Why do the modern Alien movies suck？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
123.79475
Summary
Why does the Alien franchise suck now? Why do the movies have terrible people in them now? And why is it that the first two movies were so good, and the third one is so bad? I'll tell you why.
Transcript
00:00:07.000
I'm a fan of movie reviewers. I really like watching movie reviews.
00:00:14.000
Guys like Spoonie, Nostalgia Critic, Confused Matthew, SF Debris.
00:00:23.000
Particularly as an author, I learn a lot from listening to these reviews.
00:00:32.000
I have no interest in becoming a reviewer, however.
00:00:37.000
Author and critic are very two different things,
00:00:42.000
and very few are the Yahtzees that can transcend the divide.
00:00:57.000
And the Alien movies are just such an amazing example,
00:01:08.000
And everything since then just keeps getting worse and worse as time goes on.
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trying to explain the different elements that are all wrong with it.
00:01:34.000
It's one thing I've never seen mentioned in any of them.
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Which is what I'd like to address with this video.
00:01:43.000
Maybe it's the fact that I'm an author allows me to see behind the workings of the movies.
00:01:53.000
I'm not examining them from the top down, I'm examining them from the bottom up.
00:01:57.000
So maybe that's why I've noticed this, and nobody else has.
00:02:02.000
But in a nutshell, it's that the movies have terrible people in them now.
00:02:10.000
Let's go back to Alien, the first one. Alien 1, we'll call it.
00:02:19.000
This was an example of a strong female character.
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Strong female characters are almost completely gone from modern cinema.
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What you have instead is the empowered female character.
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Ripley, in 1 and 2, was playing a strong female.
00:02:42.000
I don't know if they established whether or not she had a family in the first one.
00:02:49.000
Like, regardless, it's not a surprise in the second one when they do establish that.
00:02:53.000
Regardless, she's playing a working woman, blue collar, who's good at her job, but is also 100% woman.
00:03:04.000
One of the big things you can notice is that she's actually not a very good gung-ho leader.
00:03:11.000
When the captain of the ship dies, she's the next one in command, and she is not a very good leader.
00:03:18.000
Because, generally speaking, good female leaders are very, very few and far between.
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I've met a few, but they are very few and far between.
00:03:39.000
Wonderful people, but they're not a normal person.
00:03:42.000
Whereas Ripley is a normal, 100% female woman in the first movie.
00:03:48.000
And everybody on that ship, everybody in the first movie, is...
00:03:58.000
They're not, you know, they're not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
00:04:05.000
They have the rough and tumble, blue collar humor.
00:04:09.000
And they do start to panic and everything goes to shit once the alien's on board.
00:04:21.000
Once again, we have Ripley not taking a leadership role.
00:04:26.000
Her leadership role in the first movie went to hell.
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In the second movie, she's taking a mothering role.
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She's acting like a mother to all of these space marines.
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They are good salt of the earth, rough and tumble, but decent people at the end of the day.
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And I think the typical sort of liberal that you get writing in Hollywood nowadays
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sees this as a really scary and mean interaction.
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you can tell that these two respect each other.
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That they're just punching each other in the shoulder.
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You know, because these people do not bruise easily.
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These are solid, likable, decent, good people in this movie.
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And that's why when everything goes to the fuck later on,
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you care so much about these anonymous space marines whose names you don't even remember.
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Which again, that's how men relate to each other.
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And the third movie was just such a complete piece of poo that I don't even need to go into it.
00:06:43.000
They kill off two of the main characters from the second movie.
00:06:51.000
I can't even remember that terrible, terrible movie.
00:06:54.000
So let's just move on from that pile of depression.
00:07:10.000
In the first two movies, you kind of have this sense that there's something suspicious going on with the corporation.
00:07:20.000
Especially in the second movie, you've got that one flim flam CEO scam artist that talks Ripley into going onto this whole trip.
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When really what they're trying to get is somebody impregnated with an alien.
00:07:33.000
But that's the sort of villainy you can actually believe in.
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Where they're not twirling their mustaches and going on about how evil they are like some sort of umbrella corporation.
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But they're a bunch of psychotic CEO scam artists that don't care about people and are manipulating them.
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Most people in the company are decent enough folk.
00:08:00.000
It's the few people pulling the strings at the top are assholes.
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But no, in the fourth movie, everybody that works for the company is a psychopathic, sadistic asshole.
00:08:17.000
And the mercenaries are the biggest bunch of douchebags you've ever seen.
00:08:23.000
The one bit that really stands out to me is where one of them, one of the guys is in a wheelchair, you know, even though it's the future.
00:08:31.000
But he's in a wheelchair and one of them drops a dagger, like from a story up into his leg.
00:08:36.000
Which you can't feel, but you could still potentially kill the guy.
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What sort of crew of a ship, what sort of group of mercenaries acts like that?
00:08:51.000
They're all the biggest assholes in the universe.
00:08:58.000
But to the liberals writing this whole bloody thing, you know, they saw the space marines punching each other in the shoulders in Alien 2.
00:09:10.000
So in Alien 4, they have them stabbing each other.
00:09:14.000
And this is the movie where Ripley goes from being a strong woman to an empowered woman.
00:09:28.000
They have that whole sexual tension between her and the girl android.
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And she acts like Miss Tough Space Marine superhero.
00:09:43.000
Which, you know, okay, yes, she has alien DNA in her, which is stupid for all of its own reasons.
00:09:56.000
She was more of a matronly figure with her crew, which is when the patriarch dies, things really go to hell.
00:10:09.000
In Aliens, she is just completely 100% loving, strong woman.
00:10:15.000
As Heinlein said, it's motherly love that can turn 15 pounds of female cat into a vicious death beast when it chases off a junkyard dog from her kittens.
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The mother cat that you do not want to mess with.
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All of a sudden, she's just as good as the boys and, look, I'm emaciated and my muscles are showing off.
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I'm going to be a jerk and try and associate with men the same way the dyke in Aliens did.
00:11:06.000
You don't feel like you'd want to ever grab a beer with any of these people.
00:11:10.000
And this was just brought to a T in Prometheus.
00:11:19.000
First off, the science of the Alien movies has been getting progressively worse as the movies go on.
00:11:24.000
In this third movie, they're mixing alien and human DNA, which is retarded.
00:11:32.000
And in Prometheus, I'm sorry, in the fourth movie, they're doing that.
00:11:43.000
But you've got this stupid female protagonist who has this complete beta schlub of a boyfriend.
00:11:56.000
You've got these biologists taking off their helmets in dangerous alien environments.
00:12:06.000
But she, not only does she become the alpha lead character, and all the white males are evil, and there's that bitchy Nazi blonde girl.
00:12:20.000
She even gives herself her own abortion in the movie.
00:12:34.000
And, you know, if they'd done it right, sure, okay, um, aliens create the human race.
00:12:39.000
I would have gone for that if they'd done it right.
00:12:41.000
But, no, it's, it's a joke, it's preposterous, and all of the characters are assholes.
00:12:48.000
Hollywood does not know how to write real men anymore.
00:13:00.000
They write caricatures of men getting along in military units.
00:13:03.000
None of these guys have ever served in the military.
00:13:07.000
And so they take these rough-and-tumble marines from aliens, and they try and rewrite those characters,
00:13:21.000
Bunch of pricks, every single one of which deserves to die.
00:13:27.000
And they wonder why these movies aren't scary anymore.
00:13:30.000
Because seeing a bunch of subhumans like that get taken out by an alien is an act of cosmic justice, not an act of cosmic horror.
00:13:44.000
Hollywood, could we please return to real men and strong women that take care of babies as opposed to performing their own abortions?