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Aliens (1986)
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 14, 2017 12:56 pm    Post subject: Aliens (1986) Reply with quote




I'm not a huge fan of Alien (1979), but the socks I was wearing when I first watched this movie in 1986 were knocked right off my feet and haven't been seen since! Shocked

I guess the following IMDB trivia item demonstrates why James Cameron was the right man for the job when it came to make a sequel to Ridley Scott's classic.

Like most films, the movie wasn't shot in sequence. But for added realism, James Cameron filmed the scene where we first meet the Colonial Marines (one of the earliest scenes) last. This was so that the camaraderie of the Marines was realistic because the actors had spent months filming together.

The difference between this movie and its predecessor is that it's both scary AND fun. It's like The Thing from Another World — a story about characters we care deeply about, so we don't want them to even get a migraine headache, much less a facehugger! Shocked

The extended version is definitely the one to watch, because we get the brilliant backstory about Ripley's lost daughter when she wakes up in the hospital near the beginning. So, when Ripley gets seriously maternal over sweet little Newt, the soft and creamy centers of everyone in the audience turns the scene shown below into the Battle of the Millennium!



I mean, really . . . nothing shows a mother's unconditional love like when she's says those six magic words. Very Happy


"Get away from her . . . you BITCH!"

That was one helluva warm and fuzzy moment, folks. Shocked

The story is exciting, the special effects are wonderful, the music is brilliant, and the cast . . . well, they kick ass.






However, unlike The Thing from Another World, many likable characters bite the big one by the end of the story. But they all die in noble fashions (except for poor Paul Reiser).

And only James Cameron could make a tender moment out a macho guy showing a heroic lady the right way to handle his big ole' gun! Wink






Corporal Hicks gets the most quotable line in the film (with a set-up from Ripley), when he offers words of wisdom concerning the importance of doing something right by doing it all the way!

Corporal Hicks: I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Yes sir. Words to live by. As I often told my children while they were growing up, "Kids, remember . . . when in doubt, just nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way be sure."



________ The Only Way To Be Sure (Aliens 1986)


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________________________ Aliens - trailer


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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 29, 2018 11:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

I posted a fan-made trailer for The Last Starfighter (1984) on the thread for that movie, and the trailer had this amusing message at the beginning.






I wondered just how true the claim at the bottom was, so I made a list of 1980s science fiction films that I thought were good, just to see if that decade really did produce a significant number of “the best” sci-fi movies.

This movie is on the list I made. I know what I like about the film (and a few things I don’t like), but I’d like to hear the pros and cons from the rest of you folks.

So, what do you think, guys? Cool

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Robert (Butch) Day
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 23, 2018 2:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now THIS I want:



The power loader and Ripley figures are in the "Star Wars" scale!
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Bogmeister
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 30, 2019 9:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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________________
______________ Official Trailer: Aliens (1986)

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Cameron seems to have a knack for releasing shorter, less-satisfying versions of his films to theaters and then selling (not giving) the longer versions to the home market. He escaped this paradigm with Titanic, of course.

The 'full-length' version of ALIENS is more satisfying, more complete.



Ripley (Weaver) wakes up several decades after the events of ALIEN1979) but has been (it seems) permanently traumatized; she's tough, but she's also human; the nightmares won't go away. To add salt to the wound, the corporation which contracted her does not believe her version of the events; her career is derailed. All she has left is her cat. Then, contact is lost with a small colony which has been set up on the planet where Ripley's deceased crew had first found all those alien eggs...

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The easiest, most apparent effect this has on a viewer is the adrenaline charge. I still remember exiting the theater over 20 years ago after watching it a second time with a couple of friends. This was our 2nd viewing and we were still amped up afterward. I'm not sure any other film ever gave me such a thrill, on such a primal level (this is on a huge screen, remember). Most films these days are, by contrast, mind-numbing - they wear me down, not pump me up. I think this has to do with the characters in ALIENS; they're all well-drawn, even the minor ones, and you care what happens next. And, what a cast, huh?

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Excellent performances by all, topped by Weaver in her 2nd go-around as tough-getting-tougher Ripley. Oh, and, many grunts agree (I think) that Alien 3 was something...of...a letdown. I call it the bad dream. Hey, waitaminnit... what happened to Spunkmeyer above?





