Davis Aurini - Why do the modern Alien movies suck?

Nov. 3, 2012 - Davis Aurini

13:55

Why do the modern Alien movies suck?

Gah, sorry about that - wrong video got uploaded. Meant to do the Breaking Bad one first. For now: why does Aliens suck?

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	Why does the Alien franchise suck now?
	I'm a fan of movie reviewers.
	I really like watching movie reviews, guys like Spoonie, Nostalgia Critic, Confused Matthew, SF Debris.
	I'm really entertained by these guys.
	Particularly as an author, I learn a lot from listening to these reviews.
	I have no interest in becoming a reviewer, however.
	Author and critic are very two different things, and very few are the Yahtzee that can transcend the divide.
	That's that I am a culture critic.
	And the alien movies are just such an amazing example where the first two movies were stupendous.
	They were so, so good.
	And everything since then just keeps getting worse and worse as time goes on.
	It's almost baffling.
	And I've seen a lot of reviews of the movies trying to explain the different elements that are all wrong with it.
	But they're missing.
	There's one thing I've never seen mentioned in any of them.
	Which is what I'd like to address with this video.
	Maybe it's the fact that I'm an author allows me to see behind the workings of the movies.
	I'm not examining them from the top down, I'm examining them from the bottom up.
	So maybe that's why I've noticed this, and nobody else has.
	But in a nutshell, it's that the movies have terrible people in them now.
	Let's go back to Alien.
	The first one, Alien 1, we'll call it.
	This was an example of a strong female character.
	Strong female characters are almost completely gone from modern cinema.
	What you have instead is the empowered female character.
	Ripley, in 1 and 2, was playing a strong female.
	I don't know if they established whether or not she had a family in the first one.
	But essentially, she's...
	Like, regardless, it's not a surprise in the second one when they do establish that.
	Regardless, she's playing a working woman, blue-collar, who's good at her job, but is also 100% woman.
	One of the big things you can notice is that she's actually not a very good gung-ho leader.
	When the captain of the ship dies, she's the next one in command, and she is not a very good leader.
	Because, generally speaking, good female leaders are very, very few and far between.
	I've met a few, but they are very few and far between.
	And then the few I've met are, they're exceptional.
	They're not a normal, bell-curvian person.
	Wonderful people, but they're not a normal person.
	Whereas Ripley is a normal, 100% female woman in the first movie.
	And everybody on that ship, everybody in the first movie, is they're good people.
	They're blue-collar.
	They're not, you know, they're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but they're decent people.
	They have the rough and tumble, blue-collar humor, and they do start to panic, and everything goes to shit once the alien's on board, but they are likable.
	You care about these people.
	Same thing in the second movie.
	Once again, we have Ripley not taking a leadership role.
	Her leadership role in the first movie went to hell.
	In the second movie, she's taking a mothering role.
	She's acting like a mother to all of these Space Marines.
	And these Space Marines are decent people.
	They are good, salt of the earth, rough and tumble, but decent people at the end of the day.
	There's the one scene that I absolutely love where the one female Marine is doing chin-ups, and one of the guys says to her, Has anybody ever mistaken you for a man?
	And she looks at him and says, No, has anybody ever mistaken you for a man?
	And I think the typical sort of liberal that you get writing in Hollywood nowadays sees this as a really scary and mean interaction.
	Look at how mean and gritty these people are.
	No, you idiot.
	That's how soldiers say, I love you.
	They make fun of each other.
	When these two share that joke, you can tell that these two respect each other, that they've worked together before, that they're just punching each other in the shoulder.
	You know, like, because these people do not bruise easily.
	These are solid, likable, decent, good people in this movie.
	And that's why, when everything goes to the fuck later on, you care so much about these anonymous Space Marines whose names you don't even remember.
	Because they're good people, but the liberal can't tell that.
	They see the insults, they see the sexual harassment, which, again, that's how men relate to each other.
	We sexually harass one another.
	And they just see meanness.
	So then you get to the third movie.
	And the third movie was just such a complete piece of poo that I'm not even going to.
