Quote from: SM on Mar 01, 2018, 12:18:47 AM
QuoteI know it sounds silly, but is it anymore expensive than Fury 161? Look how that turned out.
Like most mines it would've turned out valuable products which the Company then on-sold. Then had a second lease on life as a prison. I daresay the Fiorina facility paid for itself several times over a long time prior to the events of the film. And as evidenced by how rundown it was, the only ongoing costs were twice yearly supply runs. And still have the benefit of having a foothold in that region of space.
A purpose built custom wooden space station that's five miles across has no discernable profit.
I don't know how you could even recoup investment with the export Fury 161 had compared to the trillions terraformed at it. That would require a lot more prisoners, and frankly, the writers were thinking more on terms of a release date than the logic of how this labyrinthine prison would have been feasible.
We can endlessly speculate how or why they did what they did in either case, but neither makes a whole lot of sense. Such is looking too hard into Alien 3. Fincher realized Ward's vision was probably better than whatever David Giler was writing and tried to incorporate as much of it as possible while being slapped with "REAL HUMAN BISHOP" "THE COMPANY" "T.H.E. C.O.M.P.A.N.Y." when the real meat of the story was never the company or its financial status, it was how in either case Ripley overcomes the world she returns to that took everything from her, and reminds her of the Alien everywhere she goes, not only that but she learns she's pregnant with one. The story is about that drama.
I think Vincent Ward probably wasn't as equipped to handle Fox as FIncher, no question. But Ward probably would have come up with a better narrative for Ripley's closure had the stars aligned correctly, I really do think that. Talking about the logic of "why would the world of 2179 build a prison for luddites covered in wood" is pointless because either iteration of Alien 3 makes you have to jump through a ton of logical hoops you just have to accept; but that's also just what the Alien franchise does. How does the Alien grow from chestburster to a 8 foot tall death god so quickly? I don't know. That's not the point of the movie. The point of the movie was the woman battling the figurative dragon and all it represents. So was Aliens. Both incorporate ridiculous and reasonable ideas, but you get caught up in it too much to really second guess them.
If you weren't so hung up about the setting's feasibility you might be able to consider its importance to the narrative as much as it was important for Ripley to crash on a prison. It's about a sexual abuse survivor. From the first movie to the third. The fandom just sort of grew to love the world around it, but at the end of the day, that's what the whole series is about. It isn't about a biological lifeform, it's about a metaphorical demon present in all of man, and Ward rightfully understood that. And what Fincher borrowed from Ward, though not to the same degree as Ward would have liked.
I am fine with a setting that doesn't make sense as long as what the franchise has always been about is tackled, if we get too far into the hard scifi aspects people begin to miss the forest for the trees. Alien, Aliens, Alien 3 are an important adult parable of the dangers and consequences of being hurt by anyone you might even know. There can be a healthy balance, but following Aliens you can't have another action story, if you want another movie you need Jacob's Ladder-tier psychological horror and its similar closure, and they missed a gigantic opportunity by ditching the concepts of Ward's script besides the skeleton for being too artsy. Jon Landau and David Giler and the like have all the blame in the world for that and they can't blame anyone for it but themselves.
Alien isn't about the feasible in the film's setting, it's about the feasible in your life. Fox and the bunch wanted to tone it down and make it more science fiction with "the company" because they were a bunch of Reaganite Conservative types who wouldn't touch such deconstruction and exploration with a ten foot pole. They could have easily done the same on a prison colony, but they didn't. Ripley just saves the day by killing herself and Bishop II screaming "NOOOOOOOOO" while the rape of her body happens because "SHOCK VALUE, GOTCHA! IT'S SYMBOLIC RIGHT...AM I NOT MISSING THE POINT RIGHT NOW?"
All I'm trying to say is that Ward had the right idea on how to confront the third movie and that is through hallucinatory psychological horror, the only thing Giler and Hill were right about was Renny Harlen, Eric Red, David Twohy, and even to my shagrin because he's one of my favorite authors, William Gibson. None of them got what Alien 3 needed to be. The only people who came close were David Fincher and Vincent Ward.
I wouldn't care if they set the movie on a satellite that was a giant creme egg or a prison planet.
They were too distracted by the setting to see what Ward was going for. Something more terrifying than the Alien 3 we received, pulling the rug from under you and remind you that survivors can't fight their way out of the metaphorical sexual abuse the character of Ripley suffered through the advances of the first dragon, and being lured by someone who ended up having over a hundred men women and children violated. You can't win because sexual assault is never that easy, and simply shooting your way out of it won't get you far. You deal with it by accepting that it happened and moving on, and that's what Ripley cannot do in this situation presented by Ward. It's far more tragic, and it's also far more close to home. They kept some of it, but the effect of killing Newt and Hicks by Ward was not for shock so much as it was a reminder that it is never that easy to escape what hurts the most.