___

BoG's Score: 9 out of 10




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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 21, 2020 4:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Whatever happen to cute little Newt, you may ask? Ah heck, she's just fine! Very Happy

Heres what Wired has to say.
________________________________

Thirty Years Later, Newt Remembers Filming Aliens

More than 30 years ago, Carrie Henn was a 9-year-old living in London, where she'd just landed a big role in what would become one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time: James Cameron's Aliens.

In the 1986 smash, Henn starred as Newt, the soot-faced, wide-eyed orphan whose family has been wiped out by xenomorphs, and who develops a near-familial bond with Ripley, the creature-cratering heroine played by Sigourney Weaver.






And if you thought that hanging around the] set filled with multi-mouthed monsters (not to mention James Cameron) was scary for a young kid, you're right — though, as it turns out, Hehn's fears had nothing to do with her acid-drooling co-stars.

"I wasn’t nervous about being on set, because I knew everybody, and they were very friendly," Henn said during a recent stop at the WIRED Cafe during Comic-Con International, where the film is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

"The aliens were all my friends, wearing suits. I was actually most nervous about going to the cafeteria for lunch, because I had to go in-character as Newt, and I thought everybody would be staring at me. I didn’t have any concept that everybody else was going to be dressed up, too. My tutor actually gave me a big pair of sunglasses to wear when I went in. But it turned out not to be such a big thing."

Henn had gotten the part after a meeting with Sigourney Weaver, who'd flown on the Concorde to London to test out their on-screen chemistry.

"I was excited, because I was like, She was in Ghostbusters! How cool is this?”, Henn remembered. The slow-building Newt-Ripley relationship — they start off skeptical of one another, but eventually develop a de facto mother-daughter bond — has always been the heart of Aliens, culminating in the film's most famous moment, in which Ripley, having finally tracked down the abducted Newt, confronts the Queen alien-turned-kidnapper and delivers one of the most delightfully bitchy lines in movie history.






According to Henn, who still keeps in touch with Weaver, the two actress' bond was evident from the get-go. "Immediately, we hit it off," she said. "She took me under her wing when we were filming, because I was so inexperienced. I can't describe my relationship with her, because she’s more than just a friend — what you see on screen is genuinely how we feel about each other."





Even though Henn was only 10 when Aliens was released, she has a vivid recall of her days on the set.

Her favorite scene to shoot? The one in which Newt, stuck chest-high in water, is snatched up by a towering alien — a terrifying sequence, and one that gave most other 10-year-olds nightmares for years to come. But for Henn, it was mostly a chance to goof around.






"The first assistant director had actually had someone stay there overnight, to make sure the water stayed warm," she said. "But it was actually too warm for me, so I would sit up on bars on the side, and the alien and I would stay up there, kicking our feet in the water.]

Aliens would prove to be Henn's only major acting role. By the time the film was released, she and her family had moved back to the United States, and she soon decided to pursue a career in education (she now teaches fourth grade in Northern California. Occasionally one of her students will bring in an Aliens DVD for her to sign).

But she still finds time to visit conventions, and this spring, in celebration of Aliens Day, she watched the movie for the first time in nearly a decade.

"It’s very weird, because I have a daughter who’s now the age I was when I made the movie, and she’s like my clone," Henn said. "So as I’m watching it, it’s like watching my daughter up there."

Newt, there it is!

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)


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ralfy
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 24, 2020 8:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

An interview from two years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDeW92lK4k8
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ralfy
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 24, 2020 8:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Spoilers: Don't read if you plan to watch the movie.

Here's one interesting problem about the plot:

Ripley is found by the company almost 60 years later and is questioned about what happened to the Nostromo and its crew. The company doesn't believe her, having searched the shuttle and given the point that they've found no lifeforms in 400 worlds surveyed. When she advises the company to search the rock where they found the alien ship, she's told that they started colonizing it around two decades ago and received no reports of such a ship.

Weeks later, she's approached by Burke, one of the company officials, and a Marine officer, and is told that they've received no word from the colony.

When they arrive at the colony, they find no colonists except for Newt and some facehuggers in the lab (some living and others dead).

Since it would have taken several days for the colonists to find the eggs and extract huggers from their hosts, then they could have contacted the company about the findings and their situation, and yet Burke maintains that they lost contact with the colony and don't know why.