	I don't even need to go into it.
	All the characters are despicable criminals.
	They kill off two of the main characters from the second movie.
	It's just garbage.
	I can't even remember that terrible, terrible movie.
	So let's just move on from that pile of depression.
	Then you get movie number four.
	First off, every character is an asshole.
	In the first two movies, you kind of have this sense that there's something suspicious going on with the corporation.
	Especially in the second movie, you've got that one Flim Flan CEO scam artist that talks Ripley into going onto this whole trip when really what they're trying to get is somebody impregnated with an alien.
	But that's the sort of villainy you can actually believe in.
	Where they're not twirling their mustaches and going on about how evil they are, like some sort of umbrella corporation, but they're a bunch of psychotic CEO scam artists that don't care about people and are manipulating them.
	They are the exceptions.
	Most people in the company are decent enough folk.
	It's the few people pulling the strings at the top are assholes.
	But no, in the fourth movie, everybody that worked for the company is a psychopathic, sadistic asshole.
	Then you get the mercenaries.
	And the mercenaries are the biggest bunch of douchebags you've ever seen.
	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, but he's in a wheelchair and one of them drops a dagger, like from a story up into his leg, which you can't feel, but could still potentially kill the guy.
	Who acts like that?
	What sort of crew of a ship?
	What sort of group of mercenaries acts like that?
	They're all the biggest assholes in the universe.
	They're terrible, terrible people.
	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.
	So in Alien 4, they have them stabbing each other.
	And this is the movie where Ripley goes from being a strong woman to an empowered woman.
	They have that whole sexual tension between her and the girl android.
	She murders her own child.
	And she acts like Miss Tough Space Marine superheroine.
	Which, you know, okay, yes, she had alien DNA in her, which is stupid for all of its own reasons.
	But she's not acting like Ripley.
	Ripley was always a mother.
	She was a mother to the troops in Aliens.
	She was more of a matronly figure with her crew, which is when the patriarch dies, things really go to hell.
	But especially, especially to Newt in Aliens, she is just completely 100% loving, strong woman.
	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.
	That was Ripley in the old movies.
	The mother cat that you do not want to mess with.
	All of a sudden, she's just as good as the boys.
	And look, I'm emaciated.
	My muscles are showing off.
	It makes me look sickly.
	I'm going to be a jerk and try and associate with men the same way the Dyke and Aliens did.
	Utter garbage.
	So you hate all these characters.
	They're bad people.
	They're jerks.
	You don't feel like you'd want to ever grab a beer with any of these people.
	And this was just brought to a T in Prometheus.
	First off, the science of the alien movies is getting progressively worse as the movies go on.
	In this third movie, they're mixing alien and human DNA, which is retarded.
	And in Prometheus, I'm sorry, in the fourth movie, they're doing that.
	In Prometheus, it's what?
	Like, just idiotic.
	Completely idiotic.
	But you've got this stupid female protagonist who has this complete beta schlub of a boyfriend.
	You've got these biologists taking off their helmets in dangerous alien environments.
	It's just absolutely ridiculous and asinine.
	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.
	She even gives herself her own abortion in the movie.
	The thing's a complete train wreck.
	You can't follow what's going on.
	The science fiction is utter, utter garbage.
	And, you know, if they've done it right, sure, okay, aliens create the human race.
	I would have gone for that if they'd done it right.
	But no, it's a joke.
	It's preposterous.
	And all of the characters are assholes.
	Hollywood does not know how to write real men anymore.
	They write caricatures of real men.
	They write caricatures of men getting along in military units.
	None of these guys have ever served in the military.
	And so they take these rough and tumble Marines from aliens and they try and rewrite those characters, except they don't understand the dynamic.
	They don't understand what's really going on.
	So they write assholes.
	Bunch of pricks, every single one of which deserves to die.
	And they wonder why these movies aren't scary anymore.
	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.
	Hollywood, please return to real men and strong women that take care of babies as opposed to performing their own abortions.

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