; Ripley’s cigar-chomping sergeant doesn’t think she can do anything; and the tough, eager-to-please Latina lesbian who calls Ripley “Snow White” is teased for looking like a man. After floating in space for 57 years, Ripley is picked up by a salvage ship and is treated like a rape victim by a money-minded conglomerate. After her feminine insight gets the better of everyone, she helps spearhead a mission back to the alien planet after the ship loses contact with its colonists. Plot holes abound, but more tragic is the sorry lot of archetypical characters a fierce Ripley has to rub shoulders with; you can tell exactly in what order everyone will die depending on how nondescript, polite, hysterical, or evil the characterization. Aliens is a “guy movie” through and through, right down to the “get away from her, you bitch” female-on-female violence (Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill must have been watching Dynasty while writing their screenplay). The director’s cut of the film hauntingly amplifies Ripley’s disconnect from her dead daughter and her relationship to the young Newt (essentially a substitute for her creepy pet cat). Otherwise, the film’s human interactions are nowhere near as interesting as Cameron’s deft direction of action and use of non-alien space (the “Remote Sentry Weapons” killing spree may be Cameron’s finest moment)."

"The special-effects specialists are featured prominently in the credits that precede Aliens, and so they should be. Under the direction of James Cameron, they have put together a flaming, flashing, crashing, crackling blow-’em up show that keeps you popping from your seat despite your better instincts and the basically conventional scare tactics.”"

"Although the aliens still have that nasty way of bursting through people's skin, mostly we meet them full-grown, with scales and coils and, my, what big teeth. Now they look like dragons, now like sea monsters or pterodactyls or a combination plate of lizard, bat, eel and spider. The young aliens resemble agitated lobsters. I thought I saw an elephant trunk on the Big Mamma alien, who is too big to be blown away even by Miss Weaver's big gun, but it could have been something else. Anyhow, it wasn't anything you'd want clutching at your foot while you were trying to hang on to your spaceship and not be gulped into the void. No monster movie with pretensions can do without a scene that stirs a twinge of compassion for the monsters. It might be just my wishful imagination, but I thought I detected an expression of anguish on Big Mamma, a prodigious breeder, as dozens of her extra-large eggs were getting badly cracked. But she could merely have been opening her glacierlike jaws to devour that little girl."

"Talk about relentless. There probably has never been a cliffhanger as outrageous or as ingeniously sustained as Aliens, writer-director James Cameron’s absolutely smashing sequel to Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 science-fiction/horror classic…. Aliens proves that a bigger budget and more elaborate visual effects haven’t spoiled Cameron, and that he can still generate that involvement. In many ways, this is one sequel that improves on the original.”"

"“[O]ne of the things that makes Aliens work is the performance of Sigourney Weaver, reprising her role from the first film. She is strong and serious and very human. And she puts to shame the spate of one-dimensional macho heroes we’ve had lately who all look like plastic imitations of each other.”"

"Aliens is often regarded as a blueprint for how to execute an effective sequel. And rightly so. It didn’t try to replicate the first film. Instead, it took its essence and Scrapheap Challenged a rip-roaring war movie out of it. Ripley, the lone survivor of the mining ship, Nostromo – the sepulchral setting for the first film’s slasher-horror minimalism – joins a ragtag band of marines to take the fight back to the aliens. And what a bunch they are: Michael Biehn’s stoic Hicks, Bill Paxton’s wild-eyed gobshite Hudson, Jenette Goldstein’s badass gunslinger Vasquez. Frost, Spunkmeyer, Gorman, Apone, Drake – it’s amazing how many memorable grunts Cameron managed to forge with so little expository dialogue. That they used enormous “smart guns” mounted to their hips and sped around in a Batmobile-esque armored personnel carrier only served to sprinkle more geek catnip on my impressionable 12-year-old brain."

"Rewatching it over the years I’ve only come to appreciate Aliens more. It remains a masterclass in building tension: we don’t actually see an alien until the hour mark, and when we finally do it’s in a bewildering frenzy of bodycam panic. The scene with Ripley and Newt (the girl Ripley finds living feral on a base long since overrun by aliens) trapped in a laboratory with a scuttling face-hugger is still a bum-clenching ordeal. Paul Reiser’s smarmy, flop-sweat-slick company man, Burke, has become ever more punchable with every passing year. And Ripley overcoming her prejudices to accept the android Bishop as a friend is more touching now than it ever was. Yes, Bishop had to be literally ripped in half in order for her to do this, but the point stands. It could be argued that Cameron hasn’t made a truly great film since Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). That was the other adult-centric movie I remember featuring heavily in my childhood. Both Cameron films, both sequels to grimier, more disturbing originals that my mum would rather I didn’t watch, both held together by remarkable performances by their leading women. I’ve come to think that my mum was engaged in a not-so-subtle campaign to imbue me with an appreciation of strong female role models."

"Brandishing sophisticated weaponry and rescuing hostages in a style that leads Pauline Kael to label her “no more than a smart Rambo” (79), Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley champions a type of a feminist role in Alien (1979) (dir. Ridley Scott) and its film child Aliens (1986) (dir. James Cameron). Lawrence O’Toole croons that “Weaver brings wit, warmth, compassion, sweat and strength to her heroic role. Feminism has barely had it so good”, while David Ansen calls her “human macho” a “strong, unsentimental heroine” (64), and Rebecca Bell-Metereau celebrates Ripley as a “prototype for a new female lead…because she is not stunning, stunned, or simpering” (210) Single-handedly defeating alien creatures who threaten to destroy the human race, Ripley is intelligent, resourceful, independent, able to take command, and, in the greatest divergence from Hollywood’s typical depiction of “feminists,” not linked romantically to a man. “The closest thing that [Aliens] comes to romance” is Corporal Hicks showing Ripley how to operate an M41A pulse rifle (Kael 79). Ripley thus seems to epitomize, both for the films and their many viewers, the type of a new woman, one who not only holds her own in a man’s world, but is the only person to survive successfully in it."

"FROM the halls of Montezuma to the spores of outer space, they will fight our country's battles anytime, anyplace . . . The Marines, sweating and swearing and valiant as lions, engage "Aliens" in this hell-bent-for-leathernecks sequel to the 1979 thriller by Ridley Scott. "Alien" was a classic of gothic horror, but "Aliens" is a blockbuster of epic combat, a high-powered, spine-tingling, interplanetary "Pork Chop Hill." Here, a few good men -- and in the year 2036, a few good women -- battle the blood-thirsty beings of the planet Archeron."

"Raunchy one-liners relieve the fear of the unknown that menaces this mean, terrific team. Only the sequel isn't as shocking because we know a little about the monster now. "Aliens" can't top the original caesarean scene -- the monster tearing through the abdomen of its human host. But this time there are more parasites. If "Alien" was a cancer metaphor, "Aliens" is more like AIDS. There may be no defense, though there are plenty of skirmishes. Then there's the red-blooded feminism. Basically it's "Rambo" for her, with Weaver's demeanor steelier than Stallone's. But she is a woman. And that means she's got to balance a career and mothering when she takes a spunky nine-year-old space orphan under her wing."

"As in the original, Cameron's space looks lived in. The computer banks are dusty and the troop-ers wear fatigues instead of silver-zippered suits. The monsters, in their many forms, are recreated with gooey veracity, plus there's a new queen bee ovipositing spores in the aliens' nasty nursery. Boy, do those things make a lot of slime. It gets slippery for Ripley in a girls-only show-down with the alieness, despite the backing of formidable comrades: Michael ("Terminator") Biehn as a dashing corporal and Lance Henriksen as a valiant synthetic ("I prefer the term artificial person myself"). The vigorous and well-chosen cast also includes comedian Paul Reiser in his first serious role, as a corporate villain; and Al Matthews as the bull-necked sarge who moves 'em out to the rat-tat-tat-tat of the drums. Except for the droid, they're characters you'd find in any foxhole from "Sergeant York" to "The Green Berets." The enemy is as merciless as the Nazis, as elusive as the North Vietnamese. All of it is set against the pristine starscape of deep space."

"Director James Cameron makes all the right moves. [H]e brings to Aliens a solid gift for action, pacing and excitement…. Though Aliens is unable to eschew some obvious sci-fi conventions and those of other genres as well, it brings a fresh and lively spirit to this tired cinematic clime. Scene to scene, encounter to encounter, its tension builds unrelentingly. So, fasten your seat belts. It’s a blast."

"You’re entering a tight corridor filled with menacing shadows. Is that breathing you hear? Well, don’t run. Clanging metal walkways and staircases always give your position away. You might be playing a first- or third-person shooter - or watching the film “Aliens.” Every science fiction/horror game of the last 20 years - from the granddaddy of them all, Id’s “Doom,” to recent titles such as Electronic Arts’ “Dead Space” series - owes a debt to the first two films in the “Alien” franchise, Ridley Scott’s moody 1979 original and James Cameron’s action-packed 1986 sequel, “Aliens.”"

"Cameron was confident enough to not only dream up a sequel that continued Ripley’s story but also shift it into a different genre. Where Alien was pure horror, Aliens was first and foremost an action thriller; the movie’s tagline, “This time it’s war” was a clear indication that Cameron’s movie was anything but a straight retread."

"In the wake of Aliens, the pop culture impact of the colonial marines – and the look of film in general – was immediate. It’s worth noting that Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation of Starship Troopers, with its military units wearing light armour rather than powerful exoskeletons, was actually closer to Aliens than Heinlein’s book. Aliens impact on videogame design, meanwhile, can be seen everywhere – from the retro alien blasting future soldiers in Contra (1987) to the frat-boy space marines in Gears Of War and a thousand identikit sci-fi shooters. In the absence of more colonial marines adventures on the big screen, videogame designers filled the void."

"It starts with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) emerging like Sleeping Beauty from more than half a century of interplanetary slumber, which she doubtless needed after her prior ordeal. The planet where it all happened, she learns, has since been colonized by humans, who have broken off contact with Earth—but note the timeline: they did so only after she awoke. Is that a mere plot contrivance, or could it be that the monsters have been waiting for Ripley, to summon her to the fray? She certainly seems more determined and queenly this time around, with a foe to match, plus an android, played by Lance Henriksen, and the result is a formidable acceleration of all the fears that lurked in the first film: the frigidity of Scott’s detached and spooky manner is replaced by the relentlessness of a racing heart. Action thrillers assail but rarely test us; this is the tautest, most provoking, and altogether most draining example ever made."

"It’s a fun film that also demanded you to take it seriously. I think some people missed all that and just wanted to indulge in the ‘bug hunt’ war porn of it all. But beneath its rollercoaster surface, Aliens is a pretty sophisticated genre classic.”"

"Aliens could have used a lot more of what made the first ill-fated voyage such a harrowing experience: creeping horror that is so cold-blooded and unspeakable you scream but nothing comes out.”"

"There ought to be a warning attached to the video release of "Aliens," the sequel to the 1979 sci-fi thriller "Alien." It should read: "Warning. Not To Be Viewed Alone, Nor After 11 p.m. Otherwise, Tranquil Sleep Cannot Be Guaranteed." Because that's how I watched this remarkable thriller -- late at night and alone. I found it, quite simply, terrifying -- one of the scariest movies since "The Exorcist." And one of the best of this type. Translated to video, "Aliens" is not quite as terrifying as it was in theaters, but the suspense, drama and horror are there nonetheless. Sigourney Weaver, that willowy, captivating young star, returns as the sole survivor of the earlier space mission. She's been asleep for 57 years when she's returned to Earth. Why the technology hasn't changed too much in half a century is about the only unanswered question in this otherwise near-perfect thriller."

"The rest of "Aliens" is basically a series of search-and-destroy missions in the bowels of an abandoned structure on a far-off planet. But the way the creatures are stalked, and the slow, me-thodical steps the marines take before suddenly confronting them, make for superb drama. Some-times, even though you know the nature of the enemy, not knowing when or where it will strike is more terrifying. And so it is with this wonderfully filmed thriller. Whereas the original "Alien" was a bit too laid back for my tastes, with its characters spending too much time sipping coffee and waiting to be devoured, skewered and decimated, "Aliens" has no such flaws. It is a continual series of furious encounters with the aliens, who are multiplying rapidly."

"Watching a movie like "Aliens" on home video cannot match the terror from a big screen, at least for me. The security of one's own living room is reassuring, and so is that omnipotent off button on the VCR. But if you make the commitment to watch "Aliens" -- and I think you should -- you will see something quite remarkable. Not only is terror sustained for more than two hours, but also the last 20 minutes -- Weaver's final confrontation with the queen bee of the aliens -- has to to be one of the scariest horror sequences ever filmed."

"[L]ittle touches make Aliens much more fun than the run of the science-fiction genre. And its creatures are much more ingeniously mean than the gremlins of two summers ago."

"The original Alien was a haunted-house movie, brilliantly transposed to outer space. Claustrophobia was its primary tool of terror, and it featured a gross out unparalleled in movie history. Aliens writer James Cameron had the good sense to try to make a different kind of movie. Aliens resembles less its predecessor than The Terminator."

"Director James Cameron’s continuation of Ridley Scott’s Alien is long on brawn and short on brains. Too many Marines, too much noise, and too many acres of heavy hardware clutter up the scenery."

"[Aliens is] a sequel that exceeds its predecessor in the reach of its appeal while giving Weaver new emotional dimensions to explore."

"Count me out of the fan club for this one. To me, Aliens is one extremely violent, protracted attack on the senses, as surviving space explorer Sigourney Weaver again confronts the spiny, slithering creatures who killed her buddies in the original film, Alien. Some people have praised the technical excellence of Aliens. Well, the Eiffel Tower is technically impressive, but I wouldn`t want to watch it fall apart on people for two hours. R."

"Long after the thrills and chills wear off, I would argue that Aliens will be remembered not for its military saltiness, but for the role that Weaver takes to full-bodied heroics."

"Fifty-seven years on, Ripley is discovered - Sleeping Beauty in space. Plagued by nightmares and surrounded by sceptics, she's forced to return to the resting place of the original alien's mother ship with a bunch of seen-it-all-before Marines. Confidently directed by James Cameron (heretofore known only for 'The Terminator' and 'Piranha II'), this sequel dares to build slowly, allowing Weaver to develop a multi-dimensional character even as it ups the ante by fetishising the Marines' hi-tech hardware and spawning legions of aliens (the suspense involves guessing which group will be cannon fodder). There is always an interesting tension in Cameron's work between masculine and feminine qualities. When it finally hits the fan here, we're in for the mother of all battles."

"In a summer of disappointing sequels, it’s a pleasure to announce that Aliens is every bit as good as the original. That said, it’s also quite different, which is probably why it succeeds where other sequels have failed."

"Monday, July 18, marks the 30th anniversary of the debut of Aliens, so EW asked Weaver, director James Cameron, and producer Gale Anne Hurd to reminisce about that final knock-down drag-out. Cameron: I did the initial drawings. I presented them to Stan Winston, and then the next thing was, all right, now how are we going to do this damn thing? Because you got to remember, there was no CGI back then. So, you know, we’re talking about big puppets, miniature puppets, and maybe some guys inside it, and I said, well, I think you can put guys inside this thing. I think you can put two people inside it. He thought I was nuts. So we did a test where we built a frame that could hold two people. Hurd: You’ve got to remember the state of computers back then also, this was not a time of microcircuitry that’s as advanced as it is today. There were robots in manufacturing lines, and we used some robotics in the film, but it was first generation. If it could be choreographed with people, it’s much easier to tell someone what you want to do and how to change something in a nuanced way. And it’s less likely to break!"

"Weaver: Looking back, I’m always astonished that they trusted me to flame the dummies and shoot blanks into the stunt guys and bazookas into some of the other targets. You know, we just went for it. And luckily I didn’t kill anyone."

"CORNISH: OK, remind us the difference between 1979's "Alien" and what came seven years later in "Aliens" with an s. Like, fundamentally, what's the difference in plot?"

"What returns from Alien: creepy egg chamber, spidery face-clinging larval parasite, chest-bursting imago, search missions in dark and wet places, a race against a nuclear self-destruct device, android malfunctioning and going literally to pieces, corporate conspiracy to obtain an alien at the cost of innumerable human lives, the airlock as weapon of choice, and the nasty suggestion that it isn’t all over (embodied there in a cat, here in a little girl, both apparently red herrings). What’s new in Aliens: Cameron replaces the timeless lethargy of Ridley Scott’s space and the sweaty, stultifying boredom of life on an intergalactic freighter with frenetic pace. Aliens grab you immediately and never lets go; it seems much shorter than its 2:17 running time (and even the 2:34 restored/enhanced edition released in 1999 streaks by with white-knuckle kinetics)."

"No futuristic plastic fantastic technology. Metal takes over, and dominates the look and sound of the film. Sigourney Weaver’s wonderful, resourceful Ripley doesn’t just continue the tough-woman role but transforms and refines it until she out-Rambos Rambo, succeeding where the military cannot. And of course there are the Marines—the “mechanized infantry” of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which Cameron boldly adopted a decade before Paul Verhoeven’s film and dropped into Aliens about forty minutes in. We have references to a “bug hunt,” getting the shakes before a drop, female pilots, cameras mounted on the Marines so leaders behind the lines can see what the troopers on the point are seeing. Cameron clearly loved Heinlein’s novel and found a way to film it by dovetailing it neatly into his sequel to someone else’s film of someone else’s vision."

"What’s not to like? There are a few things, including four of my seven least favorite movie clichés: sitting bolt upright from a dream, yelling “no” at something that’s already happened, outrunning an explosion, and having a computer voice remind us that time is running out. Newt, the little girl who is the sole survivor of an ill-fated farming colony on LV-426, is witty, wise, and brave beyond her years, but when the chips are down she has nothing to contribute beyond screaming repeatedly. The marines talk in a 1970s idiom (“check it out,” “badass,” “get it on”) even though the movie is set in a future by which, surely, those vacuous expressions—which sounded false even in 1986—will be unheard of. Their weapons are so impractically huge as to be more comical than impressive. Indeed, most of the film’s machinery seems designed with its human interface only half thought-out, creating the impression of future man as a kind of industrial junkyard hybrid. And of course this underscores the mirroring effect of the android: a machine that is almost human interacting easily with humans who are almost mechanical."

"But the film’s many fine touches more than balance out the occasional clichés and annoyances. We cut from an alien larval parasite’s spidery legs gripping the head of a space farmer to a close shot of Ripley’s spidery fingers manipulating a cigarette. Cameron enjoys giving us Kubrick references: reverse tracking, especially long corridors; a kid riding a three-wheeler; human talks in alien environments; sidewise tracking cameras discover characters and events around corners; scenes are introduced and enhanced by drums; we’re won over by an android as logical and as humanly fallible and wistful as HAL. There’s even a tough-talking, verbally abusive sergeant whose attitudes and phraseology recall Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (but wait, that can’t be a Kubrick reference since Full Metal Jacket didn’t come out until after Aliens…) Aliens also shares Kubrick’s atmosphere of a desensitized future; but here, feelings aren’t deadened, but heightened. It’s more Clockwork Orange than 2001 everyone is edgy, resentful, suspicious, abusive; their only humor is insult-humor. These are the ‘80s, the era of The Road Warrior and dozens of other junkyard futurism films in which human behavior has been stripped to the essentials and human emotions reduced to raw-edged anger or screaming terror."

"Despite the relentlessly bleak and pessimistic view of future humankind, Aliens sings an ultimately joyful song, and I will always love it for the bold self-assurance with which Cameron does Heinlein and out-does Scott."

"Before he started developing Aliens, Cameron had a different kind of extraterrestrial-themed project in mind, tentatively titled E.T. That name, of course, changed once he learned of Steven Spielberg’s film — Cameron retitled it Mother after its maternal themes. The script languished until he started developing the Alien sequel. “I cribbed some chunks from [Mother]. But it seemed to fit very well,” Cameron told us. “In the same way we needed to evolve and ratchet up Sigourney’s character, we needed to take the nemesis — the idea of the alien — and take it to another level. It was kind of staring us in the face: There was this ship filled with all these eggs. … Who laid the eggs? Continued Cameron: “Now, a scene that was removed from Ridley’s film showed there was a closure of the life cycle where the humans were cocooned and became eggs. We just threw that out. In my mind, I didn’t go against canon because that scene hadn’t made it into the release cut. So, I thought, ‘You got a mother someplace.’ Now you’ve got two mothers. Obviously, I never went anywhere with [Mother] — I just stuck it all into Alien 2.”"

"”Sigourney set the bar. I was in awe of her before I ever met her. I had her picture up on the wall while I was writing the script,” said Cameron, who directed her to an Academy Award nomination for the performance. “No actress had gotten nominated for Best Actress for a genre picture until then, not for science fiction or horror.” “I was just starting Gorillas in the Mist, which was an intimidating project because I had to play a real person and I had never done that,” Weaver recalled. “So it [the Oscar nomination] was a real shot in the arm. I didn’t realize it was groundbreaking until Jim told me. He still thinks I should have won.”"

"“For better or for worse,” said Hurd, who currently produces The Walking Dead. “All of a sudden, sequels, which were not common then, became considered a little more viable.” “A lot more viable,” Cameron interjected. “At the time we made Aliens, the rule was that a sequel would cost twice as much and make half as much. So, it never looked like a particularly good business model.” Hurd said Aliens established a rulebook for making a quality sequel: “As opposed to formulaic filmmaking, go to an auteur and have the auteur write the script and reinvent the story while staying true to canon.” “It’s about answering a question they didn’t know to ask, but when they see it, it seems obvious,” said Cameron."

"In its first five days, “Aliens” took in a healthy $13.4 million at 1,437 theaters. Seven years after Ridley Scott’s space- noir classic “Alien” first arrived, “Aliens” looks like the runaway hit of the summer and may even surpass “Top Gun” when all the counting is done. But “Aliens” almost didn’t make it to the screen. In an era when it seems as if half the current releases are sequels feeding off yesterday’s fare, “Aliens” almost crashed and burned. At one point, 20th Century Fox, the studio releasing the film, nearly sold the rights to the sequel to the producers of “Rambo.”"

"Today, the lines for “Aliens” snake around the block even for weekday mid-afternoon screenings. The line to take credit for making “Aliens” is only slightly shorter. If movie-making is a collaborative art, the story behind the making of “Aliens” offers classic evidence that the number of contributors increases exponentially with the success of a film."

