I've decided: it's not canon.
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Picnic10 — 9 years ago(October 25, 2016 01:29 PM)
Alien 3 has such rich metaphorical possibility that a longer film could have more explicitly investigated but, ironically, that might have turned off some intellectuals who like to make connections / imagine themselves. eg the alien as an attack of conscience, a self defeating beast in the imagination of paranoid, abandoned, scared prisoners, a symbol of insurmountable odds due to upbringing, other people's treatment of them. Scared mostly of never being loved. Most probably had terrible childhoods. Few comforting bedtime stories for them. They hope to be the knight to slay the dragon. But it's not a gentlemanly dragon. It's an insectoid mammal type hybrid and it doesn't care or know of romantic tales. It's not there to provide them with a meaning of life. If it had the wit to think of it, not that it needs one, it'd be there to deliberately suck every last bit of meaning out of their life, to deliberately fill their last breath with terror, fear, a sense of stupefying dehumanising smallness against, in essence, a big insect, and no peaceful enlightenment. It's every bully, every mind game psycho (whether they're intellectually clever or not), every sadist, every nihilist philosopher's icon of the Godless vacuum in human or nonhuman hearts.
The alien's birth from the dog/ox at the time that Newt's funeral is being held tells you, in glaring sickening irony, that hope of new life, new optimism, to replace deceased ones is wishful thinking. Evil persists and it tends to destroy many people before it is contained. And those it destroys cannot be physically or emotionally brought back to what they were. Reproduction is not necessarily an intrinsic good, either by becoming evil or being born in to an evil world. Newt was spared the psychopathic strain of solitary alien seen in the first and third films.
So some things could have been developed. But it's canon to me. -
McQueen1980 — 9 years ago(October 26, 2016 04:40 PM)
What a post!! and a superb read
There was also talk back in the early 90s that it was a metaphor for AIDS and its consequences
Of course having a lone wolf alien on a prison planet was very effective and made for some disturbing scenes
I'm gonna read your mesmerizing post again to come up with some other thoughts!wow -
Picnic10 — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 03:37 AM)
Thanks McQueen. Yes, I go along with what people say as AIDS as possible metaphor. A great thing about the Alien series, Alien 3 in particular, is that different potentially metaphors coexist, they don't ruin the mystery by having too much explicit exposition or philosophy, and you can choose to concentrate on one above the others on each viewing. The Alien films end up, I think, of having this undertone of late 1970s and beyond brutish nihilism brushing up against the working or middle class. And, aloof from it all, an upper class not of kings and queens but of a money and war making corporation. Again, the series brilliantly barely shows the corporation. Just like many a passively aloof employer, they show up only when the threat's been contained. You can almost imagine that their biggest bore would be to have to answer what they'd see as merely bureaucratical questions from the people left alone with the alien. To the corporation, it'd be a mere question for Human Resources. On one hand, the alien is inevitable slowly creeping death itself, on another the arbritary nature of dumb reproduction, on another it sums up class hostility/competition which was accelerated in some places by the capitalism of the 1980s, on another hand it's a solitary psychopath, on another it's the cold hand of modern interaction but it's often implicit - the mystery's there for us to unwrap ourselves if we want or people can just admire the packaging. So the series never became too 'scifi'. It remains essentially gothic in its horrifying awe.And on a prison planet where the inhabitants were, in some fiery Hell-like Garden of Eden, trying to avoid urges through finding God and doing heavy industry, not only does a woman enter but, cruelly to them, she's fairly cold and aloof, becomes sexless when shorn of her hair. The final indignity the prisoners have, as if Eve herself has brought the serpent to tempt them, is that they achieve no female close companionship but, instead, a phallic monster destroys them. A metaphor for their own self loving masturbatory madness in the absence of anyone else loving them.
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VVolfySnackrib — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 07:26 AM)
Oh right. You've decided. Well guess what, I have decided, as I always have, that Alien 3 is legitimate, and it is part of the canon. And it should remain part of the canon. I'm so sick of all the whiners whose only concern is they can't bear the thought of a child character dying. Hell, Newt's death is one of the reasons I love Alien 3.
Alien 3, while it's not at all as good as the first two, it certainly is an entertaining little flick of its own and there's lots of movie lovers that have tons of fun sitting it through.
