Alien: Alone – Alien: 40th Anniversary Short Films

Started by Corporal Hicks, Apr 23, 2019, 07:06:12 PM

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Alien: Alone – Alien: 40th Anniversary Short Films (Read 33,881 times)

The Old One

The Old One

#45
Weird is good, for a franchise designated Alien.

kwisatz

Quote from: The Old One on Apr 26, 2019, 11:34:45 PM
Weird is good, for a franchise designated Alien.

Weird only or too much weird is often not that good though.

Alien embeds the weird in a technical/realistic approach. Ron Cobb meeting Giger.

Thats what makes it so good, in my eyes.

The Old One

The Old One

#47
Agreed, a excessive amount is nonsensical.
No familiarity, no empathy, generally.

You're right, it's the contrast between the two worlds, the world of the real, regular and causality (Ron Cobb) and the world of the surreal, the perverted. (H.R Giger)

A beta male

A beta male

#48
Unconventional for sure. I liked it. Would have been great with a bigger budget no doubt. :)

SiL

I don't feel Alone is excessively weird, or outside what we've seen in the series from the EU. It's a welcome retooling of familiar elements rather than resorting to just picking scenes from existing movies.

It did drag on a bit and the actual impregnation scene could've been cut to just one or two shots, but I didn't think it was quite as bizarre as some are making it out to be.

morseman

That was brilliant! By far my favourite of the 5. Great paving, solid atmosphere and very clever use of the story!

bacchus

bacchus

#51
My review...

Just wanted to say, before I forget, could the production not afford a dolly/slider for those establishing shots at the start of the different rooms?! The handheld/jittery movements in the first 45 seconds or so were just weird.

This was a film of two halves. The first, great, the second, the polar opposite. I enjoyed the old-school vibes initially, the soundtrack more reminiscent of the first Alien film, and the overall idea for the story for this short was the most interesting to me when reading all of the summaries beforehand.

Also enjoyed the more original ideas in this one compared to the others – the facehugger companion (was hoping for something like this when I first heard the shorts being announced) and the android main character.

However with the final 4-5 minutes (after the ship docks with the bigger ship) this one fell apart into strange territory – the weird, amateur editing and B-movie feel came out of nowhere – none of it in a good or fun way. From such a promising first half, this one descended into an amateur fan film farce. Great ideas and again the most originality of the lot, but poor execution.

6/10 (points for originality and the best story)


My final scores for all of the shorts...

Specimen - 8.5/10
Alone - 6/10
Harvest - 6/10
Ore - 5.5/10
Night Shift - 4.5/10
Containment - 3/10






Monster Man

A synth and her alien. Very creative dynamic here.

I only wish we got to see more of the adult's interactions with it's guardian angel instead of leaving it ambiguous, even if it meant we see her get torn apart.

Nightmare Asylum

Quote from: [cancerblack] on Apr 26, 2019, 09:16:29 PM
Quote from: 0321recon on Apr 26, 2019, 05:18:11 PM
Totally dug this short.

My order is

Specimen
Alone
Ore
Containment

Harvest
Night Shift

Swap the first two around and that's my take.

Harvest is worse then Night Shift in my opinion, but otherwise I agree.

I don't think Alone is the best made, mind you (that's definitely either Specimen or Ore), but it is the most narratively interesting, has a great score, and some really nifty miniature work.

The Old One

The Old One

#54
For fun.

Spoiler

Specimen = Egg/Facehugger
Containment = Chestburster
Ore = Adult Alien
Alone = Android
[close]

;D

D88M

D88M

#55
This one was better, it was a little more original (the story was obviosly "inspired" by Covenant, but they at least tried to do something different this time, unlike the other shorts) but still was not good enough.
All around a pretty mediocre collection of shorts, if anything they made me appreciate the movies even more, so there is that.

bacchus

Quote from: D88M on Apr 27, 2019, 01:59:09 AM
This one was better, it was a little more original (the story was obviosly "inspired" by Covenant, but they at least tried to do something different this time, unlike the other shorts) but still was not good enough.
All around a pretty mediocre collection of shorts, if anything they made me appreciate the movies even more, so there is that.

All it's made me realise is that Fox has very little, if any quality control for 'officially endorsed' Alien films.

Xenomorphine

Xenomorphine

#57
This would have made a lot more sense with a human character driven semi-insane by loneliness with some sort of protective equipment.

Neither Ash nor Bishop cared about longevity. Why would this synthetic? Especially as it/she could just need to plug herself into the ship's reactor for power, go temporarily dormant or simply copied/transmitted its memory and code, in order to effectively 'survive'.

Why did the character care about the facehugger? We're not given any reasons. The character's motivation (psychologically relating to something in a similar predicment) is something a human would do, not an AI, which wouldn't have any reason to care. But, sure, let's assume the opposite - so, the droid decides to do the one thing which would guarantee it dies? Why not just coerce it back into frozen stasis?

A human character could have gone down that path. They'd make up the typical David 8-like logic, where the adult Alien would be seen as a 'continuation'/reincarnation of the facehugger. They'd be fearful about self-preservation, but not about sacrificing someone else to that fate. Doing so could even have made a nice call-back to Golic. Or even have the story feature a Newt-alike, who the audience is initially led to believe is a similar distrusting survivor of a massacre, only to be revealed as convincing herself to sacrifice the newcomer for some allegorical 'greater good', before commandeering their ship and leaving the impregnated victim behind, like she's talked herself into believing was a bargain struck with the facehugger (like Golic similarly did).

The Old One

The Old One

#58
"I could be reworked, but I'll never be top of the line again, I'd rather be nothing."
Spoiler

The computer voice recalled the computer voice modulation of the Alien Resurrection videogame, and the astronaut recalled the Hot Toys "Kane" figure. lol

And Night Shift used the Monolith's AVP terminal sound effect. Neat.
[close]

The concept's good, anyway.
A.I rationalisation:
It doesn't die it changes form.

Huggs

Editing and camera work was rough.

Dialogue needs reworked.

Acting was so-so.

Premise is terrible.

I rank it just above night shift.

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