"Fall, 1983: The 42-page treatment, written in three days, was submitted to Fox where, because of lack of support for the idea, the project went into its own form of hyper-sleep. Said Cameron: “An executive told me he didn’t like the treatment because it was wall-to-wall horror and it needed more character development.” At one point a deal was almost closed to sell the rights to the sequel to producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vanja (“Rambo”) but the lawyers couldn’t close the deal. Prospects for a sequel looked dim. July, 1984: Independent producer Larry Gordon was hired to replace former studio production head Joe Wizan. Finding few projects in the production pipeline, he looked for possible sequels and came across the “Aliens” file. “I couldn’t believe it hadn’t already been done,” Gordon said. “In this business there are those decisions you agonize and lose sleep over, but this was so obvious. It was a no-brainer.”"

"When Fox insisted that it would make “Aliens” with or without Weaver, Cameron and Hurd quit again, this time taking off for a honeymoon in Hawaii. Said Hurd: “We assumed it was a dead issue, and when we left for Hawaii we thought the movie was off.” But when they returned, the movie was on--with Weaver as the star. According to those close to the negotiations, she was paid close to $1 million in compensation plus a percentage of the profits, the highest salary she has earned to date in her career."

"September, 1985: “Aliens” finally started shooting on a London sound stage. After all the debate and questions about the budget, Hurd and Cameron brought in their movie on schedule and on budget. The studio loved the dailies and the buzz began to leak out: “Aliens” just might be the sleeper hit of the summer. But there was one more bitter struggle preceding the film’s opening. Fox wanted a movie of two hours or less but Cameron’s print came in at a lengthy 2 hours, 17 minutes. Nowadays, studios rarely release movies longer than 2 hours, 5 minutes, because the length cuts the number of daily screenings from five to four, substantially reducing the box-office take. For Fox to have the extra showing, Cameron would have had to cut 12 minutes. Late April, 1986: As Cameron and Hurd were working on their final “mix” (joining sound and picture together), Rudin flew to London to see their cut. Said Cameron: “We were standing on this London sidewalk and Rudin asked us if there was anything that could be cut. But we felt that if we had to take out 12 more minutes, the movie wouldn’t make sense.” Rudin acquiesced."

"Aliens is the perfect sequel. The Empire Strikes Back, while certainly a better film than Star Wars, was more a polished segment in a longer story than a stand-alone adventure. But Aliens is the model for every potential sequel-maker: it connects irrefutably with the events of the original (even to the point of starting exactly where the drama left off, albeit 57 years later) and expands on all the ideas and themes while simultaneously differentiating itself. The same, yet entirely different. Perfect. It also stands as testament to the unwavering vision and icy nerve of James Cameron (here directing only his third movie). Utilizing the bombed-out skeleton of Battersea Power Station to create the vast industrio-grim colony/hive setting for events, he was faced with a veteran British crew who had worked on Alien and worshipped the ground Ridley Scott walked on. What could this Canadian punk kid know? Well, for starters that in this case more is, indeed, more. Not just a single, ruthless, unbeatable killing machine but an army of them. On home turf."

"What also counts here is execution. Cameron accepted Scott's (and, of course, H. R. Giger's) design ethic — gloop, scaly bits, loadsa teeth and long, dark, dingy, dripping corridors — but reinterpreted them as a battleground rather than a haunted house. The point he grasped straight away is that you can't win against this foe or the stigma, the sheer terror that this endomorph engenders would be lost. You can only escape. He replaced Scott's "behind-you" tension with a muscular fury, unrelenting, sweaty-palmed, pant-filling movie intensity. Nothing before or since has locked the viewer in with such an all-consuming sense of peril (audiences and critics actually complained of physical discomfort even illness upon exiting the auditorium)."

"Thematically Aliens also expounds the set-up further. Central is a continuation of Scott and Dan O'Bannon's (the original screenwriter) bogeyman hypothesis — what if a lifeform was so attuned to survival it became the perfect killing machine and as such garnered a degree of Darwinisitic respect, even form its prey? Ash in Alien, lunatic android though he was, praised the monster for its "purity", even Ripley, confronted by the duplicity of company man Burke (Paul Reiser), has to admit that "You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percent-age!" Then it really gets going: Alien as giant phallus (and now there's a whole army of them) versus feminist heroine. The feminist subtext is hardly "sub" at all, Ripley is one of the strongest female characters in movie history. Closer to Cameron's heart, and a theme that recurs throughout his work, is the preservation of the nuclear family. With Newt rescued and Ripley taking on the role of surrogate mother we only need add Hick's gentlemanly (but by no means dominant) father to complete our model of perfect family unit (the other survivor, the android Bishop, well, he's either a kindly uncle or the pet dog or something). This whole notion is finally boiled down to a remarkable battle of maternal instincts — Ripley defending her child Newt; the queen Alien defending (or, at least, avenging) her children — summed up memorably in Ripley's battle call: "Get away from her, you bitch!" The biology of the species has been developed to the point where empathy if not sympathy is acceptable. And if you want to keep this up there is the 'Nam in space metaphor: unseen "gooks" mounting stealth attacks and the retreating Yanks totally undone by a tactic and mindset they cannot comprehend (a metaphor for US foreign policy?). Yet none of such academic noodling is ever at the expense of the thrills. Cameron understood fundamentally the basis here was a gut reaction. Aliens construction of action scenes, its build-up of tension and its final execution of combat is a marvel to behold (the film literally provokes a physical reaction). These are characters we care about, headed up by a resourceful heroine who is pitted against a formidable enemy in a thoroughly believable environment. Pure movie."

"Sigourney Weaver - Ellen Ripley"

"Carrie Henn - Rebecca 'Newt' Jorden"

"Michael Biehn - Corporal Dwayne Hicks"

"Lance Henriksen - Bishop"

"Paul Reiser - Burke"

"Bill Paxton - Private Hudson"

"William Hope - Lieutenant Gorman"

"Jenette Goldstein - Private Vasquez"

"Al Matthews - Sergeant Apone"

"Mark Rolston - Private Drake"

"Ricco Ross - Private Frost"

"Colette Hiller - Private Ferro"

"Daniel Kash - Private Spunkmeyer"

"Cynthia Dale Scott - Corporal Dietrich"

"Tip Tipping - Private Crowe"

"Trevor Steedman - Private Wierzbowski"

"You... are... my lucky star."

"[after the Nostromo explodes, seemingly killing the Alien] I got you... you son of a bitch."

"[last lines in the film] Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo. Third Officer reporting. The other members of the crew - Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas - are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off. [to Jones, the ship's cat] Come on, cat."

"It's a robot! Ash is a goddamn robot!"

"[to Dallas] Oh, God! It's moving right towards you! Move! Get out of there!"

"In space no one can hear you scream."

"Sometimes the scariest things come from within."

"There are things so terrifying, they only exist in a nightmare...or outer space."

"A word of warning …"

"Top Secret - Science Officer's Eyes Only...Bring back life form. Priority One. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable."

""The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility...its purity. A survivor - unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." ...Is there room enough in space for us and it?"

"Tom Skerritt – Dallas"

"Sigourney Weaver – Ripley"

"Veronica Cartwright – Lambert"

"Harry Dean Stanton – Brett"

"John Hurt – Kane"

"Ian Holm – Ash"

"Yaphet Kotto – Parker"

"Bolaji Badejo – Alien"

"Helen Horton – Mother"

"Alien is an expensively assembled science-fiction and horror shocker that’s being pushed hard by 20th Century Fox, and enough of it works on the gut-level of cheap thrills to justify the company’s high expectations. Alien has its problems [though]. Visual effects and shock moments aside, Scott seems ponderous about getting through simple plot mechanics that one of the old science-fiction films could have tossed off with workmanlike abandon. But for those who like this kind of film, he’s produced — in 70mm and Dolby sound — something like the equivalent of every amusement park ride rolled into one.”"

"[The] plot is simple in the extreme. Alien has almost no wit, no depth of character, no complexity of plot, no subtext of meaning. In the long run, that might prevent it from being a truly classic horror film. For the moment, however, that won’t matter. The immediate sensation of Alien is nerve-shattering terror, and on that level it works masterfully.”"

"I’m going to attack [the audience] sexually… I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs."

"Alien was green lit by 20th Century Fox after Star Wars proved just how lucrative science-fiction could be in 1977. The two films aren’t wholly different, either. Han Solo, a scruffy, self-centered mercenary, was one of sci-fi cinema’s first great working-class heroes, and his battered, lived-in spacecraft inspired Scott. “[Star Wars] influenced me when I did Alien,” he said later. “I thought I better push it a lot further, make [the aesthetic] feel a lot like truck driving.”"

"The sheer normality of these interstellar wage slaves is conveyed before we even see them. At the start of the film, the crew members of the Nostromo, a “commercial towing vehicle”, are snoozing in their suspended animation pods, but one of them has left a plastic drinking-bird ornament bobbing away on a table, and there is a coffee cup on a dashboard. Then, when the ship’s onboard computer wakes them, they don’t slip into form-fitting Starfleet uniforms and hurry to their posts: they shrug on their shapeless overalls, and then sit around eating and smoking while two blue-collar engineers, Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), grouse about “the bonus situation”."

"No other horror or science-fiction film has captured the humdrum reality of doing a day’s work for a day’s pay with such accuracy. For that matter, perhaps no film of any genre has. There may be sitcoms that depict these everyday frustrations and interactions as deftly as Alien does. But in the cinema? The most authentic ever film about earning a living could well be the one with a giant, slimy, acid-blooded extra-terrestrial monster."

"Many, many years ago — back in 1985 — I wrote an episode of my comic strip where two women are talking to each other. They want to go see a movie and one woman says, "I'll only go to a movie if it satisfies three criteria." I have to confess, I stole this whole thing from a friend of mine at the time because I didn't have an idea for my strip. My friend Liz Wallace ... said, "I'll only see a movie if it has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man." That left very, very few movies in 1985. The only movie my friend could go see was Alien, because the two women talk to each other about the monster. But somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era and now it's this weird thing. People actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test. Still ... surprisingly few films actually pass it."

"Alien is another triumph of technology over art. It is also a horror movie set in space — and it just doesn’t work…. Scott does make a concession to feminism by casting Sigourney Weaver as the hero but he couldn’t resist a sexist jab at the end when, with no motivation, she removes her trousers.”"

"After 40 years, this sci-fi horror masterpiece still feels lethally contemporary. With screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Ridley Scott created an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare [parody]] of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, and the biological weapons industry."

"Weaver begins the action looking girlish and serious, but changes into the toughly self-reliant woman who defined her subsequent roles. Her career evolves before our very eyes. Interestingly, the famous, heart-stopping moment where the alien embryo jumps out of the egg happens much more fleetingly than you might remember. Scott cuts away from it quickly, leaving the negative image impressed on our retina. Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots. The idea of it starting the size of a toad, then emerging the size of a bus with multiple rows of razor-teeth is skin-crawlingly horrible."

"The amount of academic work that has been written about Alien is phenomenal. But in a way that should not be surprising. The film contains themes about motherhood, gender politics, post-humanism, biology and so much else. Almost everything we can do in film studies we can do through Alien."

"Don’t race to it expecting the wit of Star Wars or the metaphysical pretensions of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At its best it recalls The Thing (from Another World), though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"A GIGANTIC construction moves serenely through space where, though the night never ends, there's always enough light to see strange objects. This one looks like the main set of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance". It's as if Babylon had been cut loose from earth to sail back through space to its own time. In actual fact, it's the cargo-ship Nostromo on its return to earth at the end of an extended voyage to the far end of the galaxy. When we go inside, the ship appears to have been as suddenly deserted as the Mary Celeste. We wander down empty corridors into abandoned living quarters, into engine rooms and, finally, into the command room where the computers are the only signs of life. The interior of the ship is vast. It contains the kind of waste space one seldom sees anymore except in some rare old Manhattan pile like the Dakota. Something decidedly eerie is going on."

"Alien is an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production. Don't race to it expecting the wit of "Star Wars" or the metaphysical pretentions of "2001" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." At its best it recalls "The Thing", though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"The horror genre, in any period, is one that you like, or leave distantly alone. The violence in Alien is less ’real’ than the shark-infested waters of Jaws. But telling yourself that these galactic goings-on are improbable nonsense is less effective than it should be in unclenching your fists or making your heart stop pounding. Surrender at all to Scott’s extraterrestrial make-believe and you are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights."

"Much admiration is justly lavished on the exquisite Lovecraftian qualities of Giger’s designs, his creation of a monster whose various slime-dripping protuberances managed to be hideous, beautiful and unnervingly sexual all at once. It was Giger who gave Alien its vision. It was Scott, with just one feature (“The Duellists”) under his belt, who gave the movie its impact. To watch Alien now is to marvel at just how patient and stealthily elegant a picture it is, particularly in its first hour, with its creeping camera movements, hypnotic pacing and enveloping, womb-like sense of dread. Released today, it would no doubt feel like an art film among so many noisier, clunkier blockbusters. If Alien looks formally radical in retrospect, it was also thematically provocative in its moment: Here was a movie that turned on the audacious spectacle of a man being raped and impregnated and that gave us a (still) too-rare female action protagonist for the ages in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley."

"The gender politics of Alien have been grist for endless deconstruction, although “Memory” does examine a few fresh wrinkles. Philippe unpacks the feminist dimension that links the movie to other 1979 releases as different as “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Elsewhere, his subjects discuss the Alien’s stature as a Fury, an extraterrestrial manifestation of a figure from Greek mythology, exacting retributive violence on behalf of the repressed feminine. Pointedly, Philippe begins the film with a shot of the Temple of Apollo ruins at Delphi and a dramatization of the Furies, played by a trio of actresses with a few creepy Giger-esque visual enhancements. It may seem like a curious point of entry, but it reinforces that Alien is timeless, in part because it brilliantly cross-pollinated so many of our most ancient and enduring myths. Its abiding respect for the past is what gave such shattering force to its vision of the future."

"Alien is such a great and groundbreaking film that no amount of redundant prequels and sequels will ever reduce its luminous majesty. It will always be there as a never-to-be-improved-upon metaphor for the icy despair and inhuman horror of deep space."

"Make no mistake about it — the gore, which is essential to this film’s effectiveness, is excessive enough to help earn the film the first ‘R’ rating given to any of the four recent sci-fi blockbusters. Any theater playing Alien may well consider building new wings on the restrooms to accommodate queasy patrons.”"

"The premise is simple: seven astronauts working on a battered cargo spacecraft, bring something back on to the ship after touching down on a strange planet, and the alien starts preying on them."

"The film was nominated for Best Art Direction at the Academy Award and won for Best Visual Effects. Anyone who has ever seen the notorious "chestburster" scene – which was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1944 painting [[w:Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion|Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion – will understand why Scott's special effects team, headed by Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, deserved to win."

"Ridley Scott’s 1979 thriller was greeted with no particular fanfare by the reviewers, and if there was a critical consensus it was that the film was at best watchable pabulum-reasonably professionally handled visually and enjoyably scary, but without significant nuance to qualify for discussion as art. Jack Kroll’s comment was typical: “It’s about time someone made a science fiction thriller that thrills, that has no truck with metaphysics, philosophy or theosophy and just boils everything down to the pure ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.” Aside from its manifest violence, the only aspect of Alien that attracted much critical fire was what one reviewer called its “gratuitous sexism.”True to a two hundred-year-old tradition of gothic horror, the film relies for its most gut-wrenching effects on the spectacle of a helpless beautiful woman threatened with violence by an unspeakable, inhuman, but quintessentially masculine horror. Significantly, one scene repeatedly mentioned as a “gratuitous” injection of voyeurism involves Sigourney Weaver’s stripping down to her underwear just prior to a final attac by the alien and her subsequent blasting of the creature into space and, presumably, oblivion. The implication seems to be that Alien was overall good, clean, horrible but simple-minded fun, and shouldn’t have been compromised by random intrusions of irrelevant sex. A close look at Alien, however, reveals that not only is sexuality not occasionally intrusive in an otherwise prestine film, but that sexual symbolism and iconography of a singular kind are pervasive throughout the film and may actually be its “leitmotif”. What Alien is about is gestation and birth. The sexuality of the film has strong reproductive overtones that distinguish it from the kind of garden variety titillation of most thrillers. The centrality of the birth process to the film is not hard to demonstrate."

"The 1979 film had married science fiction with horror in a way unseen since the ‘50s, reviving the monster genre, which had, for the most part, died out in the wake of Psycho’s ushering in of an era of more personal, intimate, human horror."

"Alien has proved an ideal text for academics, a deep well – or perhaps a totem pole – of Freudian allusion from which critics and theorists have drawn whatever they fancied. Since it was first released, every frame of the film has been pored over for meaning. James Cameron’s excellent sequel, Aliens, has been studied too. (The other films in the series, not so much.) Most of this attention has been occupied by the character of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and the Swiss artist HR Giger’s terrifying design for the alien, or “xenomorph”. But the androids, the spaceship, the uniforms and even the ship’s cat have come in for analysis. In 2019, the rise of the Alien-academic complex shows few signs of slowing down."

"In an interview looking back at the role, Weaver said: “The writers were especially smart in that they didn’t turn Ripley into a female character. She was just a character, a kind of Everyman, a young per-son who’s put in this extraordinary situation. Believe me, when we did [the sequels], I saw how hard it was to write a woman in a heroic, straight, unsentimental, authentic way.”"

"[Alien is] just an intergalactic haunted-house thriller."

"At its most fundamental level, Alien is a movie about things that can jump out of the dark and kill you. It shares a kinship with the shark in "Jaws," Michael Myers in "Halloween," and assorted spiders, snakes, tarantulas and stalkers. Its most obvious influence is Howard Hawks' "The Thing" (1951), which was also about a team in an isolated outpost who discover a long-dormant alien, bring it inside, and are picked off one by one as it haunts the corridors. Look at that movie, and you see Alien in embryo. In another way, Ridley Scott's 1979 movie is a great original. It builds on the seminal opening shot of "Star Wars" (1977), with its vast ship in lonely interstellar space, and sidesteps Lucas' space opera to tell a story in the genre of traditional "hard" science fiction; with its tough-talking crew members and their mercenary motives, the story would have found a home in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction during its nuts-and-bolts period in the 1940s. Campbell loved stories in which engineers and scientists, not space jockeys and ray-gun blasters, dealt with outer space in logical ways."

"One of the great strengths of Alien is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings). It suggests the enormity of the crew's discovery by building up to it with small steps: The interception of a signal (is it a warning or an SOS?). The descent to the extraterrestrial surface. The bitching by Brett and Parker, who are concerned only about collecting their shares. The masterstroke of the surface murk through which the crew members move, their helmet lights hardly penetrating the soup. The shadowy outline of the alien ship. The sight of the alien pilot, frozen in his command chair. The enormity of the discovery inside the ship ("It's full of ... leathery eggs ...")."

"Alien has been called the most influential of modern action pictures, and so it is, although Halloween also belongs on the list. Unfortunately, the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking. We have now descended into a bog of Gotcha! movies in which various horrible beings spring on a series of victims, usually teenagers. The ultimate extension of the genre is the Geek Movie, illustrated by the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which essentially sets the audience the same test as an old-time carnival geek show: Now that you've paid your money, can you keep your eyes open while we disgust you? A few more ambitious and serious sci-fi films have also followed in the footsteps of Alien, notably the well-made Aliens (1986) and Dark City (1998). But the original still vibrates with a dark and frightening intensity."

"You’re going to be most appreciative of Alien in its most technically advantageous circumstances."

"It is easy to see that director Ridley Scott had hoped for a cast of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty and Jim Brown, for the three principals, but settled for lookalikes Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt and Yaphet Kotto. With only about 20 pages of script, it’s understandable why everyone is sulking and biting, even being obscene enough to give the movie an R rating."

"20th Century-Fox is rather superstitiously opening the picture on the same day that Star Wars opened two years ago, and in many of the same theaters, in hopes that box-office lightning can strike twice."

"Although the spaceship models look like they were patched together with Super Glue in your brother's basement, the majority of the 24-year-old movie holds up well. The production design in Alien was always among the movie's strongest points, and the bulky details (a motion detector the size of a leaf blower; spaceship monitors that look like Radio Shack TRS-80 computer screens) seem more industrial than quaint. Even with its horrifying villain and scenes of bloody excess, Alien endures as a superior piece of filmmaking, with a pace that's like watching an art film when compared to the over-the-top space operas in recent years."

"Time has been kind to Ridley’s Scott’s Alien since its release in 1979. What was initially regarded as a science fiction/horror genre work – albeit a superior one – now plays like an existential drama that just happens to take place in deep space. An example of what commercial cinema can aspire to, even on a limited budget, the film boasts an intelligent script, careful performances, clever visual effects and well-crafted sets. The titular alien, which was designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and is only partially glimpsed throughout, remains the most elegantly vile creature to ever grace cinema screens."

"The film, of course, is loaded with innuendo; much has already been said about its phallic predilections, the reverse penetration, conflating consumption with food and sex. The crew of seven is hunted and devoured through air vents that open and close like orifices by a creature that is both biologically perverse yet undeniably industrial. There’s a very good reason why the final scare comes when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley mistakes the alien for an innocuous wall of her escape shuttle. Teaming with artist H.R Giger and set decorator Ian Whittaker, Scott envelops viewers with a paralyzing fear of replacement, becoming expendable in favour of soulless mutations of machine and matter."

"This being my fourth or fifth viewing of Alien, I’m now able to communicate better what exactly it is that scares me about it so much. Moreso than awakening subconscious biological repulsions of the other, or inherently masculine sexual insecurities, the key is in realizing that the most frightening sequence is the revelation that Ash (an uncanny early performance from Ian Holm that wipes the floor with Michael Fassbender’s David) is an android. Any initial fears of a ravenous, acid-blooded carnivore with the deadly efficiency of a slaughterhouse are immediately trumped by the slow, unsettling drip of milky blood from Ash’s forehead. The creature, the mesh of flesh and artifice driven by inhuman consciousness, was, of course, onboard the whole time."

"Alien’s pairing of genuine, spine-tingling horror and thematic resonance put Ridley Scott on the map, and it’s frankly unfair that the masterful director was able to immediately follow-up with Blade Runner, another existential sci-fi classic. 40 years on, and it has remained one of his best, most invasive and obsessive films. It’s truly a testament that, despite Prometheus and Alien: Covenant’s irritating disposition to posit answers to questions never asked, every turned corner of that first nightmare invites mystery and intrigue. We still don’t really know where the aliens came from, and it’s for the best that we never find out."

"This scary tale of a monster stalking astronauts in deep space, made with no pretense to great art, has almost by accident become of one of the most influential films in history."

"Before Alien, big showdowns were always about the last man standing, not the last woman."

