Uncle Bingo wrote:
I disagree that it was "brave" to kill off Hicks and Newt. What's the point of them surviving Aliens? It makes the finale of that movie a waste. They didn't want to pay Michael Biehn and Carrie Henn....not so brave.

Ripley goes through an hour of saving Newt and she is killed off before we can say goodbye? Thematic letdown - and a big reason why Alien 3 was a downer and was a failure.

If they wanted to kill them off, do it IN THE STORY, make it mean something - not just wipe them out in the first 10 minutes of the film.

Glad you got attached to the characters - sorry though!

Uncle Bingo,

In a movie that's about the unfairness of the alien infection, killing them without a goodbye IS the story.

I don't have the attachment to ALIENS most of those who hated A3 have.  I think the whole 'badass' thing is silly and lame. 

ALIEN and A3 are attempts at making adult movies; ALIENS and AR were attempts at 'badass' action movies.  That's a big yawn for me.  The cliched characters are enjoyable, but they go against everything ALIEN was trying to be--taking cliche characters we've seen in all kinds of movies in the past and setting them in a different environment, which made them different AS characters.  ALIENS, on the other hand, took its cliched characters from just one source--ALIEN.  It didn't reinvigorate the stereotypes, it just reran them.   

ALIENS and the disappointment about the opening of A3 seem linked.

As for the usual grumbling about budgets, Biehn's comment on the trilogy set doesn't mean anything in that sense.  The truth is several scripts were written and Hicks was in a couple of them, and Ripley was in some and not in others.  The deaths are in large part due to Fincher's take on the material (he was the one who wanted a bald Ripley--this according to Sigourney Weaver herself; she also pointed out that she and Fincher read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's book about the stages of grief, and Ripley goes through these in the movie--not exactly something you expect to find in a shoot em up in the evil studio's complete control).  Considering the number of people in the cast and the cost of the movie, I don't buy for a minute that Fox couldn't afford Michael Biehn--good actor as he is, he ain't no budget-buster.  And the child Newt was now grown up.

Watching Ripley defend a kid against rapists?  No offense, but who cares?  Anything with newt would have been a sideshow, taking away from the attempt to focus on something very original and different in horror films--a movie in which one character has a fatal condition we KNOW will end in her death.  How does she face her mortality?

Newt simply isn't that interesting a character to me, and I don't see what could be done with her in this dreary, bleak context that wouldn't risk the sentimentality her character was always in danger of.  Taken scene by scene, the character in ALIENS is a real drag on the experience.  Remove her from ALIENS and the movie would have been properly brutal.  Her presence pulled the movie into the sentimentality Cameron has gone after with a vengeance.  Aliens so powerful they wipe out an entire armed colony...but the cute widdle kid is magically brilliant enough to escape!  Woman is tough, hmm, we have to let the audience know she aint' a dyke--retro-fit her with a dead child and have her go all soft and gooshy over a widdle kid!  Aliens kill everyone they encounter...but they KIDNAP the widdle kid!

Please.  ALIENS should have been directed by Sam Peckinpah.

 “The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
 Joseph Priestley
Last Edited By: Jonatwork May 27 11 7:09 AM. Edited 5 times.