Finally, while they're on the Sulaco, some of the Marines wonder if this is just another bug hunt, and one starts kidding about sleeping with Arcturians, which puts to question the company's claim that they've never discovered extraterrestial lifeforms.
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 24, 2020 1:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ralfy wrote:
Since it would have taken several days for the colonists to find the eggs and extract huggers from their hosts, then they could have contacted the company about the findings and their situation, and yet Burke maintains that they lost contact with the colony and don't know why.

What makes you think that they hadn't called for help, and the company, or just Burke concealed that they had?

Burke was a liar. He hid the fact that he sent the colonist to look for the ship, I assume without warning the colonists of the danger. Lying about the colonists not calling for help would be in character.

David.
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 24, 2020 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Krel has a great point. With Burke hiding whatever he wanted to and distorting whatever he wanted to, we don't really know the full story of what happened on LV-426 prior to the arrival of marines.

Burke was such a despicable little creep that he even conspired to have Newt and Ripley get Alien embryos implanted so they would take them back to Earth for the company's weapons division! Shocked

I had to watch the clip below to refresh my memory. At the 1:45 mark, the lady at the debrief quotes Ripley's description of the Aliens and then told Ripley that, according to her story, "you found something never recorded once on over 300 surveyed worlds."

So, the movie doesn't tell us that no alien lifeforms have ever been found, it says no alien life forms like the one she described had ever been found.

Therefore, I guess the comments made by marines about "bug hunts" and sleeping with Arcturians weren't contradictory after all.


_____________ Aliens Debriefing (1986) Edited


__________

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The Spike
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are.

Ripley has been found in deep space by a salvage ship and brought back to a space station to be awoken from her 57 year sleep. Here she is mortified to find that the planet on which herself and her now deceased Nostromo crew found the Alien, LV-426, has been colonised by Weyland-Yutani Company. Suffice to say that when The Company representative, Burke, tells her that all contact is lost, she's not in the least bit surprised. Unable to get anyone to believe her about what happened to the Nostromo crew, Ripley is cajoled into going back to LV-426 with a crack team of space marines to seek, destroy or rescue...

How do you make a sequel to one of the finest, most loved modern era films ever? This was something that director James Cameron must have pondered on many a dark night once he had agreed to make Aliens. The answer was to rightly not copy the format so brilliantly laid down by Ridley Scott and his team for Alien, but to embrace its mood and enhance it with thrills spills and exhilaration. This was only Cameron's third feature length movie, and here he was working with the crew who had made Scott's movie so special. Also writing as well as directing, this could have gone very wrong indeed, but Cameron rose to the challenge admirably and set up his marker on how his film would succeed. Keep the premise simple and seamlessly connected to Scott's film, and lets have more. Not just one bad ass acid bleeding alien, but an army of them, and their mother too!

They mostly come at night - mowstly.

Where Alien was a splicing of sci-fi wonderment and basic horror terrors, Aliens is a blend of war film staples to compliment both of those earlier picture things. Thus in keeping with Cameron's more is more work in progress skeleton. Another thing that Cameron instinctively called right was to make Aliens about Ripley (Sigorney Weaver simply brilliant), it's her story. Be it a parental thread or a feminist heroine fighting off the phallic hoards, cinema got in Ripley's extension one of its finest and strongest female characters ever (Weaver was nominated for Best Actress but lost out to Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God).

Thematically Aliens has been pored over in regards to metaphors about Vietnam, foreign policy and corporate greed at any cost, and rest assured that Aliens isn't merely one big excuse for a shoot them up bonanza. But realistically, and explaining why it was such a huge box office success, it's with the thrills and terror that Aliens most succeeds. The action scenes are slick and at times breath taking, and the tension is often palpable. None more so as we enter the film at the half way point, because here we realise that we have characters to care about. Blood, brains and brawn, all led by a heroine of considerable guile and guts. 10/10

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Krel
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 25, 2020 10:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
"The first assistant director had actually had someone stay there overnight, to make sure the water stayed warm," she said. "But it was actually too warm for me, so I would sit up on bars on the side, and the alien and I would stay up there, kicking our feet in the water.

With all the behind the scenes photographs they took, it is truly a shame that they don't have a photograph of that. Laughing

David.
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ralfy
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 10:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
What makes you think that they hadn't called for help, and the company, or just Burke concealed that they had?