"The end of Alien (spoiler alert!) has Ripley facing down the monster aboard the escape shuttle she’s using to flee the doomed spaceship Nostromo. She plans to eject the parasite from an airlock, but before she does so, she risks her own life by first rescuing the ship’s pet cat, Jones. Author/screenwriter Blake Synder used this scene as a title and theme for his Save the Cat! series of manuals on successful screenplay structure. Snyder, who died in 2009, coined “save the cat” as the moment where a movie hero does something that wins audience affection and empathy. This could happen at any point in a movie. Saving the cat in Alien proved that Ripley had a heart, because she’s a steely cipher in the rest of the film."

"When we didn't make the picture, Dan O'Bannon needed to be interned in a mental institution for two years, suffering because we didn't get to do "Dune." And when he came out he wrote the script for Alien. Alien was the reaction to not doing "Dune." Who would believe that? But it's true!"

"Alien (1979): Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt. It’s Friday night. The sold-out theater is so packed, I have to sit in the last seat available in the front row. My parents, who had no problems taking me to R-rated movies, have to sit elsewhere. Then there’s that stunning scene where John Hurt is eating breakfast with his spaceship crewmates and goes into convulsions. Unbeknownst to me, my mother has somehow sneaked up behind me. In a masterpiece of timing, just as the creature pops out of Hurt’s stomach, my mother grabs my shoulder and goes “Bah!” I still have flashbacks. It’s the most scared I’ve ever been at the movies. The film’s tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” In that theater, everyone heard me."

"[Alien] reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized.”"

"The austere minimalism of Ridley Scott’s Alien has kept it from becoming dated. Originally released in 1979, this “haunted house in outer space” scary movie still manages to spook audiences, though its infamous “chest-bursting” scene plays somewhat comic now, with the crew looking on aghast like a bunch of stooges. Best known for creating an atmosphere of dread through production design and art direction (the cavernous ship looks like a sci-fi variation of a dilapidated car garage) and, of course, H.R. Giger’s creature (all limbs and shiny black skin and protruding jaws—watch those teeth!), Alien may be the most artfully directed and well-acted slasher movie of all time."

"It was as stylish and thoughtful a space-horror film as has been made, a delightfully cerebral movie in which thrills and chills were accomplished less by the sight of evil than by its implication. The creature in Alien was an ugly little thing, to be sure, and had a disposition to match. But he never was able to dominate the film as he might possibly have one`s later dreams. In Alien, human beings--the ill-fated crew of the spaceship Nostromo--shared the front seat (and the driving) with special effects, and it was on that strength that the film became a memorable box-office smash."

"Alien begins slowly, with a methodical, restrained pace and some self-conscious interplay among its cast, but once the alien itself is introduced the movie takes as firm a hold as the alien does on its victims."

"This homicidal monster, which keeps changing shape, is designed to provoke nightmares, especially in one early scene in which it catapults itself into view, teeth bared. This scene should go down in the books as one of the most disgustingly horrifying moments in movies."

"No film I have seen in the last year or so, excluding perhaps The Deer Hunter, emanates so strong a whiff of palpable, nerve-straining shock. It is, in fact, an audience reaction picture par excellence. This explains, perhaps better than the colossal build-up, why everyone wants to see it. The public now seems to be sitting back in its seats and saying "Amaze me." Alien, above all others recently, can be relied upon to do just that. Yet it does so, oddly enough, with a story that is basically just a mixture of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Thing from Outer Space. A dozen other 50s-sounding titles spring to mind – well, 60s at any rate. The point is the added 70s proficiency. You won't see anything very original anywhere in the film, other than in the actual making of it. There, no holds are barred. Scott, a recruit from advertising, where instant atmospherics has to be the order of the day, manipulates his audience in a far stronger fashion than he managed with The Duellists. His combination of space fiction and horror story is no great shakes as a work of art. Artifice, however, it has in profusion."

"Some people call it a cruel, heartless and essentially exploitative opus. Something to gibber at, in fact. But Alien is not in the business of old-style family entertainment (which was, after all, often as warm and gooey as hot treacle, and about as nourishing). It bases its appeal on a different set of values. Not very enlightening ones, no doubt. But exactly in tune with much more cynical times. It deserves its success for gauging, and gorging, its audience so thoroughly. Technically a British film, it certainly shows how much talent we have in this country if only we had the courage to develop it ourselves. But that's another story, and a much less exciting one."

"Alien is a rape movie with male victims," explains David McIntee, author of the Alien study Beautiful Monsters. "And it also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth. It is a film that plays, very deliberately, with male fears of female reproduction." Does this make Alien a conservative film or a radical one? Over the years the debate has been teased out in either direction. In the opinion of the cultural critic Barbara Creed, for instance, Scott's film epitomized what she refers to as "the monstrous feminine". It trades in classic Freudian imagery (penis-shaped monsters; dark, womb-like interiors) and shudders at the bloody spectacle of childbirth. Here is a horror film made by men that exploits a particularly male fear of all that is female. Others beg to differ. Ripley, they argue, is the game-changer; the character that sends Alien (and its sequels) off in a bold new direction. "Ripley is pretty revolutionary," insists McIntee. "All of a sudden you have a horror film that has a younger female character who is a survivor and a heroine as opposed to a victim."

"Ridley Scott's 1979 film "is not just about people trying not to get eaten by a drooling monstrous animal," film critic David McIntee writes in Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and Predator Films. "It's worse. It's about them trying not to get raped by a drooling monstrous animal.""

"20th Century Fox was certainly not seeking intellectual respectability when it began production of Alien in the 1970s. Its executives simply wanted to replicate the massive commercial success of Star Wars and plumped on a science fiction script that writer Dan O’Bannon had been shopping round Hollywood. Scott agreed to direct. Crucial to his approach to the film was the creation of a sense of intense claustrophobia on Nostromo which, he decided, should appear as if it had been drifting around space for eons. Its interior was constructed out of old plane parts while smoke was blown through the whole set to give the film a gritty appearance. Intellectual aspirations were never in his sights, Scott later recalled. All he wanted was to make “a straightforward riveting thriller”."

"It has scared generations of filmgoers; triggered sequels, prequels, computer games and graphic novels; and made a star of Sigourney Weaver. But most of all, the film Alien – which is about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its first screening – has spawned an academic industry unsurpassed by any other film. Over the past four decades, dozens of books, hundreds of journal articles and innumerable college courses have analyzed, frame by frame, Ridley Scott’s story of a bloodthirsty creature stalking the crew of the spaceship Nostromo. No other film, not even The Godfather or Psycho, has generated quite that amount of attention."

"“It is quite astonishing how much academic work Alien has triggered and from such a wide range of approaches. For example, there are psychoanalytic analyses which stress the importance of the alien as a kind of all-consuming mother figure. The birth trauma of the alien erupting from Hurt’s innards also plays to Freudian interpretations of the film’s significance.” It is as good an example of Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, the main driving force in existence – to survive and reproduce at all costs. Alien is intriguing when viewed from that philosophical perspective."

"The consensus about the first Alien was that no one had ever seen anything like it, except those of us who had. With its more lived-in, “2001: A Space Odyssey”-like attention to futuristic detail and S&M and bondage–inspired alien design by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, Alien was unique and an instant classic, adding the words “facehugger” and “chestburster” to the horror-movie lexicon. Scripted by Dan O’Bannon (“Dark Star”) and Ronald Shusett (Aliens), Alien tells the simple tale of a terrifying and deadly alien creature (played by slender, 7-foot-2-inch London design student Bolaji Badejo in an elaborate, tight-fitting suit) on the loose inside the outer-space “commercial towing vehicle” Nostromo. Alien was, like “Jaws” (1975) and “Star Wars” (1977), another case of a B-movie concept getting the A-list treatment from a visionary young director. Indeed, the Alien screenplay was pitched to studios as “Jaws in space.”"

"With its death’s head “face,” phallus-shaped skull and snapping, slavering jaws-within-jaws, the Giger-designed Alien was unlike anything the movie-going public had ever seen. Like the mummy, Frankenstein monster, King Kong and Godzilla, the Alien creature has long since been admitted into the pantheon of greatest movie monsters of all time."

"Sci-fi classic Alien is really two movies. The first is a drama about work, labor issues, contracts, company rules, and so on; the second is just a horror film. In fact, one can see the unresolved management/labor problems in the first part of the film as being transmogrified into a monster that destroys the mining spaceship (the Nostromo) in the second part. From a wider historical perspective, the 1970s marked the end of an economic order that began at the end of the 1940s and witnessed the rise of unionized labor in the United States (this, in the film, is exemplified by the working-class characters on the spaceship factory—the late Harry Dean Stanton and the still kicking it Yaphet Kotto). The 1980s, on the other hand, marked the beginning of an economic order that transferred a massive amount of power to supermanagers. We have not left the 1980s to this day, which is why this film is still relevant."

"When I was 10 years old, I read in a newspaper that a new film called Alien was so terrifying that people were not only fainting out of fear during screenings but also taken out of the theater on stretchers. I badly wanted to see this movie: one that was so terrifying it could send a person to the emergency room."

"Yes, these films take place in outer space, so light is minimal. But Alien made distinct use of darkness, hiding its monster in the ship’s bowels, down dim corridors and inside caves. The original poster for Alien made the darkness a selling point, with a cracked egglike figure oozing green on a black background and the frightening tag line: “In space no one can hear you scream.” Much of Alien: Covenant is on the lowlight spectrum, too, with no way to know just where, or how many, threats lurk. Another film with Alien DNA referenced the darkness motif outright: Pitch Black, from (2000), which starred a rising Vin Diesel. After crashing, the passengers of a ship find themselves stranded on a planet full of E.T.s that attack in the dark. When an eclipse comes, so does terror."

"Twentieth Century Fox has spent the annual budget of several emerging nations to fashion a zillion-dollar Tunnel of Screams where you ride through the dark, past various waxy things that leap out of the wall at regular intervals and boo! Or rather, bleah! In Alien you're never quite scared - just queasy. For nothing occurs between the Scary Parts but mumbly crew members chatting it up with that gabby control panel. Even an old ghost story has more than ghosts. Alien skips the story. There's nothing to lead you on, to try to trick you and make it seem like it's all happening to real people. The crew is just part of the hardware fright-meters who register shock; the warmest thing aboard is a cat. You can't imagine being stranded out there in space - helpless - the way you could in, say, that old haunted New York apartment in "Rosemary's Baby" or upstairs in a Georgetown brownstone in "The Exorcist," or in the ocean at Martha's Vineyard in "Jaws." A problem with Alien is that, out there in some vast dreary nth dimension, anything goes. It's too darn easy to haunt a cosmos."

"Any amount of symbolism and sociological messages can easily be intellectualized in Alien. There is a whole routine about science, for instance, that is compelling and intriguing. But I leave such considerations to others for now and give fair warning: When going on intergalactic travel, always be sure to take a cat. It may prove a friend.”"

"When the first Alien came out in 1979, promising and delivering screams in space that no one could hear, more than a few critics and regular humans called it a relentless, hard-driving thrill machine. In retrospect it resembles a movie with the patience of Job, taking its sweet, stealthy time before arriving at one of the great moments in the history of extreme cinematic gore. You know the scene, probably. There's John Hurt, an actor whose face always seemed halfway to crestfallen even when he didn't have anything to worry about, sitting around the spacecraft galley, having a jolly meal with his crew aboard the Nostromo. He doesn't realize the steroidal tapeworm inside him, gestating, awaits the right moment to burst forth from Hurt's chest and commence the cat-and-mouse franchise spanning two centuries and counting. That monster has been chasing director Ridley Scott ever since."

"Ridley Scott has given us a chilling and brilliantly rendered antidote to swashbuckling space heroes and amiable robots. This is the best horror film to reach the screen since The Omen and a landmark piece of science fiction that looks back to the ’50s tradition of malevolent aliens.”"

"Alien (like other 1970s films such as Jaws, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Godfather, and Star Wars) was a seminal landmark in the upgrade of shopworn B-movie clichés — monsters, comic book characters, flying saucers, gangsters, Saturday afternoon serials — into major A-movie assets.”"

"In the days of Blade Runner and Alien, there were what I would call matte paintings. We did pretty well with those paintings with Blade Runner, but when you look at them today you can see the seams. In those days, it was good enough, and digital effects didn’t exist. To do Alien, I literally had to have a guy in a black rubber suit. That’s why the film is like Jaws, where you don’t see much of the shark, and you don’t really want to look that closely. In Alien, the scariest of all the films in that series, you don’t see much of the monster, mostly because I was so limited in what I could do."

"Mr. Scott said that when he first read the Alien script, by Dan O’Bannon, “it was frankly what I would call a very well-written B-movie. And we carried it out in an ‘A’ way with a terrific cast and a fantastic monster.”"

"I think Alien captured our most primordial fears. It’s particularly special because it’s not gilded with any characterization other than what you see is what you get — minute by minute with these people. That’s really why a lot of people were scared to death. It’s because they are living in it, minute by minute, and eventually, second by second."

"Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon has gone on record to say he used Giger's design motifs to force male audience members to reflect on the effect of sexual violence; he wanted to force male audiences to understand and experience the visceral horror of rape and sexual assault."

"On an intuitive level, Giger understood how humans express themselves in sexual terms; how it's rarely far from our minds, and how we attribute all kinds of positive emotions with the enjoyment of sex and its capacity for new life. Alien took something we're conditioned to view as wholly beautiful, joyous and celebratory—and twisted it into a nightmare."

"Alien is a corker, a walloper, a rouser, a screecher and a ton of fun. If all movies were as thrilling I would happily spend all of my life in the movies."

"Alien is mostly in the business of thrills, and on that level it did provide more than a few. I looked away from the screen during its most gory scenes. Even more enjoyable, though, was watching the film debut of an actress who should become a major star, Sigourney Weaver (she probably changed her name from Alice) makes an auspicious debut as one of the sturdiest crew members.”"

"When Academy Award-winning Swiss artist H.R. Giger passed away on Monday, he left behind, among his endless menagerie of horrors across a wide array of media, including painting, film, sculpture, and music, one of the most unique depictions of alien life ever put to screen. The titular alien, heretofore referred to as the Xenomorph, from Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction horror classic, wasn't inspired by the stars. Instead it came from deep within mankind (sorry John Hurt) and somehow developed into something more alien and terrifying than anything from the unknown."

"Famed science-fiction screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (Total Recall, Dark star) and Ronald Shusett, who wrote the original draft of Alien, wanted to make a movie about interspecies rape. The script called for a creature that, after impregnating one crew member on the space freighter, The Nostromo, would go on to force itself on the rest of the crew. For that, they needed a creature that reflected not the best that life in the known universe had to offer, but the worst."

"Alien is only the second feature for director Ridley Scott, but it should establish the young Briton as a major filmmaker. And if there’s any justice, it will cause a scramble to book The Duellists, Scott’s over-looked first film.”"

"In the wake of the huge commercial success of Alien, almost all attention has perversely focused on the provenance of the script (was it a rip-off of It, the Terror from Beyond Space? Of Van Vogt's fiction? Was former John Carpenter collaborator Dan O'Bannon sold out by producers Walter Hill and David Giler's rewrites?). But the limited strengths of its staple sci-fi horrors - crew of commercial spacecraft menaced by stowaway monster - always derived from either the offhand organic/ Freudian resonances of its design or the purely (brilliantly) manipulative editing and pacing of its above-average shock quota. Intimations of a big-budget Dark Star fade early, and notions of Weaver as a Hawksian woman rarely develop beyond her resourceful reaction to jeopardy. At least Scott has no time to dawdle over redundant futuristic effects in the fashion that scuttles his later Blade Runner."

"The price paid for the excitement, and it’s a small one, is very little involvement with the characters themselves. But it really doesn’t matter when the screaming starts. In contrast to the glamorous, adventurous outer-space life often depicted in sci-fi, Alien initially presents a mundane commercial spacecraft with crew members like Yaphet Kotto bitching and moaning about wages and working conditions."

"For those unfamiliar with film, Alien follows the unlucky crew of the Nostromo, a space barge of sorts that picks up what seems to be a distress signal from a nearby planet. After investigating, the crew members find an otherworldly craft on the surface, and one poor fellow (John Hurt) picks up an alien parasite that attaches itself to his face, making him a host to something infinitely worse — a hostile beast that begins picking them off one by one."

"Ridley Scott’s original, 1979’s Alien, is a deeply complex monster movie but it wasn’t the first movie to suggest multinational corporations were a danger to individuality. The late Ned Beatty’s explosive cameo in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 nightmare-ish TV news satire Network is a memorable monologue about corporate power replacing the state. Even a hokey, if still entertaining, junk sci-fi flick like 1975’s Rollerball starring James Caan knew that the future belonged to fat cats, not presidents. These movies, all of them almost fifty years old, are also blatantly political. In Alien, the real monsters are the executives who see the humans who work for them as disposable. I don’t think there’s a better encapsulation of modern capitalism."

"It is disingenuous for Rubin to somehow suggest Alien is just a movie about humans being chased by a deadly extra-terrestrial. There isn’t any subtext in Alien. The company is evil, full-stop."

"I was really lucky getting the part of Ripley because it took my career down a much less conventional route than I had thought I had wanted. I had dreamt of being mostly a stage actor, which was the kind of career my mother had. Shakespeare and all that. I think what helped was that I wasn't falling over backwards to get the role. I thought, 'Right, I'm going to be chased around the room by this big blob of Jell-O.' And there wasn't anything startling or original about the script. It's basically Ten Little Indians. Then I met Ridley and he was a madman in a wonderful way. When I saw the set design I realized this was going to be fabulous."

"Thirty-five years ago, when Weaver was cast in a sci-fi horror movie — with a little-known commercial director named Ridley Scott at the helm — Weaver would never have predicted that she'd be talking about the film in the far-flung future of 2014. "(Before I saw the designs,) I pictured this big blob of yellow gel rumbling around," she said. "At the first meeting with Ridley, he pulled out all these beautiful big drawings H.R. Giger had done. He's one of the main reasons we're still here talking about this film. ...I wanted to be part of whatever that was because I had never seen anything like that on the screen before."

"It really is not the traditional kind of space adventure where you have a hero and a sidekick and a damsel in distress. In this case they’ve transformed that. I think in some ways that comes out of the moment in the 1970s when there is a turn toward the more dystopian."

"The mother of all action heroines is Ellen Ripley, the character played by Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. Ripley was no superwoman - just a capable crew member on a space barge that was invaded by a maternal monster who laid eggs inside humans. Ripley was a survivor, but in James Cameron's subsequent sequel, she morphed into an avenger, with more overtly violent tendencies and a surrogate daughter to protect."

"The plot wasn't new even when the film was first released. With its hook of a seven-member, multicultural spaceship crew running afoul of a ravenous space alien who gets aboard their ship and kills them, one by one, it suggests a mix of Stanley Kubrick's "2001," Howard Hawks' "The Thing" and every monster movie since "Frankenstein." But the look of the film was new. Few science-fiction movies are as cold, as full of cavernous space, angst and horrific beings. The original Alien is a work of popular entertainment and movie art in which the makers took the "art' as seriously as the entertainment."

"Alien was released a year after Carpenter's Halloween and it altered the landscape of high-budget studio horror as irrevocably as Halloween changed cheapo horror. Alien was a classy picture with classy people -- both Scott and Holm were later knighted -- but it was also gruesome, awful. "In space, no one can hear you scream," ran the original ad line; like Poole and Bowman in "2001," these astronauts are at the mercy of their ship, and even their computer, as well as the alien."

"The look of Alien remains fabulous: a cross between the elegant austerity of 2001 and the raw funk of Dark Star and other low-budgeters. The sets are dazzling and macabre. The characters are both archetypal -- even slightly cliched -- and cipherlike. Being trapped on those sets, with those people, still imparts a creepy chill. There have been three other Aliens since, by directors James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but though all have their points, none is as relentless as this. Weaver was never quite as sexy, vulnerable or compelling. And though they kept trying and repeating, none had an alien this gruesomely, shatteringly awry and unexpected. When it jumped, or when it jumps now, so do we."

"Alien opens on a disarmingly restful note, with establishing shots of a majestic spaceship in which we first discover the seven crew members slumbering away the long voyage home in "hyper-sleep." But the serenity soon fades as British director Ridley Scott and his collaborators build and sustain a brilliant nightmarish tension. Crew and spectators alike are kept in a state of hyper-apprehension, anticipating the sudden, deadly reappearance of a monstrous alien organism one of the most bizarre and vicious creatures ever to spring from the shadows of a movie set."

"Alien is a stylish update on the tradition of '50s science-fiction monster thrillers like The Thing or Forbidden Planet. Alien may seem no more ingenious or frightening than those films did at first sight, but it enhances their durable fear mechanisms with the latest refinements in special-effects artistry, space-age scenic design, sophisticated pictorial atmosphere, tantalization and dynamism. It is certain to take a respected place along the classics of cinematic suspense and horror."

"The monster in Alien variously recalls the shark in Jaws (film), the demon in The Exorcist, the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even the benign extraterrestrials of Close Encounters. But the most terrifying adaptation is the mouth: as it grows in both size and ferocity, the infernal beast, conceived by Giger and realized by several visual effects designers, flashes not only jaws but jaws within jaws. After the first shocking, snarling show of teeth, all that's necessary to provoke our self-torment is the buildup of suspense, which Scott orchestrates with masterful visual and rhythmic command and the startling emergence of fragmentary features from some border or background of the image. Alien is scary enough to create a sensation and justify taking the "R" rating seriously, especially for young children. Yet, it is graphically restrained and subtly abstracted compared to the excesses of The Exorcist or Dawn of the Dead. There are two spectacular gruesome passages, but even here the horror concept is at least as frightening as the depiction. Scott has opted for the minimum effective gruesomeness, given the circumstances and current standards in trick-effect traumatization."

"I left Alien feeling contentedly manipulated, but not in an unparalleled entertaining panic. The monster’s one blood-spattered attack will probably become the most talked-about sequence in Alien. The climactic episodes are a rather more impressive cinematic achievement.”"

"Alien is all about “the dark side of technology, of science,” says David J. Skal, author of “The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.” “Despite all the things we’re told that will make the future a better place, what happens in Alien is our worst nightmare.” That’s exactly what Dan O’Bannon was thinking when he set out to write what he calls “a scary spaceship movie” in the mid-1970s. Influenced by 1950s sci-fi films like “The Thing,” O’Bannon was determined to make a “monster thriller about a monster from outer space, done with the style and technology that had accumulated since the 1950s.” This merger of horror and science fiction proved extremely fortuitous. There had been plenty of monsters in movies before Alien, but mostly they had been of the “man in a rubber suit” variety. Thanks to the creepy vision of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, the extraterrestrial monster in Scott’s film, with its insect-like body, acidic blood and knife-sharp teeth, was truly nightmarish."

