With that mandate, and after the long and indecisive development of the script (more on that later), they settled on a story that only involved Ripley (Sigourney Weaver in her followup to GHOSTBUSTERS II). Doing something very different each time is the priority. I’m sure many would’ve enjoyed an ALIENS rehash with a few new twists, but it was a brief, beautiful time when the producers and even the studio agreed that this series doesn’t do that shit. Each sequel drastically reinvented the world and form and took big swings. Each was from a different visionary (or soon to be visionary) director. How about that? Do you think that would go over well?īut sharp left turns like that were the beauty of the ALIEN series. He spends the movie working with murderers and rapists, almost all of whom die, and then the triumphant ending is that he commits suicide. Riggs goes to the morgue to see Leo’s body, then demands to watch the autopsy. We see brief glimpses of Murtaugh’s mutilated corpse. What if rather than bring back the whole gang, including Leo, they only brought back Riggs? Murtaugh and Leo are said to have died in between 2 and 3. To illustrate how unusual the approach is, let’s imagine if the summer’s earlier part 3, LETHAL WEAPON 3, had made some of the same decisions. Another ’92 blockbuster sequel I’ll be reviewing caused a commotion for allegedly being “too dark,” but I think this baby is still the undisputed bleakness champion of big studio sequels to mainstream hits. Artistically I never thought it was the outright disaster it was initially received as – in fact, I always liked it – but I could never pretend it matched its predecessors.ģ0 years later – after it’s been in my life so long I can’t remember anything else – it requires no effort to drop all the baggage and admire ALIEN 3 as a singular-ish vision or, at the very least, an act of sheer audacity. What came out of that battle was a mean, dark, anti-crowdpleaser that disappointed, outraged or depressed many fans. Like when they reshot the ending of FATAL ATTRACTION, or later when they tried to make Fincher get rid of the head in the box in SEVEN. Never great when that happens.īased on what we learned from THE PLAYER, studio interference should mean they gave it an unearned happy ending that changed the whole spirit of the thing. The 27-year-old first time feature director fought for (and lost) creative control, eventually quitting during post-production, at which point the studio recut the movie without his input. After numerous reworkings with a series of writers and a late-in-the-game switch of directors from New Zealand’s Vincent Ward (THE NAVIGATOR: A MEDIEVAL ODYSSEY) to MTV’s David Fincher (Madonna’s “Vogue” video, the “Would you give a cigarette to an unborn child?” American Cancer Society PSA), they finally got the ball rolling. After Ridley Scott’s sci-fi-horror masterpiece in ’79 and James Cameron’s ass-kicking miracle sequel in ’86, producer/writers Walter Hill and David Giler struggled to develop a worthy followup. Let’s get this out of the way first: many things went wrong with ALIEN 3 (or ALIEN 3 if you prefer).
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