Alien lost its way by becoming a franchise celebrating the creature as a movie monster to sell toys to children by the end of Aliens. It almost had a cartoon.
Ward wanted to remind the public not only what the Alien was and what it represented. A leering, abusive, reactionary, power hungry monster taunting its victim over what she failed to do, giving her the child of rape, and sending her to a world of similar reactionaries that would do nothing but abuse her anyways. This movie would not have felt as much as insult as a clear cut violation that needs to be solved. And that's what Alien was always about, regardless if your planet is one of wood sheathed in metal, or a giant hollow creme egg. I love the Assembly Cut of Alien 3, but it simply did not go as hard as Ward would have done. It made the public further lose the point of just what Alien was about as a franchise, allowing Fox to turn it into an action movie series that further celebrates it. By four it became self parody, which is probably the most inappropriate way to deal with the "character", afterwards we had Alien vs Predator which missed the point by millions of miles, and after that we got AVP:R which instead of focusing on defeating this heart of darkness, indulged itself by celebrating the sexual assault by simulating oral sex on a pregnant woman. it was too ahead of its time and the heads of Fox were too busy sexually harassing their secretaries because of the power they had to care about the message Ward wanted to convey to audiences. And in my gut I know Fincher tried to tackle that as best he could but failed. Why, many ask, does Fincher refuse to talk about Alien 3? It's probably because he was bullied by Jon Landau's fat ass as hard as he could into making it a creature feature instead of an exploration of one of society's greatest taboos still in its time.
That does not sell enough toys, was probably something endlessly screamed into the ears of Fincher and Ward by Jon Landau.
The bigger crime than setting an Alien movie on a world that makes little financial sense for "the company" to build, is Fox denying the public a movie that gives adults a real conversation it needed about sexual assault and abuse, giving an audience a glimpse on what being a survivor is truly like. It never happened anyways because Fox wasn't interested in making Alien a disturbing exploration into the psyche of an abuse victim and the beast that represents its grip on her mind, her femininity, her life, and even her ability to accept what has happened. It didn't want a movie exploring the Alien as an abusive partner, or a rapist like it always was meant to be. It wasn't willing to give film makers the ability to explore what the Alien truly was, but to make it something different than what it really was.
I say this as a survivor of a sexual assault early in my life, that the movie Ward envisioned was meant to show every terrible spitting yelling screeching and heart ripping reality of the kind of hideous cruelty that the monster was supposed to represent. Many of us are drawn to the Alien franchise because of the catharsis it represents, and Ward's vision offered it straight to the point. You do not survive the tragedy of being violated by even confronting it (ala Aliens), a family won't help, it lives with you, it is a part of you. It lives with you until you die. And that is exactly what Fox was unwilling to show people who could have gotten a glimpse of why it's taken so seriously. The Alien is not an animal that kills to eat for Ward, it seemingly taunts Ripley for all her faults and makes her relive being spread open across a cryotube and taken in nightmare.
Later it, opens its mouth slowly to reveal Newt's head in nightmare.
It rubs her belly reminding Ripley of her violation, in nightmare.
And it taunts her about its fatherhood, after it took away both her real and surrogate daughter, in nightmare.
Just like I have since this happened to me, the taunts of abuse do not go away with or without the person being present. If they wanted to make a third, they needed to confront, not science, not gore, not the company. It needed to directly address how the Alien will not let her rest until every inch of her body is gone and reminds her that it was never hers, she's property now. It does this by just merely showing up again, the rest is done by Ripley in her nightmares. The alien wasn't doing that, she was.
This is what the Alien represented from 1979.
And that is about exactly what it's like in life, as well. Ward's concept has always moved me, not for it's unusual visuals but being brave enough to confront what the Alien is.
Ward was never enthusiastic about making a monster movie, a celebration of a monster that reaches into the darkest fears of many and the blackest memories of others. Fox however, was interested in making a monster movie, and continued for years. Their very own Bela Lugosi until he dries up and ends up giving Ed Wood advice.
That's worse than setting the movie in a wooden world.
Maybe how I see the films is different than how others do, but I don't think Giger enjoyed the beast being turned into something it wasn't either.
This was difficult for me to post and to put into words.