"“The H.R. Giger alien was like nothing you’d ever seen before,” says Gordon Van Gelder, editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. “ Alien was the first film that put the splatter element into a sci-fi context.” “The monster is skeletal, it’s mechanical, it’s insect-like,” Skal says. “It’s all of this stuff hitting you at once, and it’s bound to elicit a response from the viewer.” Thanks in part to an innovative marketing campaign -- the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” might be one the best ever devised -- that response translated into a $79-million domestic box-office gross (huge for the time), three sequels and stardom for Sigourney Weaver, whose sexy but no-nonsense Ripley became a template for all subsequent female action heroes. And the film itself became a model of sorts. Take a sexually and racially diverse crew; place them in an out-of-the-way space station, planet or underwater research facility; then have them menaced by a horrific creature until there is only one man, or woman, left standing -- “Leviathan,” “Deep Blue,” “Event Horizon,” “Pitch Black,” “Screamers,” the list of films seems to go on endlessly, and in a sense, that’s the problem."

"“It’s an impossible nightmare, this fusion of technology and vermin, death and sex,” he says. “It goes back to what monsters are: They’re always a fusion of contradictory aspects. They’re things that don’t exist and can’t exist, but they work on a dream level; they capture our imaginations.”"

"Forty years after its release, Ridley Scott’s 1979 chiller is rightly regarded as a sci-fi horror classic. It has aged beautifully – its industrial yet futuristic production aesthetic retains a cutting-edge realism, H.R Giger’s creature and ship designs are unsettling yet perversely beautiful and Dan O’Bannon’s naturalistic dialogue is memorably understated. Alien’s pervading, gloomy atmosphere and sense of lonely terror ensure it remains a touchstone in haunted house cinema. As in other genuinely frightening films, less is more: by cutting his camera away early, Scott leaves much in the minds of audiences. We fill in the blanks by conjuring up nightmarish thoughts and images. Much commentary on Scott’s film justifiably focuses on the film’s technical achievements – direction, cinematography, music and the fearsome alien creature. What’s less remarked upon is how its tension is amplified by Alien’s realism, its sense of everyday life turned upside-down. Yes, this is science fiction and this is outer space, but Alien feels real."

"Although we’re far into the future and far from Earth, the film feels palpably naturalistic and relatable, which makes the ensuing horror even more disturbing. By presenting engineers, technicians and navigators – regular, blue-collar workers complete with hierarchical and contractual disputes – audiences more easily engage with the story. This is something that Lachlan Walter argues in his article ‘Apocalypse Soon-Ish: Blue-Collar Science Fiction and the ‘Ordinary’ Worker As Hero’:"

"Impeccable directing, acting and music aside, Alien’s ‘look’ is perhaps its most memorable feature. While otherworldly, surrealistic art may seem a far cry from workers and realism, it’s worth emphasizing again that were it not for Alien’s remarkable visual style and unshowy presentation of employment in space, the film’s impact and enduring qualities would be much diminished."

"Responsible for designing the seductive yet deadly alien, the insectile ‘face-hugger’ creature and the forebodingly derelict alien ship was Swiss surrealist artist, Hans Ruedi (H.R) Giger. Much like in the ‘body horror’ films of David Cronenberg, such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), Giger fuses human and machine, with his sleekly imagined biomechanical mash-ups of bone and metal resulting in images that take on a kind of disordered symmetry. Giger also designed the surface of LV-426, a sunless, boulder strewn, god-forsaken planet where brutal winds never stop blowing and jagged rocky outcrops, almost phallic in appearance, punctuate the landscape."

"Alien’s visual centrepiece is the alien itself, inspired by Giger’s 1976 print Necronom IV. It’s a truly hideous creature, replete with a long, smooth phallic skull, a set of razor-sharp teeth and a second set of pharyngeal jaws similar to those of an eel, which shoot out, stabbing and penetrating flesh. The creature also appears to have no eyes, but we know it sees, and its gender is never revealed, though it displays both male and female characteristics. The creature’s hands are monstrous and dragon-like, with long fingers and claws, but its body resembles the cross-section of some complex industrial machine, with human-like ribs lying externally over a mass of coils, springs and what look like hydraulic mechanisms."

"Areas of the Nostromo are reminiscent of various blue-collar workplaces, a counterpoint to the sleek spaceships imagined in much science fiction before Alien. In his article ‘The set design of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Christopher Aguiar explains that this approach had rarely been seen in science fiction before 1979, which adds to the quality of trepidation: “Fear is built largely from the camera prowling around the empty spaces of the Nostromo ship – a battered, truly ugly spacecraft, unlike the Death Star or USS Enterprise… instead of being outside and exploring the world as sci-fi often wants us to do, we’re largely stuck inside the rundown, twisted corridors of a ship. That immediately works as a way of Scott installing fear and uneasiness.”"

"Sci-fi cinema has a long history of ruthless and evil corporations, including the Tyrell Corporation in Scott’s subsequent Blade Runner (1982), Cyberdyne Systems in the Terminator films (1984-), Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop (1987) and the Soylent Corporation in Soylent Green (1973). The interests of these conglomerates, often inspired by real-life organisations, lie entirely in profit, operating with a total indifference towards the welfare of their employees. The companies at the heart of blue-collar science fiction such as Alien, Moon and Outland are similarly ruthless. Viewers watching Alien 40 years later may have little trouble recognizing the practices of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation; the way it controls its poorer workers with unfair and dangerous working conditions. Grounded in Scott’s gritty, blue-collar vision, it all seems both credible and familiar. As in 1979, 2019 and so in 2122, money is the ultimate goal, not worker’s rights or their well-being."

"Its plot is a kind of nightmarish allegory for the socially conservative backlash, in which a gender-egalitarian and sexually liberated future is torn apart by a monster whose only concern is impregnating everyone against their will. The gender politics of Alien are shockingly progressive, even now."

"Alien is a movie about the tyranny of the body over the self. Culture and technology allow us some degree of reproductive and sexual agency. Alien is about how terrifying it feels to have all that agency stripped away by something that defines you purely by your body — how it feels to be turned from an adult human being to a fleshy vessel that can be used to host and birth someone else’s young."

"In 1979, we had the luxury of imagining the Xenomorph as something fundamentally estranged from humanity. It is, as Ash says, a being comprised of pure reproductive instinct, with no culture or intellect to get in the way of its drive to propagate the species: “A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Yet today, it’s precisely those conservative “delusions of morality” that are forcing people to live in bodies and lives they haven’t chosen and don’t want."

"Culture, technology, medicine — all the tools that help us to live in our bodies while retaining autonomy and agency over them — are not only necessary, they’re what make us human. Alien rings true for us, 40 years later, because it understands that truth. It shows us that brute, mindless animal existence — a life concerned only with making more babies, no matter the cost — is hideous, horrifying, and destructive."

"What is it about Alien that gets under our skin? Scott’s film pursues an astronaut crew hunted by an alien life form aboard their spaceship. It’s interwoven with endlessly interpretable themes: artificial intelligence, desire, rape, fear of the unknown. But the alien’s ruthless biological imperative to reproduce is the film’s masterstroke."

"On planet earth, predators hunt their prey to consume them. Alien deviates from this evolutionary food chain – the creature is more interested in impregnating humans as carriers for its biological spawn. Scott’s film evokes primal horror of violation and sexual perversion; it’s no accident that the alien itself is so phallic."

"In the original script, characters’ genders were explicitly interchangeable. This was a distinctly unusual feature for a sci-fi script at the time, and meant that the lead Ellen Ripley, the now iconic female action hero played by Sigourney Weaver, was never initially conceived of as a woman at all. This might explain why her behaviour doesn’t conform to the sexist stereotypes rife in 1970s filmmaking. Weaver also told the Independent in 2012 that Ripley was an expression of 1970s feminist insurgency: “Women were agitating to be in the army, to work in warehouses and as truck drivers.” Other than making room for a powerful female lead for the film, the gender-neutral script underlines something crucial about Alien’s horror: all human life is at threat. Audiences were already familiar with women as the targets of sexual assault, but Alien brought a new horror into the mainstream, a truly inhuman sexual attacker indiscriminate about its targets."

"When the BBFC were deciding how to rate the film in 1979, they gave it an X (18) certificate for depicting “a perverse view of sexual function” which runs “like a dark undercurrent” throughout. As we follow Ripley fleeing through the ship’s labyrinthine tunnels, we can imagine the alien’s desire."

"The 40th-anniversary reissue of Alien this month feels timely. While other sci-fi classics like Blade Runner or the Star Wars films showcase technological advances of a coming space age, the vision of the future seen in Alien is one focused on a primal fear that predates technology. The future, Alien asks us to imagine, might not look so different from the present: rape and sexual violence might be more of a threat, not less. Our contemporary cultural landscape is in-comparable to that of the 1970s, and today we are far more aware of the insidious nature of sexual violence. What enables Alien to endure 40 years on is how it suggests men, as well as women, should fear rape. Sexual assault is not limited to female bodies. If Alien makes one thing plain, it is that everybody, regardless of their gender, suffers if sexual violence is allowed to take place unopposed – a message that will be appreciated in 2019 perhaps more than ever."

"With no consideration given at this point to the ideas generated by the film's narrative, I assure anyone with the slightest affection for the SF genre that it's worth its admission price simply for the intelligence and audacity of its look."

"It melds the American-pragmatic form-as-function look of "2001" with the European fantasist influence of artists whose work appears in the upscale-head-comic magazine Heavy Metal. The spaceship in which most of the film takes place is a humble freighter, and it looks used. The crew has humanized it with toys, wind chimes, a cat, and non-company-issued clothing. The outside of the spaceship is standard-issue count-the-rivets Star Wars. But the space suits are based upon 15th-century Japanese samurai warriors. And the dead race which once lived within the alien planet upon which the ship lands created works of engineering which appear made of organic matter. The first half-hour of the film, before we settle in the space-freighter interior for the rest of the evening, is one breathtaking visual effect after another."

"A warning: Despite the state-of-the-art visual effects and Scott's remarkably comprehensive use of the syntax of film, Scott seeks to entertain you by the brutally primal tactic of reaching into your gut and squeezing your adrenal gland: There's an awful thingie there in the dark, and it gets people, and you have to watch it as it does. The filmmakers have come up with some images that are sheerest nightmare. The film earns its shudders honestly: Scott is too talented to need gratuitousness as an aid. We are repelled more by the idea of what's happening than by simple excess of repellent images. Still, even while you acknowledge that the filmmakers are scrupulous, sitting with your arms wrapped around your head because you can't watch the screen may not be your idea of a good time."

"Alien is such a startlingly well-made film that it seems the height of something -- malcontentedness, I guess -- to complain even in low tones about its objectives. Inarguably, the filmmakers achieve their objective entirely -- they make us leave the theater reeling."

"Is it critical overreaching to ask that Scott had been more ambitious? Probably. You never want more from bad films, though. You just want out. Good ones, as they satisfy appetites, often create fresh hungers. But the movie Scott wants to make -- as opposed to the one I'd preferred he made -- works. Wow, does it work. If you leave the theater with your nerves unjangled, you arrived in a coma."

"Few scenes in cinema are as etched in the popular mind as the moment in Alien when a phallic-shaped metal-toothed creature bursts bloodily from the chest of Kane (John Hurt), a crewman aboard the intergalactic mining ship Nostromo, before scuttling off to lurk and grow and begin killing Kane’s crewmates one-by-one. For those who saw it at the cinema in 1979, the world was split in two: the time before the chest burster and the time after. Movies would never be the same. Science-fiction had found its darkest expression. Horror had a new name – the shape-shifting, acid-dripping, all-consuming creature that fans soon labelled the xenomorph, as far from the benign bug-eyed presence of ET as it was possible to imagine. The film spawned a franchise – three more Alien films, two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, and Ridley Scott’s more recent prequels, Prometheus and Alien Covenant – that have collectively earned more than $US1.5 billion ($A2.2 billion) at the box office, and a whole lot more on video, DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms. It has spawned PhD theses and endless discussion and riffs in popular culture. Earlier this year, it even spawned a high-school theatre version."

"We live now in a culture saturated in filmed images, but very little of it ascends to the level of shared experience, says Philippe. Game of Thrones was an exception, “but there are very few now that have these moments – like the chest-burster, like the Psycho shower scene – that completely traumatize a generation. They are very rare.” Philippe – who was born in Switzerland but moved to the US 26 years ago with dreams of becoming a professional golfer – is fascinated by these cut-through moments. His last film was 78/52, a forensic examination of the 78 seconds and 52 cuts that comprise the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. His next – which he was about to take to the Venice Film Festival when we spoke earlier this week – is a meditation on The Exorcist. What he sees in these films is an expression not just of their makers’ intentions and talents, but of something far greater – our collective unconscious at play. “There are certain movies that become phenomena because they express ideas that we need to see in our culture at a particular time,” he says. “And rarely are we actually conscious of the fact that we need to see those ideas being expressed.”"

"“I’m very interested in the idea of coincidence versus fate,” says Philippe. “The way I see it, nothing is ever completely coincidental and nothing is ever completely fated. Coincidence can become fate. “You could argue that it is audiences that willed Alien to life,” he continues. “Had Dan O’Bannon, Ridley Scott and HR Giger not been on the frequency for that myth, someone else would have had to be. When you look at the number of coincidences that happened for Alien to be Alien you have to wonder if there were greater forces at work.” The thing that most desperately needed to be expressed, he argues, was a challenge to the “patriarchal imbalance”. Kane’s “rape” by the alien – by the face hugger that latches onto his face and inserts its egg via a tube shoved down his throat – and the shocking experience of “birthing” the alien through his chest “jolted people into a feeling of unease”, he says. “There were things that happen to women that were suddenly transposed to Kane,” he continues. “I don’t think that was being processed consciously – I don’t think the studio was thinking, ‘Oh yeah, here’s $11 million, go make a male-rape movie in space’. I don’t believe O’Bannon, Giger and Scott were thinking along those lines either.” But they were images and ideas that we needed to see in order to deal with the underlying tensions in our culture, he believes. “What makes Alien so amazing is that it took 40 years for society to process and to start having a dialogue about those images and ideas,” he adds. “Alien is, in a way, much more contemporary today than it was 40 years ago.”"

"“The birth of the alien from Kane’s stomach plays on what Freud described as a common misunderstanding that many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow impregnated through the mouth,” determined Barbara Creed, professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” (Screen, Vol. 27, 1986), just one of hundreds of academic theses spawned by Scott’s 1979 shocker and its sequels. Academics have always loved science fiction, of course. No film studies syllabus is complete without an invitation to parse alien-invasion B-movies from the ‘50s as fretful cold-war allegories. There was always something a little lordly about this kind of approach to pop-artifacts, as if the little dears couldn’t tell what made their hearts pitter-pat so until the redoubtable professor arrived with his chalkboard, duster, and special subtext X-ray specs. But the cottage industry of analysis that has sprung up around Alien is something else again. In 1980, the highly-respected academic journal Science Fiction Studies devoted an entire issue to the first Alien—an event that may, in time, come to rank alongside Cahiers du Cinema’s All-Hitchcock issue of 1956. Since then, there has been no looking back. We’ve had Alien as feminist allegory (“Woman: The Other Alien in Alien,” Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1985), Alien as mothering fable (“Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby, and Mothering,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1990), Alien as abortion parable (“Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self-Annihilation Metaphors in the Aliens Trilogy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1995). Even Jones the cat got his own diagram, courtesy of James H. Kavenagh’s essay “Son of a Bitch: Feminism, Humanism, and Science in Alien” (October, No. 13, 1980), which sought to align the alien attack on humans with an Althusserian-Marxist takedown of humanism in general:"

"What is it about the Alien films? No other modern science-fiction film has inspired this level of termite-like deconstruction save perhaps Scott’s own Blade Runner, whose rain-soaked surfaces teem with postmodern theorists researching doctoral theses with titles like “American Exceptionalism and the Complicit Postcolonialism of Blade Runner” and “Data and Dick’s Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier.” This suggests that there is something about the rich, art-directed layer-cake of Ridley Scott productions that positively cries out for Greimasian semantic rectangles. “It has absolutely no message,” insisted Scott of the first Alien. “It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror.” Of all the things you can do with Scott’s alien beastie—be frightened by it, thrilled by it, repulsed by it—studying it seems the last thing on anybody’s mind, except of course Science Officer Ash, secretly eyeing it up for the company’s weapons division. When it comes to the burgeoning field of post-doctorate Alien study, Ash graduates summa cum lauda. Study is all he wants to do."

"It’s one reason Alien scholars tend to be a little down on James Cameron, although they love the elevation of Ripley to post-feminist action figure—“get away from her you bitch!”—and approve of the fact that all the white males become dead white males at a faster rate than all the nonwhite males (see Greenberg, Harvey. “Fembo: Aliens’ Intentions”). Marxists, too, have clucked with approval at the series’ clear-eyed take on corporate malfeasance and outer-space worker rights. And Freudians, needless to say, have had a field day, at least with the first film. A movie more in need of a trip to the analyst would be harder to find."

"For a brief moment in the early ‘80s, it looked as if the brave new world of Alien studies was going to splinter irreconcilably on the issue of Officer Ripley’s panties—the anti-panty camp accusing the pro-panty wing of uncritical phallocentrism, the pro-panty caucus accusing the anti-panty wing of repressive and self-defeating assumptions about what constitutes sexism. It was left to Melbourne’s professor Creed to broker a tentative piece between the two camps. “Much has been written about the final scene, in which Ripley undresses before the camera, because its voyeurism undermines her role as successful heroine,” she wrote with an air of weary summary in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” Screen, Vol. 27, 1986. What if Ripley in her panties “signifies the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman. … The display of woman as a reassuring and pleasurable sign.” It’s the system of signification, stupid! As for the sex of the alien “the alien is the mother’s phallus,” she determined, “but the alien is more than a phallus, it is also coded as a toothed vagina, the monstrous feminine as a cannibalistic mother.” Voilà, thanks to another of those toothed vaginas that seem to be all the rage on college campuses these days."

"Yeah, you should, you know what it's made of."

"Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty..."

"I can't lie to you about your chances... but, you have my sympathies."

"Get out of the way, Lambert! Get out of the room!"

"Kill me... kill me!"

"You always say that, Frost. You always say, "I got a bad feeling about this drop"."

"Maybe they don't show up on infrared at all."

"Say again? All after "incinerator"!"

"Alright, I'm in! Ramp closed."

"Spunkmeyer? God damn it. [Door opens] Well, where the fu-"

"Come on! Come and get it! Come on! I don't got all day! Come on! Come on, you bastard! Come on, you too! Oh, you want some of this? Fuck you! Fuck you! HICKS!"

"You always were an asshole, Gorman."

"Spike? Spikey? Is that you?"

"Okay, who are the comedians?"

"So, do you still trust me with a needle?"

"Stop this raving at once! Stop it! [Ripley: I'm telling you, it's here!] Aaron, get that foolish woman back to the infirmary!"

"I hate this place. I hate this place. There's definitely somethin' in here with us!"

"Come and get me fucker!"

"You can't go in there, dickens. The big mother fucker will eat you alive."

"Tell me what to do next."

"This thing is REALLY pissed off!"

"Hahaha, you wanker!"

"Is that all you bite, motherfucker?!"

"FUCKING ANDROID!"

"You're crazy."

"You are a beautiful, beautiful, little butterfly."

"I'm fine. Really. I feel good."

"Why does nobody listen to me?"

"USM Auriga will impact in Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Thank you."

"Faris, you fuck! Stay the fuck away!"

"Motherfucker!"

"(Talk to me. Hey, Look at me. You alright?) "Yeah, I'm okay." (Can you walk?) "Yeah.""

"I'm going to clean up. I'll be right back."

"What do you believe in, David?"

"There have been a few updates since your day."

"Please don't let me die."

"Stay back, stay back!"

"Is that all you got?! Is that all you got?!"

"I will be damned if I'm going to let those idiots from Weyland-Yutani take it back to Earth. They just might succeed, and that would be it for the rest of mankind. Maybe for all life on the planet. I don't see why these things wouldn't be able to reproduce in any animal of a size larger than, say, a cat."

"We give you thanks, O' Lord. Your wrath has come and the time is near for us to be judged. The apocalypse is upon us! Let us be ready! Let your mercy be just! Amen!"

"[explaining his prison barcode tattoo, to Ripley] After my student years, despite the fact that I had become secretly addicted to morphine, I was considered to be most promising. A man with a future. Then during my first residency, I did a thirty-six hour stretch on an ER. So I went out and I got more than a little drunk. Then I got called back. Boiler had blown on a fuel plant, and there were thirty casualties... and eleven of them died. Not as a result of the accident, but because I prescribed the wrong dosage of painkiller. And I got seven years in prison and my licence reduced to a 3C. [pause] At least I got off the morphine."

"The Bitch Is Back"

"This time it's hiding in the most terrifying place of all..."

"Our worst fears have come true. It's back!"

"Three times the suspense. Three times the danger. Three times the terror."

"In the original Alien, Weaver played a young lieutenant on an industrial spaceship, who sheds her naivete to display a bold brain and steely core that leaves her the only survivor of the crew`s first encounter with the alien. Waking up after spending 57 years in hypersleep, adrift in an escape pod, the Ripley of the Aliens sequel is made of even tougher stuff. Cynical, smart and very fit, she manages to make most of the men on board seem like posturing wimps, but still displays a tenderly fierce maternal impulse toward Newt, a little girl orphaned by the alien. In the second film, we left her with sort of everything ahead of her. She`d found this daughter and she had, perhaps, a fellow, maybe. And I think there was, at least on my part, an expectation that maybe she`d be able to lead a normal life. But, life not being fair, she doesn`t get to pursue that dream, says Weaver."

"The maternal storyline hits a dead end in Alien 3, which, Weaver says approvingly, is much closer to the spirit and flavor of the first film. She credits director David Fincher with that. Well, he`s amazing. He`s completely uncompromising, she says, while admitting that, I was sort of the last person to jump on the Fincher bandwagon. I was just a little wary because I wanted very much to break new ground with Ripley. You know, you never know with these sorts of geniuses where their attention is going to go, she says, carefully. But, Fincher, particularly, I think, blew us all away by being such a committed actors` director and so patient. And I think we did break new ground with Ripley. I feel very complete about her. I think she`s more vulnerable. I think she is truly alone. It`s very interesting to play a character who is truly alone, especially a woman, because women are always seen in relation to men or to other woman. It was a very-not to put our audience off-but it was a very existential situation in many ways."

