Sunday, December 28, 2014

"Alien: Resurrection" - Christmas Movies

What says Christmas more than a hideous creature with two rows of teeth and acid for blood.  Ho, ho, die Earthling!

"Alien: Resurrection" is sort of sci-fi and sort of isn't.  The story is set way in the future with lots of outstanding rockets and twisted machines but it's a psychology rather than thoughts on extrapolation of science.  That's not a criticism, it's that sci-fi is generally postulating what will happen if we had this kind of machine or that kind of capability and the psychology of it is secondary.  In this story the sci-fi is secondary and the psychology is brilliant.

Sigourney Weaver is so outstandingly non-Rambo as the character is hugely complex and she goes through the nuances with incredible delicacy.  The previous ones were cool when she was playing Rambo with a heart but they weren't at this depth.  Men could say, hey, I'm a feminist.  I love it when chicks shoot machine guns.

Winona Ryder is my first choice for a personal robot as she does an exceptional job as well.  Her character doesn't go through as much of an evolution as Signourney Weaver but she's the other light as most of the male characters are one-dimensional.

To my taste, this is more a horror movie than sci-fi but there's a lot of horror in sci-fi anyway.  Harry Harrison wrote "The Deathworld Trilogy" and there's all kinds of horrible death in that.  Even though horror, the depth of the character portrayals moves it up to cinema level versus being just another cool movie.

There's been a string of bad sci-fi but this one is first-rate.  You can probably slash it on hyper-technical grounds as how does acid for blood work.  Only glass or (I guess) some other type of silicon-based material could contain it so maybe this makes them silicon-based life forms.  Doing that sort of analysis can be amusing but it doesn't gain much as suspension of disbelief is part of it.  If you analyze that disbelief, of course it will fall apart.


(Ed:  Christmas?)

Hey, Ripley saved the world.  That's got to count.

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