Alien Resurrection and Suspension of Disbelief
Nostalgia Critic's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRy05ts1zyk Originally uploaded March, 2017.
June 17, 2020 - Davis Aurini
04:50
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| Time | Text |
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| Alien Resurrection is widely regarded as a disappointing film. | |
| I was just watching the Nostalgia Critic's review of it, where he goes through many of the reasons that it is so disappointing, many of the plot problems, the setting problems. | |
| However, there's one thing that really stood out to me in his review, and that's the suspension of disbelief, or the lack thereof that you have in the film itself. | |
| The gentleman over at Red Letter Media have discussed this before, where, especially with science fiction, if you're going to get the audience to suspend disbelief, you need to make the rest of the world very plausible, and you need to have a protagonist who is somebody you can comprehend, somebody who can help explain the world to you as it gets explained to him. | |
| Now, in Alien Resurrection, I'm going to boil this down to three major scenes that beggar belief, that tear away suspension of disbelief. | |
| The first is the basketball scene, where Ripley does a full court basket without even looking. | |
| The next is the flamethrower scene, where Ripley kills off her clones by destroying them in the most painful manner possible. | |
| And the third is one of the many, but we'll look at this one particularly, the shooting physics in the movie, where this guy we're supposed to believe is such an amazing shot that he can bank a bullet off of multiple objects and still have it go where he wants it to. | |
| Cinema is supposed to have striking scenes. | |
| It's supposed to be symbolic, it's supposed to be exciting. | |
| And any one of these scenes on their own wouldn't necessarily be a bad scene. | |
| The basketball scene, for instance, might have a role to play in a superhero movie to show what amazing reflexes this superhuman has. | |
| The flamethrower scene is very spectacular, and it might belong in the sort of movie which is about over-the-top violence and gore. | |
| And the third scene, the bullet physics, might apply in some sort of Tarantino film or some sort of war movie, something to that effect. | |
| But Alien Resurrection isn't that type of movie. | |
| Alien Resurrection asks you to believe two big things. | |
| Number one, that it's in the future, and number two, that there are black scary space rapists out to get you. | |
| To make that frightening, to pull in the audience and help them believe that what's happening is really going to happen and isn't just a story being told on the screen, you need to make the rest of the world as believable as possible. | |
| If we're supposed to take the threat of these aliens seriously, then we can't simultaneously have these absolutely superhuman to the point of impossibility skills in the rest of the cast. | |
| Suspension of disbelief relies upon the fact that we can overlook one or two things, one or two imaginative descriptions of this world, but we still need to be able to relate to the rest of the characters. | |
| And so when we see characters acting out of character, like Ripley burning to death her clones, we no longer feel empathy for this character. | |
| And again, if it was an exhibition movie, a Godzilla movie, then it's more about the spectacle, and you don't need to have empathy for their characters. | |
| If we're supposed to take the alien threat seriously, we can't have superhuman shooting abilities. | |
| Otherwise, the aliens are no longer terrifying. | |
| This, I believe, is the main reason why Alien Resurrection failed to be a compelling movie. | |
| It's there subtly, and it's not the first thing you're going to criticize. | |
| You might criticize the scene itself as being ridiculous, but your first criticism won't be how that one scene affects the rest of the movie. | |
| Instead, you'll look at the plot problems, the setting problems, the feel of the movie will just be tonally off to you. | |
| But I believe it mainly stems from these scenes, this unreality and the lack of suspension of disbelief that Alien Resurrection offers to its audiences. | |
| So if you're a science fiction writer or a fantasy writer or if you're doing a superhero type of story, you need to keep certain elements grounded so that you can get away with the creativity in those other spaces. | |
| Thanks for listening, folks. | |
| There's a link to the Nostalgia Critics Review down below. | |
| And you guys take care of yourselves. |
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