"In Alien 3, Weaver landed in a movie with a history as acidically sticky as anything excreted by the alien itself. In the five-odd years since its conception, the film devoured some seven writers and three directors and so trampled its shooting schedule and estimated $50 million budget that Twentieth Century Fox halted production a year ago. Less than a month before its scheduled release, in fact, the movie`s actual ending remained in doubt. Audience reaction, in sneak previews, Weaver says, was ambivalent. For emotional reasons, we felt we needed to give the audience one more thing to enhance the ending. The missing ingredient turned out to be six more seconds, drawn from the original script and shot at a price estimated at $500,000. The original ending is still there, says Weaver, but now, There`s like a period on it. There was never any doubt, however, about Ripley`s fate, according to Weaver. This is Ripley`s last one, she says firmly. There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and confront the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien."

"I hated what they did... I couldn't stand 'Alien 3' - how they could just go in there and kill off all these great characters we introduced in Aliens, and the correlation between mother and daughter? It stunk."

"I saw the rough cut of the film, uncut, and there were some scenes in there that were pretty gross. There was an autopsy scene on the girl [Newt] and I like certain gore in the films. I do it [professionally], and it made me sick. It really grossed me out and I remember people got up and left, walked out of the theatre and I was just thinking, 'This will never be in the film. They can't show this stuff.' It was just too much I thought. And when the film came out, it wasn't in the film."

"Look, it wasn't a nightmare, despite what you may have read or heard elsewhere. But it certainly wasn't an easy shoot. What was on the screen was quite removed from what was in the script. But, with that said, I don't regret that I was a part of it. I mean, I knew going into 'Alien 3' that this was a big franchise picture – and there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen on these things."

"Nevertheless, at least one thing was evident as shooting on Alien 3 got underway – this was not going to be the sort of special effects laden supernova that Aliens had been. “I was pleased with that actually,” admits Dance. “I didn’t go back and watch the other two films before Alien 3 – however, I did see Alien when it first came out and I remembered it fondly. On the other hand, I didn’t think Aliens was very good. To me, it was not a very good story – it was just a lot of people firing guns all over the place. What got me excited about the third film was that they toned that down. But what ended up on the screen was a different animal than what was on the page.”"

"The film was critically panned upon its release, but has since gained a cult following. “I think Alien 3 was a better film than Aliens, to be frank,” says Dance. According to the actor, Vincent Ward’s initial script for the film was “really spooky” and centered on a religious cult in a penal colony, but since the character of Ripley was relatively minor, “changes were made to the script.” And the problems didn’t stop there. “Fincher had the studio on his back the whole time phoning him at all hours of the day and night—not taking into account the time change,” says Dance. “But I remember walking on this huge set at Pinewood Studios and Fincher comes up and fires off his shot list for the day. Here’s this guy young enough to be my son who knew all the crew’s jobs, all the shots he wanted, and where he was going to make the cuts in the film, and I thought, ‘My God, this guy is going to go far.’”"

"[N]ow comes "Alien 3 " - as unnecessary a sequel to a major movie as we've seen in some time. First-time director David Fincher and four writers have created another horror movie, attempting existential overtones as they make the alien in this film Ripley's "Moby Dick.""

"There are a lot of problems with this film, but the worst are its dreary, dark motif; the lack of sympathetic characters; the unpleasantness of the film's premise, which has Ripley eventually discovering she has a queen alien growing inside of her; and a lengthy chase sequence that is so dark, and edited so chaotically that it becomes confusing."

"1992's Alien 3, the film, was a strange installment in a franchise that's struggled to find itself ever since its first two movies, an oddly somber experience that was born of complex studio strife and emerged undeniably comprised. With no guns, just a single alien and a cast of barely developed supporting characters, it represented a poor foundation for a licensed game tie-in. So it was hardly surprising that the games that did come out, bearing the title Alien 3, were only loosely connected to the events of David Fincher's directorial debut."

"Aliens, a great action movie, cheapened the original by replacing one hyper-intelligent, indestructible monster with an army of gormless critters. This third entry has only one creature, but unfortunately it's just as gormless. When Ripley (Weaver) crash-lands on a prison planet full of hard-nut slap-heads, they haven't seen a woman in years. Discovering that there's an alien loose, Ripley asks the warden to break out the guns, and can't believe it when she is told there aren't any. Nor can we. Good acting has salvaged many a poor script in the past, but not here."

"I lost interest [in Alien 3], when I realized that the aliens could at all times outrun and outleap the humans, so all the chase scenes were contrivances."

"One of the best looking bad movies I've ever seen."

"“I thought it was dumb. I thought it was a huge slap in the face to fans,” said Cameron without hesitation. “Look, David is a friend of mine. David is an amazing, amazing filmmaker, unquestionably. But that was kind of his first big gig, and he was getting vectored around by the studio, and he was dropped into the production late, and they had a horrible script, and they were rewriting it on the fly, and it was just a mess. I think it was a big mistake.” “I was disappointed,” added Biehn. “But I actually got into [Aliens] because another actor dropped. So, I got into the movie on a fluke, and then I got cut out of Fincher’s movie. And Fincher’s movie, because he was young and they didn’t have a good script, wasn’t any good. And the fourth one [Alien: Resurrection] wasn’t any good. … So, to me, I’m the leading man in the best Alien movie.” Henn, who at 16 would have aged out of the Newt role by the time Alien 3 was made anyway, had already decided by that point that she wasn’t going to continue acting. She got to experience some of the hoopla, though. “Sigourney actually made sure I was invited to the premiere for it,” she said of Alien 3. “I got to experience it as 16-year old, and I knew who these movie stars were and I was like, ‘Oh, wow!’”"

"SPJ: Ripley tries to extinguish the species a second time in Alien 3, throwing herself into the cauldron to kill the alien incubating inside her. Is this action as morally repugnant as nuking all the aliens from afar? Is it worse?"

"If I go on to make 10 great [movies], this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece."

"I hadn’t directed a movie yet. I was just going off to do that. Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work."

"I didn't like the script, but I love 'Alien,' so yeah, I signed up, naive, and went off to Pinewood [Studios] to be sodomized ritualistically for two years."

"There's no one problem with a $65-million, f***ed-up, first-time filmmaker. Look, I made a crucial error. I listened to the people who were paying for the movie, and they said, the way to go about this is not to work with your friends. The way to go about this is to work with people who have done this time and time and time again. And basically, that translates into: meet a lot of people who are going to resent you and your age and are not going to want to take instruction from you, and allow them to tell you what you can't do."

"Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work. I kind of resented his anti-auteurist take. I felt that what the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration: You may not like the fact that you’re going to be beholden to so many different disciplines and skill sets in the making of a movie, but if you’re not acknowledging it, you’re missing the side of the barn. A script is the egg, and it needs a donor to create the cellular split that moves it into the realm of something playable in three dimensions and recordable in two dimensions and presentable to other people."

"So out went my carefully constructed motivations for all the principal prisoners, my preserving the life of Newt (her killing in the film is an obscenity) and much else. Embittered by this experience, that's why I turned down Alien Resurrection."

"Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the unluckiest woman in the universe, is once again in a bind. She`s been awakened prematurely from her hypersleep by the crash of her spaceship on Fiorina 161, a distant prison work colony. It seems she isn`t the only survivor her crash, however; when the residents of the colony begin turning up shredded, and it`s up to Ripley to play the role of aliencatcher again. Alien3 tries to get back to what made Alien great-suspense, dimly lighted glimpses of the alien, and the suggestion, rather than exposition, of gore-but is saddled by one overpowering burden. How much can you so with this storyline? The alien shows up, it kills people, Ripley hunts it down, end of movie. By the third time around, it`s just worn out. Great performances from an interesting cast (including Charles S. Dutton of TV`s Roc), convincing industrial sets, and visually exciting Alien effects can`t salvage Alien3 from its all-encompassing tiredness. (STAR) 1/2"

"After directing a string of popular music videos, David Fincher was commissioned by Fox to direct Alien³ but left the project before editing commenced because of studio interference. If Alien³ is not his film, neither is the studio’s “extended cut” (Fincher didn’t want anything to do with the project). Unlike the director’s cut of Aliens, this extended edition of Fincher’s first film does more harm than good. Impregnated with an alien queen, Ripley lands on Fury 161, a prison planet occupied by horny religious criminals. The scenario is the same (more doubting Thomases and labyrinthine tunnels) except the returns are less exciting or scary; an amalgam of power shots (some reminiscent of Fincher’s clips for Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself”), the film’s overall effect is noticeably suffocating. Charles Dutton’s preacher man, Dillon, conducts an impromptu funeral service and the extended cut intercuts his prayer with scenes from Fincher’s intended alien-birthing sequence (from canine to bovine). This creepy interplay brings to mind the final moments of Apocalypse Now but doesn’t really spill over into the rest of the film. Not only is Ripley personality-free (is the character jaded or is Weaver simply bored?), so is the alien. If the material appears to strain to offer the new alien attacks a ridiculous religious context, that’s because the filmmakers never really evoke a sense of godlessness on the planet community to begin with."

"No sooner is Ripley speeding away from the napalm-laced carnage of Aliens than she finds herself crashing into a prison planet full of Brits. Relentlessly dark and filled with unsympathetic characters, Alien³ is not loved by many. But director David Fincher seems lucky to have come away with any kind of movie, as is revealed on a surprisingly frank DVD from Fox. As with the other DVDs in the Alien Quadrilogy, you can choose between watching the theatrical release or a new special edition. David Fincher declined to put together another cut of the film, but has approved this new half-hour longer version. All the subplots removed by the studio are now here to see, including a different dogburster scene, the convicts capturing the alien and a slightly different ending. Trouble is, the production was in such disarray that this new longer take on the movie doesn't sort much out from the incoherent nature of the original."

"David Fincher has not done any new interviews for this release so other people fill in, including director Renny Harlin - who pops up in the Development featurette. Fans will be interested to hear what Harlin's vision was, the story options discussed, and why he was not keen on setting it in a prison. Still, that's nothing compared to the original idea of writer Vincent Ward to set the movie on a wooden planet populated by monks. Thanks to extensive image galleries and an in-depth featurette, you can explore what was certainly a bold, if somewhat strange, idea. While there is undoubtedly some fascinating gossip still to be told about the fraught production of Alien³, at least Fox has allowed frank comments to be aired. There's a great shot of an alien (man in suit) sitting with his head in his hands that seems to sum up the whole experience. Major changes to the script were regular occurrences, no end ever seemed in sight on the shoot, and it was finally shut down and taken to LA so the studio could try and fathom something out of it all."

"One idea would have seen Xenomorphs arriving on Earth and destroying New York City, which is as close to the film the teaser suggests as any of the unmade Alien 3 scripts. Between 1987 and 1990, more than ten screenwriters had a bash at scripting the film, including William Gibson, Eric Red, David Twohy, and John Fasano. Drafts differed on whether Weaver’s Ripley would be in the script or not, whether Biehn’s Hicks had a bigger role or not, and whether the film would be about a “Marxist space empire”, a prison planet, or a satellite full of monks. The latter idea came from director Vincent Ward, who was signed up to direct the project. However, Fox executives didn’t like his vision for Alien 3, with Jon Landau dismissing it as “more on the artsy-fartsy side than the big commercial one” than the studio wanted. In the end, Giler and Hill wound up writing the screenplay, inspired by various bits and bobs from different incarnations, with co-credit going to script doctor Larry Ferguson."

"Once again, Weaver is shocked to discover the alien loose—this time in a desolate prison colony. You'd think she'd get over those surprises by now. Once again, she has to rally a group of macho men (rapists and murderers) to take on the beast; and, once again, it doesn't take a college degree to guess who'll be left facing whom."

"Ironically, "Alien " is not a bad movie. In fact—here's the rub—it's too interesting to make an exciting summer flick. At the core is a promising tale written by Australian filmmaker Vincent Ward, who made "The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time," an often brilliant, time-hopping saga about medieval men journeying into the 20th century. His "Alien " is woven out of the same classic sci-fi yarn. The prison is a Middle Ages-type institution, with gaunt-faced, monastic characters in robes walking through dark, twisting corridors bearing candles."

"This movie—peopled with English performers, including Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Paul McGann and Danny Webb—seems more like a "Star Trek" episode than an "Alien" picture. It's also hard to get a handle on how big or small the alien is, the usual sign of low-budget horror filmmaking. Sometimes it seems small as a child; other times, it looms eight feet high."

"First of all, it is difficult to empathize with (or care about) any of the characters in this film. And there is very little in the way of character development, that might help this problem. I've heard that this film was heavily cut before its theatrical release, and that there is a much longer director's cut, which is ultimately more satisfying in this respect. I wish Fox had used it here. Another problem with Alien 3 is its poorly conceived and written script. To start off with, we're asked to accept the idea that the alien queen managed to lay a few eggs unnoticed in the scant minutes she was on board the Sulaco. Then we're asked to believe that a single face hugger could cause enough damage to require evacuating the crew in an EEV, and then we're asked to believe that the EEV just happened to eject near a populated (albeit sparsely) planet. To make matters worse, all of the survivors of the previous film are immediately killed off (problems with budget or contract negotiations perhaps?), including Ripley's surrogate daughter Newt. Which leads to the script's other major problem - it's just a major downer. After the sheer horror of the first film, and particularly coming off of the edge-of-your-seat thrills of Aliens, this film seemed far too subdued and somewhat less than frightening. It just wasn't at all what I was expecting. Which is not to say that the film doesn't have some merits. I did find the quasi-religious undertones of Fury's inhabitants compelling. And the concept of the alien creature taking on some of the physical characteristics of its host (in this case a dog) was intriguing. But again, the film stumbles over another major shortcoming, which is that the creature effects are just, well... bad. More often than not, the creature effects were accomplished by using a marionette-type puppet that was shot in front of a blue screen, and optically added to each shot with the actors. In other cases, its just a mechanical prop... and it shows. The first time we ever see the creature (in chapter 9), it just looks silly. The best thing about the creatures in the first two films, was that we barely saw them. They were far more frightening. Here we're seeing way too much."

"Alien 3" was already chasing a release date when Fincher boarded the project, taking over from outgoing director Renny Harlin rather late in the process, so he only had five weeks of prep time. According to Film Stories, the movie was originally scheduled to have a 12-month turnaround, from the start of production in January 1991 to a theatrical release in December 1991. The Christmas deadline was soon extended, but even before the story was finalized, an infamously misleading teaser trailer announced, "In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream." As anyone who's seen the film can attest, Earth was not, in fact, the setting. They began shooting without a completed script, partly because "Alien 3" had already undergone numerous rewrites and no one could seem to get it perfectly tailored. William Gibson, author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning cyberpunk novel, "Neuromancer" (which influenced "The Matrix"), wrote a draft that kept Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Oscar-nominated heroine of the first two movies, in a coma. It instead centered on the space Marine, Hicks, and the robot, Bishop, played by Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen, whose characters were left alive at the end of "Aliens."

"Eric Red ("The Hitcher," "Near Dark") whipped up the next version of the script for "Alien 3" in under two months, and it was set on Earth (hence that teaser about screaming there), but it was quickly discarded. Then there was David Twohy's prison planet version, developed alongside Vincent Ward and John Fasano's legendary wooden planet version, where the setting was a kind of monastery in space. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill and script doctor Larry Ferguson eventually fused elements of these last two versions into what became the working draft of "Alien 3," with Fincher and his own uncredited script doctor, Rex Pickett, doing further rewrites. All told, there were reportedly ten different writers on the film. While other classic movies like "The Wizard of Oz" have juggled that many writers in the past, "Alien 3" could not be termed anything other than a cult classic at best."

"The third movie in the Alien series was a hot ticket at the time. The Bond films were halted and locked in a bitter legal battle that eventually took six years to resolve. So Alien had suddenly become one of the world's biggest franchises and was camped, almost insultingly to the impotent, sleeping Bond, on Pinewood's giant 007 Stage."

"It's left to Paul McGann, playing Golic, to spell things out in a way that only McGann can. I've met him a few times by this point, going back to the 1986 production of The Monocled Mutineer, a two-part TV series on First World War deserter Percy Toplis. He's established himself, at 31, as one of our biggest stars, with Withnail And I and a sharp TV series called Dealers. He's a Scouse jack-the-lad who calls a spade a shovel – particularly when it's used for shovelling manure. "There are more producers around here than actors," he tells me. "I wondered who the hell they were at first. It's like having an extra fucking audience for every scene. You can't get a clear picture of who wants what, it gets changed as we go along. I don't know what they're doing here. Rewriting some of the script? Getting in the way? Fuck knows. But movies are in a mess. I am in the only fucking film which is shooting in England. The situation is getting dire with this recession going on. We're going to be down to one cameraman and one sound crew in this country if we aren't careful.""

"Putting it into the mildest terms, Alien 3 was an omnishambles. Armed with a trailer and a release date, 20th Century Fox didn’t know what the movie was going to be about, but knew it was going to come out in 1992. A film that had already seen several writers and directors come and go, with just as many concepts making their way through the revolving door, the resulting story came partially from re-writes done by David Fincher himself. In the end, no one would know just how the experience would turn out, as a pretty impressive, yet misleading, teaser promised quite a bit: Through his trial by fire on Alien 3, David Fincher emerged as a directorial phoenix, and went on to make Seven as his next feature film. Understanding that writers and directors literally need to be on the same page, the lessons learned from his own career and also from reading his father’s script, Fincher understood that no person is an island in the movie business. If only the Fox executives that trashed his version of Alien 3 could have learned that back in 1991, maybe we'd be talking about the "absolute classic" Alien 3, rather than the very expertly crafted euphemism that David Fincher used to describe what was essentially, a living hell."

"On the face of it, Alien 3 should have been a pretty great movie. The first two films from the franchise were spectacular; it had a director at its helm that would go on to be one of the best of the modern era, it was written by the legendary Walter Hill, and it was packed to the brim with stellar acting talent. But in the end it was just downright turgid."

"If it hadn’t been for the American science fiction horror movie Alien 3, one of the brightest lights in Hong Kong’s scientific community could well have spent his days staring into a microscope and performing autopsies. “The night before the [job] interview, I went to see Alien 3 – which opens with a postmortem. I thought, ‘Do I really want to start my days with a postmortem?’ So, in the end I became a chemical pathologist – we look at blood rather than dead bodies,” says Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, the Li Ka Shing professor of medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). It seems, then, that we have American film director David Fincher to thank in part for Lo’s many contributions to health – from the development of non-invasive prenatal testing to new screening tests for cancer."

"Alien 3 has a certain reputation with different groups—to David Fincher, it was a nightmare first production for the enfant terrible director, one he has since refused to be associated with because the studio will not restore his child autopsy scene, which even the biggest Gone Girl fan in the world would admit is a bit much. For movie dorks, it’s a movie you like to argue is better than whoever is tolerating listening to you remembers. For most people, it’s the one where Sigourney Weaver got head shaved. For losers, it’s the one where Newt dies off-camera and they get angry. I remember Alien 3 as the first rated R movie that had a very large toy push, meaning I was being sold ephemera related to a product I technically wasn’t supposed to see. For cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, Alien 3 was how he got his WGA card. He says as much in this books—an adaptation of a screenplay that wasn't used—introduction. Gibson’s association with Hollywood has largely been uninteresting. Adaptations of his work that have made it to screen amount to 90s-doing-80s footnotes like Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel (though he allegedly wrote most of Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent Strange Days without screen credit). For Alien 3, Gibson turned two drafts over to Walter Hill and David Giler that had little to do with the final product. That's a good thing. Gibson’s script has long been available on the internet. It’s not enough of an oddity to be interesting. It’s okay. The comic is ultimately okay too."

"Alien 3 was a very silly movie to work on. It had already been going for four months by the time I started, and they hadn’t even begun thinking about making the Alien. The script wasn’t even finished by that point, and I don’t think there was a director either. All there was was a bunch of models of the characters that were going to die – the Alien didn’t get made until five or six months later. In fact, the Alien was the last thing to be considered out of all the effects. On my first day, they weren’t even sure what the Alien was going to look like – there were all kinds of different drafts of the script, and at one point it was a glass planet so they were talking about having a glass Alien, and then it was going to be all wood and they were talking about having a wooden Alien because it was supposed to adapt to its surroundings. They had done the facehugger which you see at the beginning of the film, because that was the thing they were least worried about. There was another super-facehugger, a clear one, that took us about three months to make, on and off; that was kicked out just after we’d finished it. We also built a huge ox that the Alien burst out of, but David Fincher didn’t like that. Eventually they went back to America and reshot it anyway; now it’s a dog. It was a colossal waste of money."

"The original Alien had these kind of pipes sticking out the back that took it away from just being a man in a rubber suit, but creature designers Alec (Gillis) and Tom (Woodruff) hated them, so we left them off. The very first day we took our Alien on set, Fincher said, "Where are the stove pipe things on the back?", so he had us make some foam ones and glue them on. We made them overnight and they were strapped on with string – this is on a multi-million dollar movie – and when we got on set with them he just said, ‘Take them off’. It was extraordinary."

"The way it worked was that we’d start making something for the film and it would be written out, so we’d stop making it. Then it would be back in again, so we’d start making it again – the same thing happened with the sets. [Special effects supervisor] George Gibbs reportedly built this huge set for the ending of the film on the 007 stage at Pinewood, and they changed one aspect of the script so he had to tear it down and start again. We also spent a huge amount of time and money making an Alien suit and some other guys did the same, making an alien puppet, and the two things just don’t match up, they don’t look like the same Alien. Again, that was because it got to the stage where it just had to be done, so consequently they don’t look like each other in the final movie."

"I suppose you can’t really blame him, you’ve got to blame the people who want to make a film without having a script to start with. You’ve got to blame Sigourney Weaver to a certain extent, too, for having too many fingers in the pie. From what I was told she had a lot to do with the script: she was the one who didn’t want there to be any guns in the film, she was the one who decided to have the love scene. There was no reason for it other than she decided Ripley had to get into bed with someone."

"IT'S apparent during the opening credits of "Alien 3" that this is going to be a movie for the generation that finds the computer friendly. Those of us born before 1975 can't possibly comprehend all of the introductory information that goes clicking across the on-screen television monitor, spelling out time, place and imminent crises with the relentlessness of a speed-reading exam. The information is also so understated that only someone who speaks computer language realizes that life, as we know it, is about to crash. Yet again. What the computer generation knows, and the rest of us don't, is that this information isn't really necessary or especially relevant. Logic is out. Visceral sensation is the point. Unlike "Alien" (1979) and "Aliens" (1986), the new film, directed by David Fincher, puts no great emphasis on futuristic technology. "Alien 3" belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results."