Burke was a liar. He hid the fact that he sent the colonist to look for the ship, I assume without warning the colonists of the danger. Lying about the colonists not calling for help would be in character.

David.

I'm not arguing that they did not ask for help and that Burke is not a liar. What I'm questioning is the manner by which Burke covered up the calls for help.

Ripley was discovered by scavengers, who reported their find to the company and the authorities. The same authorities are also part of the board of inquiry. When Ripley narrated her tale repeatedly ("I already told you") they could have, together with the company, contacted the colony and ask about anything a derelict ship, and at the very least contacted them periodically about any findings.

It's highly unlikely that Burke was able to cover that up, as that would have meant taking sole control of all communications to the colony from both the company and the military. What is more likely is that Burke wasn't working alone. Rather, he was given directives by top officials interested in using the alien for bio-weapons research.
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ralfy
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
Krel has a great point. With Burke hiding whatever he wanted to and distorting whatever he wanted to, we don't really know the full story of what happened on LV-426 prior to the arrival of marines.

Burke was such a despicable little creep that he even conspired to have Newt and Ripley get Alien embryos implanted so they would take them back to Earth for the company's weapons division! Shocked

I had to watch the clip below to refresh my memory. At the 1:45 mark, the lady at the debrief quotes Ripley's description of the Aliens and then told Ripley that, according to her story, "you found something never recorded once on over 300 surveyed worlds."

So, the movie doesn't tell us that no alien lifeforms have ever been found, it says no alien life forms like the one she described had ever been found.

Therefore, I guess the comments made by marines about "bug hunts" and sleeping with Arcturians weren't contradictory after all.

From what they found in the lab and from what Ripley reported to them about what happened in the first movie, it was implied that they deduced that the one who found the derelict ship became infected, and after he was brought back to the colony, an alien burst out. Either they were sending more people to the derelict ship, leading to more infections, or that the new alien laid more eggs, leading to the creation of more 'huggers, and so on. Meanwhile, colonists managed to extract four or five 'huggers, two alive and two dead, and even wrote reports.

That meant that throughout all that time, they would have made multiple calls and reported findings to both the company and authorities, not to mention multiple distress signals as they called for armed reinforcements.

That means either Burke had managed to cover up all of that, with company officials and authorities not wondering why the colony (which is part of their investigation) had not been reporting back, or that they (the company and top gov't officials) knew what was happening to the colony. In which case, even with the investigation on-going, they would have sent Burke and the marines much earlier without Ripley, with no need for deception on Burke's part, as the whole team would be instructed to recover eggs and 'huggers.

Finally, it is true that the company official was referring to the type of extraterrestial described by Ripley, but if humans had managed to engage socially with some extraterrestials and hunt down others, then there is no reason for them to doubt Ripley's tale concerning aliens from a derelict ship.
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ralfy
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 11:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some more points:

From what I remember, some pointed out that the second movie became an action film because the creature was already revealed at the end of the first. Thus, the horror genre could no longer be used. And with action used as well, the third resembled a police procedural, with a combination of investigation and strategy for defeating the alien.

One unused script for the third would have been interesting, as it focused on conspiracy, with rival groups fighting over capturing an alien for weapons research, and Bishop and Hicks in lead roles. I would have made it similar, and set in a large space city.

The company had issued a directive six decades earlier, requiring all crews to investigate not only distress signals but even phenomena that could lead to recovery of organisms and materials that would be profitable for the company (and the crew, as they would get a share) by force. This was seen in the automatic rerouting of the ship's computer in the first film given a distress signal (which for some strange reason stopped working two decades later, when the colony was being installed) and stipulations in crew members' contracts. A second directive is more beguiling, as it called for recovery at all costs, with the crew (and presumably the ship, if it cannot properly operate without a crew to do repairs) expendable.

Given the fact that the company could have accessed historical records on those (i.e., since they were able to gather detailed information on the crew of the Nostromo), then they could have easily initiated an investigation based on Ripley's account while outwardly questioning the latter. That might explain why Burke contacted the colony to look for the derelict ship. And unless the company officials and their military and government counterparts are that stupid, it is highly unlikely that Burke worked alone. And they would have received word about the ship and sent recovery teams much earlier, and without or without Ripley.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Great analysis,, ralfy! The situation is much more complex than the film portrays it. I really like the way you've laid out all the possibilities and probabilities. Very Happy

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