Alien 3 is better than Aliens

Alien 3 is better than Aliens. End of.

Better cast of decent british actual acting talent and the tall bloke from Casualty who has just had his ear bitten off. The setting is more atmospheric, the characterisation deeper, and despite Fincher's production problems, it has a sense of style way above the KY dripping big gun techno porn of Cameron's vision.

And it has Chales Dance in it. I've liked Charles Dance ever since the wonderfully daft White Mischief, where he was shot by Joss Ackland and then masturbated upon by a middle aged ukulele strumming posh woman from the Kenyan Happy Valley set.

As for the rest of the reasons, it is best if I just list them as a procession of "No" bullet points, that will definitively illustrate for you why Alien 3 is better than Aliens.

NO irritating child NO actually rubbish subtexts about motherhood et al NO silly picture of an aged Ripley daughter that looks like it was ultrasounded in the womb of a tree NO stupid trainers that go over the ankle with velcro fasteners NO suits with turned up lapels NO scary corporate Rosa Klebb lesbian NO lines of dialogue that are flagged as a radical new symbol of female empowerment that aren't NO NO NO Bill Paxton rapping NO director's cut featuring Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf in an LV426 set that looks crummy when lit NO director's cut with Sentry Guns NO "Don't be gone long Ellen" NO silly giggle names like "Spunkmeyer" NO shot of Lance Henriksen in a tube that gives me nightmares NO heterosexual bromance between a crop haired latino and a guy last seen in a recurring role in Murder She Wrote. And above all NO NO NO over-rating by male critics who want to look like they were in at the beginning of some kind of female emancipation movement in world cinema.

Have a nice, dark, set on a prison planet that was originally a monastery kind of day.

Alien Resurrection - is it really so bad?

I needed to tidy, I needed to cook soup. I needed distraction that enabled me to lie under my duvet on the sofa and not do anything.

Not fancying another dose of Hawk the Slayer, I put Alien Resurrection on, which was sitting neglected next to it on a particularly dusty part of the shelf. I thought I might try and watch it with fresh eyes, and see if it is truly as bad as I remembered.


Alien is a classic piece of atmospheric, and let us not forget, sexual, horror. Aliens is a crash bang action fest where the extended cut should be avoided. And Fincher's Alien 3 gets slated by many, but I rather like it thanks to its strong cast and oily, greasy vibe. Where does Alien 4 fit in?

Needless to say, even taking a charitable view, it is comfortably the worst of the 4. Again, it's a strong cast with it's cultish crew of Ron Perlman, Dominic Pinon, and Michael Wincott, and Winona Ryder is not so really out of place. But it's script writer, a certain Josh Whedon, is. "If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta Plague look like a fucking square dance!" is symptomatic of the "yoof interest" awful dialogue that finds its way into the script. Add to this the endlessly clanged desire to explore Ripley's historic desire for motherhood results in a clearly not giving a toss Sigourney Weaver creeping around like a genetically engineered incestuous abuser, muttering in am dram fashion when she isn't cosying up to xenomorphs for some borderline interspecies nookie.

"I'm the monster's mother..." "You mean....my baby?..." Weaver breathes, and the audience giggles, turning into outright cackles when Brad Dourif's signature oddball introduces "The Newborn", the human-alien iceberg that sinks the movie in many more pieces that the Titanic went down in. Looking like a heavily KY'd Scooby Doo villain, the brain eating space pug dog roars, whimpers and coos through 'emotional' scenes with Weaver that plunge the depths of emetic bathos.

And then we have Jeunet's direction. It seems to me that he feels pretty early on in the piece that his chances of making a visceral masterpiece have been fatally compromised, and so decides to lather the gore on and seemingly stick cameras down people's throats on several occasions, while trying to fit in a bit of humour such as spaceship General chap Dan Hedaya giving a cornball salute before picking his cerebellum out of an alienised hole in the back of his skull. But the nadir is the scene where clone number 8 Ripley meets the previous failure versions of herself, seemingly including Captain Caveman in a jar; and Joey Deacon clone strapped to a bed dribbling "kill me" before meeting a humane and painless death at the end of a..er...flamethrower.

"Kill Me?" "Kill Us" chanted the audience.