"Fiorina 161 is a planet, but we never see much of it. Clearly, though, it is a place where the sun doesn't shine. The outside temperature hovers in the neighborhood of 40 degrees below zero. Formerly a maximum-security prison, Fiorina 161 has been decommissioned and is now home to 25 of society's worst rejects, former prisoners who have elected to remain on the planet to live lives of edgy atonement. They are members of what is called "an apocalyptic millennarian fundamentalist Christian sect." Whatever they are, they obey their own commandments."

"The production is dourly handsome, with great, chunky, dimly lighted sets that suggest dungeons out of the Middle Ages. They are actually so dark that sometimes it's not easy to know who is doing what to whom. Blood looks black, which may not be all bad. The alien is seen in glimpses, but it's seen often enough so that it seems to be nothing worse than a large, dark sticky lobster claw with a terrible disposition."

"Mr. Fincher, who has directed music videos for Madonna, Billy Idol and others, doesn't waste time trying to make things plausible. His direction of "Alien 3" suggests that he grew up reading instructions on how to program VCR's. He knows that most explanations, like directions, are incomprehensible, and thus irrelevant."

"David Fincher’s Alien³ may be the only film ever made to peak with its logo. As the 20th Century Fox fanfare crescendos over the studio’s familiar logo, the music holds on the minor chord before the usual last note, replacing jubilant bombast with a dissonant groan of strings. The alteration produces an immediate sense of discomfort and unease, setting the tone for something ominous and fearsome. It’s an ingenious shot across the bow from Fincher, ushering in a feature career dotted with immaculately ordered, carefully scored works of blockbuster entertainment that veered from audience-pleasing major keys to their grim underbellies. The perversion of the Fox theme epitomizes a succinct grasp of horror that only occasionally surfaces in the film proper."

"Too often, Alien³ shows its seams, whether in its thematic arc or the design of the xenomorph, and at not even two hours it still feels weighed down by unnecessary exposition and padded suspense scenes. But blame for much of this cannot fall at one person’s feet, as the film was notoriously the product of years of production hell that saw the studio soliciting wildly different drafts from writers including (but not limited to) cyberpunk author William Gibson, writer-director Vincent Ward, and producer/filmmaker Walter Hill. Eventually, ideas from each version found their way into a Frankenstein monster of a shooting script, one further plagued by endless on-set rewrites that left Fincher so exasperated that even Fox’s officially released behind-the-scenes footage shows the director railing against the pressures of the studio’s poorly planned project."

"Considerable criticism, from both audiences and former cast and crew members on the series, was directed at the decision to callously kill off Lt. Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn) in the opening credits. Regarded on its own terms, though, their deaths fit well within the series’s bleak tone. Structured in staccato clips inserted between the credits, the scene shows off the sense of visual economy that Fincher picked up while making music videos. It plays out in ominous glimpses of a hatched alien egg, a facehugger stretching toward Newt’s cryogenic pod, a crack of glass, and seepage of blood into cloth. In seconds, all of the good feelings left over from the end of Aliens are brutally cast aside, robbing Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) of the ad hoc family she’d only just rallied together. It’s a promisingly nihilistic beginning, and Ripley’s dismay upon learning of her friends’ deaths is compounded by the revelation that she’s crash-landed near a Weyland-Yutani prison, a refinery work camp whose inmates are all men with double-Y chromosomes, a defect that enhances their aggression and leaves them more likely to rape and murder. The early scenes, of Ripley interacting with men actively afraid of her presence and what it might encourage in them, mark the film’s thematic high point, balancing Ripley’s fears of a possible xenomorph outbreak against the equally immediate worries about the rippling aftershocks of her presence on the inmates’ vows of celibacy, made in a mass religious conversion among the prisoners that occurred long before she arrived. Frequently, the men use their religion as pretense for distrust of the woman, if not outright abuse. Ripley has always had to deal with unfriendly elements, but they usually came isolated in the form of company men (or androids); here is an entire facility’s worth of people with an innate antagonism against her, one that stymies her attempts to lead them against the alien threat that breaks out shortly after her arrival."

"In what’s become something of a recurring theme of the franchise since its first two entries, Alien³ arguably peaks before the alien itself takes center stage. The looming, Brutalist-style prison setting evinces a sense of decay well before the camera explores its dripping, darkened corridors and vents. The private-owned prison, more work camp than carceral institution, has a wide-open feel that paradoxically enhances the feeling of being trapped, a testament to the assurances of its builders that those who worked there would know they had nowhere, ultimately, to run. When the alien finally does begin to roam the prison, however, the environment too quickly loses its character, its labyrinthine structure and dangerous areas (a ventilation shaft with a giant fan telegraphs a gruesome human purée well before it happens) betray their usefulness to the story. No longer does the facility have its own story to tell; instead, it looks as if it were built around the alien sequences."

"The alien itself is a disappointment, as the filmmakers’ intriguing idea of having a xenomorph infect and thus absorb the DNA of a quadrupedal animal is squandered on a garish puppet creation that moves in jerky, dissonant steps that completely divorce the creature from the environment. This robs the alien of even a hint of menace, barring a few close-ups that keep the image limited to the xenomorph’s face and teeth. Prefiguring an issue that’s plagued all future Alien movies in the CGI era, the depiction of the xenomorph so casually in full view saps much of the suspense that the first two films wrung out of keeping the monsters hidden or partially glimpsed. Once its definitions are set, the creature loses its amorphous, undefinable shape and size, limiting it to something comprehensible. The lackluster alien undeniably drags down the proceedings, but the film maintains a consistently bleak atmosphere that elevates it above its sloppy sequel and the more self-conscious philosophy of recent prequels by staying truest to the simple hopelessness of the original film."

"Even within arguably the most nihilistic franchise in cinematic history, Alien³ stands out for its consistent tone of despair. It presents a reality where even machines feel fear and agony, as when Ripley reactivates the heavily damaged Bishop droid (Lance Henriksen), its tattered face struggling to focus a sagging, milky eye as it relays Weyland-Yutani’s continued, destructive interest in capturing and weaponizing the xenomorph. Having warned Ripley, he then asks her to be shut off, saying he feels pain in his current form and fears being rebuilt into something less special and perfect than what he was. Ripley’s death drive, always present but overwhelmed when she discovers an alien embryo inside of her, is so intense that it blunts the confrontational behavior of the men around her, even Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), the prison’s religious leader whose initial hostility toward Ripley fades when he recognizes the purity of her martyrdom. The deflating alien antics of the film’s back half sap some of the power from Ripley’s ultimate sacrifice, but her final act, taking pro-choice symbolism to self-immolating extremes, is one of the most powerful images in the entire Alien franchise."

"For all its inherent structural problems, Alien³ remains a worthy intended conclusion to the series, finding its true resolution in Ripley’s resolve to break the endless cycle of her torment. Initially panned upon release, Fincher’s film now has its supporters thanks in part to a 2003 recut that restored footage that’s even more evocative of the filmmaker’s overriding sense of dejected gloom. Yet its most lasting impact may be what it said about the direction that blockbusters would go, perpetuating the franchise’s close bonds to the state of tent-pole releases to their respective eras."

"Alien enjoyed [[w:New Hollywood|New Hollywood freedoms in its use of avant-garde production design and its deliberate, character-driven storytelling while its first sequel operated along the faster, more upbeat and cathartic tone of the mid-1980s. This film, the product of a hastily reconciliation of incomplete ideas, points to a future in which blockbusters would be crafted as if on an assembly line, no longer the product of one vision or even that of a group but of a conglomeration running on autopilot. As producer Jon Landau later said of the film, “We set out to make a release date, not a movie.”"

"Q: Thinking back over your career, you were attached to over Alien 3 for over a year. Can you tell us what happened there?"

"The movie opens with spooky, effective opening credits that completely rip apart everything you loved about Aliens. If Alien is mysterious, and Aliens is hectic, Alien 3 promises at the opening to be depressing as hell, which happens when you kill an innocent little girl in the opening five minutes. Combined with the death of Hicks, Alien 3 destroys the surrogate family unit from Aliens, and now Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the sole survivor of a tragic crash and the only woman on a desolate planet populated by murderers and rapists. Except the prisoners have found religion, and this is where you can see Alien 3‘s split personality emerge. The religious angle from Ward’s script has been retained, but now it’s been shoehorned into a story where a skeleton crew of prisoners (the film has a weak explanation of why a huge facility would be kept running by and for about twenty people) now have Christianity for some reason. The script then tries to dance with this aspect, but it only remains an interesting idea even though there was the possibility that this idea could have been developed on its own merits despite being outside of Ward’s original intent. These men have been able to turn their lives over to God, but they’ve also been devoid of temptation. There’s not much on the planet Fiorina “Fury” 161 worth wanting, and then Ripley comes into their lives, which begs the question of the value of faith without temptation. But then the movie’s ugliness reemerges when some of the prisoners try to rape Ripley. Then Charles S. Dutton rescues Ripley, beats the crap out of her attackers, and the attempted rape is never referenced again."

"To the film’s credit, Alien 3 consciously doesn’t want to be a retread of the first two movies. The xenomorph doesn’t even carry human DNA, and instead comes from a dog, which turns it into a quadruped, even though that ultimately doesn’t make much of a difference. To quote Warden Andrews (Brian Glover), who has my favorite description of the xenomorph ever: “It kills on sight, and is generally unpleasant.” It’s also kind of background in a movie that can’t really be anything because it was torn apart at its fundamental level. They had sets with no story, characters without purpose, and discarded plotlines galore right down to seemingly insignificant scenes like the xenomorph coming out of an ox rather than a dog. The whole thing is a mess, and it’s an infuriating mess not only because it’s stifling Fincher’s talent, but because Alien 3 is littered with potential. It’s an atmospheric film, but it’s not worth breathing the air. Even Ripley is less interesting this time around even though there are plenty of places they could have gone with her character."

"When it came time for Ripley to jump, Fincher wanted to stick by the religious angle that had been so thoroughly reduced throughout the picture: “I said ‘whatever happens she has to be in peace at the end.’ It has to be a sigh rather than gritting teeth and sweat. So we talked about it and went over and shot this blue-screen element. We were shooting that shot four days before the film opened, a completely ridiculous mess. I don’t know if it works.” And it ends with gritted teeth and sweat. I have mixed feelings about the ending. Had Fincher been able to get his vision through, then perhaps that ending would work, but as it stands in the theatrical cut, the moment fits in with the ugliness that permeates the rest of this movie. A peaceful sigh doesn’t fit with a grey-brown palette, attempted rape, and a dead little girl getting her ribcage cracked open. Ripley and the alien had become one, and it cursed her until her final moment."

"That's it: the trilogy is now complete - uneven, incoherent, often unpalatable, but still one of the great achievements in popular cinema. The last part is the worst, no question, but it isn't your average sequel; for these films contained many sequels within themselves, the same old story flicking round time and again, refusing to give up for dead. As each movie came and went, the heart of darkness kept pumping away: The horror. The horror. The horror. This time it starts with the credits. Slipped in between the names we see slashes of wild movement, the now familiar elements of evil: acid, fire, a hiss like a hot iron, something clamping on to Ripley's face. By the time we get to the name of the director, David Fincher, we know what he does best. He cuts fast and surely, like a surgeon in a hurry, delving towards the warm root of the problem. No wonder he shoots an autopsy so well. I'd heard about the scene and was dreading it, but there's nothing to look away from, unless you count the little two-handed saw shaped like a parsley chopper. Somehow it doesn't look sick; blood coils silently into a dish, no more than that, leaving our imaginations to do their worst. And their worst is their best, to judge by the nervous wailing that rose from the auditorium, dotted with giggles and gulps."

"Alien3 is hopeless, scarfed in a rusty gloom that's light years away from the sheen of a good blockbuster; no wonder that American audiences soon learnt to stay away. It reads like a suicide note, a pulp version of Celine: 'I'd rather be nothing', or 'I need you to kill me . . . I'm dead anyway'. All three movies have been dank and dour, of course, and that is their triumph. After years of brushed chrome and spacious command rooms, along came Alien, and soon the lights were going out all over space. It was the first film to suggest that a spaceship was just that, a ship in space - a wet, primitive hulk, cavernous yet cramped, with all manner of malevolence shivering behind its timbers. The new film keeps up the claustrophobia but turns it inwards, too, putting the squeeze on the souls of the inhabitants and wringing the fight out of them."

"The alien is all she has, and all she has to kill; Holmes is nothing without Moriarty, Achilles needs Hector more than he ever did Patroclus. Their whole life resides in these few hours of remorseless wrath. What of soul is left, I wonder, when the killing has to stop? These are grand ways of looking at it, but then the Alien trilogy is grand. Not pretentious and talkative, just laden with images of doom and sexual control, the unstoppably fecund as well as the unbearably blocked. The final part doesn't let us down here, with all its writhing corridors and Satanic furnaces, the odd tongue of flame rasping against Piranesi girders and whale-grey walls. It suffers from poor supporting performances, and a plot that splutters instead of pushing on; but when the chase is on, all is forgiven. Fincher brings on the Steadicam and whips it through tunnels at alien pace, flipping upside down and bulging the walls with wide-angle lenses. You can't tell what the hell is happening, but you know it's hell all right. I can't give the ending away, but I wish I could. Everything is wrapped up a treat - Fincher can't really tell a tale, but he can wheel on the awe with the best of them. I think he must have been watching Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, which I saw again last month. Both films are graced by actresses with shaven heads and staring eyes, at the furthest reach of their powers; both pound along towards fire and sacrifice, and edit our nerves into thin strips. Dreyer made a masterpiece, Fincher made a mess; but he rounds out a modern myth, and in so doing ensures that, like Lieutenant Ripley, we will never sleep easy again."

"The shape-shifting "Alien" trilogy reverts back to the form of the first film in this third close encounter—a muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it. Although certain to open strong thanks to the must-see faithful, look for a quick fade beyond the first couple of box office orbits as word-of-mouth and the dour tone pull "Alien3" down to earth, making it a likely also-ran among this summer's blockbusters. In interviews, star/co-producer Sigourney Weaver has spoken of the producers’ conflict with Fox over crafting a more cerebral film rather than an outright thriller, and that indecisiveness shows."

"In any event, Ripley (Weaver) finds herself stranded on a planet with a bunch of converted convicts who’ve embraced religion, led by Charles S. Dutton of TV’s “Roc.” The colony’s kindly doctor (Charles Dance), with whom Ripley shares another kind of close encounter, suspects something is wrong, but throughout the early part of the story Ripley won’t share her suspicions with him that an Alien has landed on the planet. That reticence is only one of numerous inexplicable aspects of “Alien3,” which again relies on the same faceless “company” as an unseen heavy while toying furtively with the sexual politics of a lone woman trapped on a planet of murderers, rapists and miscreants. In that vein, a significant problem stems from the fact that aside from Ripley and perhaps Dutton and Dance, none of these characters has a defined persona, making the bald convicts all virtually indistinguishable Alien-bait."

"Music video director David Fincher doesn’t reveal much finesse with actors in his bigscreen debut, and the screenplay (by producers Walter Hill and David Giler, plus Larry Ferguson) proves fraught with lapses in reason, motivation and logic. That leaves Weaver to carry the load, but her character is so encumbered with baggage that she can’t really showcase the qualities–particularly evident in the second film–that made the audience empathize with her. Much has been made of her shaved head, but Weaver has more importantly been shorn here, for the most part, of the epic strength that made Ripley such a striking female protagonist in “Aliens.” As for the much-discussed re-shoot of the movie’s ending, one can only judge what’s on screen, which shows that the screams of heavy-handed religious symbolism can be heard even in space."

"The Alien itself remains a technical marvel in its three repugnant forms, more a tribute to H.R. Giger’s original design than anything else. Fincher, turning to musicvideo editing techniques, resorts to rapid-fire glimpses of the beast, relying on a variety of methods ranging from rotoscoping to puppetry. Still, we’ve seen those dripping jaws before, and even impressive shots of the creature rapidly scurrying across ceilings don’t justify the fare to be a passenger on this latest voyage. Other technical aspects are also top of the line, although the production design proves so relentlessly bleak that there’s no relief from the film’s oppressiveness, even when there are lapses in the tension. While the look is an accomplishment, this isn’t the sort of environment that tag-along filmgoers–or even those who bring them–will relish visiting."

"By all accounts, Alien 3 should have been one of the most successful sequels of all time. At the close of 1986’s rip-roaring Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, having defeated her interplanetary acid-blooded adversaries, retreated into a space pod bound for Earth accompanied by her compatriots Bishop, Hicks and Newt. All four characters were (seemingly) put into a very safe cyber-sleep. The next instalment, one assumed, would pick up shortly thereafter – with the fabulous foursome awake, and in fresh surroundings, pitted against a new horde of hot-tempered Xenomorph menace. Unfortunately, it was not to be. With ex-music video helmer David Fincher opting to take the franchise in an unexpectedly dark and dingy direction – with a plot detailing Ripley’s struggle for survival on an inauspicious all-male prison-world – 1992’s would-be summer blockbuster, Alien 3, was not what anyone expected. Highlighting just one solitary space-beast, and a group of gun-less victims, the often-meandering movie could not be further removed from the “gung-ho”, blood-pumping bullet ballet that propelled its immediate predecessor into a pop culture phenomenon."

"Initially, the plan was to concentrate on Michael Biehn’s Hicks character – with Weaver taking a back seat to the action. When this idea was scrapped, later screenplays were commissioned – including an aliens-on-Earth option courtesy of Eric Red (who had penned the popular vampire potboiler Near Dark) to the now-legendary wooden-monastery planet take instigated by Vincent Ward (who obtained a credit for “story” on the final flick). Finally, though, original Alien creators Walter Hill and David Giler were brought in, alongside Highlander scripter Larry Ferguson, to form the film that became Alien 3 – although Fincher and his own pen-man, Rex Pickett, would do a further rejig as shooting was about to commence."

"For some, part of the interest of the Alien franchise comes from the underlying elements of maternal malevolence and gender-subversion, from a male giving birth to the penetrative-parent alien. You can see Alien 3 as extending these intriguing elements, with Ripley forced to dominate a group of males, and in the process masculinising herself (witness that shaved head), before dying in the midst of giving birth to a beast that she, understandably, does not want to introduce to the world. According to Hill, though, giving too much Freudian thought to this tale of torrid parentage is best approached with caution. “You would really need to explain some of that stuff to me,” he chuckles. “Listen, I once made a wise ass remark. It was about 25 years ago and I have never had so many letters in my life. I said something about psychoanalysis – basically that it is astrology for intellectuals, and I got about 200 letters scolding me. Everybody has to make a living, though, and some people have obviously decided they can make living out of writing that stuff on the Alien films. But that is not the business I am in. All I know is that we just wanted to make good scary movies. Maybe some stuff got snuck in there without me realising – who knows?”"

"“I was, and am, surprised that the franchise kept going,” admits Hill. “When we did Alien all we wanted to do was to bring a more sophisticated style of filmmaking to what had always been regarded as a B-picture. I always thought that if you did that you would have a commercially rewarding endeavour. But who knew that approach would lead to the Hollywood you have now, where more serious dramatic films have been squeezed out by that B-movie approach. The fact that our monster movie contributed to the loss of a wider approach to filmmaking is, in a way, quite sad.” Such a pessimistic statement seems entirely fitting for a feature on sci-fi’s most famous feelbad follow-up. Even so, we would wager that few would argue that, in the grand scale of studio sequels, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever again dare to destroy a potent celluloid property like David Fincher did with Alien 3. For that reason alone, we can but admire the decisions – however mad – that led to this most unlikely of threequels."

"The end product was set on an all-male prison planet, with inmates and jailers instead of monks, but it retained a bit of Ward's flavor. Everyone was bald thanks to a lice infestation. The sweaty domes, the faintly monastic single-sex casting of the prisoners, the fearful and hateful descriptions of women, and the invocation of religious language and imagery gave the whole thing a Biblical or medieval feel—and as Ripley overcame her depression and near-paralysis over losing her surrogate daughter Newt and maybe-boyfriend Cpl. Hicks in the crash, her possessed, crusading demeanor had echoes of Saint Joan. As Tafoya points out in his video essay, the direction, photography, writing and production design of "Alien 3" reference a tradition of religious art and tales of spiritual torment, even filming the shorn heroine so that she resembles Falconetti, the star of Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent classic "The Passion of Joan of Arc."

"The sight of a woman testing herself against macho environments was always a fixture in the "Alien" series, with its threats of rape and impregnation, and its mostly male casts swaggering through landscapes of industrial or military machinery, cursing and smoking and muttering about "the bonus situation" or teasing each other as "ladies." But this aspect becomes more pointed, and more poignant, in "Alien 3." The inmates' misogyny is built right into the storyline. The religious elements are teased out through prayers and talk of devils and deliverance via Ripley's Joan of Arc figure. And much of the picture is—when you boil it down to its essence—about a woman who was sleep-raped by a monster trying to abort the spawn before company executives that masterminded the crime can cut it out of her, and use it as the seed for a biological weapons program."

"Because the third film revolves almost entirely around Ripley's desire to protect the integrity of her body—specifically her womb—"Alien 3" feels more purely feminist than the previous two movies, for all their innovative images of a badass heroine fighting bugs whose bodies fused male and female genitalia into a Freudian nightmare. In the first movie, she's fighting to save her crew. In the second, she's fighting to save a little girl, and in so doing, embracing her own latent potential for motherhood; the climactic action scene even brings her face-to-face with another mother, the alien queen, in an egg chamber. These are all engaging, relatable motivations, but they're culturally conservative, because they play on the traditional image of woman as potential victim or maternal protector. In "Alien 3," Ripley is fighting for Ripley, period. She has to. Nobody else will fight for her. She's been betrayed and abandoned by everyone and everything she ever valued. She's shattered by grief, staring numbly out at a universe that barely seems worth saving. She has allies but no protectors—nor, it seems, does she expect any, not after enduring so much suffering en route to this hellhole. The film's unexpectedly powerful final sequence flips the ending of Cameron's "Aliens" on its head. The second movie closed with an image of Ripley in hypersleep alongside her "daughter" Newt, with her potential mate Hicks slumbering nearby: a fairy tale image of a (makeshift) nuclear family, heartwarming in an almost Spielbergian way. The climax of "Alien 3" shows Ripley leaping into a firey pit to destroy the murderous "baby" inside of her. When it tears out of her gut anyway, she grabs it and holds it close to make sure it burns. Her pose evokes a mother cradling a newborn."

"Reviews were generally unkind to the film that eventually made it to theaters, calling it stylish but shallow. Variety described Alien 3 as “a muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it,” while the New York Times complained that the film was too dark and too implausible. The third installment in the franchise “is nothing to scream about,” wrote a critic for the Washington Post."

