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Alien/Aliens/Alien3/Alien: Resurrection (nine disc set) Dir: Ridley Scott/James Cameron/David Fincher/Jean-Pierre Jeunet Rating: various Running time: the rest of your life 20th Century Fox  While it’s mainly a result of hiring four very different and idiosyncratic directors, it’s hard to think of a franchise of films that works less well as a series than the four Alien films; aside from HR Giger’s stunning (and much-copied) creature design and Sigourney Weaver, the films have close to nothing to do with each other. The only comparison I can think of is the ‘Hellraiser’ series, which shares Alien’s trajectory through brilliant-and-atmospheric to enjoyable-but-effects-heavy to nice-idea-badly-executed to should-have-been-drowned-at-birth over the space of four films. Thanks to 20th Century Fox you can enjoy them all again on beautifully remastered DVD, with no less than five lovingly-compiled discs of bonus material.It starts on a high note: Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ was a terrifying film in 1979 and it’s terrifying now. It also raised the bar for design in both science fiction and horror films: as with the original Star Wars trilogy the production design team went all out to make sure that all the exotic spacecraft and equipment looks as lived in, kicked around and slept on as possible, and as a suspenseful horror film it has few equals. While most horror films telegraph the order of death within minutes, I can’t imagine any first time watcher guessing that Ripley turns out to be the sole survivor (for one thing, Sigourney Weaver is the third credited actor and barely does anything for the first half of the film) as the performances of the equally-weighted seven principals are, without exception, excellent; from Tom Skerrit’s gruff Captain Dallas to Ian Holm’s beautifully balanced portrayal of the replicant Ash, while John Hurt’s chest-bursting scene is one of the most memorable moments in sci-fi cinema. On to 1986’s ‘Aliens’, the most commercially successful of the franchise, where a fresh-from-‘Terminator’ James Cameron adds his typically subtle touch for his space combat epic: cue beefy men, manly women, two-dimensional character development, indigestible sentiment and explosions, explosions everywhere. On the other hand, it introduces the replicant Bishop (played with otherworldly control by Lance Henrickson), the nine year old Carrie Henn is surprisingly subtle as Newt and Michael Biehn underplays Corporal Hicks to great effect. The film also has a bunch of spectacular set pieces (Ripley fighting the mother Alien in the power loader, Newt and Ripley evading the face hugger in the locked medical lab) and fulfils every sane person’s dream of seeing Paul Reiser brutally killed by monsters. The ill-starred ‘Alien3’ (1992) was the directorial debut of David Fincher, who was to go on to redeem himself with ‘Seven’ and ‘Fight Club.’ Hamstrung by much-limited budgets, a thoroughly implausible premise and an astonishingly downbeat opening (Hicks and Newt, whose rescue took up the last half of the previous film, are both dead before the opening credits stop rolling) he still almost pulls it off thanks to fine performances by a primarily British supporting cast (especially Charles Dance as the gentlemanly Clemens), but nothing can save the film from the ropy CG effects and Lance Henrickson’s terrifying mullet. It shares some of the darkness of the original but little of the surprise and the confused plot slows things down even further (although the making-of documentaries also reveal the last-minute decision to slash a major subplot based around Paul McGann’s character Golic which would have enlivened the film considerably). For 1997’s ‘Alien: Resurrection’ the producers decided to experiment by taking the stylish directorial eye of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (‘Delicatessen,’ ‘City Of Lost Children,’ ‘Amelie’) and a bunch of his stable of actors, mix them with Winona Ryder and a wryly post-modern script by Joss “Buffy” Whedon and see what happens. This can be summed up in one word: whoops. The oh-so-snappy dialogue is at odds with Jeunet’s lush visuals, Weaver looks as though she’s mentally working out what to buy with the truckload of money she was paid to resurrect Ripley (that’s “resurrect” in the literal sense: she’s now an alien-hybrid clone) and Ryder never quite works out the difference between “emotionless” and “confused” as the replicant Call. So that’s four films – actually six, since ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ contain both the original theatrical release and excellent extended “director’s cut” versions, which is reason enough to buy this box - but then there’s the superb bonus content: comprehensive documentaries, interviews with most of the key cast and crew film-by-film (Fincher being a notable absence), production stills, archival photos, trailers and more, all divided up into digestible featurettes. The documentaries are both wildly entertaining and surprisingly candid (watch ‘Alien’ co-writer Dan O’Bannon bitch about what the producers did to his script, while producer/ghostwriter David Giler complains about the shitty quality of O’Bannon’s original screenplay), and you’ll laugh as hard as the DVD compilers no doubt did when an archival interview with Ryder reveals that she kept stealing things from on set. It’s a gloriously well-deserved treatment for an important series and exactly what DVDs were invented for. Absolutely essential. | |
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