Quote from: itshouldneverhavebeenabug on Dec 15, 2015, 08:29:54 PM
Hear, Hear HuDaFuK re Alien 3. Alien 3 had so much going for it, unfortunately not the Alien design, who thought it would be a smart move to have a cheetah-like Alien that hunted prey with speed, where's the horror in that? Alien's alien was so horrifying, it seemed that you'd almost hope that it just kills you. A lesson to be learned.
I think speed can be useful, if it's done to give emphasis to viciousness. Aliens could go through groups of people like living chainsaw and it could be a terrifying sight -
if it's done right.
The creature has always been a mixture of deliberate stalking and quick striking/abduction. Like a shark or spider.
With that said, I don't think the creature effects of '
Alien 3' managed to emulate that well. It just always looks fake and fails to sell the central premise of it being a living horror. A few really great instances of acting, but the monster stuff failed to convince.
Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Dec 16, 2015, 08:27:47 AM
It bothers me that that Alien didn't try to kidnap people instead.
Truly! The potential of the creature to do something unseen, yet
worse to you than just acting like a lion/tiger/bear, has always worked wonders to elevate it above the villains from slasher films. It's always been a prospect which hovers at the back of your mind, every time you see a victim being taken.
We didn't originally see the cocoon sequence from '
Alien', but the possibility was still worked into other stuff. Saying how nothing was found around Dallas' flamethrower. Not knowing
what the heck happened to Lambert. Then later, in '
Aliens', nothing even happens during the Marines' first foray into the colony, but it's kept really tense and those mentions of not finding any bodies, even amidst the sight of a last stand... It's seriously eerie, man.
The first might have been a haunted house, but by the time we follow them into the nest, the sequel has become like wandering into Dracula's crypt.
A lot of the power of the creature was diminished by completely removing those aspects. It turns up, randomly kills someone and then buggers off. It just...
Feels very different. A dangerous animal, sure, but you know you're getting the kind of quick death the first two instalments
deliberately hinted might not be a possibility for their victims.
The closest it came to that were the strange 'mauling'-like actions it was undertaking with the prisoners, but it was never clear what was going on during those (so much so, that parts of fandom began to speculate in the 1990s that it might have been attempting to emulate the 'humping' instinct of its canine host, to assert social dominance), because the actual bodies didn't seem to have any actual clothing or flesh removed. Especially during Dillon's death, when he's just angrily shouting, "Is that all you've got? Is that all you've got?!"
It's a
world removed from the death scenes of Brett and Lambert, where you get the sense that just being close to the thing would make someone want to turn inside-out with primal revulsion.
If there had been a cocoon scene, it would have returned some much-needed undertones of dread to the creature's motivations, rather than the more simplistic opportunistic kills which we view.