"Alien 3 is very much a David Fincher film, as distinctly the product of his dark and twisted imagination as Seven (film)|Seven]] or Zodiac or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Just as the icy survivalism of Alien helped set the tone for Ridley Scott’s career, and the guns-blazing ferocity of Aliens helped pave the way for James Cameron’s later work, Alien 3 works as a setup for the rest of David Fincher’s films. It’s nihilistic and misanthropic, bleak and despairing, slickly shot and bathed in ragged industrial gloom. It’s a big-budget movie about human frailty and the inevitability of death in which the characters are never particularly likable or heroic and the protagonist dies at the end. As in Seven], the ending is a shock downer. As in Fight Club, the character relationships are built from a series of existential dialogues. As in Panic Room, the story is driven by the need to use one’s surroundings to survive what is essentially a home invasion. The alien of Alien 3 is, in a way, Fincher’s first serial killer."

"Visually, Alien 3 may be the most distinctive entry in the franchise. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose work on Blade Runner defined a certain decaying urban sci-fi aesthetic, had to quit after a short time on the job. But the final work by British photographer Alex Thomson is stunning in its own way. Backgrounds are textured with steam columns, damp surfaces, and sharp beams of light that give the sets a textured physicality. For much of the film, the camera lingers close to the floor, pointed up, as if to emphasize the close confines of the prison space and the impossibility of escape. Beyond the visuals, Alien 3 also excels as an exercise in imaginative world building. Its lonely prison planet is as richly detailed and lived-in an environment as the industrial corridors of Alien or the abandoned mining colony of Aliens. Its sequestered society, in which a religious contingent effectively runs the prison while a small group of overseers struggles to maintain a facade of control, is as nuanced a cinematic sociology as the corporate power structures that drove the first film, or the military conventions that powered the second. Like its predecessors, Alien 3 is an exploration of human power dynamics in a confined setting and the limits of institutional control. Fincher, in other words, put his own particular stamp on the tropes that animate the Alien franchise: He took the ideas that Scott and Cameron had developed and remade them in his own image. His ideas may be too bleak, too gloomy, too misanthropic for some, but they are clearly his, and in Alien 3 they are presented as forcefully as ever."

"Full of clanging corridors, belching furnaces and ravaging monsters, the cavernous maze-world of “Alien 3" (citywide) is not only seemingly the last stop for the entire “Alien” series—it looks like civilization’s last stop as well. In a way, that’s what this erratic, ambitious super-thriller is about. It’s not just the ultimate duel between Sigourney Weaver’s beleaguered Ripley and the kill-crazy extraterrestrials that have chased her through three hellacious movies, it’s about running into the ultimate cul-de-sac."

"“Alien 3" isn’t a classy, visionary nightmare like Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” and it’s not really a hell-for-leather, super-tech toboggan ride like James Cameron’s 1986 “Aliens.” It has a different mood than either of its predecessors, and a different look: stylish but gloomy, portentously grim. It does succeed in rounding the three movies off, not smashingly but interestingly."

"Fincher has good designers and a great cinematographer—Alex Thomson, who lit “Excalibur” for John Boorman—and he’s obviously trying for something closer to Scott’s “Alien” than Cameron’s. A rock video specialist, he wants eerie Gothic chic instead of a slam-bang, cleanly lit apocalypse; he wants his images to have a shine, a pizazz, a depth. But, although “Alien 3" is stylish—and ambitious—the movie doesn’t have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom."

"The underlying theme of all the “Alien” movies, the distant glossy ancestors of Howard Hawks’ 1951 “The Thing,” is the rot in the technology, bugs-against-machines. In a way, this “Alien” capstone is about the end of everything, a technological and spiritual meltdown—which, considering the social and governmental breakdowns all around us, may be appropriate to 1992. But, however much it tries, the movie can’t escape the bugs in its own machine: the money-driven monsters that keep driving it into infernal cul-de-sacs."

"Sigourney Weaver - Ellen Ripley"

"Charles S. Dutton - Dillon"

"Charles Dance - Jonathan Clemens"

"Brian Glover - Harold Andrews"

"Ralph Brown - Aaron"

"Paul McGann - Golic"

"Danny Webb - Morse"

"Pete Postlethwaite - David"

"Holt McCallany - Junior"

"Peter Guinness - Gregor"

"Clive Mantle - William"

"DeObia Oparei - Arthur"

"Phil Davis - Kevin"

"Niall Buggy - Eric"

"Christopher Fairbank - Murphy"

"Lance Henriksen - Michael Bishop (Bishop II)"

"Weyland Corporation: Building Better Worlds. Hello, friends. My name is Peter Weyland. I am your employer. I am recording this 22 June 2091 — and if you are watching it, you have reached your destination, and I am long dead. May I rest in peace. There is a man sitting with you today — his name is David — he is the closest thing to a son I will ever have. Unfortunately he is not human. He will never grow old and he will never die — and yet he is unable to appreciate these remarkable gifts, for that would require the one thing that David will never have: a soul. I have spent my entire lifetime contemplating the questions "Where do we come from — what is our purpose — what happens when we die?" And I have finally found two people who have convinced me they're on the verge of answering them: Doctors Holloway and Shaw — if you would please stand. As far as you're concerned, they're both in charge. The Titan Prometheus wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods — for that he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return."

"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

"I was designed like this because you people are more comfortable interacting with your own kind. If I didn't wear the suit, it would defeat the purpose."

"Big things have small beginnings."

"How far would you go to get what you came all this way for — to get your answers? What would you be willing to do?"

"This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life."

"Good morning. I am Meredith Vickers, and it is my job to make sure you do yours."

"A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable."

"It's us — it's everything. What killed them?"

"Final report of the vessel Prometheus. The ship and her entire crew are gone. If you're receiving this transmission, make no attempt to come to its point of origin. There is only death here now, and I'm leaving it behind. It is New Year's Day, the year of our Lord, 2094. My name is Elizabeth Shaw, the last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching."

"Look, I'm just a geologist. I like rocks. I love rocks! Now, it's clear you two don't give a shit about rocks. But what you do seem to care about is gigantic dead bodies. And as I don't really have anything to contribute in the gigantic dead body arena … I'm gonna go back to the ship. If you don't mind."

"The search for our beginning could lead to our end."

"They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end."

"Noomi Rapace — Elizabeth Shaw"

"Michael Fassbender — David"

"Guy Pearce — Peter Weyland"

"Idris Elba — Janek"

"Logan Marshall-Green — Charlie Holloway"

"Charlize Theron — Meredith Vickers"

"Rafe Spall — Millburn"

"Sean Harris — Fifield"

"Kate Dickie — Ford"

"Emun Elliott — Chance"

"Benedict Wong — Ravel"

"It's been more than 200 years...The beginning has just started."

"We are not alone."

"Witness the resurrection."

"Pray you die first."

"Hell gives birth."

"It's already too late."

"Beyond salvation."

"In the fourth film, Alien: Resurrection, we arrive at a world where moral values are erased. The only thing that matters for the characters in Jeunet's film is acquiring power over others. Set on a military research station, it's about a group of scientists who undo Ripley's death by cloning her so that they can extract the alien inside her. Their experiments include impregnating human test subjects with the creature, a singularly unhealthy procedure for the hapless civilians conscripted for that purpose. The scientists and their military taskmasters care about only one thing: having the alien's power. They speak about its beauty. Its purity. Ironically, the only character who has a sense of human decency and compassion is an android (Winona Ryder)."

"To be blunt, the "Alien" movie franchise should have died along with its lead character, Lt. Ellen Ripley, in 1992's "Alien3." Instead, greed has struck again, as producers have drafted a hip director (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of "Delicatessen" fame) and an even hipper writer (Joss Whedon, creator of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") in hopes of reviving the film series. But neither man has come up with anything particularly original and instead fall prey to dumb horror conventions with this splattery sequel, which actually gives "Starship Troopers" a run for its money in the gore department."

"Whedon, whose "Buffy" TV scripts and whose dialogue for "Toy Story" evidenced some keen wit, shows none of it here, save for a couple of funny one-liners. His characterizations are similarly stilted. None of the heroes is sympathetic, which makes it hard to care whether they survive the inevitable attacks (Ron Perlman, as a chauvinistic space pirate, is particularly irritating)."

"Jeunet — who is without his collaborator, French comic book artist Marc Caro — seems intent on conveying a weird, creepy atmosphere, but fails to keep the action moving, and he photographs things at perspectives that make it hard to see what's going on. And without a strong director, the actors are all over the place. Dan Hedaya plays things for camp as the station commander, while Weaver is even colder here than she is in "The Ice Storm.""

"Of course in the latest chapter it's not the same old Ripley who reappears. The resurrection in the title refers to the cloning by which she is involuntarily brought back to life 200 years (or 4 years in Hollywood time) after she hurled herself into an inferno in Alien 3 rather than let a ferocious monster gestating inside her live. The twist is that the reconstituted Ripley has strands of the alien species woven into her DNA, enhancing her powers and infusing her with a dark, sardonic ambivalence about clashing again with probably the slimiest monsters Hollywood ever devised, now vaguely her kin. Ms. Weaver says it was the reinvention of the Ripley character -- this spirit of nihilism, as she calls it -- that persuaded her to do a fourth Alien film after she had all but decided that three were enough."

"Tiptoeing into weird Freudian areas and moments of grotesquerie new even to this series, "Alien Resurrection," the fourth entry in Fox's almost 20-year-old franchise, is a generally cold, though sometimes wildly imaginative and surprisingly jokey, $70 million scarefest that may prove too mixed a meal to scare up monstrous business among mass auds. French helmer Jean-Pierre Jeunet — the more directorial half of the duo behind “Delicatessen” and “The City of Lost Children” — has breathed new life into the series on several fronts, and proves no slouch in delivering the action set pieces. But the movie is held back by a lack of emotional engagement at its center and a pottage of half-assimilated, European-flavored quirks."

"As a series of action set pieces, the movie is frequently gripping and always highly watchable. In one extended section — geographically reminiscent of “The Poseidon Adventure” with its underwater swim and vertical climb — there’s a real sense of claustrophobia as the beasties pursue their human lunch underwater, and the “Goldfinger”-like demise of the final alien is a typically imaginative tour de force. Editing by Jeunet regular Herve Schneid is especially tight (pic is the shortest of the quartet). Darius Khondji’s lensing, aided by the silver-added ENR printing process, emphasizes deep blacks and soft ochers, with flashes of electric blue supplying visual relief. Nigel Phelps’ production design crosses geometrical sets and clangy brute iron with the Victorian-industrialized look of Jeunet’s own “Lost Children.” Whedon’s script injects some of the rough, testosterone humor of “Aliens” into a story that tries to build on the cross-species subtext of “Alien3.” However, when the movie strays into weirder territory — where, one feels, Jeunet’s heart really lies — there’s a growing feeling of inadequacy. Pic’s interest in Ripley’s split, half-human personality and her maternal bond with the Queen leads to some of the most intriguing — and cheesiest — stuff in the picture, but overall come off more as exotic inserts than fully assimilated sequences. Upside moments include the discovery of a horrific lab (straight out of “Lost Children”) and Ripley’s late-on “embrace” of her fearsome offspring; downside is a laughable Newborn that all but blows the pic’s finale."

"It’s almost as if the pic is afraid to enter the darkened rooms whose doors it keeps opening, though if it had, a truly original movie could have resulted. As it is, the finished film shows many signs of creative push and pull — Whedon’s original script was extensively changed during production — from unexplained ellipses in the plot’s early stages, through dialogue that is surprisingly jokey and unelevated (considering the themes at play), to a storyline that seems unwilling to stray far from the action. In addition, the key relationship in the picture, between femmes Ripley and Call, has little chance to realize its potential and provide a badly needed emotional hook for the audience. In every respect, this is a cold movie that, even at the very end, fails to provide the sense of emotional release that the others in the series all managed to deliver."

"Weaver, admittedly, is excellent in the latest Alien outing and remains probably the only credible female action lead. The film also puts an interesting twist on the steely bonds of motherhood and makes some rather obvious comments about the perils of genetic engineering (when will those dratted mad scientist types ever learn?). But about half-way through a film I desperately wanted to like, I found I had become bored. And that is the one crime against film-making I can-not forgive. Here we were, once again, on a gloomy spaceship, with a rag-tag band of stock characters being picked off one by one by creatures that once were terrifying but now are mere caricatures. There are only so many times you can be scared by grasping claws dragging people through metal-grille floors, those tell-tale patches of slime (gasp, an alien was here!), those snapping, ratchet choppers embedding themselves in yet more flesh. How often are we supposed to cheer as the heroes narrowly escape, or the chief nasty gets sucked into the void? For most of the film, I was more scared of the sheer size of Sigourney (I'd give her a 9.5 on the buff-o-meter, compared to, say, a measly six or seven for Demi Moore in GI Jane) than her multi-toothed nemeses."

"From the instant those green-tinged posters were plastered about the winding corridors of MTR stations announcing the fourth instalment in the Alien series, each sighting sparked a flutter of excitement in my gut. Ever since those unforgettable scenes in the original film - the spidery creature erupting from the egg to force its deadly spore down an unsuspecting throat; the baby alien bursting through its victim's ribcage and scurrying slimily away with a malevolent shriek - I was hooked. It was an irresistible combination of suspense, space - where no one can hear you scream - and artist H.R. Geiger's twisted vision of a monster which combined phallic imagery, insect savagery and a concept from the wilder shores of Freud's psychological armoury, vagina dentata (a deep-seated fear of female sexual organs armed with razor-sharp fangs). The anticipation of Alien Resurrection, however, proved to be more thrilling than the event. Granted, we live in an age of cinematic cynicism, ruled by the multiplex and the multiple sequel. And I admit to having done my bit to contribute. If they keep churning them out until an 80-year-old Sigourney Weaver is blasting away at goo-oozing arthropods in Aliens 15, or a geriatric Mel Gibson is dislocating his shoulder in Lethal Weapon 22, I'll probably still be forking over my money to watch. Because art (and sequels) mirror life; occasional epiphanies, followed by frequent and generally doomed attempts to recapture them."

"The sheer contempt bred by familiarity has reduced what was, in its original incarnation, an intelligent, ground-breaking and thought-provoking film to a James Bond-style franchise. You pay your money and you know what you'll get and how you'll feel. Alienated."

"The much-maligned last part in the Alien quadrilogy should be approached as the comic-book actioner that it is (only Slate’s David Edelstein seemed to recognize the film’s ridiculous allure at the time of its release). Jean-Pierre Jeunet was brought on board by the suits at Fox to give Alien: Resurrection the look and feel of his overrated The City of Lost Children. That he did, but with a lot more laughs. Two-hundred years after Fincher’s Alien³, some company has resuscitated Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as a human/alien hybrid that combines the best and worst attributes of the old model. The new and not-so-improved Ripley has the same touching mother instinct and sex drive of her predecessor, but she’s also considerably more jaded. Weaver gets to deliver one humdinger after another, evoking Tallulah Bankhead in a sci-fi version of Lifeboat when she wails, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” Not much has been written about the similarities between the film and Romero’s Day of the Dead, but they’re impossible to ignore: the nature/nurture debate (Ripley versus the docile zombie Bud) and the ego of a military operation under attack. Of course, Alien: Resurrection is nowhere near as sophisticated and profound as Romero’s classic, but it’s still every bit as fun. As General Perez, Dan Hedaya spearheads a human retreat from the film’s military compound that’s remarkably orchestrated and ends with his goofy demise. If the film doesn’t bullshit around, the same can’t be said about Winona Ryder. As a closeted robot sent to destroy Ripley, the perpetually constipated actress declares at one point: “I can’t make critical mass.” How touching."

"It's no secret, but if you've never seen the end of Alien³, look away now because here comes the spoiler - Ripley dies at the end of it. You can almost see her muttering "Thank God" under her breath as she falls back into a molten lead sea. But! Using her DNA, she's cloned and brought back to life, now with some rather scary alien attributes. Stick her in a ship full of aliens and off we run once again."

"As Hollywood movies go, it's a reasonably involving divertissement about genetics and Philip K. Dick-borrowed themes exploring what it means to be human. It satisfactorily recycles the great surprises that made the first movie so powerful. And most significantly, it makes a big hoot of the whole business. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who co-directed the otherworldly "Delicatessen" and the Terry Gilliam-like "The City of Lost Children," indulges his taste for dark, bizarre humor and surrealistic sets. And his vision gets the full-throttled boost of Darius Khondji, the brilliant cinematographer behind "Seven" and both Jeunet movies; and visual effects geniuses Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis, who are responsible for the visual wonders in "Death Becomes Her," "Jumanji" and "Starship Troopers." "In space," went the original "Alien" advertisement in 1979, "no one can hear you scream." But in "Alien Resurrection," that slogan has evolved: In space, no one can hear you laugh."

"Were you intent on making your mark on the Alien franchise?"

"What’s still jarring about Alien: Resurrection is its tone, which departs entirely from the other movies in the series. Perhaps meant as a reaction to the unremitting gloom of Alien 3, Resurrection is shot and acted like a black comedy. Dan Hedaya offers up one of the most scenery chewing performances in any Alien movie as General Perez, and when he’s finally silenced by an alien’s extending inner jaws, he expires with crossed eyes."

"The result is a brisk action comedy that functions like a sci-fi reworking of The Poseidon Adventure, as the film’s survivors make their way across the damaged Auriga to the safety of the mercenaries’ ship. There are several set-pieces that are high on visual impact, but low on tension, including an underwater scene with swimming aliens, and sequence involving two characters dangling from a ladder. If it wasn’t an Alien movie, Resurrection could easily be regarded as a piece of light, disposable genre entertainment. Its direction is sure-footed, and Darius (Seven) Khondji’s cinematography produces some occasionally beguiling images. But taken as a fourth chapter in the Alien canon, Resurrection seems horribly out of place, its tone at odds with the other three films. That it’s entirely without shocks is forgivable. Neither aliens nor Alien 3 replicated the palpable sense of horror present in the first film, but the lack of tension is a far greater problem."

"In the beginning, it was supposed to be Dan Hedaya who got sucked out into space. His character, General Martin Perez, was originally set to exit Alien: Resurrection in spectacularly bloody fashion – his entire body ejected, limb by limb, through a tennis ball-sized hole in the space ship, Auriga. Effects company Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc, spent several weeks in 1996 solving the problem of having a body pulled apart realistically by the vacuum of space. Test footage released by ADI shows the painstaking process of researching and testing practical means of creating Hedaya’s death scene, which would have concluded with his character’s screaming head stripped of its skin until only a gaping skull remained. The results were almost comically grotesque and almost mesmerising to watch – so mesmerising, in fact, that Alien: Resurrection director Jean-Pierre Jeunet eventually decided that such a violent demise was more fitting for his movie’s most formidably villain, the Newborn, and not a relatively minor character. And so it was that the process of designing and testing began once again – this time on the practicalities of having a giant alien’s stomach rip open and its guts spill out on the floor before its skull shatters into countless tiny pieces."

"'I think that at least design-wise there have always been sexual and sensual overtones to the sets,' says Weaver. 'And I've always thought that the Alien is interested in other things than itself. I think it has other, sexual things in mind. But for Aliens: Resurrection, they've cut out a lot of the kinkier stuff, believe it or not. I'd still classify it as sensual, though. Jean-Pierre really understood the relationship Ripley has with the Alien. The French are great. You can't shock them.' Kicking off production in November 1996 and wrapping up last May, Aliens: Resurrection was a gruelling shoot, confesses Weaver. Particularly tough was an extended underwater sequence, in which the pirates and Ripley are pursued through the submerged kitchens by a phalanx of Aliens. The actors had to spend weeks submerged in a tank with no respirators or face masks. 'It was the worst physical experience of my life,' says Ryder. 'You're in a tank that's filthy - the crew is in there for 17 hours a day and there was no coming out to go to the bathroom.' Weaver adds: 'It seemed to go on forever. It actually took a month. And I'm not brave. Ripley's brave. I can say that nothing exists of Sigourney Weaver in that scene at all.'"

"Two hundred years after her suicide, Ellen Ripley's cloned by scientists intent on nurturing the alien foetus inside her. The new Ripley couldn't care less - she's dead already - but goes along for the ride when Call (Ryder) and a band of marooned space pirates fight the inevitable rearguard action. In outline, the resilient Alien movies may be little more than slasher movies in space, yet equipped with strong, imaginative directors, each has proved distinctive and surprisingly resonant. Jeunet, the series' supreme fantasist, plunges deep into the nightmarish genetic whirlpool concocted by screenwriter Joss Whedon. After an ominous, memorably ghoulish opening, however, the Frenchman can't disguise a lack of engagement with the action sequences. The laziest stuff is all linear, mechanical business, much of it concerning Ryder, inadequate in a role designed simply to guarantee the teenage male fan-base. With her deep-freeze intensity and sinewy self-sufficiency, Weaver needs no such back-up. Choking as she comes face to face with earlier, aborted clones, grappling with residual maternal feelings towards the monsters she spawned and contempt for the humans she's long since left behind, Ripley Mk II is a terrifyingly ambivalent millennial saviour, more frightening than a score of aliens."

"Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley looks pretty frisky for someone who killed herself to save humanity from the demon seed in her belly in Alien3. There is more to Ripley’s rise from the ashes than Weaver’s rise in salary from $33,000 for the first Alien to $11 million for Chapter 4. Credit the script by Joss Whedon (Toy Story) for making a joke of it. To the remark, “I thought you were dead,” Ripley replies, “I get that a lot.” You go, girl. In space, no one can hear you scream, “Hey, stupid, ever heard of DNA?” Ripley gets cloned just like the dinos of Jurassic Park. Better to ask: Is there life left in a franchise that began in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s Alien, expanded to James Cameron’s smash 1986 sequel, Aliens, and shrunk – in grosses, not daring – with David Fincher’s 1992 take on the aliens as an AIDS metaphor? You bet. Alien Resurrection is juiced by the fresh thinking of visionary French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the teaming of Weaver’s Amazonian warrant officer, Ripley, with Winona Ryder’s diminutive space smuggler, Call. In a shit-can universe where human aggression handily beats out alien retaliation for gross-out depravity, these two female warriors can outsmart any freak of nature, be it man or beast."

"Weaver and Ryder have a ball playing yang and yin action figures with a common foe. Science is that foe, as it is in Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, the provocative French features Jeunet co-directed with Marc Caro. Like the scientist in the latter film who invades the dreams of children, Brad Dourif’s kinky Gediman – he licks the glass that separates him from an alien’s darting tongue – learns the hard way not to mess with Mother Nature."