It was pretty damned bold to bring in such a dark tone for the third movie, and don't tell me it doesn't suit the franchise. It was dark from the beginning. If anything, the happy little ending for Aliens was out of place. If nothing else, a good quality that Alien 3 brought in was making the franchise the right shade of dark that it ought to be. Sure, it's a bit of a mess because of its problematic movie making, but they managed to put together a decent enough movie with qualities enough of their own for it to be memorable and different.
Alien: Resurrection would probably be the most easy movie to reject as non-canon. It's almost entirely disconnected from major events in the franchise. It's like a self contained chain of events where they have a ship, they clone Ripley and aliens on the ship, and things go south. However they manage to contain the situation. So the stakes in the movie were invented by the movie, unlike the other movies, where it follows a specific narrative. There's LV-426, there's aliens there, Ripley's the main character, and that's pretty much it. In Aliens they blow up all the aliens, kill the queen, but they save an egg on the ship for the third movie.
Anyone who thinks it's BS that an egg could have been laid on the ship for numerous reasons, think about the fact that it's BS that the queen got on the ship in the first place, as fast as she did, off screen and everything. But I bet you're not upset to have the awesome final fight with the Queen in the movie, are you?
Just enjoy the movies you got. Although Resurrection is by far the worst, I can bring myself to enjoy even that movie a lot. It's quirky as hell. It's weird to think we went from Alien to Resurrection, when you compare the two, but hey it's a fun watch so what the hell.
And it's up to everyone to decide for themselves what they consider canon.
If Alien 5 come along and skip over the third movie and says it's not canon, I will personally skip over Alien 5 and consider that one not canon.
I think most of us will agree though that Prometheus is not canon. -
Drooch — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 08:32 AM)
Cool your boots there, Wolfy, your overly defensive post bites back at assertions I never made. As I qualified in another post here, killing off the Aliens survivors is a legitimate creative choice, but to have that happen before the film even begins due to some freak occurrence, and to have sealed Ripley's fate at the same time (and all for shtty reasons like star egomania, twatty writers and a frightened, bullying studio) after their nail biting ordeal and hair's breadth escape from peril, is disrespectful and dismissive of a monumental filmic achievement and possibly the greatest sequel ever made. It's fine to disregard toxic crap like AvP, but not the likes of Aliens.
So, sadly it's necessary to be equally disrespectful and eject Alien 3 from the canon, which is a shame because it's a very good film in many ways. It'll make for a nice nightmare in between Aliens and its true sequel (if it ever gets made and isn't just more crap trading on the brand name).
As for Prometheus, I haven't decided if it's canon yet or not. It's crap but Ridley's visuals and some of the ideas are intriguing. I'll wait to see how its sequel turns out. -
Picnic10 — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 09:00 AM)
I would have once agreed with your assessment of disrespectful of the filmmakers on first viewing but a message I personally take from the film is death might disrespect all but life also disrespects people, often by ignoring them, even if the alien hadn't come on board. Newt was given a loving send off by people who never knew her who some of 'polite' society would have written off. It is a loving send off that none of the prisoners, no longer if ever deemed to be cute and lovable, will get. Disrespectful' is arguably a key mirror on society theme of the Alien series. Death does not always ask for permission. It is at least not the social death that the prisoners had before their physical death which was disrespectful to them.
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Drooch — 9 years ago(October 27, 2016 09:25 AM)
Very good. If only the writers put as much effort into their script as you have. They were monks instead of prisoners until some point in the process, on a wooden planet, killed by a new Geiger alien with big lips that kisses you while shoving a proboscis down your throat that erupts in spikes, when retracted it rips out your guts through your mouth. I would like to have seen that version, and heard your commentary on it.
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Drooch — 9 years ago(December 07, 2016 06:21 PM)
Well, anything after Alien 3 is complete junk, albeit with slight variations of crapness, including the odd memorable sequence here and there, but no sane person could say that Resurrection nor any AvP film is canon.