"Alien Resurrection is sometimes glib and repetitive, but it stays worthy of its predecessors by staying close to its two battered heroines. There is more to understanding the bond between them than Johner’s supposition that “it must be a chick thing.” Ripley and Call are fighting for the same thing that Jeunet achieves in making movies: the chance to dream."

"The fourth film in a series that started with Ridley Scott’s widely appreciated 1979 original, the current “Alien” has devolved into something that’s strictly for hard-core horror junkies who can’t get enough of slime, gore and repulsion. While progress in some areas of civilization is problematic, one thing that continues to go from strength to strength is the ability of special-effects technicians to up the ante for state-of-the-art revulsion. There’s an audience for this kind of stuff, as there was for public executions, and starry-eyed movie executives no doubt stand up and cheer when new levels of disgust are reached and surpassed."

"The studio hero this time around is French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose fascination with highly stylized grotesquerie and pretentious dead-end weirdness was last on display in the unfortunate “City of Lost Children.” Working with some of the same actors and technicians from that film, Jeunet has also re-teamed with cinematographer Darius Khondji. His visual style, grandly described in the press kit as “signature chiaroscuro lighting and muted colors,” in practice means that “Alien Resurrection” looks as if it were shot under the sickly fluorescent lighting of a decrepit hospital emergency ward. One reason “Alien Resurrection” places so much emphasis on the stomach-turning is that only so much can be done with these films in terms of plot. In fact Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) neatly summarizes what’s to come when she says of the monster, “She’ll breed, you’ll die, everyone will die.”"

"French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the cinematic visionary who (with partner Marc Caro) gave us Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, brings an "other" Ripley to life, cloned, transformed, quietly cynical and possessed of inhuman strength. Working from a tight, quirky script by Joss Whedon (Toy Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Jeunet makes this Alien into an extravaganza -- a movie narrated by its own look -- a deep, dark, sci-fi tableau in which the shadows around Ripley throb with malevolence."

"Jeunet has marked Resurrection with his telltale signature of unsettling, even disgusting, spectacle: A close-up of an ear getting singed by a drop of alien acid; the deep-set, needy eyes of a freak hybrid; even an impossible traveling shot down the throat of a screaming human victim. Standout sequences include an underwater chase that seems more dream than reality, a horrifying DNA-lab showdown and a truly awesome alien birth. With members of his French production team at the controls of photography, editing and visual effects, Jeunet has given this film a haunting presence, like the scent of formaldehyde in a jar of caviar."

"A series such as the Alien films, with hordes of fans worldwide and much acclaim under its belt, has a lot to live up to when a new sequel hits the collective retina. So, with the release of Alien Resurrection, the fourth chapter in the Ripley saga, audiences should be surprised by changes in the heroine we've come to know like a sister."

"Ms. Weaver says it was the reinvention of the Ripley character -- this spirit of nihilism, as she calls it -- that persuaded her to do a fourth Alien film after she had all but decided that three were enough. "It seemed a challenge," she says. "You know, we all feel that when things get too difficult we have a way out, that it's finally up to each of us, that we can exit. And I thought, how awful it would be to find yourself in a world where you had exited, with all sincerity, and they had brought you back against your will. I tried to go with that idea as far as I could.""

"According to Den of Geek, Whedon's first draft of "Alien Resurrection" has the Betty crash-landing in a forest, which becomes the setting for a fight between Ripley, Call, and the skull-faced human-Xenomorph hybrid, the Newborn. Ripley wields a grenade launcher and Call drives a flying harvester with threshing teeth. After that, Whedon rewrote the ending several times, with the final earthbound version shifting to a desert location. As he explained: "The first [version] was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard. The third one was in a maternity ward. And the fourth one was in the desert. Now at this point this had become about money, and I said, 'You know, the desert looks like Mars. That's not Earth; that's not going to give people that juice.' But I still wrote them the best ending I could that took place in the desert." Whedon was dead set on an Earth finale because he felt, "The reason people are here is we're going to do the thing we've never done; we're gonna go to Earth." However, the aforementioned budgetary concerns led to the abandonment of this and other ideas in the movie. What's left is a film that the screenwriter was unhappy with and that came in dead last in our ranking of the "Alien" movies."

"Uh...you know, it wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending, it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."

"There are a few fun touches that superficially play on the original film. Call is part of a group of robots who rebelled and won back their freedom. It seems the top-down structure of Weyland-Yutani was so oppressive that even the previously obedient machines couldn’t stand it. And the military’s central computer now has a male voice and is referred to as “Father,” cementing the patriarchal role of those in power, in contrast to all the maternal imagery of Alien and the “Mother” console. Ryder, who didn’t manage to use her 90s “it girl” rep to make Resurrection a hit, is one of the few people who actually remembers the film fondly, and is largely responsible for making it “kind of like a really cool art film,” as she described it in a 2013 interview with the Huffington Post, praising the direction of Jeunet, who was gaining fame for his offbeat French films and would eventually become an international star with Amélie. It turns out Jeunet was Ryder’s idea, and he gives the film an eccentricity that may dull the horror a bit but gives Resurrection a really distinct style. At times, it feels like a vaudevillian theatre troupe putting on an Alien play, and I mean that in the best way. The actors playfully dive deep into their roles, and camp things up for a director who can appreciate the absurdity of it all."

"Then there’s Ripley herself, whose transformation has all the hallmarks of a Whedon heroine. Nearly every Whedon project seems to have a woman with special abilities given to her by one shadowy cabal of men or another. Inevitably, she rebels and takes back her autonomy with force. This happened with Buffy, it happens with River in Serenity, and it happens with Echo in his later series Dollhouse. Ripley’s rampage in Resurrection is textbook Whedon patriarchy smashing, but it’s also a fitting conclusion to her relationship with Weyland-Yutani. The company is replaced by a galactic military, but it’s all part of the same consolidation of power. The aliens represent the line corporations, governments, and armies (are these three even distinct?) are willing to cross to achieve their own ends, so Ripley’s resistance is always essentially pitted against the same thing. In Resurrection, they accidentally empower her through the very process that was meant to use her up. By reducing her to the level of meat to be experimented on, she and the xenomorphs literally become one. Everything and everyone is just a plaything for those in power. In one of the film’s most cathartic (and disturbing) scenes, Ripley torches a lab full of failed Ripley clones, one of which painfully begs her for death. One of Ripley’s new crewmates, played by the always scene-stealing Ron Perlman, doesn’t get why she’s so angry as to be wasting ammo. He chalks it up to being “a chick thing,” which is a fitting final note. The control over human bodies has always had gendered undertones in the Alien films. Ripley is a woman whose physical autonomy is always under threat, either from the aliens or from her patriarchal corporate overlords. Here, she takes back control more divisively than ever before."

"Now here is "Alien Resurrection." Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is still the heroine, even though 200 years have passed since "Alien3." She has been cloned out of a drop of her own blood, and is being used as a broodmare: The movie opens with surgeons removing a baby alien from her womb. How the baby got in there is not fully explained, for which we should perhaps be grateful."

"The birth takes place on a vast space ship. The interstellar human government hopes to breed more aliens, and use them for--oh, developing vaccines, medicines, a gene pool, stuff like that. The aliens have a remarkable body chemistry. Ripley's genes are all-right, too: They allow her reconstituted form to retain all of her old memories, as if cookie dough could remember what a gingerbread man looked like. Ripley is first on a giant government science ship, then on a tramp freighter run by a vagabond crew. The monsters are at first held inside glass cells, but of course they escape (their blood is a powerful solvent that can eat through the decks of the ship). The movie's a little vague about Ripley: Is she all human, or does she have a little alien mixed in? For a while we wonder which side she's on. She laughs at mankind's hopes of exploiting the creatures: "She's a queen," she says of the new monster. "She'll breed. You'll die." When the tramp freighter comes into play, we get a fresh crew, including Call (Winona Ryder), who has been flown all the way from Earth to provide appeal for the younger members of the audience. Ryder is a wonderful actress, one of the most gifted of her generation, but wrong for this movie. She lacks the heft and presence to stand alongside Ripley and the grizzled old space dogs played by Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Dan Hedeya and Brad Dourif. She seems uncertain of her purpose in the movie, her speeches lack conviction, and when her secret is revealed, it raises more questions than it answers. Ryder pales in comparison with Jenette Goldstein, the muscular Marine who was the female sidekick in "Aliens." Weaver, on the other hand, is splendid: Strong, weary, resourceful, grim. I would gladly see a fifth "Alien" movie if they created something for her to do, and dialog beyond the terse sound bites that play well in commercials. Ripley has some good scenes. She plays basketball with a crew man (Perlman) and slams him around. When she bleeds, her blood fizzes interestingly on the floor--as if it's not quite human. She can smell an alien presence. And be smelled: Her baby recognizes her mother and sticks out a tongue to lick her."

"Mankind wants them for their genes? I can think of a more valuable attribute: They're apparently able to generate biomass out of thin air. The baby born at the beginning of the film weighs maybe five pounds. In a few weeks the ship's cargo includes generous tons of aliens. What do they feed on? How do they fuel their growth and reproduction? It's no good saying they eat the ship's stores, because they thrive even on the second ship--and in previous movies have grown like crazy on desolate prison planets and in abandoned space stations. They're like perpetual motion machines; they don't need input."

"The "Alien" movies always have expert production design. "Alien Resurrection" was directed by the French visionary Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("City of Lost Children"), who with his designers has placed it in what looks like a large, empty hangar filled with prefabricated steel warehouse parts. There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder--nothing like the abandoned planetary station in "Aliens." Even the standard shots of vast spaceships, moving against a backdrop of stars, are murky here, and perfunctory."

"There were plenty of problems that plagued the production of Alien Resurrection, but despite the movie’s convoluted set-up and knotty plot, its creation was not quite as strained as its predecessor Alien 3. Future Amelie director Jeunet thought that the franchise ended with Alien 3 and, like producer Walter Hill, he was skeptical about continuing the story, but the movie’s large budget tempted him to take on the job. The helmer hired visual effects specialist and future Catwoman director Pitof to work with him, which could, in retrospect, be read as an early indication that things were taking a bad turn. But the problems didn’t become clear until the movie’s secret weapon—the newborn Alien—was unveiled. Like the Predalien in the later (underrated) Alien Vs Predator spin-off series, the Newborn Alien was intended to be a huge draw for Alien Resurrection, as the movie would be unveiling a new hybrid form of the title monster with a previously unseen creature design. The Alien Queen of James Cameron’s Aliens was one of the sequel’s best-loved additions to the franchise, so expectations were high. The Newborn Alien did not live up to them. Slimy, gangly, and hilariously human, the newborn was a laughable, giant-headed mess of overlong limbs and pot-bellied oddness. Originally intended to have human genitalia until the studio balked and Jeunet admitted that “even for a Frenchman it’s a bit much”, the Newborn was, nonetheless, a disaster even without its private parts appearing in the finished movie. An earlier design would have seen the creators model the monster’s appearance on Weaver herself, but this was abandoned for fear of resembling Species’ Sil. It’s a shame, as anything would have been an improvement on the prune-faced ghoul viewers were eventually left with."

"[A]t least part of Alien Resurrection’s failure to win over even existing fans of the franchise can be attributed to the movie’s failure to nail down a definite, specific tone. The movie is too quippy and action-oriented (thanks to screenwriter Joss Whedon’s contributions) to be as authentically scary as Ridley Scott’s critically acclaimed original movie. 1979’s Alien was pitched as a “haunted house movie in space” for good reason, as it begins dark and only grows more brutal throughout its duration. James Cameron’s sequel Aliens, meanwhile, is a less grim affair, with the cast well-armed and better prepared to take on the titular threat. In contrast, in Alien Resurrection, the characters never seem to be in mortal peril; they’re toughened mercenaries and scientists developing bio-weapons, neither of whom seem ill-equipped to take on a threat."

"Speaking of the movie’s darkness, Alien Resurrection’s lush visual palette is an immediately striking and evocative change of pace for the series. Each movie in the franchise had a unique visual style, whether it’s the burnt-orange and metallic grey post-apocalyptic look of Alien 3, the sleek steely blues of Aliens, or the grimy, black-green fetid darkness of the first installment. To be fair, Alien Resurrection made use of its large budget by creating a new, distinct Gothic-influenced green-tinged color palette for this installment. The only problem is that for anyone not accustomed to Jeunet’s highly stylized look, marrying the style he established in earlier releases Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with the world of Alien is a tall order. The movie’s green patinas lend a sickly look to proceedings and, by the time it was released, the likes of Tank Girl, Judge Dredd, and The Fifth Element had boasted similarly striking visual palettes without looking quite so garish. When a movie makes Tank Girl look less than garish, it’s cause for concern."

"Perhaps it counts as a compliment among those who appreciate the dripping, throbbing, drooling intensity of the Alien movies to say that the series' latest installment is its most freakish and macabre to date. But Alien Resurrection, the fourth installment and the one that comes closest to suggesting there may be rain-slicked dark alleys in space, also offers the most buff and sexily insolent incarnation of the aliens' favorite antagonist, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. And this time it's personal: much of Ripley's new swagger comes from the fact that she now apparently has alien blood, or slime, or ooze, or whatever it is, coursing through her veins."

"We know most of the aliens' tricks by now, even if Alien Resurrection gives them the chance to chase human prey through garbage-strewn waters and swish their tails like marauding raptors. They still invade human hosts and burst out horribly at inconvenient moments; they still enjoy some of the most stomach-turning breeding habits imaginable. The new wrinkle this time is that neo-Ripley finds herself strangely sympatico with these creatures, even to the point of experiencing maternal stirrings late in the story. A new queen alien has appropriated some of Ripley's re-productive system and can now produce live, skeletal, screeching, glop-covered offspring. Maybe that tells you more than you want to know."

"As directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, half of the duo behind Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, Alien Resurrection has an eerie grunge look (with cinematography by the inventive Da-rius Khondji) and a sometimes ghastly sideshow atmosphere. The characters this time, with a cast including Dan Hedaya, Brad Dourif and Ron Perlman, tend to be surly miscreants, and the story has more kinks. Winona Ryder wears Army boots as a crew member of the Betty, a small ship that docks with the Auriga to engage in illicit business and stays long enough to fight the evil beasts. Tauntingly flirtatious scenes between Ms. Ryder and Ms. Weaver give this film a sexual boldness that the others' action-adventure spirit lacked. Fierce, beautiful and sardonic, Ms. Weaver makes an impressive linchpin for this series, even if she can't make it palatable for the faint of heart. When Mr. Jeunet's well-established taste for the grotesque yields an episode worthy of a circus sideshow, with hideously malformed creatures floating in glass containers and a grisly secret about Ripley's past ready to emerge, not even Ms. Weaver and her flamethrower can triumph over the sequence's extreme nastiness."

"As movie spawns go, "Alien Resurrection" is a clumsy, plodding child having a big hissy fit. The cluttered, surreal, claustrophobic sets and gooey alien creatures look intriguing, sometimes shocking. But the story tries so hard to be imaginative that it congeals and sinks like lead. This film should be an amazing thrill ride, but it has the emotional impact of a bowling ball at rest. The scene that gets the biggest response is one showing just how hairy actor Dan Hedaya is (he plays a spaceship captain), and he's not even an alien. No doubt the intensely violent production, opening today in time to gross out Thanksgiving holiday moviegoers, will do stratospheric box-office business. But staying power is another question."

"As almost always with sequels, the "Alien" spawn have gotten dopier as they've gone along. Yet each has had the saving grace of a distinctive look. "Alien Resurrection" is easily the most visually interesting of all. Credit it to French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who imported his surrealistic, horrific ideas direct from "Delicatessen" and the superb "The City of Lost Children." Jeunet blended darkness, heavy metal, repugnantly weird things in specimen vials, an underwater sequence, a feeling of paranoia and an almost determined lack of humanity. And he also brought two of his favorite actors: big Ron Perlman to be a jackbooted bad guy, and Dominique Pinon to get a few laughs as a pipsqueak. Winona Ryder is the biggest new attraction in the series. Her character, Call, is the only soft, humane creature within several light-years of the -- sprawling spaceship Auriga, where the action takes place. Eventually it is revealed that 12 hissing, hungry aliens, products of evil biology experiments, are headed toward Earth. Ryder, arriving with a crew of smugglers, looks almost too doll- like to be hanging around the tough, cynical or maniacal types that populate the film's cavernous, clanking world. But her big button black eyes and that intense focus she has at just the right dramatic moment wind up providing the only dollop of humanity. And it's much needed."

"Sigourney Weaver, in this fourth in the "Alien" series, returns as Ripley, the tough heroine who has been dallying with the toothed aliens since 1979. Weaver has weathered the experience much better than the films have. She's lithe and sexy in that no-nonsense action-hero way. About that much-discussed backward basketball shot she makes -- Weaver looks like the type who could pull it off."

"Meanness is big in "Alien Resurrection." It's hard to remember a more coarse, obscenely violent movie. The "fun" starts right away with open-chest surgery shown in up-close, disgustingly graphic detail (with Brad Dourif as an icky doctor). The scene is the birth of a baby alien from under Ripley's ribs. Whoever said that surgery was the next pornography was right. In the course of the film, viewers get treated to aliens feeding on guts, brains and heads, all shown in splatter-movie fashion. And there are constant references to predatory sex acts. That popular '90s phrase "viewer discretion advised" is definitely applicable."

"Ryder: When we were doing the underwater stuff, I was having complete anxiety attacks. We'd go underwater, and I was so scared. You reminded me to act. We'd go down with scuba stuff, but then they'd take it away from you."

"As with previous entries, Ripley's central to every one of A:R's greatest moments. "I loved the evolution of the character," Weaver has said, and it's not hard to see why she signed on despite the infamously onerous Alien 3 production. She plays an intoxicating range, from snarky quips ("I'm the monster's mother") and slam dunks (she put that basketball in the net for real), to the gut-punching moment she discovers Ripleys 1-7. That last encounter spectacularly drags the franchise into freak show territory - you thought Ripley's life was a circus of horrors before? You ain't seen nothing yet."

"What really separates A:R from its predecessors is its morbid sense of humour. Positioning itself as a carnival of weirdness rather than an all-out scare-flick, it amps the gore up to Shakespearean levels and, most shockingly, a number of deaths are played entirely for laughs (see cross-eyed General Perez plucking out the contents of his skull). It's a brave move by French director Jean-Paul Jeunet. In stark contrast to David Fincher's experiences on Alien 3, Jeunet was given free rein to do whatever he wanted (within the $70m budget; the biggest of any of the Alien films), and while he kept most of Whedon's script intact, Jeunet's weird humour is all over Alien: Resurrection.–"

"If Alien was sinewy like a xenomorph and Aliens was pumped-up like the Alien Queen, Alien: Resurrection is as grotesque and mesmerising as the newborn. Whedon may have hated it, but he's hardly the first writer to disown his work. (Besides, he went on to make Firefly, which features just about the exact same set of characters - Johner is now Jayne, with Reavers standing in for xenos and so forth). "It's kind of like a really cool art film," Winona Ryder recently surmised of Alien: Resurrection, and she's right. Like art, it's unapologetic and singular in its vision, and it's a shame that the enticing open ending never developed into an immediate sequel. It's also odd that Marvel man Whedon isn't a fan - while the previous Alien films were all sci-fi horrors, there's something distinctly comic-booky about Alien: Resurrection. Perhaps it was just a little ahead of its time."

"Kozak: I thought your original screenplay for “Alien: Resurrection” was brilliant – with its epic final battle on Earth, for Earth – and vastly more engrossing than what ultimately made its way to the screen. I have to assume there were budgetary issues, because I can’t imagine another reason anyone would tinker with it."

"Whedon: The history of “Alien: Resurrection” is fairly twisted also because I wrote a 30-page treatment for a different movie. They wanted to do a movie with a clone of Newt [the little girl from “Aliens”] as their heroine. Because I’d done some action movies and I’d done “Buffy,” they said, “Well, he can write teenage girls and he can write action, so let’s give him a shot.” The franchise was pretty much dead, and I wrote the treatment and they said, “This is really exciting. We want to get back in this business. But we want Ripley. So throw this out.” That one was probably my favorite; I think it was a better-structured story than the one I ultimately wrote."

"Sigourney Weaver ~ Ellen Ripley Clone 8"

"Winona Ryder ~ Annalee Call"

"Ron Perlman ~ Johner"

"Dan Hedaya ~ General Martin Perez"

"J.E. Freeman ~ Dr. Mason Wren"

"Brad Dourif ~ Dr. Jonathan Gediman"

"Michael Wincott ~ Captain Frank Elgyn"

"Raymond Cruz ~ Vincent Distephano"

"Leland Orser ~ Larry Purvis"

"Tom Woodruff Jr. ~ Alien"

"Kim Flowers ~ Sabra Hillard"

"Gary Dourdan ~ Christie"

"Is it as easy as you're making it sound, this plan of yours?"

"Andy... are you there?"

"Listen to me -- you'll die in here. That's not in the best interests of the Company. Or mine."

"Die, motherfucker!"

"This is the cryo-log for the mining holo Corbelan. I set course for the Yvaga system without knowing if I'll ever reach it, or what fate is to find me. But, whatever comes, I'll face it. This is Rain Carradine, last survivor of the Corbelan, signing off."

"Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut? He needed space."

"I'm an ND-255 Weyland-Yutani synthetic, originally bought for mining and safety tasks. You guys call me Andy!"

"Forgive me. I've been nothing but a burden to you. Today, I can finally help. And you won't see me as a child anymore."

"You will be free to continue to Yvaga together, and I'll return to Jackson. And stay in Jackson. That is, assuming we make it out of here alive."

"Get away from her. You bitch!"

"Listen to me -- humans go through too many emotional stages before accepting the cold, yet rational, sometimes hardest path. You must help them. You must help them!"

"Mankind was never truly suited for space colonization, it's simply-- It's simply too fragile. They're too weak. The work of this station aimed to change that. The perfect organism, that's how we should refer to human beings!"

"This is a much-needed and well overdue upgrade for humanity. We simply cannot wait for evolution anymore."

"I can't lie to you about your chances, but...you have my sympathies."

"Tyler: Right, take a good look outside the window 'cause, the way I see it, we're never coming back."

"Navarro: Please don't let me die."

"Tyler: Is that all you got?! Is that all you got?!"

"Cailee Spaeny - Rain"

"David Jonsson - Andy"

"Archie Renaux - Tyler"

"Isabela Merced - Kay"

"Spike Fearn - Bjorn"

"Aileen Wu - Navarro"

"Daniel Betts & Ian Holm - Rook"

"Trevor Newlin - The Xenomorph"

"Robert Bobroczkyi - The Offspring"