Alien 3 presents a problem, however, because it is very good in many ways with much to admire, and I could totally understand a person seeing it as the legitimate end of a great trilogy. For me, I can't get past the decision to casually wipe out all of the Aliens survivors, after their epic ordeal, huge losses along the way, incredible hair's-breadth escapes in action sequences that pushed the boundaries of cinema, and final elegant closure. To crap on Cameron's masterpiece in this way is incredibly disrespectful, and I am forced to reciprocate that disrespect - Alien 3 isn't canon. It's a hyper sleep nightmare at best, and the real sequel to Aliens is yet to come -
randerson112 — 9 years ago(December 13, 2016 12:37 AM)
I see it this way. We all agree Resurrection was a disaster. I want Alien 3 Assembly Cut to be cannon, but as Ripley's Dream.
James Cameron was FURIOUS when he saw Alien 3 originally because they immediately destroyed the audience's love for Hicks and Newt.
Either way I love Alien 3 Assembly Cut. I wish they would spend a little money on fixing the goofy CGI used. But I'm okay with this being a dream sequence. Supposedly, Blomkampf's version will have Sigourney Weaver, Michael Beign, and CARRIE HENN! The girl that played Newt and never acted again.
If that turns out true, then it makes sense Ripley dreamed Alien 3, and maybe some compromise was done to their cryosleep capsules and they aged.
Hence a TRUE SEQUEL to Aliens.
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crissttigaldames — 9 years ago(December 22, 2016 01:08 PM)
I agree OP. I cannot accept all of Hicks, Newt and Bishop being dead, right off the bat. As far as I'm concerned the Ripley story ends in Aliens. I'll call the others parallel universe stories or whatever. And this one a nightmare.
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bearuk — 9 years ago(January 02, 2017 06:27 PM)
At the time I said the next film should be called Alien 3.1 - and that Alien 3 was a hypersleep dream. Which could just about have been plausible as Ripley said to Newt at the end of Aliens something like 'sleep tight and don't dream'.
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Drooch — 9 years ago(January 03, 2017 12:28 AM)
Nice. A really tacky spinoff series called
Alien: Hyperdreams
could be quite fun. We see the hyperdreams of each major character from the series,
John Hurt could come back for a cameo - he dreams about himself in old age, now married to a chestburster. Or Burke fantasising about all that money he could have made, driving in a Ferrari, draped in fresh whores, one of them a just-legal Newt.
Wet Hyperdreams
hosted by Spunkmeyer. The possibilities are endless -
TheSmashingTesticles — 9 years ago(January 03, 2017 05:41 PM)
Nope, you're wrong. Whether you like the movie or not,
Alien 3
is canon.
Plus, who gives a donkey's ass about Hicks and Newt? Hicks was just a soldier, that's it. People like Hicks simply because he was played by Michael Biehn, if Hicks were played by a different actor, no one would give a shlt about Hicks. And people like Michael Biehn just because he was in the first
Terminator
film. I'm pretty sure it's safe to say no one watched
Terminator
for Michael Biehn but watched it for Arnold instead.
and Newt was just a little kid who would
"AAAAAAAGH! RIPLEYYY! AAAAAAAGH!"
She was annoying as fvck. Thank God they kill her in the beginning of
Alien 3
and we never have to worry about her annoying ass screaming again. Seriously, her character was pointless. James Cameron wanted Newt in
Aliens
just to add that useless mother/daughter relationship.
Until someone makes a film that contradicts the events in
Alien 3
,
Alien 3
IS
canon, and
Alien 3
(Assembly Cut) is way better than
Aliens
.
Alien 3
is dark, gothic, brutal, and I love the religious tone in the film. And the idea of Xenomorphs taking their hosts' genes and the quadrupedal Xenomorph were awesome.
At least in
Alien 3
, you don't see Aliens getting killed by humans in every 5 fvcking seconds. -
TheSmashingTesticles — 9 years ago(January 18, 2017 12:48 PM)
Sure. If someone thinks
AvP
is canon, even tho it's clearly
NOT
canon, it must be canon to them since that is what they want to believe.
If someone thinks
Prometheus
isn't canon, even tho it clearly
IS
canon, it must not be canon to them since that is what they want to believe. -
Snake_MacReady82 — 9 years ago(January 19, 2017 08:22 PM)
At least in Alien 3, you don't see Aliens getting killed by humans in every 5 fvcking seconds.
Instead we see random, mostly indistinguishable guys getting killed every five seconds. This was more of a slasher movie than a proper horror movie.
Thit and thpin!